00:00:13.240And since you're definitely going to make big mistakes, it's much better to be one of
00:00:18.860many, many, many white people who are good enough, doing our best, definitely going to0.74
00:00:25.640mess up, but are going to stick around and be available for repair and further responsibility.0.56
00:00:38.620Alexis Shotwell's work focuses on complexity, complicity, and collective transformation.
00:00:45.000A professor at Carleton University on unceded Algonquin land, she is the co-investigator for
00:00:51.400the AIDS Activist History Project, and the author of Knowing Otherwise, Race, Gender,
00:00:58.200and Implicit Understanding, and Against Purity, Living Ethically in Compromised Times.
00:01:07.000Well, Alexis, thank you so much for joining us today on For the Wild. I really look forward
00:01:14.100to speaking with you and diving into some of these complex and nuanced topics.
00:01:20.220Such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
00:01:25.260So to begin our conversation, I'd like to discuss the ways in which your work finds impurity and imperfection as fecund ground for political, social, as well as personal and collective transformation.0.52
00:01:41.700Now, I'm particularly struck by this notion because of the ways that perfectionism and purity are inextricably wound up in white supremacy culture.
00:01:54.120Now, to provide some needful grounding, I want to raise an article titled Divorcing White Supremacy Culture by Tema Okun, a facilitator of long-term anti-racism and anti-oppression work, wherein Okun identifies perfectionism, individualism, and either-or thinking as key tenets of white supremacy culture.
00:02:18.480So given this, I wonder if you could expound on the relatedness of conceptions of purity and whiteness, and then speak to the utility of our imperfection and how we harness it for collective power.
00:02:35.440yeah that's a beautiful and complicated question so i think yeah people are often really surprised
00:02:44.440to think about the ways that purity culture is an expression of white supremacism and
00:02:53.040so one thing that i think we can start with is just asking what whiteness is you know what it
00:03:01.700what it has been historically and when we look at that there's something really significant
00:03:09.680about the particular formations of what we call racial formation so the particular way
00:03:17.820that race came to be delimited articulated firmed up as part of the project of colonization
00:03:28.940And I'm situated in North America, but we can see the ripples and the intellectual formation of whiteness moving across the Atlantic, across the globe, as part of the colonial project.0.60
00:03:46.180So what that was, in some real way, was an attempt to square the insurgent and liberatory idea that all people have worth and dignity, that was coming out of the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment, to square that sense, right?0.65
00:04:12.480That everyone has dignity and anyone can be someone who learns and transforms and leads with the fact of colonizing nations, wanting to and enacting genocide, enslavement, land theft, and so on.
00:04:34.640So the initial way that that was organized intellectually was to make a split, make a difference between people who would be considered human persons and everyone else who could be exploited, used, subjugated.
00:04:53.540And of course, now when we look at this, we also see the ways that this, when we think
00:04:59.320about people, we don't need to just think about human people.
00:05:03.120We can think also about the tendency and impulse that this initiated and that it sustains in
00:05:13.100extracting and devastating the natural world, ecosystems, and what we sometimes think of
00:05:22.440So to say there's a difference between the ones that we need to consider and hold in
00:05:31.340view and respect their dignity and everyone else who we get to use up, that's the initial
00:05:36.380kind of an initial impulse of whiteness as we're living it now.0.54
00:05:42.100So that impulse is always splitting and it's always concerned about contamination.0.61
00:05:49.280always concerned especially about contamination of lineage or blood. It's concerned about the ways
00:05:56.340that things can be inherited. And so it comes to be a whole governing modality that is about
00:06:05.900keeping things pure. And, you know, we see this continue in white supremacist logics and rationales
00:06:15.360today in eugenicist moods and moves that turn toward an idea of purity, purity of blood and
00:06:23.940purity of being. And of course, aside from all the violence that that impulse has curated and
00:06:33.620promulgated, the move toward purity is always going to fail because the world is just not like
00:06:43.220that. There is no such thing as racial purity. There is no delineation between different kinds0.60
00:06:49.840of humans that is biologically written. And as we learn more and more, and as we deepen our
00:06:56.460attention, it turns out there's no delineation that we can really hold firm between humans and
00:07:05.620non-humans who also care and are curious and play and think about the future so I can say some
00:07:16.020things about how this shows up in our personal experience which most people don't don't think
00:07:21.020about that quality of the purity move as something that is showing up in their own pursuit of
00:07:27.940perfection but would you like me to talk about that a little bit yeah I would love that thank
00:07:33.200you okay so a lot of the time the way that we experience this is we think that in order to do
00:07:42.640anything we have to do it perfectly in order to have standing to do something we have to do it
00:07:47.940perfectly so that might seem a really long way away from colonialism and enslavement and border
00:07:55.280militarism and so on but the way that that purity impulse is actually the same is it's
00:08:05.180supposing that there is something that really exists that can be achieved and so
00:08:15.160one part of that is a framing of the activity that we're doing as something that's possible to
00:08:25.160close off from the complexity and the interconnectedness of the world so the only
00:08:33.720way that you actually have you know purity is a it's a myth it's a lie and the only way that you
00:08:39.520can even imagine that it exists is if you're imagining yourself as not embedded and connected
00:08:46.080to the world and to other people as soon as you breathe as soon as you take a sip of water as
00:08:53.620soon as you be in any kind of relationship you're implicated in everything that's happening
00:09:00.240it doesn't mean you're responsible for everything there's definitely people who are responsible for
00:09:07.580horrible things that are happening but we all inherit the whole history of what has shaped our
00:09:16.180world and we're connected to the whole thing. So if we're trying to, for example, I'm a white
00:09:24.180person, I think a lot about whiteness. So if I'm trying to be responsible and get everything right0.97
00:09:31.200about whiteness, I will inevitably mess up because there's not a way for me to be a white person and0.98
00:09:39.340not be inheriting the legacies of all of those violences. And there's also not a way for me to0.91
00:09:45.060be a white person and not be benefiting from them. So if I aim for perfection and purity,
00:09:53.300even as a leftist, right, if I aim for perfection and for never messing up, you know, for never
00:10:00.020getting canceled, I'm always going to miss that goal because it's not possible. There's no such
00:10:07.200thing as being pure. So the place that I care about this most, I think, is in our politics,
00:10:15.480right? Is if we're trying to be perfect in our politics, the only thing that we'll do is never
00:10:21.000do anything. Because as soon as we do anything, we're going to make mistakes. And I have to say
00:10:28.720that as I've thought about imperfection as a ground, one of the things that has really helped
00:10:37.160me is also noticing how releasing that idea eases a whole bunch of other stuff in our personal
00:10:45.600lives. So it's not just political, I think, that we should let go of that idea of perfection. It's
00:10:51.420also personal. It's how we could live in a more gentle way with ourselves and others.
00:10:58.380gosh i'm with you there i've been definitely thinking a lot about that
00:11:10.540strain for perfection in myself and how detrimental that is and how much internal
00:11:18.740pain that's caused and and where that idea of perfection even came from who conditioned me
00:11:25.700like that was this it doesn't feel like it was nature that put these ideas of perfection in my
00:11:31.360head and I think also there's the cancel culture but there's also sometimes this
00:11:38.300self-righteousness that comes out when people strive for perfection or purity it's maybe it's
00:11:45.260like the pain of being complicit and implicated is is so intense that instead people go to the
00:11:54.740other side of the spectrum of self-righteousness to maybe defend themselves from that pain of
00:11:59.240complicity I've been thinking about that lately how we all metabolize and acknowledge our complicity
00:12:07.820and lack of purity and how that relates to being a good person or you know it's like there's so
00:12:14.720much there's so much in this and I want to keep going I wanted to bring up in your book against
00:12:21.780purity, living ethically in compromised times, you write, personal purity is simultaneously
00:12:28.940inadequate, impossible, and politically dangerous for shared projects of living on earth, end quote.
00:12:38.040So you started to touch on this, but I would love if you could speak about how personal purity
00:12:43.580actually bifurcates us from collective thinking and walk us through a process of how we reframe
00:12:51.060neoliberal conceptions of the self into broader, expansive understandings of collectivity.
00:13:00.160And maybe a second part, you know, in your view, how might this reframing be done in a way that
00:13:05.820does not extract or appropriate indigenous epistemologies and worldviews that are fundamentally
00:13:12.200relational. Yeah. Well, maybe I'll start with that part because many of us now are trying to
00:13:22.940be in better relation with indigenous lifeways and land and recognizing that we live on stolen0.79
00:13:31.200land in this continent and that we're not in good relation with the land or the people who have
00:13:37.180cared for it historically and who would care for it again if they were given the opportunity as a
00:13:43.100practice of their responsibility. So I see a lot of us when we start thinking about interdependence
00:13:52.060and about being in good relation with other people and land, turning toward Indigenous
00:13:58.860indigenous teachings and people and for settlers who are differentially positioned right so there
00:14:07.840are white settlers like me who have moved across nation-state boundaries without the permission or
00:14:14.300you know blessing particularly of the people whose place I came to live on and there's also
00:14:20.120settlers of color who were brought to this continent not you know they didn't choose it
00:14:26.740and people who are currently being displaced because of rapacious capitalism whose migration
00:14:35.060and movement is also not chosen in any direct way. So there's lots of different ways that
00:14:44.720we who live here who are not Indigenous might try to be in relation with these places,
00:14:51.980thinking with and in response to indigenous practices of relationality.0.89
00:15:01.680So one way that works and that is really great is we might begin to have less of a sense
00:15:10.140that the point is for us individual people to be correct and sort of like certified on
00:15:20.220the right side because a lot of those teachings and just people are really organized around
00:15:29.180what does interdependence look like and what do ongoing relations of responsibility feel like
00:15:37.600what's the practice of those so there's like nothing bad about listening to indigenous people
00:15:44.140and trying to have those relationships, relations of responsibility. But one of the things that
00:15:51.380tends to happen is white settlers in particular might try to become indigenous in one way or
00:16:00.620another. So in the part of North America where I live, this is happening where people are explicitly
00:16:06.700just discovering, you know, pretending that they're native because they've found some
00:16:13.200ancestors 14 generations ago. And that's a kind of identity theft that is very violent.
00:16:22.340Also, though, we might just try to fold in and give up the particular painful space of being0.84
00:16:34.160part of settler society and the sort of web of implication that that puts us in. So the way to
00:16:40.420do this, these relations of responsibility without either appropriating indigenous spiritual
00:16:48.720traditions or identity pretending to be indigenous or like kind of, yeah, folding over actually our
00:16:58.860own capacity to be in dignified relation is to find our own ground, right? Which is to find the
00:17:13.400threads of response and capacities for responsibility that actually we have.0.76
00:17:20.440So I've come to think that at every point that any of us feel a kind of tug of wanting to divest ourselves completely of settler history and its violences,
00:17:38.520that those places, those sites of complicity are really good places for us to start to transform
00:17:46.240complicity and implication into responsibility and reciprocal care.
00:17:55.920So wherever we notice something where we're like, I do not want the world to be like this,
00:18:02.360and I feel awful that I'm implicated in it, that's a place where we can start, we can turn
00:18:09.760toward that feeling and start asking what collective work is already happening there.
00:18:17.300So that's a sort of heuristic, right? When you feel a sense of horror that there's a mine going
00:18:24.860in near where you live and it's going to poison the river and the people who are authorizing it
00:18:33.300are settlers who are ignoring indigenous treaties and land responsibilities and they're saying it's
00:18:41.400for the benefit of settlers like me and maybe settlers like you that's a good place to start
00:18:46.720fighting to start calling relations of responsibility into being to say no um so it's
00:18:55.360a heuristic when you feel uncomfortable turn turn toward it and see where you might fight
00:19:00.720and then it's a kind of medicine uh for counter individualism um and for resisting
00:19:10.080what yeah you know i think of as self-righteousness that is based on purity so often when you start
00:19:20.960doing work you know when you start working together with people there's an impulse to be like
00:19:26.660the good you know the good white person who is totally down and has everything together
00:19:33.400but a little bit often that happens in a mode where there can only be one
00:19:37.400And since you're definitely going to make big mistakes, it's much better to be one of many, many, many white people who are good enough, doing our best, definitely going to mess up, but are going to stick around and be available for repair and further responsibility.
00:19:58.400responsibility. So that's kind of the best way that I've thought about the practice of0.81
00:20:05.680not trying to be personally perfect and always correct. It's those two ways, right?
00:20:28.400Do you ever get the feeling you're gaspin', you're holdin' on your graspin' for something
00:20:46.280you barely remember lastin' Past a few breaths in the morning time
00:20:52.480Before the aches, the pain, the stress, the grease, the grind
00:21:48.660yeah there's definitely a few people in my life coming to mind as and of course myself too in my
00:22:00.780own ways but just really playing out what you're saying and in my memories of just moments of
00:22:09.840conversations with intimate loved ones of how do we show up in this time and what is it to be
00:22:17.440a good person, a good white person, a good earthling, somebody who cares, somebody who
00:22:22.940protects. It's interesting to consider what leads us to choose these different paths of
00:22:31.480relating to these issues. Those of us who choose to be comfortable in our imperfection or those
00:22:39.960of us who choose this type of desire for purity and perfection and self-righteousness
00:22:45.340And how our wounds probably inform which path we go down with how we relate to these times and also what stops us at moments from breaking through that clinging to purity in ourselves. I don't know if you could speak to that at all or what your thoughts are there.
00:23:09.100i mean you know some of the time i feel really moved actually when i notice myself clinging to
00:23:19.560purity or i see someone else having that struggle because one of the things that it signals is we
00:23:25.320really wish that it could be better like we've we really really want the world to we really want to
00:23:33.240help the world so it's actually we could see it and say this is a beautiful impulse you know this
00:23:39.620is it's wonderful that you want to do it do it right so if we meet that impulse in ourself
00:23:46.260with that quality of curiosity and kindness we might be better able to meet it in others
00:23:52.900with that same quality too so seeing like oh you want to get this right i see that
00:23:58.960Well, the definite and sure and certain way to get this wrong is to spend a lot of time identifying how everyone else is getting it wrong, you know, and how you're getting it right.
00:24:12.540Or to be, you know, monitoring your words constantly and trying to never put a foot wrong.
00:24:20.960And that actually is a recipe for demobilization and decollectivization.
00:32:30.780And really what I mean to be saying is we're all connected and we don't get to choose it.
00:32:36.560So, so just by being alive right now on this earth, we're connected to things that if we
00:32:44.000really looked at it, we would say, I, I don't want this to be like that.
00:32:50.060So that's about, that's about, I mean, gosh, just, you know, anything you look at, it's,
00:32:57.180there's something when you pull on any strand in it there's something that you're like i would
00:33:03.900rather if it wasn't like that right so the the right really likes to say to anyone who is
00:33:12.980advocating for solar power well but look at the mining practices that are required to make solar
00:33:19.560panels so i mean anyone who's been in an argument with a anyone who's said something about like
00:33:26.340climate change or environmental devastation uh with a relative or a co-worker a friend who is
00:33:33.200on the more conservative end has probably had one of these conversations like you say you are
00:33:38.040against climate change but there you are you know taking a plane or and i think all of us it's you
00:33:47.400know it's nourishing actually to to think about like how can we how can we actually perceive better
00:33:56.020the points of attachment that we have to these sites that we wish were otherwise and that's one
00:34:03.440of the things that I'm I think really is a way for us to start right if we if we are like I want a
00:34:10.080solar panel but I don't want children mining it and enormous environmental devastation what is
00:34:17.860what what things might we step into what things might we prioritize in our in our work
00:34:23.620so saying that we're all connected to things that we think should be otherwise is really just a way
00:34:31.220to say all of us have some point of attachment for something that we could work on that we could care
00:34:37.780about that would start to move this world in a direction that would produce more possibility
00:34:46.260for more of us to live and flourish but of course not all of us are equally responsible
00:34:53.980so there are people who are making decisions that will vastly immiserate
00:35:03.200masses and masses of people that will devastate ecosystems that will kill rivers
00:35:09.240that are killing the planet so we're not equally responsible and it's good for us to identify our
00:35:17.920enemies the people who are making it be the case that we are implicated in truly horrific things
00:35:27.020because they want to make money um so that's when i say we're all implicated we're all complicit but
00:35:34.940we're not equally responsible um that's that's what i mean right we can have a clear-eyed
00:35:42.280understanding that there are people who are making these decisions they could make different
00:35:47.560decisions and if we're generous we could help them make different decisions now thinking about
00:35:55.860this move right so i was saying purity politics is always going to be individual like the illusion
00:36:02.560of purity relies on the idea that we could be separate and not complicit and not implicated.
00:36:12.000So resisting purity politics is going to always require us to resist individualism,
00:36:18.640and so this comes back to the question about neoliberalism that you asked earlier that I
00:36:22.080never answered. We can't solve these problems just by sheer acts of will and trying really,
00:36:31.120really hard to recycle everything we can't solve them by going off grid you know in any relevant
00:36:40.780way right we're still going to be involved in the worlds touching the world making an impact
00:36:46.300on the world so if we think about that then we can say the only way we're going to solve these
00:36:55.420big problems is by organizing with other people by getting together with other people
00:37:01.400which again is always gonna it's always gonna mean that we make mistakes or we are really grumpy we
00:37:09.700don't like we don't want to organize with that person they're so irritating when they talk all
00:37:13.780the time in a meeting like all those things are going to happen as soon as you're organizing with
00:37:17.460other people. They are irritating. You make mistakes. It's uncomfortable, but it's also
00:37:25.180joyful because it's the only way to actually address the things that matter to us. So in this
00:37:33.660book that I'm working on, I've been really thinking about these different ways that we can
00:37:38.540get together with other people and what they look like and how they are. Do you want me to
00:37:43.460talk a little bit about that yeah please so so one way is just it's just on the level of like
00:37:51.700actually friendship so we're really taught in this world that the only kinds of sustaining
00:38:00.080relationships that we should have should be with maybe our sort of nuclear family of origin
00:38:06.280which is one of the myths of neoliberalism that the only people that will take care of you are
00:38:12.320your family. That's a lie. And when we maybe leave our family of origin, we're supposed to
00:38:19.540find dyadic, monogamous, romantic relationships that will fulfill us in every way. So as everyone
00:38:28.360knows, neither of these things work like that. And both of them have actually a kind of great
00:38:35.080fear of the power of friendship so one way to get together with others is to be friends
00:38:40.880and to be friends in the mode that the friends that you have call out to you in their being
00:38:51.180a kind of respect for what philosophers think of as your best self so the the you that you are when
00:38:58.600you feel most yourself, when you have joy and no shame, and you feel like you're filling yourself
00:39:05.640to the edges of your skin, and you're also stretching into something that you can't predict
00:39:10.000yet. And this can be, you know, humans can do this. Companion animals can be friends to us in
00:39:16.660this way. Places can be friends. You can befriend a mountain or a river that can do this for you.
00:39:23.660so that's a kind of personal feeling and I just I think we should proliferate more friendship like
00:39:30.580that but that's a different and not necessarily this you know doesn't even necessarily come in
00:39:37.660to doing political work with people so having comrades in struggle or fellow travelers this
00:39:45.280is the way that you build people power with people who you don't even necessarily like
00:39:52.640but you are on the same side of a relevant struggle and you trust them to show up
00:39:58.200and work with you to help something change so this is another kind of relationship that is
00:40:08.460not nourished it you know movements have been on their back foot for a long time now
00:40:14.860and many people don't have the experience of being in a collective
00:40:18.580so forming collectives is a skill that we can have we can have collectives that are
00:40:25.440like intentional and formal um where you have social harm reduction practices where you have
00:40:32.980ways of rotating roles so that fixed hierarchies don't structure those you can have temporary
00:40:39.380collectives you can have so i'm just a big fan of people actually just making collectives having
00:40:44.520friends, making collectives. And then the third kind of relationship that I'm really thinking
00:40:49.860about is the relationship of naming our enemies and opposing them. So in my town right now,
00:40:57.760there's a lot of white supremacists organizing and coming out to say, I am opposing you because
00:41:06.860I am white and you claim to speak for me is another form of relationship. Opposition is a
00:41:14.440relationship. So when we directly name the thing that we are fighting, we can begin to engage in
00:41:24.520opposition. And that doesn't mean that we have to be mean or horrific, but we have to actually be
00:41:32.460able to stand against things. And sometimes it helps once you've got your mushroom friends and
00:41:40.280mountain friends and your human friends and your animal friends too and your comrades who are
00:41:45.880standing with them too um it helps to think about that work of opposition as something where they're
00:41:53.240you know standing shoulder to shoulder with you or um paw to shoulder and uh
00:42:01.960and you sort of have a duty to to respect their dignity by opposing the thing that's killing them
00:42:10.280So those are three forms of relationship that fight individualism, but also that we need in order to make big change at the scale we need to make it right now if we're going to survive on this planet.
00:42:26.280I am a great ship, I'm a beast of the sea
00:43:50.940yeah i'm yeah i'm just taking it all in and i'm wanting to expand on this notion of friendship
00:44:08.860and comradeship and relations but also on this understanding of our implication in white
00:44:16.240supremacy and settler colonialism and capitalism, and I'd like to reference your essay Claiming Bad
00:44:23.860Kin, in which you propose, quote, I argue for a specific form of responding to whiteness that
00:44:30.400involves white settlers claiming rather than disavowing our connection to white supremacist
00:44:35.940people and social relations. I see at least three different roles we white people can
00:44:41.180take up in reclaiming our kin as friends comrades and enemies end quote so could you elaborate on
00:44:50.440this methodology perhaps through even a personal account of claiming bad kin at sites of friendship
00:44:57.820comradeship and relations with those perceived as our enemies yeah0.68
00:45:04.000so thinking about whiteness I think is really generous for thinking with these relations
00:45:13.920because it's so hard so the ways that the friend relation helps us well I'll just say something0.65
00:45:21.920first about claiming bad kin so often white people we do a good job claiming and referencing
00:45:30.620the ancestors we have who maybe fought slavery or opposed in the Canadian context, residential
00:45:39.820schools, we sometimes will look to inspiration to people who fought, right? Who were on the side of
00:45:48.920good as we identify it. And sometimes even we'll say, I'm nothing like those bad white people,0.63
00:46:00.620So one part of claiming bad kin is just recognizing that also we inherit people who were actively engaged in enslavement and colonizing projects, that many of us have inherited the benefits of those systems or currently benefit from them.
00:46:27.780so claiming bad kin is partially that actual work of like who in our family do we need to
00:46:34.440take responsibility for like in our our bloodline you know our particular family narrative our
00:46:41.220particular family tree if we know it but claiming bad kin also for me comes from0.96
00:46:48.320listening to indigenous feminists who have talked about that move that white people do to say that1.00
00:46:55.680they're not really white. And to say, oh, I'm Cherokee, I'm, you know, different thing. And one
00:47:02.520of the things that people like Kim Talbert and Circey Strom say is, it doesn't matter actually
00:47:08.120what you claim about your relations and your identity. What matters is who claims you,
00:47:15.620who says you're part of them. And when I started really looking at that, I realized that white0.98
00:47:24.500supremacists claim me. So they're doing what they're doing to benefit the white race, to
00:47:32.160benefit white people. And they're trying to build that world. And as I've been walking around my0.92
00:47:38.420city this weekend, the racialized people I know are targeted by these folks who are in town and
00:47:46.420I'm not. So they're claiming me as one of them. They're claiming me as kin. So thinking about0.97
00:47:54.200how i can oppose that you know and name that move as a move that i'm against
00:48:00.440various things can happen right so that can be showing up for the people who are targeted
00:48:09.220by white supremacists organizing in my town it can be putting my my body and my face between
00:48:17.600them and someone they're targeting. It can be using my political position to leverage certain
00:48:25.380things because of the ways that I'm listened to. So there's lots of ways that opposition can be
00:48:30.460that kind of relation. Comradeship in fighting whiteness or recognizing white complicity
00:48:38.000is often going to be in these more collective spaces, asking how groups that we're involved in
00:48:46.060can take better or different responsibility
00:48:48.440for the things that we're implicated in,
00:49:11.420How is this group calling each other and calling ourselves into practices of responsibility and transformation collectively? And what forms of coalition might we build that can leverage more power against white supremacy?
00:49:31.280see. And then friendship. So some of the time this is people who are white people who have
00:49:42.080friends who are racialized sometimes have the really incredibly generous space where the
00:49:52.260racialized friend will say, this thing that you did was really not okay. That was a racist thing0.69
00:49:57.660to say, or the way you behaved was, was because you're white and it hurt me, or I noticed it.
00:50:06.000So sometimes we have racialized friends who will do that very hard friend work for us as a,
00:50:13.380and it's always a sign that they actually care about us and want to be in relation care enough
00:50:18.120to do that. Um, we also can do that for each other. White people can do that for each other.
00:50:24.780we can say, I noticed this happen, or I noticed you spoke about this person in this way, or0.98
00:50:31.140I know you don't want to be like this in the world. And those conversations also are really
00:50:37.220hard. But if we're friends with each other, we actually, no one, no one wants to be awful,
00:50:47.640you know but the only way that we transform is through relation so those spaces are the
00:50:54.800ways that we can shift how we're how we're living whiteness I think and often they're
00:51:00.660all entangled they're all together you know as soon as you're working with a group you're
00:51:05.380usually identifying something you want to change and you have a tactic for how you want to change
00:51:09.640it and you have people you're targeting whose minds you want to change or whose actions you
00:51:15.480want to shut down whether they change their mind or not you have comrades you know you have people
00:51:21.200who are friends who are calling you in or calling you out so it's messy