studio being new orleans. here now is joy reid and chris hayes. [applause] all right. good evening, and welcome to our town hall of the national day of racial healing and event created six years ago by our sponsor, the wk kellogg foundation. this special day is held every year the day at their dr. martin luther king holiday if you look around, you will see that we are in this glorious space, incredible room. it is part of a studio b which is a set of former warehouses turn to an art experience by the artist brandon be mike odoms, here in the by water neighborhood of the great city of new orleans. our colleague trymaine lee who has been doing some reporting for this project is here with us as well and so is the young fellas brass band. fabulous. the land where we unfortunate to be meeting tonight has made a gathering place and trading hub for people of different backgrounds and cultures going back centuries. and so we want to acknowledge, thank and honor
top line to what that work is, what it looks like. it s all about improving the lives of the most honorable children. but we know that children live within the context of their families. families must support, them communities must be equitable places for families to live and thrive and so our work is all about improving the lives of children and structural racism impairs the ability for children and families to thrive. i am curious, after. i would love for you to explain to me what a healing circle, whether it, is what is it look like. you have conducted them. what does it look like in a healing circle? first we come to recognize the layers that sit within us and they have to consider the reflecting on and then doing. with things that we learned along this? that we learn from our ancestors. we are here because of the sacrifices that they made and how they contributed to our presence today here and one of the things that they left for us was this tradition of gatherin
a safe space that we learn from our and chester s and we are here because of sacrifices that they have made and how they have contributed to our presence. and one of the things that they left for us was a tradition of gathering, seeing one another, and beginning to understand how i position myself in the conversations that we are in, in proximity to whiteness, and what do i have to do in order to reflect and uncover how until complicit and what work i can do to transform that complicity so that we can grow and heal together in these circles, do people does it ever turned into an argument? no, no. are people allowed to give their and pc thoughts about how they might be feeling about cultural change, et cetera? different communities have different facility of language. and today, we were talking about our communities, in the latinx community, that has not developed the facility of language. so yes, there may be instances where things are said that, for those of us t
today. and so we have a lot of work to do, still, number one. but number two it seems to me we start to think about this work i kept thinking about, what had is it about america that is stopping us from doing, in many ways, what they did in germany and maybe in south africa and the truth and reconciliation thing but you cannot really have reconciliation without truth. now this was in 2010 before we had 2016. so, when we started this just ask la june and the way we went to the institute of racial reconciliation and we asked, how do you do this? what do you do? you can t go you have to go through. it going through it means talking about a, talking about it means confronting it. and basically, we came to figure out, the six most important words in the english language, i m sorry, and i forgive you. but it s kind of hard to say i forgive you if someone says i m sorry they won t say i m sorry if they don t acknowledge the truth of what it is not happened. so we have to work thro
truth of what it is not happened. so we have to work through that. we did this welcome table exercise with kellogg s financial support. i think we had 20 or 30 circles of 20 or so people of different races and creeds and colors. and they met continually over a long period of time and they began to see each, other understand each other, listen to each other, talk to each other. and of course everybody s humanity just manifested itself. and as we were saying, as an aside, what are the gifts, whether the challenges? and in other words, what do you want to get from the other side, so you can have reconciliation? it s a little bit harder. we are out of time, but i do think it is important that we have white americans in this conversation. because the people who are feeling fearful about change, people about a future that is a multi racial democracy where everyone has power, and where everyone really is equal, it ain t people of color who and so i think that these conversations need to c