The Arise Podcast

Patriarchal bargaining, belonging, and complicity
Jenny | 14:55
“They were preserving themselves in the male dominated space of, if I call this out, then I'm going to be ostracized, exiled, whatever. And so all of it then becomes this performance of bargaining to continue to try to get power in proximity to patriarchy and white patriarchy.”
Rebecca | 16:45
“Is it that we need to have a better conversation about power in general and not just the people who are at the center of it, but the people who are in proximity to it and what we're willing to do to stay there, or is there something unique about how that power manifests in white male circles that is distinct?”
Danielle | 18:03
“The anger was that he got caught. Not that he actually messed up. There was not a sense of remorse, but in the meeting, this is a person that would say all the right things, try to do all the right things in a group sense. But when leaving that place, after having been told, ‘Don't do X or please do X,’ literally goes and does their own entire thing.”
 

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

In this episode, Danielle, Rebecca, and Jenny explore how political instability reaches far beyond elections—entering the body, the grocery store, the workplace, and the relationships people have with their neighbors. Jenny describes the physical relief she experienced crossing from the United States into Canada, revealing how much fear and vigilance her body had been carrying. Danielle brings the conversation into everyday economic life through rising food prices, unreliable food systems, and the growing need for neighborhood mutual-aid networks.

The hosts examine fear as an intentional political strategy—one that convinces people to distrust their neighbors, align themselves with concentrated power, and blame marginalized communities for hardships created by corporations, billionaires, and inequitable systems. They connect today’s racialized scapegoating to a longer American history of separating poor and working-class white people from Black and brown communities who might otherwise build collective power.

Against this manufactured isolation, the hosts offer mutual aid as both resistance and repair. Directly feeding families, knowing one’s neighbors, verifying frightening information, and forming relationships across difference can interrupt stereotypes and restore a sense of shared humanity. At the same time, they wrestle honestly with whether local action can become large enough to produce meaningful structural change.

Ultimately, the episode argues that fear keeps people divided, while mutual aid helps them remember their interdependence—and potentially recover their collective power.

“When we drove across the border, I—not totally unexpectedly, but uncontrollably—just started crying. I knew my body was holding a lot being in the States, and just stepping away and crossing into another land, immediately my body was like, ‘Okay, you can rest a little bit for the next two weeks.’ It’s been mostly restful. It’s also been complicated, because it feels like such a gift to my body, while also recognizing what my body—as an American in a car with American plates—represents to people here.”

—Jenny, 01:27

“We have a lot of mutual-aid projects going in our little neck of the county. Neighborhoods of people are collecting set lists of things because food banks are overwhelmed. They collect it, we put it in a bag, and then some random things get tossed in—paper towels, toilet paper, toothpaste, whatever is needed. We’ve been trying to provide canned meat as well. Last month, we had twenty-five or twenty-seven bags go out, and over two hundred people were fed. This month, we’re hoping to do double. We’re in a pretty affluent area, and there’s still a high need for food help.”

—Danielle, 06:34

“So much of it is determined by the people making the most money. Billionaires are doing just fine right now. I think it’s the same kind of myth that created whiteness—the idea that if I align myself with the people who hold the most power, I’m going to be okay. Maybe that works for a little while. It’s so much more appealing to believe that the next president is going to make eggs cheaper and make all my problems go away than to say, ‘We actually have to face this entire system and figure out how to shift it so that it becomes equitable and sustainable.’ That is much slower and harder work.”

—Jenny, 11:46

“Even if I don’t individually take on changing the world or fixing the entire system, there is a simpler, localized perspective: I actually give a damn about the person standing next to me. I care that something, even if it isn’t affecting me directly, is affecting them. If we could care about that alone, we wouldn’t fall for the lie that because something doesn’t negatively affect me, I can afford to ignore it. It might be much more personal than taking on the whole system. It begins with deciding that I care about the humanity and safety of the person standing next to me.”

—Rebecca, 13:02

“What the documentary boiled down to was the culture of fear that is so rampant in the States. If you travel to many places outside the United States, not everybody walks around with this same paranoia, fear, or distrust. Someone said, ‘We view you locking your door not as locking someone out, but as locking yourselves in.’ I’ve been sitting with that. How do we get people to stop fearing their neighbor before we can get them to care for their neighbor? If you are constantly fed messages telling you that your neighbor is out to get you, it becomes really difficult to reach that place of care.”

—Jenny, 14:21

“I think the answer is to pull it down from the rafters—to take it out of this abstract space and bring it into your own neighborhood and your own sphere of influence. Then you realize that your next-door neighbor, who doesn’t look like you, is actually a fairly all-right person. You’ve known them for however long. You know their kids. If you allow yourself to do that, the individual humanity of another person can challenge every stereotype, every preconceived notion, and every othering ideology you hold about an entire group. If you let that sit with you, you might find yourself responding differently.”

—Rebecca, 17:07

“I’m big on mutual direct aid. I really believe in it. I feel so whole and pure doing it—it feels genuinely good. I know it’s not always possible, and I’m not saying there isn’t a place for nonprofits or other forms of support. But mutual aid was one of the main things that happened in Minnesota: it began knitting together people who didn’t agree with one another about everything. Even within social-justice movements, we have a thousand different opinions. But what can you coalesce around? What feels good? What feels right?”

—Danielle, 18:11

“The powers that be leverage fear. They weaponize fear on purpose to accomplish whatever their goal is. We have to ask: Is my fear actually well placed in this moment? Do I have personal, real-life information that tells me my fear is legitimate, or am I basing it on something someone else told me? Is it inconsistent with my own experience? If I see something on social media, my knee-jerk reaction is to check it against two or three other sources and see whether it is grounded in any level of truth. Maybe we could all do that a little more often.”

—Rebecca, 19:01

“The campaign of fear is targeted at making sure that coalescing doesn’t happen. The fear is not simply saying, ‘Your vote doesn’t matter’ or ‘Your voice doesn’t matter.’ It is saying, ‘You are not like the person standing next to you, and it would be to your disadvantage to align yourself with them.’ That is intentional. It is calculated. And it is a tactic as old as this country. What is happening under this administration isn’t actually a new set of tactics. It is someone intentionally bringing those tactics back to the front of the room.”

—Rebecca, 27:39

“Convincing working-class or poor white people that their enemy is everybody else is not new. After Reconstruction, poor and sharecropping white people were taught that there was no value in aligning themselves with newly freed Black people. Together, they outnumbered the ruling class. If they had pooled their resources and voted for a particular way of life, this could have been a very different country. There was a targeted, intentional campaign to separate the groups and villainize newly freed people. Part of the campaign is about values, but eventually they criminalize anything that looks like assistance—anything that looks like help. I would be on the lookout for that next.”

—Rebecca, 29:44

“When so many people are barely making it, people want a scapegoat. Pointing to that scapegoat feels easier, even though their problems are being caused by corporations and billionaires who are pinning people against one another rather than allowing us to work collectively to change things. In France, workers will simply not go to work, and they remind the government, ‘We run this country. You want your trains to run? Don’t mess with us.’ There is a sense that labor threads the culture and society together—and that people must be adequately compensated for their labor if we want a society that isn’t drowning in credit-card debt, bills, and expensive beef.”

—Jenny, 34:42

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

“Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life.”

Jenny — Vulnerability becomes the scapegoat

“It felt like a projection of vulnerability. We don’t want to acknowledge how precarious one medical bill could be, one school bill could be. And so I think there becomes this hatred of whoever represents vulnerability. And right now that feels really loud for the immigrant community. There’s this vitriol from privileged spaces because we don’t want to sit with how precarious our privilege is and how that squeeze is happening. And so what always happens? There becomes a scapegoat rather than looking at, wait, how do we address the systems that are squeezing us so that we don’t have people in these vulnerable situations in the first place?”

Rebecca — Masculinity and the inability to say “I don’t know”

“Having watched him, the ways in which I now understand how men are not allowed to say things like, ‘I don’t know, and I’m not sure. And I need to look that up.’ … There’s something there in the ways in which we are allowed to be in society that I think can invite this: Dude, why can’t you just pause, step out of the room, go look it up, and then come back and cite the person from whom you got the answer? Why can’t you just say, ‘They’re an expert and they’re telling me the answer is this, so that’s what we’re going with’?”

“Someone told me that because of my pain and zeal, I make a lot of unjustified charges against various groups of people and that builds more barriers and walls between white people and Latinos. And it was just like—yeah, because in the end there’s this internal bodily drive to live in a certain kind of reality, to see the world from a certain kind of space. And you don’t fit in that reality. I don’t fit in it. My family doesn’t fit in it. Your family doesn’t. So therefore, you vote based on your reality…. It’s better without you. No matter what, as long as you’re gone, our life will be better. Who cares about healthcare? As long as you’re not here, life is better.”

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

A major thread of the episode is the relationship between immigration rhetoric and broader racial control. Danielle and Rebecca argue that calls to “secure the border” are not only about the nation’s geographic borders, but also about who gets counted as belonging, qualified, safe, or fully human. They connect immigration enforcement, birthright citizenship, anti-DEI backlash, voting rights, and gerrymandering as part of a larger project of redrawing the boundaries of American life around whiteness and power.

The conversation also turns inward toward betrayal within communities of color. Danielle speaks with grief and anger about Latino communities voting against their own ancestors, families, and cultural memory, while Rebecca reflects on the pain of Black men and other communities of color supporting a political movement that has openly threatened their own interests. Together they ask what stories people have to believe about themselves, their communities, and America in order to align with power that intends to harm them.

Rebecca offers one of the episode’s central metaphors: America as a survivor choosing to remain in a familiar cycle of violence rather than step into the uncertainty of a freer world. She describes the country’s attachment to white male narcissistic violent power as a kind of domestic violence cycle, where the known threat becomes more tolerable than the terrifying work of standing without it.

The episode closes with Rebecca naming the exhaustion of Black women and Black communities being expected to remain at the front lines of every fight for justice. She frames stepping out of the room not as abandonment, but as a defiant and resilient act of self-care. Danielle and Rebecca end by questioning the stability of integration into white institutions, noting that access may have produced real success, but that success remains unstable when institutions can reverse commitments the moment political cover appears. The episode leaves listeners with a sober but clarifying truth: survival, solidarity, and resistance may now require refusing the old bargain that marginalized communities must keep sacrificing themselves to save a country still choosing domination.

Rebecca — on safety and the Black or brown body

“We need to have a brutally honest conversation about the one Black kid in the all-white room. We need to have a conversation about how that isn’t safe. Nobody is surprised by that sentence. It might not have been one we said as brutally and blatantly as it is being said now, but I guarantee you that has been the worry all along: the ways in which it is not safe for the Black or brown body.” 

Danielle — on no justice coming

“Yesterday I said to Luis, ‘There will be no justice for Lorenzo. There’s not going to be justice. There wasn’t justice for Renee Nicole Goode. There wasn’t justice for Alex Preddi. There’s no justice coming down for this dude.’” 

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Rebecca

In this country, what we do with adoption is this notion automatically that adoption is a good thing, and whoever is in the role of adoptive parent is the hero of the story. That usually means the story of the adopted child, and however they came to be in a position where adoption was an option, is villainized in a way that is often inaccurate and radically oversimplified. It’s told as if the adopted child’s story begins at the moment of adoption, as if there was not something that happened before or during.

It sets up this dynamic where there are clear heroes, clear villains, and a kid in the middle who has everyone writing their story except the kid to whom the story belongs. The frame is problematic to me. The fact that we don’t know how to address it is problematic to me. What is true for that kid at the time of adoption? What is true for that kid ten years later? What is true for that kid thirty years later? There’s no conversation about that at all. There’s no vocabulary around what that means to identity and culture.

Jenny

I reread a book called Kisses from Katie, which was very popular. Katie Davis was a white woman from the States who went to Uganda and adopted fourteen Ugandan daughters by the time she was twenty-three. In one of the last chapters, a child’s biological mother comes and takes the child back to the village in Uganda, and Katie Davis writes as if it is absolutely unjust that a child would be taken from its mother.

There is seemingly complete obliviousness to the children she has who were birthed by someone else, who have stories there. It’s like there is no history or narrative because God has called her to be mommy. That call is unquestioned and unproblematic, and it is really heavy.

Danielle

What comes up for me is the Supreme Court ruling and Amy Coney Barrett having adopted Haitian children and then voting to end TPS status for Haitians. That is where our books overlap. That is literally psychotic to me. How are her kids going to make sense of that at some point in their life? Right now, they have to survive and do whatever they need to do, but the reality shift required to live inside that world is so great.

Theme 2: Transracial Adoption, Cultural Severing, and Identity Loss

Rebecca

When you’re talking about transracial adoption, I think it’s twofold. There is the issue of being a member of a marginalized community adopted into a majority family and having to navigate the explicit or implicit, conscious or subconscious racism that exists in that dynamic. To have to navigate that from inside the four walls of your own home is a thing unto itself.

But the other piece, which I think may be equally harmful in a different way, is the absence of the collective identity space that shapes who you are. Whole parts of your identity go unacknowledged, undeveloped, misignored, because you have been removed from the womb of your cultural and ethnic identity. I don’t think there is enough language to talk about how significant that connection is—not just to your family of origin, but to land, extended family, and the whole collective group.

Oftentimes for the adoptive kid, I don’t have vocabulary to describe what it is that I don’t know, except I have this haunting whisper that there is something I’m missing, and I can’t even identify it because I don’t have enough access to the cultural knowledge to tell you what I’m missing.

Jenny

It makes me think about Indigenous residential schools and the phrase, “kill the Indian, save the child.” What makes adoption acceptable is that it is actually adopting these kids into whiteness. It is not bringing them with their Haitian culture and language and pride in the same way TPS holders have.

A month ago, Sean and I stood with the TPS community in front of the Supreme Court when they heard this case, and it was an entire day of songs and stories and such beauty in the various cultures represented by TPS countries. That is what is being killed. That is what is not allowed. You can come if you adopt whiteness.

Danielle

I think we have sanitized the abuse and harm in European-dominant families here in the States, in evangelical white churches, schools, and other places. We are told that the white families adopting these children are not perpetrating harm. But I’m looking back at it today and thinking, no, they are perpetrating a lot of harm. So you have a child coming out of one set of harm and having to navigate another set of harm. It’s a double whammy.

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

“I just love the competition of it and seeing how far people can push their bodies and how far they can go. And I love team sports. I didn’t used to like soccer, but I’ve been watching World Cup games with Luis, who’s my partner. Since Mexico played the United States, we watched that game in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico together. And that’s one of the last times the U.S. won. We were down there, and I remember cheering and looking around, and Luis was like, ‘Don’t cheer. You’re going to get us in trouble.’”

“I started getting out of my skin this morning listening to stories about the international teams arriving in Mexico and being met with mariachis and food and dancing and celebration, and then hearing about teams arriving here and being locked in rooms, strip searched, cavity searched, and the best Somali referee being sent back. He can’t referee here, which is freaking insane. FIFA has its own problems, but this is the contradiction: we’re supposed to be hosting the world, and yet we’re treating the world like it’s dangerous.”

“I have a love-hate relationship with soccer because I had three older brothers and they all played soccer very seriously. Two of them went to state, one of them was first team all-state for Colorado. Every weekend was a soccer tournament. By the time I was old enough for my parents to ask if I wanted to play, I was like, ‘No, I hate soccer. I’m going to do dance.’ I still like that choice. I prefer dancing more than soccer, but soccer is the one sport where I actually know what’s going on and know the rules. Anything else, I just dissociate and have no idea what’s happening. I do like the snacks that often come with watching sports, though.”

“I saw the story about the referee not being allowed in, and it made me think about the question of hospitality. We are hosting the world, and yet as a nation, as a government, we are acting as though we hate the world. It’s such a weird time. I honestly would not blame countries if they said, ‘No, we’re not actually going to go at all.’”

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Jenny describes dissociation as the feeling of not being fully present, not quite in the body, and not able to feel one’s weight connected to the earth. Danielle adds her own experience of dissociation through music, piano, and “slow time,” complicating the idea that dissociation is always pathological. Together, they make space for dissociation as both a protective strategy and a collective danger: something that can offer relief, but can also allow people and communities to remain absent from suffering, violence, and accountability.

The conversation then turns toward whiteness, privilege, and what Danielle names “the white tax”—the cost of pseudo-belonging to systems of dominance. Jenny connects privilege to disembodiment, describing how whiteness and supremacy ask people to gain the world while losing access to soul, embodiment, reciprocity, and aliveness. Danielle extends this through the metaphor of Jason Bourne: “Look at what they make you give,” naming the severing of family, home, connection, erotic energy, food, dance, and presence as part of the cost of assimilation into power.

From there, Danielle and Jenny ask what it means to practice another way of living. They discuss therapy’s ethical dilemma: whether it helps people survive oppressive systems just enough to continue participating in them, or whether it can become part of creating something new. Jenny imagines a slower world, less obsessed with capitalist productivity, where people have enough, creativity is not tied to extraction, and collective wisdom replaces hierarchy. Danielle brings this into concrete community care through mutual aid, access to blood pressure cuffs, medical knowledge, herbs, and shared histories.

The episode closes with hope grounded not in denial, but in practice: Jenny’s experience traveling through forty-four states and finding communities everywhere building different ways of living; Danielle’s garden, walk-running, lifting weights, and touching the earth; Jenny’s book on the trauma of privilege and the hope of regaining soul through embodiment. The conversation becomes an invitation to return to the body, not as a private wellness project, but as a communal and political act of repair.

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Michael Thornhill’s book, The First, The Few and The Only, is available through the official book site and shop. The site describes Thornhill as an AfroCuban author, consultant, and recovering DEI practitioner whose work explores race, erasure, tokenism, and mixed identity in North America.

Book / author links: https://www.thefirstthefewandtheonly.com/about

Official book site: https://www.thefirstthefewandtheonly.com/shop

Instagram: @thefirstthefewandtheonly

Telling the Truth and Taking Your Story Seriously

Michael

“The first thing that comes to mind for the listeners is you need to take your story seriously enough to tell the truth. If you're going to write anything… you need to be honest. And if I remember your question correctly, to anyone who's the first, few, and the only, what that means is if you've ever been the only one with your face in the room, when you enter a room, you find yourself counting how many brown faces are there all the time at the church, on the school bus, in the youth group. If you've gotten so used to counting that you forget you're doing it, this book is for you.”

“I wrote something called a mirror memoir and what that means to me is a phrase I coined to basically reflect what black and brown people do whenever they get together and discuss what's happened to them in a white world, that whether across lunch tables or whispered in hallways, you end up regurgitating something that happened to you and then next thing you know, the space between you becomes a mirror because you're kind of like, ‘Oh yeah, that happened to me too.’”

“They feel well worn. They don't have their shock impact. There's not as much of a recoil and of course they feel old, but they also feel not polished in a sense of pedestal, but in a sense of a smooth rock that's been beat up by the waves against this cliff and they're like gems now. It just feels like something that's been well beaten down to the point of beauty and I feel it and yet it also feels good to name because it's like my body isn't the cage for it anymore.”

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Rebecca

1. On grief, shock, and not trusting white institutions

“I don't think shocked is the word that I would use. At the risk of making a sweeping generalization, I think we don't trust white people. I don't think we ever have. And I think even when we see something that looks like forward progress, that doesn't necessarily mean that we trust the white privileged supremacist institutions that were the reason why we needed forward progress in the first place. So I don't know that surprised is or shocked is a word. I think I have some grief about the fact that my generation is now facing something that we thought was long over.”

2. On how quickly government moves when Black rights are targeted

“If you ask for anything else, the answer is the wheels of government move slowly and the wheels of justice move slowly… But the second you want to strip Black people of something, the second you want to oppress Black people… ‘We can do that over lunch. We can get that done in the next hour. We can undo 50 years worth of voting rights legislation in five minutes.’”

3. On whiteness as an invented category and an exchange

“Isn't that the setup of whiteness all along? And when I say whiteness in that, I'm talking about the category white because the truth is nobody who identifies as white is actually like whiteness is a contrived category. What you are is European. What you are is Irish or German or British or Dutch or any other set of categories. And the whole idea in the U.S. sort of experiment is that you would exchange that ethnic specificity, that nationality and the story, the narrative and the identity that is attached to that, that you would exchange it. You would erase yourself. You would shorten your name, change your last name, drop your language, drop the accent, drop all of the cultural markers of your people to join this category called white in the United States.”

4. On the cost of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia

“The exchange is always, you get to become us and them is whoever we're othering at the moment. And this belief that in that othering somehow you come out unscathed, uninjured, which is never true, right? Racism, misogyny, xenophobia, it's expensive. It costs money.”

5. On Supreme Court cases and the invention of whiteness

“If you follow the court cases at the turn of the century where you have a number of immigrants that are coming to the United States under all these waves and there's a series of court cases, people seeking citizenship… the debate in the courts the entire time is this idea that there's such a thing as a category called white and the people who belong to this category have access to power and wealth and the people who are not in this category will not have access to that power or wealth.”

6. On racism reinventing itself

“Racism is smart. Misogyny is smart. Xenophobia is smart. It never stays the same. It morphs and it changes. It reimagines and reinvents itself. It's clever… When you have this period of expansion of rights, it will be followed by a period of extreme backlash.”

7. On the danger of believing civil rights are permanent

“I was born into a season where the battles had already been fought and won and the space around human rights was fairly expansive. So my only experience is living in the space of having the rights, the civil rights that we should have as human beings. That's what I know, and it never dawned on me… that in a country that could put the first Black man in office could at the drop of a dime pivot and do the polar opposite.”

8. On power, race, and who gets to belong

“In the end it's probably really about power and that racial lines, gender lines, nationality lines are how we have decided to limit the access to that power. And this is the thing: when you get invited into the us category and you think you're secure, you aren't. Because to quote Martin Luther King Jr., injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Just because today you fall in the category of us in the us versus them calculation is no guarantee that tomorrow you will stay in that category.”

9. On loyalty to power

“If my connection is only to power, I'm loyal to no one and at the same time I'm loyal to anyone who allows me to keep that power.”

10. On the present threat and the limits of talking about trauma as past

“Probably the way that we were imagining trauma in that cohort was on this idea that the trauma that we're talking about has long since passed and whatever that threat was doesn't exist today in that way. And for that reason, we sort of have the space to talk about the trauma itself and its impact. And I think where we are in this moment is that's no longer true. The threat is present, it is real, it is tangible, and it's bigger and more concrete in significant ways than it was five, six years ago.”

11. On fear, denial, and wanting to put her head in the sand

“There are parts of me that still want to put my head in the sand and I've been there since the election and that's legit. There are real ways in which I intentionally do not know the most current set of events because I choose not to know them because I don't want to process that and I don't want to live with the fear of what that actually means.”

12. On how far back the country might go

“What happened, what we did in immigration law during World War II, what we did around Japanese internment, all these things… they could literally come for people. You start talking about you're no longer a citizen, everything and anything you own can be seized by the federal government… how far back are we going to go before we can stop the slide?”

13. On keeping it academic in order to breathe

“I don't know. I have to keep this academic. Otherwise, you can't breathe through it.”

14. On building again after rights are dismantled

“Representative Jim Clyburn came on the line and his comment was, ‘I'm ready to build again.’ The structure that we built for the voting rights and civil rights legislation of the ’60s, it no longer exists in this country. That legal infrastructure… the last piece of it was dismantled by the court in this case. And so he's like, ‘It's just time to build.’”

15. On the emotional labor of rebuilding

“What struck me is like, where does he find the capacity to even begin to imagine building again, let alone doing the work of building? You were around to build the first set and it didn’t even last your lifetime. And he's like, ‘Literally, I'm ready to get in a room with the lawyers and the organizers and the people and let's build something else.’ And it stopped me. It shocked me.”

16. On representation and opportunity

“Representation absolutely matters, but I mean in the ways in which it matters in terms of what it opens up and what opportunities might be there versus what is not going to be there for the next generation… That means the person that's hiring for the job or the person that's granting internships or the person that is doing the home loan, all those things, who's in place and what's their mindset and their perspective.”

17. On stress, uncertainty, and the future

“A future that is far less certain than it was a week ago or a year ago.”

18. On care and family

“Spend some time with my kid who's home from school, that's a good thing. I'm going to go to dinner tonight with my family, eat some good food, spend some time with my favorite humans.”

Danielle

1. On shock, Trump, and anti-Blackness

“I've been thinking about how there's one narrative like Trump hates immigrants and there's the actual truth of I think Trump has a deep hate for African Americans and Black people and he's not hiding that and they're going after that. I guess I was not surprised, but I allowed myself to feel shocked about it this week, to feel shocked that there's so many people that quote or seem good that have gone along with this and amplified it.”

2. On the poll tax and who it harmed

“I was thinking it's pre-human trafficking in the United States, pre-colonization, the English did it to their own people. So this was an English thing where I think it was like in the 14th century, they were in that Hundred Years’ War and they needed to raise money for the war. So what did they do? They put a poll tax, like a flat rate across poor and wealthy alike. And of course, when you put a flat rate, it led to a revolt by peasants because they couldn't literally afford it.”

3. On the poll tax in the United States

“With the coming of slavery and then Jim Crow and then sharecropping and all of the things that kind of follow in there… you can see how this poll tax here in the United States and the history of Jim Crow, it didn't just hurt Black folks. It took out poor folks, immigrants, like all these folks. For sure. So the idea that these white folks are doing something quote for white people, it's amazing what white folks will trade in just to separate themselves out, just to hurt Black folks.”

4. On proximity to whiteness and power

“Connection for white folks to white folks or connection to power or whiteness, let's say connection to whiteness, that will always trump any human rights, any love for neighbor, any connection to legitimate faith. I believe that inherent in the bodily manifestation of this over centuries, that connection to power trumps almost everything else.”

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Danielle

1. On adults needing honesty before they can guide young people

“But then that comes back to us and being able to honestly talk about our own experiences as kids and be far more honest about what that experience was. Be far more honest about the spectrums we probably all lie along or the ways we've felt confused or the way we've worked through maybe even contradictions in our own selves that don't feel like they fit and what tools have we used that are helpful, what tools have not worked for us… I think it's a new way of differentiating from us as parents to be able to explore something different.”

2. On colonization, sex, caste, and racial hierarchy in Mexican history

“One thing I know about my history and a part of the complex and layered part of Mexican history is that when colonizers came over, the Spanish particularly, they would then send for their families or their wives, but they would also, part of the strategy along with the Catholicism and the Christianity that was brought, was having babies with Africans that were enslaved… part of the colonial atmosphere was to essentially make classes of people based on race. And so you have a Christian monogamous colonizer with this sent-for family also having… either Indigenous folks or Africans that have been enslaved… That was intentionally done through sex under the guise of monogamy.”

3. On anger, violence, and the body

“We know how arousing anger is and regardless of your sexual orientation, in our bodies anger is so arousing… as they put certain categories of people into unacceptable other categories, they're literally arousing themselves… essentially getting off on the violent talk is what I think and feel… using the content of the United States and our military as a form of doing that just feels so deeply violating.”

Rebecca

1. On sexuality and gender as communal, not only individual

“Sometimes we can think about this conversation about sex and sexuality and gender and all of that as this sort of individual choice or this individual expression. But I think there's something to be learned from the idea that it can be very communal and very collective and in that way have communal and collective impact. And I think sometimes we don't take that into account in very real ways.”

2. On young people needing a bigger frame

“I definitely have the experience with my two kids of just a general sentiment like the frame that you gave me is not big enough to hold all of the things that my world requires me to hold. It's not. I need a different frame. I need a bigger frame. I need some flexibility in the framing in order to engage the world that is in front of me… Sometimes I think the best thing that we can do as adults in that space is say okay and be willing to knock down some walls and get rid of some steel and put something flexible in that space so they can breathe a little bit and figure it out.”

3. On not confusing authentic monogamy with colonial violence

“Does that invalidate monogamy? And my answer would be no, it doesn't… if you're running around intentionally creating babies with the Indigenous people that were there in the place where you have come to conquer, don't call yourself believing in monogamy because that's a boldfaced lie… Christian nationalism is not Christianity, it's something else. And part of what is infuriating to me is the hijacking of an idea or vocabulary or belief that in and of itself is fine and it gets hijacked and applied to something that is a gross perversion of what it was meant to be.”

Jenny

1. On purity culture, abstinence-only education, and labels

“So much of that… is a symptom of purity culture and the fact that we don't talk about sex. The abstinence-only generations since the ’80s were we don't talk about sex. And it was sort of Nancy Reagan’s idea of just say no was applied to sex. And so consent was not talked about. Sexuality was not talked about. Gender expression was not talked about. And it's not that those things didn't exist… The queer community has always been around.”

2. On labels as both liberating and limiting

“Raphaela Fieo from Healing Exchange says labels can be liberating or they can be limiting. And I think it's important to hold both. For some people, labels are really, really important and for some people labels are like, I don't actually want you to try to define me or put me in a box.”

3. On settler sex and Christian nationalism

“What would have to happen is the reckoning of white heteronormative Christian nationalism… Kim TallBear is an Indigenous polyamorous scholar who has this article called Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex… they essentially critique a lot of the white sex-positive communities that don't acknowledge the privilege in white polyamory or sex-positive practices when it literally was gender and racial and familial relations often that were used to Christianize Indigenous communities across the globe.”

4. On monogamy, normativity, and honoring difference

“Monogamy could be part of that expression and all of these other things also are part of that expression… getting out of this normative thinking of like, if this is the way I do it, this is the way everyone should do it. And rather, okay, this is the way that resonates with me. So if I stay with what feels like the truest expression of my relationship and sexuality now, can that also give me more capacity to honor the ways in which other people are living into theirs, even if it's vastly different than mine?”

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.