[applause] her book me and White Supremacy combat racism, change the world, and become a good ancestor grew out of an online effort to get people to confront and disassemble the way they benefit from whiteness and become what she called good ancestors, people with a legacy of liberation for others to follow. She is a writer and speaker and podcast father, earned her bachelor of laws degree from Lancaster University of the united kingdom, her husbands two children, my a we are excited to talk with her tonight. We are excited to announce this new book is released number made on the New York Times bestseller list. Number 88 on usa today. Welcome. Happy to be here. Are you on . Here it comes. Can you hear me . Can you hear me . Sorry about that. Never happened before. Because the tv is here. You can hear me. Im going to ask the question at hand the mike over to layla saad. I will start with a fascinating workbook and really great exploration of the topic we are all interested to talk about more tonight. You are asking white people, particularly white people in the United States to confront their racism out right, this could be an uncomfortable process. Talk about what you mean specifically. It is so interesting. I have been asked so many times, if i had known before embarking on this journey, if i had known what the journey was going to be ahead of time i might not necessarily have chosen it. The work i was seeing before. I was a life coach and business coach, wasnt doing anything controversial or anything that would make people uncomfortable. If anything, i will take care of you and help you grow your business but in 2017 when the charlottesville unite the right rally happened it was a turning moment for me because i remember seeing images of the men marching in the streets which we can all remember, the racial slurs and everything and it was like a light clicked over for me. I had things that had been brewing up inside me for many months, things i was observing in the Life Coaching space, the personal growth space that i could see with White Supremacy, people who look like the majority of people in this room were the majority and i wanted to know why that was the case. Was a because people like me didnt do this kind of work or were we being excluded from being seen as the leaders, credible people . So i wrote a letter, an open letter called i need to talk to spiritual women about White Supremacy and i was addressing things that were brought up within me and asking people in that space to look at, you say you want to change the world, heal the world, you are about loving life, you say you dont see color but racism is running rampant in this space and we need to have a conversation about it. I went on a journey through this letter that went very very viral and so fast forward a year later, one night after thinking about what have they learned in this time since they started having a public conversation and i grab my phone and start writing what have you learned about you and White Supremacy . What is White Supremacy . What had i served or experienced of it . Listing dozens of these things, white silence, tongue policing, cultural appropriation, white fragility, dozens of these products and i quickly realized wasnt a single post i was going to share to my community but was a journey so i created a journey on instagram that night that we begin tomorrow, 28 day journey to explore White Supremacy, sounds fun. Sounds fun. I really thought not many people will want to go on this journey because it doesnt sound fun. It sounds uncomfortable and hard. I woke up the next day and so many people said i am scared but i am in. We started that challenge and i had 19,000 instagram followers and by the end of 28 days it had more than doubled, we had people coming in every day and so it had been an incredible journey because it came from a place of anger and grief from charlottesville, what i was seeing in the curiosity of what have they learned. Amazing. You started this on social media as you described. A very millennial way of writing a book. Host what made you want to convert the social media experience into a book . Guest anyone in this room done the original instagram challenge . It was an incredible experience because it was for the first time people having very public conversations around their own unconscious racist beliefs. I had never seen it done before. It wasnt behind a pay wall or private setting and read what was being said. I knew from day one that this was a special thing that was happening. I knew by the end it had to become a book because there were people who were watching the challenge who were too scared to join in and they wanted to do the work that they were afraid and because the transformations i had seen i knew it had to go beyond the challenge i knew i would never run again. But it was so incredible it had to go beyond that live experience. I decided to turn it into a workbook and the great thing about doing that as i was no longer constrained to the instagram capture size. I had learned some things. I didnt realize how hard it would be for me and the people i was asking to go on his journey. Let me prepare you for what you are about to experience. Let me equip you for a journey that is very uncomfortable. Host having gone through this, those intro pages help you get to the notion this is not light work, not something you can do without a heavy amount of effort because it is going to ask you some really hard questions. The exercises that come in the workbook, when you did them online you did them in a particular order, you had to think about here is day one, day 2 and you are asking more challenging questions. Somebody says im good and then they see themselves, their complicity, these issues. How did you decide when you were doing at the first time what was the right order and did that change when you put into a print book or did it modify . What were those decision points . The night that i received the download of what the challenge would be i received dozens, wrote dozens of these things down and when we started day one the next day and i woke up and 5 oh no, i said i was going to do this thing and actually have to do it. From day one, choose the easiest one which is White Privilege, some people heard of this term. I began to see the way people were engaged on that day one post, you have to make it make sense. The thing that comes next builds on what happened. At first it was the night before, my plan had been to share what i received but it didnt make sense to do that. It was a sequential journey. I was very intentional each day about what was going to come next. The same order and prompts have remained the same from the challenge to the hardcover book. The response on that. One of the main things that was important to me, week 2, that is a hard week. That is look at racist stereotypes. People who do not want to be associated with racism. If i started that in week one most people would have shut down because consciously the way many people see themselves as im not racist. Racists either bad people, they marched in charlottesville. I am not one of those people. Cant even hear this. I started with the basic, what those do is White Supremacy, what some people do. All of us in different ways. When you get to week 2, the idea that maybe i have antiblack thoughts may be. I had all these other things that resonate. On that same line, people were speaking, the challenge putting to them next. The other thing you mentioned, the difference between the book and the challenge, people were responding, and some people working through the issue, to confront and deal with it, other people chiming in, women of color, how did that influence you when you went to create the workbook . The Biggest Surprise to me was out of nowhere black women help the situation to work. Voluntarily. They didnt have to do that and my instinct was to protect dont look at this, you dont want to read this but they showed up and helped me facilitate the work and they collectively were integral to me. I have two of my closest friends here, black women, they that sisterhood, working together that is so integral. When i went from the challenge to the workbook, i was alone and it was just me but the support and the challenge helped me to push more as well. Because there are some voices that were like cut the bs, go deeper and it helped a lot. Host to some extent, the book is your writing but communal support behind it and a different type. Guest it is so important because nobody does anything alone. Nobody does anything alone. We get to see the legacy, body of work of so many some of whom are everything to me and i stand on their shoulders because the work they did has informed the work i do. Host a big part of the book is this notion of journaling, asking people to write, to engage with these questions and to write their responses. My question becomes why is it more important for them to write their responses than to have a conversation or think about it and why do you want journaling to happen . Guest i have two answers to that question. The first is when i started having conversations about race and i wrote that open letter i was it was like a street battle every day on social media trying to convince white women this is real. You do do this and it was exhausting. It was really exhausting. What i found, instead of telling, asked, it made it easy on me and made them more open to having the conversation. That is one part of it. The other part, if we are thinking about it, if you read the book and think about it on an intellectual level where you are processing it here but not inside and so when we are talking about racism, racism is not an intellectual study. It is people who live life. It is there lived experience. That has to be matched with a lived, embodied experience of trying to understand your own unconscious thoughts and beliefs because they dont theoretically harm people of color, they actually harm people of color. It is important to use your whole body to put pen to paper, to write out and bring to the surface things that when you consciously think about them are not there immediately. Host i agree the way things happen and change. In the introduction, can you tell us what the phrase bonanza means to you . Guest a good answer saved my life and helped me to be able to sit here and have this conversation with you now. When i talked about when i started doing this work and how hard it was, i went from being somebody i was a life coach, very optimistic, very hopeful, very positive. When i wrote that letter and began to experience the very nice women in my community, suddenly had this reaction of white fragility which is many white people are not used to having complex conversations about race. When the conversation is brought up they have a sometimes violent reaction, defensiveness, getting angry, getting up and walking away, saying things they would never have said, never imagine such a thing coming out of their mouth or crying. I went from being a hopeful positive person to very negative, very pessimistic, very hopeless because i couldnt see if this work has been done for the amount of time we know it has been done which is fighting for the liberation and equality for people of color, it has been going on so long and i could read things that had been written by audrey lord, she could have written this today. It is the same experience and i needed something bigger than what i was seeing, that allowed me to continue on my journey because i couldnt do it from a place of resentment and this idea of being a good ancestor went beyond me. It became about my children and descendents, people who will come after i am gone. I used that. I have it on the cover, i host a podcast because i needed it but what is interesting is so many people resonated it with themselves and people who have White Privilege in particular, what it inspires or activates is this idea that i didnt create White Supremacy but i absolutely benefit from it. White people who came before us didnt dismantle it, didnt change it. Perhaps i can do what i can do in this lifetime to create a different future for those who will come after i am gone. Selfish it was for me but it helps people. Host can you tell me or us, some of the people you feel left the legacy you would want to leave . Who would you consider good ancestors . Guest the people we all know the first people are my parents, they are living ancestors today. When i got the news of the New York Times as we were arriving here, i called my husband and my mom. They are in qatar at 2 00 am. I told them because everything they poured into the makes me who i am today. Everything, the spiritual ability they are first. After mom and dad, writers, we set a waiting. Theres an image on the wall. I opened the book and close it with her words, she was a huge influence for me, audrey lord who i mentioned as well, black feminist women who did this liberation work in different ways. She was a Science Fiction writer. 201819, through her entire collection, if you read the parable the character in that book is what inspired me to want to be a good ancestor. She documents everything and it reminds me how important words are. The power of words because they live beyond us. Host you mentioned a months worth of content. You discussed the idea of people being able to walk through it in the 28 day cycle but they can easily go back to it but you want them to step through in the order in which it is put the first time. We cant go over all of these concepts tonight. We want you to buy the book, do the work as you mentioned, it is important for people to do the work they want to engage with its content. As i read through it, i want you i want to know how you define them, so the first one is white silence. Guest zoom out a little bit. The aim of this book is for people to understand that White Supremacy conditions and has infiltrated all of us. It is not what we can point to and say that person is being racist but the unconscious thoughts and beliefs and behaviors, it is not that bad but they perpetuate White Supremacy or maintain it in place by the nonaction. Being silent when you see having someone call the racial slur but somebody being mistreated, in normal situations, is it worth it to say anything . Does anyone even notice if i say anything . That actively keeps it in place. It is not a neutral behavior in the face of racism. You didnt create it, nobody alive created it but you maintain it and silence is a way to maintain it. Host like scrolling through facebook and you see something from someone you knew in high score see something from a Family Member and ask the question am i going to confront this here and now on social media. Host you can talk yourself into not saying anything and making a case for why it isnt worth it and moving on. Did anybody get harmed, and moving on, where they just having a bad day, maybe they didnt mean it that way. There are ways to talk yourself into white silence. Host you talked about white centering. Guest White Supremacy, White Supremacy comes from the root belief that people who are white are superior and deserve to dominate those people. And genocide, land theft. That happened before, it doesnt happen anymore. White centering is very when i talked at the beginning about why is it in the space i was in, Life Coaching, white centering played a huge part in this. A huge idea, i remember a conversation i had once. To mainly interview and the question i got once from a white woman, it was mainly people of color being interviewed, when i see the majority, is this podcast for me . If something is presented by white people it applies universally but if it is to people of color it is only for those people. Another example, in a book evens, when you watch movies, i walked through two lenses. Im watching the store but also what is going on racially. And body counts. If it doesnt matter if it is a romantic story or not, there is a romance line, if in a story, one of the romantic partners is a person of color, the other person will not be a person of color unless it is seen as a black movie. Unless it is a black movie and an audience is black people, what happens most of the time both moment romantic partners are white and is supposed to be a universal story of love we can all relate to. So that is white centering, in very subtle ways that doesnt allow people of color to be the center of the story. There is always a side character. Our stories are always marginalized. Host the other one i thought was powerful was the conversation about white savior is him. Guest i was on a plane recently and the man sitting next to me, we were cheering because no one had come to sit in the middle. What do you do . He said we were flying to hear and he said this is im going on a longer flight to africa. In my mind africa is not a country. Going to kenya. My dad is kenyan. Where are you going . Nairobi. What are you going to do . He said i am the coo of his food program, nonprofit, we provide meals. We do it in the us, we have programs here but we have one in nairobi. My spidey sense is our out because i want to know. I am asking all these questions, the basis of the company, very much faithbased. Im not going to be friends with this conversation, we just met. What was funny after that he asked what do you do . Let me show you my book. He took a picture of it and everything. It is this idea, this story, this idea that white people can save black and brown people from inherent state of wretchedness and that can look like missionary project in black and brown countries, trying to speak for a black woman, it can be very subtle. It is the same belief white people are superior to people of other colors. I know better for them what is best for them and colonization and the idea behind that, saving black and brown people, the heard museum, the advancement of American Indian art and an exhibition of stairs from the boarding schools, that was put in, stripped a entire identity. Throughout the exhibition, words that were used at the time of this policy, takes the indian out of the men, made into a man by taking away his culture because we know what is better for them than they do. Host those are all as you go through the book in these different things, each of these has a different amount of weight for individuals. Is there anything you think people need to know about . Gu