S10E2 – The Demands and Promises of Integration with John Blake

S10E2 - The Demands and Promises of Integration

Andrew: Welcome to the Integrated Schools Podcast. I'm Andrew, a White dad from Denver.

Dr. Val: And I'm Val, a Black mom from North Carolina.

Andrew: And this is The Demands and Promises of Integration, with John Blake. We've got a great conversation to share with you today that, you know, it really is sort of fundamental to our work, right? It is both about the demands, but also the promises of integration.

Dr. Val: I love the title, because I do think it's both demanding, but the promise feels absolutely worth the demand.

Andrew: Obviously, we believe in integration. This podcast is called the Integrated Schools Podcast. Integration is a powerful thing, but integration is demanding. It takes a lot of work to do well, something I don't think we've really done well, as a country, but the promises are enormous and, I would argue the promises are the only way that we move towards a multiracial democracy and our guest today really highlights that.

Dr. Val: Yeah, I'm thinking about how the demands are honestly super personal, right? They ask us to consider our own biases, our thinking, our actions. And whenever you go into doing the self work, it becomes a challenge, right? And, when people recognize it's them that has to change, that's when the rubber hits the road.

And so, just throwing two people across difference into a room, we can do that. That can happen without much demand. And yet building a community or respecting one another or valuing one another or having empathy for one another, that's what takes the work. And so it's my hope that listeners understand that as much as they are fighting systems in order to combat some of the barriers that they might feel, there's also things internally that they have to combat as well.

Andrew: Yes.

Dr. Val: And, uh, that's important.

Andrew: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, it's part of why I'm so excited to share this conversation because our guest today has done so much of that work. John Blake is a journalist at CNN. He's been writing about race and religion for many, many years, and he just released a memoir called More Than I Imagined, What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew, and Val, it is an incredible book, and it really, touches on so many of the themes that we want to talk about this season.

Dr. Val: Yeah. First of all, Mr. Blake is an incredible storyteller. When I tell listeners there were several goosebump moments in this episode and it was just being so captivated by the way in which he humanized every person in that story, right? You could connect to his own emotions around what he was experiencing and those of his family and I was just speechless a lot of the time, and I think whenever you are in a room with someone who is willing to share their story, consider it a gift, right? Because that is not something that they have to do with you.

Andrew: Yeah. And that is, you know, one of our themes for the season, the power of storytelling. And certainly, I think listeners will find this to be a very compelling story. The other themes we have the power of proximity of being in community and, his story, as listeners will hear, you know, he goes on a racial journey himself of understanding his own biracial identity and building relationships across lines of difference that are really profound. And I think, you will hear from him that the reason that he's able to do that is by being in proximity is by being in community and by forming relationships.

Dr. Val: I think another thing that Mr. Blake really hits home for me, is the idea of how much stamina is required to stay engaged in this work when you recognize it is extremely difficult, right? Where you want to tap out or you feel like you're not, you're not making progress when in actuality things are changing. And I think that is something that we can certainly learn from for our own journeys, right? It feels like, hey, we're not making as much progress as we want, but you and I both know that each conversation, each time you're talking to someone about this, each good day at school our kids had, you know, that is all progress. And that's super meaningful for taking that next step.

Andrew: Yeah. And for, staying at the work, I think, you know, the challenges that he faces and the promise of relationship and deeper understanding, a connection on the other side is what kind of keeps him going. And I think I certainly found that inspiring.

And then, the final theme for our season, the importance of public schools. And, there's not a ton about public schools directly in his story. I mean, he went to public schools and that's a piece of his upbringing. But I think the ways that he talks about the power of being in community, the power of, joining in a project together in order to build relationships across lines of difference. Schools are, I would argue, maybe the best place that we have for young kids to engage in that work.

Dr. Val: And I'm an educator and I don't want to think too highly of what we do, but I have to agree with you. It's no, seriously, it's, it's the best place that we can do this. If you think about our other cultural institutions, many of those are segregated as well, right? So your churches maybe, folks maybe have an interracial church, or place of worship. I mean, we're not kicking it at the doctor's office, like where, where else? Where else? We no longer have town squares, and then in our virtual town squares, there's a lot of arguing and not a lot of listening to one another, right? And so school is that place where we can intentionally design opportunities for us to deepen our understanding of one another. And that's why I think it's so important to the health of our democracy. Period. And, you know, and so, it feels important to get that right.

Andrew: Yeah. Mr. Blake's story really highlights the importance of that to our democracy. So we should probably take a listen.

Dr. Val: Uh, we should definitely take a listen. Hold on to your seats, folks.

Andrew: Here's our conversation with John Blake.

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John Blake: First I want to thank you for inviting me. And also thank you for actually using the word integration in your podcast. It's a word that's like kryptonite. People don't talk about it anymore.

Andrew: Yes.

John Blake: My name is John Blake. I'm a senior writer and producer at cnn.com, and I'm also the author of More Than I Imagined, What a Black Man Discovered About The White Mother He Never Knew.

Andrew: There is so much in that title.

John Blake: Yeah.

Andrew: It's great. And it captures so much about the book. I was struck by how hopeful the book is, and it's not a, not a naive hope, but a sort of grounded in reality hope. And I think that that's, I want to get into the kind of hopeful piece of it, but it's certainly, not always a hopeful story.

John Blake: I want to thank you for using the word hope. I think, uh, to attach the word hope to a story about race is really difficult now because a lot of people don't feel hopeful. And you said it's not a naive type of hope. I call it a kind of a muscular hope. It's a hope that acknowledges the staggering cost of racism, past and present, but it still believes that we can deal with this, that we can get past that. So it's not that kind of hallmark card hope.

Andrew: Yeah, it's got hope. It's got racism. It's got lots of this stuff in here. I want to get into all of it. But, you know, first and foremost, it's just a really compelling story. And it's a story that's centered around your relationship with your mother. And I'm wondering if you can sort of tell us about the White mother that you never knew and kind of the various roles she played in your life.

John Blake: So they say every good story has a mystery. So I grew up with a mystery, a very basic mystery, who is my mother? Where is she? So I was born in the mid sixties in West Baltimore, Maryland, at a time when interracial marriage was illegal in Maryland and much of the country. And my mom, who's White, and my father's Black, uh, my mom disappeared from my life not long after I was born without any explanation. I didn't have any memory of her. I didn't know what she looked like, the sound of her voice. All I was told was, your mother's name is Shirley, she's White, and her family hates Black people.

And so I grew up like, who is this woman, my mom, and why does this family hate me? And I grew up with these questions about my White mom, probably in the worst place you could have a White mom in my time. That is, this really notorious, all Black, neighborhood in West Baltimore. So my neighborhood is famous or infamous. It's the setting for the HBO series, The Wire. It was also the epicenter for this 2015 racial upheaval, when a guy named Freddie Gray died in police custody. It was very extremely racially segregated.

So I grew up there as what I called a closeted biracial person. I didn't want anyone to know that my mom was White. I was ashamed because you could get your butt kicked for having a White mom. And then finally, at 17, I had this unexpected meeting with my mom that began to shift my racial attitudes, and that led to me really getting to know her, uh, the other members of my White family who wanted nothing to do with me because my father's Black. But also it was the beginning of me getting to know myself better.

Dr. Val: This is all fascinating. And I'm sure your father was a fascinating person as well. Can you tell us a little bit about him?

John Blake: Yeah. My father was a character. So my father, he was very uncharacteristic of, uh, of a lot of Black men of his era in that he lived with a lot of freedom and boldness. So he was born during a great depression and grew up in the Jim Crow, United States. And Baltimore was an extremely racially segregated city. People don't know that, but Baltimore was the first city in the country to pass a restrictive housing covenant based on race. Where if you were Black, you couldn't move into certain neighborhoods. Baltimore, not Alabama, not Georgia, passed such a law like it was around like 1911.

So he grew up in this Jim Crow America. But part of what made him unique is that he spent most of his time overseas. He was a merchant marine. So he sailed all these countries across the world. So when he was overseas, he was treated with a measure of respect that most Black men didn't get in the United States. So he lived with a certain amount of freedom, um, that a lot of Black men didn't experience.

And on the ship, when you are at sea and you're sailing dangers with the, you know, other sailors, it's a very integrated setting 'cause you're isolated. You can't flee to the suburbs if your bunkmate is White on the ship and the German U-boats are attacking you. So White, Black and Brown men were forced to live among one another, and stuff like color didn't matter as much because the thing that mattered is could you depend on this man to save your life if something went down at sea? So that's the way he lived.

So when he came back home in the States, he carried that, that kind of freedom, and that enabled him to have that kind of boldness to go out and date my mom openly at a time when a Black man could have easily been killed, uh, for doing so. So I tell people there was no more integrated space for a Black man in the mid 20th century than the deck of a merchant marine ship.

Andrew: Hmm.

John Blake: And that’s where my father, that's what kind of formed his character.

Andrew: Yeah. And gave him like you said, the courage, the way of walking through the world that would allow him to pursue your mother. There's a story in your book about him coming to your mother's house for the first time. And meeting her father. I wonder if you can tell us just a little version of that.

John Blake: So, uh, you talk about courage, some people might call it foolish courage. Uh, my father met my mom at a hospital. He worked there as a part-time job when he wasn't overseas, and he asked her out for lunch, and she said yes, and he decided to go visit her for a date. Now, this all sounds so simple, but in 1963, I mean, he was taking his life in his hand. Keep in mind, 1968, I don't know if you know about this, Harry Belafonte was singing on a television special with a singer, a Petula Clark from Britain, a White British woman. She touched his arm during a duet and that caused an uproar, that was like five or six years after my father was trying to date my mom.

So when he goes to visit my mom, uh, it's in the White part of town. And Black people didn't go there and the cab driver wouldn't take him. He had to negotiate with him to say, take me there. And when he gets there, he knocks on the door to say hi to my mom, and her father answers the door, calls him the N word, physically attacks him, and has him arrested by the police.

But the thing that is so remarkable to me about that story is not so much that that happened, because that happened a lot. It’s that my mom and father continued to date one another after that happened. They didn't care.

Andrew: Hmm. Foolish courage maybe.

Dr. Val: That’s a lot. That's a lot.

Andrew: I think you, you sort of mentioned in the book, you came to this realization that your father who grew up in the Jim Crow United States, actually had more interracial contact than you did. That he was exposed to people of all different races, particularly White people, in a way that you were not growing up in, you know, what is supposed to be the north, what is supposed to be the racially enlightened north? And yet, I think you mentioned your schooling. You, there was one White kid from the entire…

John Blake: Yes, from my entire time in public school, from Head Start to 12th grade, I only saw one White student. And when we saw her in high school, we gawked at her like she was Bigfoot. No one would say anything. I felt sorry for her. So I grew up in what I call the Jim Crow North.

Andrew: Hmm.

John Blake: People in the North resisted integration just as much as people in the south, but they did not use the overt violence. They used more, like race neutral terms, like busing. They were more slick about it. But I didn't really realize that until when I went to college and I began to meet other students who had grown up in integrated settings. And I didn't really realize it too, until I got older and I looked at, thought about my father's life being at the ship, where he had all these interactions with White men, and they were his friends. And I used to remember, he would bring home photos of him with the other sailors. They would be in places like Vietnam or South America. Invariably, they would be in some bar surrounded by women and, you know, drinking and smiling, cigarettes hanging from their lips. And then he had all these White men who were just his buddies. And I was like, golly, he had more contact with White people than I did. He grew up in the Jim Crow era. So, you know, that was something I came to realize only later though.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. You had the very racially isolated upbringing and this kind of knowledge, I mean, like you said, closeted biracial person, this knowledge of a White family that existed but that didn't want anything to do with you.

John Blake: Right. And you would think, like, for example, in my neighborhood, uh, hostility toward White people was pretty normal. When you're not living around or going to school with a certain racial group, it's really easy to develop stereotypes and to develop hatred. And the thing is, you do it often when you don't even know you're hating. And it's almost like I absorbed these racial attitudes toward White people. And it was like the humidity. I absorbed it, but I didn't know it. It was just in the air. Nobody said “Hate White people.” It was just part of the world I grew up in. And I'm sure that hatred was compounded by my knowledge that there was this White family who wanted nothing to do with me.

But if you had come to me as a teenager and said, you know, you really hate White people and that's wrong. You shouldn't think about people like that. I wouldn't even have understood what you were talking about. I was so isolated. And even though I had a White family, I still felt that way. So that's how powerful race, you know, these kind of things, how these racist feelings, this intolerance can develop.

Andrew: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Val: I was moved by the closeted biracial comment. My own upbringing is one in a predominantly Black city, in Miami. I had one White student who traveled along with us in all of our schooling from elementary to high school as well.

I have always kinda worked from the assumption that Black folks, because so much of our racial story has lots of intermixing that, you know, we're, we're relatively inclusive. And I also think I understand about, a closeted biracial person who presents more as a White person, and so thus they are a closeted biracial person. But I had not thought of like closeted biracial identity because in your Black community it was dangerous to identify with your White family, your White mother.

And so, I would love to hear some more of your grappling around what your community could have done differently for you as a young person to make you feel… is, was there a thing? You're shaking your head. Tell us, tell us what you're thinking about.

John Blake: I mean, it's a good question. I'm not shaking my head, to imply that it's not a good question, but people would have to understand the context of the time. So I'm coming of age in the 1970’s. There are no biracial public figures in the public eye like Obama, Kamala Harris. You don't see 'em on tv. You don't see 'em on Cheerios boxes or anything like that, or IKEA commercials. We don't exist. The only time people talk about us are as people who deserve pity.

What I learned, for example, from my mom's family is that they called us Zebra children. So we were like, people who considered you don't really fit anywhere. You're neither White or you're neither Black. Even though I tell people, if you look at it like 75% of Black people are racially mixed, you know when you get down to it. But in the time, to answer your question, I grew up in a really poor, violent neighborhood and we were very aware of how we didn't have the things that White people had. We were very aware when those White police officers came through and brutalized people in front of us how they thought of us. So it was just so much hostility. We were kind of aware of what we didn't have.

There was nothing in our environment in that time where there would be this, this general acceptance of White people. We were just angry. You, when you grow up, you don't have anything and, and you're so aware of racism, it's really difficult for people to develop that acceptance of people who are different.

I remember thinking this, I was about 17 just before I met my mom. I read a story in the New York Times about a Black man who had driven into the wrong neighborhood of New York City. It was a White working class neighborhood, and his car broke down and a White mob pulled him out and beat him to death. And I remember thinking, what would I do if a White person walked through my neighborhood? And I remember thinking, I would have to attack them. I would have to hurt them to let 'em know that they didn't belong here, even though I knew my own mom is White.

Everybody thought that way. Somebody said once that so much of racism is caught rather than taught, you know, you just absorb it. And I know there's a debate about whether Black people can be racist because we don't have power in it. That's a whole other discussion. But I can tell you it wasn't abstract for me, that hatred... 'cause I felt it. And I remember my brother, my younger brother being attacked and, uh, hit on the head with rocks coming home, bleeding because people called him honky and cracker just because he had light skin.

So it was a weird world to grow up in, because I was aware of racism from my mom's side, but I was also aware of how vicious and intolerant Black people could be about skin color. And so it was, it was really a strange environment that did… that wouldn't happen today because we live in an environment where biracial and interracial marriages is okay.

In fact, biracial people, it’s almost like they're fashionable, it's cool. And I tell people, the reason that it's cool and it's fashionable is because of people like my mom and dad. They were part of this vanguard of White, Black, and Brown people in the mid sixties, who literally when it was illegal said, I don't care about that, I'm gonna marry who I'm gonna marry. Even when the polls showed that over 90% of Americans, you know, oppose interracial marriage, they went ahead and did that, and they created that ripple effect. So that later Supreme Court and politicians said it was legitimized, but it started with them. They were part of that vanguard.

So what I really take from my biracial experience, is how ordinary people who seem like they have no power can really remake America. That's what I take from it.

Like, you know, I'm familiar with the stories where a biracial person will spend a lot of their tale talking about, am I White, am I Black? That's, I mean, I felt some of that as a kid, but what I take away from my biracial experience is what my mom and dad did, that they helped create this world that we live in now. So that's what it means to me more than anything.

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Val: Thank you so much.

Andrew: I mean, you had a long way to go. That you started this journey when you met your mother learned, I mean, as the title says, more than you imagined.

John Blake: The meeting I had with my mom was totally unexpected. I'm 17 years old. About to go to Howard University, a Black, university. And I'm not thinking this much about my mom. I'm, I'm resigned that maybe she's dead. She doesn't care about us. And my father comes to me one day and said, “Hey, you wanna meet your mom?” It's like a bombshell.

Three days later, I'm being driven out to this menacing red brick building in the countryside in Maryland. And it looks like the set for the Shawshank Redemption. It just looks like an awful place. I'm led into this waiting room and my younger brother, Patrick, who's with me, and we're just waiting there. And, um, I can hear people moaning in pain in the background and other people, other people, I can hear them like, breaking out into hysterical laughter, but I still don't quite know where I am.

A hospital orderly escorts a thin White woman into the room and she's wearing these baggy clothes like they've been donated by Goodwill. And she looks at me, and she looks at my brother, Patrick, and her eyes light up and she says, “Oh boy. Oh boy. So good to see you, John. So good to see you, Pat.” And she kind of half walks, shuffles to me, hugs me and I don't even know what to do 'cause I've never used the word mom before. I don't know what do I call her? But it's my mom.

Now, what's so shocking about that isn't just that, that's the first time I'm meeting her. It's where I'm meeting her.

I am in the waiting room of a mental institution. My mom had been institutionalized because she had suffered from schizophrenia, a severe form of mental illness. No one told me or my brother, even on that day that she had suffered from this illness. We didn't make that discovery until I saw her in the waiting room.

And one of the things that was so significant about that, I don't know if you can relate to this, there, there are places you go into where you can feel the misery, you can feel the sadness. I've never been in a sadder place in my life than that place. And I begin to think that my mom had been confined to this place most of her life. And I looked at her and I remember thinking, I didn't know a White person could suffer like this. In the world I grew up in, White people were distant. They had everything, you know. They looked down on people like us. I didn't think they could understand what it meant to be poor, to be Black. But when I saw my mom, in that instant, she crushed all those assumptions within like 15 minutes and didn't have to say a word.

So my racial attitudes began to shift when I saw her. It’s the first time that I felt empathy toward a White person. And that helped prepare me to lead to other meetings with White members of my family. But that was the start.

Andrew: Whew. That's heavy.

John Blake: It was heavy at 17 years old, I can tell you.

Andrew: I, I can't imagine.

Dr. Val: So, you know, as you were, recounting that story and you're a remarkable storyteller. Thank you so much. I started to wonder just about when we are trying to create these integrated spaces, and this is one of my beliefs, so my theory, that it is about connecting to the humanity of the person across from us, right?

Like you didn't imagine that a White group would experience pain because of the stereotypes that you had been presented, because you weren't in real relationship with another White person prior to this moment. And even this wasn't a real relationship, you know, because you were just meeting her, but it was someone that you knew you were connected to in a meaningful way.

And I think it connects back to your father's merchant marine experience too, that connects to me about the importance of us breaking down these walls so that we can have a shared human experience and see one another for what we have in common.

John Blake: That's a great point. It's something I really believe in. So I was talking earlier about how I did not really feel this tug of war between my biracial identity. I mean, I felt a little bit of that. But the biggest tug of war I've felt in my life is between my identity as a journalist covering race and my identity as the son of a White mother and Black father.

As a journalist who writes about race, what I've been trained to do is to write about facts, to write stories that will persuade people to shift their racial attitudes, you know, to write hard hitting stories. If I can just show you about 1619 project, if I can talk, just tell you about Tulsa Massacre, if I can just show you this video of George Floyd, White person, that will shift your racial attitudes.

But I've been writing about race for over 25 years, and what I've discovered is this. There's always a racial reckoning, and then what happens? White moral outrage fades, and then there's a return to the status quo. So that's not the thing.

What changes people? And to go to your question, what I've seen in my life is that what really changes me is contact with someone who's different. Contact and a relationship, being in a community where I’m around people who are different, where I'm challenged to have those relationships.

Those are the things that really shifted my racial attitudes, and that's why I tell people facts don't change people, relationships do. And what changed me was not any great book I read from Ibram Kendi or Robin DiAngelo, it was seeing my mom in that place. It was going to these interracial churches and for the first time, seeing White people treat Black and Brown people with dignity, seeing the friendships develop and making friends myself. Those had much more impact on me. Way more than any kind of book I read.

Andrew: Yeah, that speaks to me of, you know, the power of using the word integration, the power of integrated spaces and, and particularly, you know, like our focus here on schools, that schools have this potential, at least to create those kind of spaces, to create the conditions for Gordon Allport’s, like contact theory.

John Blake: Oh, I love contact theory. I could talk all day about that.

Andrew: Tell, tell. Tell us a little bit about those. Because we talk a lot about the difference between desegregation and, and meaningful integration and I think people hear contact theory, they're like, well, if we just like shove a bunch of different kids in the same space, everything will be fine. But I think the sort of conditions that contact theory lays out really help kind of disabuse us of the, that, that this is a simple project, but rather kind of what are the, the, the conditions that need to be met for it to actually be effective.

John Blake: Yeah. First of all, I was shocked that I had written about race for over, say 20 years, and I thought I knew so much, but I didn't know anything about contact theory.

Andrew: Hmm.

John Blake: But to me, contact theory disproves the notion that racism is like embedded in human beings and it can't be expunged. You know, I heard someone tell me the other day that racism is embedded in our DNA. Now contact theory, what Gordon Allport showed is that, you know, prejudice is something that's learned and that you put people of different groups who have a record of mutual hostility, you put them into certain conditions, into certain settings, that racial prejudice will decline dramatically.

You know, one of the things that Alport says about contact theory, he says, you can get different races to come together to talk about race and diversity, and that can have some kind of impact, but that's limited. He said, if you really wanna see the magic happen, get people with different races together for a larger common purpose that goes beyond race.

People get tired of talking about race all the time, and you know, get 'em together for something larger that they become part of. Physical proximity is not enough. Enslaved people, and slave masters, had physical proximity. It didn't induce tolerance. So I tell people, if you wanna understand contact theory, think of a movie like, Remember The Titans with Denzel Washington? Did you ever see that?

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

John Blake: Okay. Black and White players divided by race, they join the same high school football team. What's the purpose? To win the championship. And in doing so, they see their common humanity. That's the dynamic. That's why you hear all these stories about people going to the military, you know, what's the military? The mission is the important thing. Not talking about race, but in doing so, when soldiers are in combat, they ain't got time to worry about the stupid stuff called racism. They see each other's common humanity.

When I think about contact theory I think about my relationship with my mother’s sister, my Aunt Mary. So when you have a mentally ill mom, I became her caretaker. But other people in my family became her caretakers too. So when I met my mom's sister… this is a woman I heard, stone cold racist, stone cold racist. She didn't even bother to want to meet me until my mid twenties.

And I heard the stories about her from my father. She didn't want anything to do with us because we were Black. And I remember after I met her, I asked her like, why didn't you reach out to us when we were younger? Was it because we were Black? And she said, oh nah, race had nothing to do with it. It was because you weren't Catholic. So she was just in total denial.

However, when I met her, I had to work together as a team with her to take care of my mom. So we had to coordinate visits, and I also had to kind of get to know other members of my family, and she helped me do that. But in doing so, in taking care of my mom and in taking care of other things in our family, of just getting to know her day by day, when we didn't talk about race all the time, it's like something that began to happen and she began to change and I didn't even know it.

Andrew: She plays a huge role in kind of this, this evolution for you. And, um, I feel like there's a pretty compelling story about kind of when you had a shift. I wonder if you can tell us the story of going to Lowe's.

John Blake: I, um, I went to Lowe's home improvement store one weekend, and I wanted to get some paint for my deck. And when I went to the store, I saw a White and Black Lowe's employee behind the counter. The White man was on the phone, but the Black man was free. I waited for about five or 10 minutes until the White man was off the phone and then approached him and said, what's the right color for my deck? And he gave me paint. I took it home. I poured the paint in the tray, and then I looked at it, it was the wrong color paint. And then I realized, wait a minute, I just racially profiled the Black man and I'm Black. I assumed that the White man was more competent, even though the Black man was free. I assumed that this White man knew more. And then it hit me. I said, you know what? If I can do that and I identify as Black, and I know all this stuff about race, I've written about it, I should show a little bit more grace to my Aunt Mary.

So what I did is, I went back home to my office and Aunt Mary had written me all these letters over the years, you know, pleading for a closer relationship. I stopped opening them because I was like, she can't even be open and honest about her own racism. And I just stopped opening the letters, and I kept them unopened in a box under my desk.

And I began to open these letters. I said, let me read these letters. And I realized as I began to read ‘em one by one that everything I wanted from her was in those letters. She wrote all these letters, apologizing, admitting to her racism. Saying she was ashamed of having Black nephews, but she didn't know to say it, saying that she grew up in this all White racially segregated world where she never saw Black people, they never talked about Black history in school.

And then she did more than that. She made me the beneficiary of her will, all this stuff, and I asked myself, “How did she change?” I never lectured her about racism. I never really lit into her and told her how it felt, but it was that contact, day in, week after, taking care of my mom, being family, doing stuff outside of race that really gradually shifted her. And she told me that, she said, if you would've jumped down my throat and lectured me, I don't think I would've liked that, but you gave me room to grow. You just, we talked and talked and it was changed. So it was that. It was that relationship that went beyond race that made the change, and I think that's a great example of contact theory.

Dr. Val: Oh so much. First of all, how did you not open Aunt Mary's letters?

John Blake: Because I was angry. Val… Val… Keep in mind. See, look, I'm saying the big tug of war is not being am I White or Black. It's, I'm the cynical, jaded journalist. I'm old enough to have covered Rodney King. You know, right. I covered Clarence Thomas. So when my aunt denied that racism had anything to do with her absence from my life, I said, this is the same old crap I encounter in my job. I don't want to, I don't want to hear another White person rationalize about their racism, even if it's my aunt. So I wouldn't open those letters. It would just make me angry.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

John Blake: But I was wrong. She had changed and I didn't even know it. Have you ever heard of this guy called, uh, Adam Grant? So he wrote this book about persuasion and he said, a lot of times when we're trying to change people's mind, we slip into a preacher or prosecutor mode.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

John Blake: You know, we wanna preach to 'em and prosecute, and that's what we do as journalists. That wouldn't have worked as Aunt Mary. It was the relationship. You know what they're talking about… Integration, people coming in contact, seeing each other's common humanity, sharing common problems. That was the dynamic that changed her.

Dr. Val: Yeah. Amen. And I think it is hard to part from, like your family's upbringing, and I'm thinking, I'm thinking specifically about White folks who have racist ideas. It's very hard, if you don't have a community to, to part from the family that raised you, right? Like you have your, your family, your mom, your dad, they love you, they've fed you, you know, they also taught you these racist ideas. And if we don't provide a safe place for them to land once they have to break from those ideas, which might include a break from their family and their upbringing, then it makes them less likely to want to, like question those ideas or challenge those ideas, right?

And so, I think as folks of color, and this is hard, and I, I don't know that I advocate everyone to do this because I don't know that everyone is equipped. You have to be ready to extend the grace that an Aunt Mary requires, for others. That you have to be able to find the grace and the how I feel like I've been able to do it is recognizing my own areas where I have biases where I'm like, I had no idea I needed someone to show me some grace, you know, around X, Y, Z issue, because I was just stepping in it left and right. And again, I think together is the only way we win in life. So we have to figure out how to do it. But I do recognize like your 16 year old Baltimore self was not able to do that, you know, and a lot of people are still there. So what got you there? Was it just that instance in Lowe's? What got you to figure out that, that your aunt needed some grace?

John Blake: That's an excellent question. It was because I belonged to an interracial community where we talked a lot about grace and forgiveness, and that was an interracial church. So it wasn't enough just for me to meet my mom in those dramatic circumstances. It wasn't enough for me to have that dramatic Lowe’s incident to give that grace to Aunt Mary. I needed that kind of, uh, day-to-day training in that kind of grace in some kind of community.

And so what happened when I was in college, right after I met my mom, I joined a church. And I didn't know it at the time, but it was this big, interracial church that really emphasized interracial solidarity. So I grew up in this church where we talked about race, where we talked about, uh, you know, being able to forgive, to talk about difficult things.

And also what happened is that my Aunt Mary, my mom, were devout Roman Catholics. So they also spoke that Christian language of forgiveness and grace. So therefore, when I had the dramatic incident at Lowe's and I called Aunt Mary to kind of half apologize, we kind of spoke the same language. She could kind of get the grace and the forgiveness. And in fact, one of her letters, she said, I will state for the record that you, God and Pat, and Pat being my younger brother, gave me a second chance.

So she saw her, her ability to be open about her racism as part of her Christian journey. Now, what I'm saying here, I'm not saying this can only happen in the Christian community. You can be in a 12 step program. You can be in an athletic team, you could be in a military unit, whatever kind of community where you're around people of different races, different classes. That's where you can learn those skills to accept people.

And that's why I tell people, one of the best things we can do to reduce racial prejudice in the country is to create a national service program, like a kind of domestic peace corps. When you get people of different races and backgrounds to come together, work on something to improve the country. And you just think of all the good things that can happen when some White kid from Appalachia meets a uh, Latino kid from the Bronx. And how they learn that they have a lot more in common than they realize. Those are the kind of things I think will help us make a multi-racial democracy possible.

Dr. Val: You got two people to sign. I'm signing Andrew up right away. So you have me and I just signed up, Andrew. No, we can do this. We can totally - I got two kids. You got two kids. Andrew, we can do this.

Andrew: We'll sign, I'll sign my kids up. Yeah. I mean, I think that the other place that it's possible is in schools, you know, the project you're working on is learning. The project you're working on is math and reading and whatever. But also you have this potential to create these spaces where, and you reference Michelle Adams, who's been on the podcast. She talks about radical integration. We often talk about third wave school integration.

And like you said, you know, integration is, is a word that definitely can kill a room pretty quickly because it has so much baggage associated with it. But the reason that it's in our name, the reason that this, you know, that, that it's part of, and our, our founder, Courtney Mykytyn, has a great blog post on sort of choosing our name. The reason that it's not called, Let's All Get Along, Hands Holding Hands, Multiracial Nirvana, whatever is, because if we're not talking about integration, we're not talking about integration. That integration, and not the version of it that hasn't been tried in the past, but some new version, a radical integration, a third wave integration, Elise Boddie was on, talked about integration in full view of race, we often talk about Integrate NYC, who has the 5R's of real integration,that this kind of new version of what integration could look like is the thing.

And think, you know, you talk about it as the, the only way save our democracy that the only way that we actually can get to a multiracial democracy, which maybe some people don't want to, but I think that only way we, we can have this country, that we can live into the contradictory ideals written into our founding documents is to become a true multiracial democracy and real integration is the way to do it. And it seems like your, sort of, your, your life story is in, in part of, uh, an example of that.

John Blake: It is. And you said it beautifully. I mean, I've done about 30, 35 interviews for the book, but you're the only interview people who really get this. People focus on other parts of the book. But that was really important to me, that term, radical integration. You know, I read that Michelle Adams paper and it really resonated with me. Ideas won't save us. I can't argue anyone outta racism. It's, it's relationships. There's a reason why there are some White Americans that have fought so ferociously against integration because they know how threatening it is.

There's a guy named Calvin Baker that I quote in the book. He said that integration is the most radical, unsettling, transformative idea in American politics. To me, it's more radical than reparations. It's more radical than critical race theory, anything you want to think about, because it challenges us to really live up to what this country's supposed to be.

So, yeah, I, you know, I used the word, but sometimes, you know, people, it seemed like a sellout term, and I'm just like, no, integration is the most demanding thing out there. You wanna talk about demanding where I have to become friends and family with these White family members who called my father the ‘n’ word, called me a zebra and had all this racism. That's incredibly demanding, but it was so worthwhile.

Andrew: Hmm. Yeah, you know, we've had various sort of inflection points in the country, we've sort of had these opportunities. We had Reconstruction, then we had Jim Crow, we had, you know, Brown v Board and then Segregation Academies, we had the, you know, Fair Housing Act and then restrictive covenants. And even, you know, more recently the backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement, all these, these, these ways that this sort of happens.

But it does feel like, to me at least, in the moment that we are in right now, the stakes feel really high. And, you know, we have the shifting demographics in the country. We have a country that is becoming Browner and Browner. You know, White people in the minority coming up. There are some people who I think point to that and say, we don't really need to worry about it. Like that will, it will solve itself, right? Like as soon as the country becomes minority White, then sort of problems will fix themselves. And I loved, you, you have an article called, uh…

John Blake: White Supremacy With a Tan. [chuckles]

Andrew: [chuckling] White Supremacy with a Tan. And I wonder if you can just sort of talk to us about that kind of, you know, the, the shifting demographic. Because I think it gets at this idea of radical integration and the difference between desegregation and meaningful integration.

John Blake: Well, I'm, first of all, I'm incredibly impressed even more that you even know about that article. I mean, you did your research. So there's this notion out there that we can procreate our way to equality. That if we just produce enough biracial babies and interracial marriages, that that will automatically create this tolerance that we need to have a multiracial democracy. You know, people tell stories like, you know, my grandfather was a racist, but then he had a Black grandson and that just changed him.

I think that is naive. Okay. And as I say in the book, racism is about power, not just personal relationships. And I think it's very easy to have a situation where you can have more interracial children, more biracial marriages, but White supremacy can still be just as strong. And if that sounds abstract to you, I say all you gotta do is look at Latin America.

Andrew: Hmm.

John Blake: So my wife is from, um, central America and my brother and my sister, they have Spanish and all, and I'm a little familiar with this dynamic. So, so if you go to places like Brazil or Cuba, they will tell you we don't have the race problem that the gringos have in the United States. Look at all these interracial couples and all these biracial people, however, look at who's in charge. Look who has the economic and political power in those countries.

The lighter you are, the Whiter you are. So, it's a new form of White supremacy. They still have this kind of color hierarchy where the Whiter you look the better you are. So they haven't really gotten rid of White supremacy, they just tweaked it. It's White supremacy with a tan.

That could easily happen here. You're gonna have a lot more Latino people who are lighter, who are gonna identify with the GOP, who are gonna identify with White. You can have more biracial people identify as White and it'll still be the same racism. So that's what I mean. I don't really believe this stuff that we can, like I say, procreate our way to equality. It doesn't work that way.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Val: I'm originally from Miami and I worked from the assumption that if you were a person of color, you understood White supremacy in the way I understood it as a Black American and the history that related to that. And so to learn that being a person of color didn't necessarily mean that you were free of anti-Blackness, that was hard. Right. That is hurtful in ways that I just didn't anticipate because I think I assumed a sense of solidarity with other people of color. So, I connect to that White supremacy with a tan idea, and I think it's a yes/and with the contact theory and doing some real unlearning around anti-Blackness, because I think if we don't name that part, then we'll still have the issues.

John Blake: No, I agree. You've gotta deal with the anti-Blackness in the Latino community because what happens with the Latino community in the next 10, 15, 20 years is gonna be instrumental. It's critical because they're the largest ethnic group. And if the majority of them still worship Whiteness and still have this anti-Black racism that you talk about, it's gonna make it much more difficult. And, I talk about this with my wife a lot. I don't see a lot of people writing about that, the anti-Black racism in the Latino community. I see a little bit of it, but I think there should be a lot more written about it. I hope I can do it too.

Dr. Val: Well, we're starting the Peace Corps and we're helping you promote all your books. [laughs a bit]

John Blake: Well, thank you. But you, you know we're talking about this, like what gives me hope? Like how do we… You know, and that's the question I've been asked and I think about it. And what I'll say sometime is that if you try to appeal to a group's morality, a group in power, a dominant group, and say, do this because this is the right thing to do, that's a pretty weak argument. If we say to White America, you should embrace integration because it's the moral thing. You are living up to the American idea of blah, blah, blah. I don't think that's a very strong argument to move groups of people. I think groups move ultimately because of self-interest. When they see it's in their interest to do so, they move. And that was part of the same dynamic that gave us those civil rights bills in the mid sixties. People think that we passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Bill just because White America felt sorry because they saw John Lewis get beaten on TV.

What a lot of people don't know… the Cold War was a huge reason. We had these African diplomats getting stopped and turned away from restaurants 'cause they had dark skin and we looked bad when we're competing against Russia. That was a huge dynamic. Today we're in this great power struggle with China. All these authoritarian governments are popping up all over the world. They don't think democracy works. So I think that's gonna be one of the factors that gives me hope, that if we are going to prove that this is a legitimate form of government, that we are the superpower we claim to be, we got to deal with this racism. We can't be having January 6th every year.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

John Blake: And then I, secondly, I, I think I mentioned it in the book, we know that all these countries around the world, the people aren't having babies, they're not having children. And if we're gonna do it, all these immigrants that tend to be not White who want to come here, We need them to come here. We need them to pay into Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, so we can have that safety net. So I think my hope is, part of my hope is that when enough White Americans see that, that they will be like, no, this is good for us. Integration is good. It's out of our self-interest to embrace this.

Dr. Val: Yeah, you talk about muscular hope and I was connecting to that. I consider it active hope. And the idea that we are acting even though we don't know the outcome, right? Yeah. We are acting….

John Blake: That's beautiful.

Dr. Val: …in spite of that. I think it gives hope, the action gives hope.

John Blake: Yeah. It's, it's interesting you say that 'cause I've been talking a lot about that. Uh, there's a writer, uh, Rebecca Solnit.

Dr. Val: Oh yeah. I love Rebecca Solnit.

John Blake: So she says, action without hope is impossible.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

John Blake: And so my story is a hopeful story about race. And I've felt criticism from some people, like, your story is naive. Like, what is that gonna do to attack structural racism and all that? And I've noticed as a race writer that it's become almost fashionable, particularly if you're, you know, you're Black, to write stories to talk about how hopeless things are.

Dr. Val: Hmm.

John Blake: Have you heard of Ta-Nehisi Coates?

Dr. Val: I have.

John Blake: He's a brilliant journalist. We come from the same community. And this is, I mean, he has been open about that hope is not historical, that it's, his stories are not built around hope. Remember he was on the Colbert show. And Colbert asked him like, what about hope? He said, I'm not here to give you hope.

Andrew: Hmm.

John Blake: He says, you want that? You go to your pastor or your priest or your friend, but that's not me. Now for me, for me, a lot of people see that as being like authentically, unapologetically Black. For me, that is not part of the Black tradition of hope. How do you survive the middle passage if you don't have hope?

Andrew: Hmm.

John Blake: How do you survive? Jim Crow's segregation and humiliation and don't have hope? How the day before you get assassinated in Memphis, when you, the movement is crumbling around you and you still talk about these difficult days, but we will get to the promised land… How do you not have hope to be able to do that and live that way? So, I don't apologize as a Black person that I wrote a story that shows me being able to reconcile these White family members that I thought were racist and what that could mean for us. I don't think I have anything to apologize for that.

Andrew: Yes, sir.

Dr. Val: Amen. You, you did turn into a Baptist preacher, FYI. [laughs]

John Blake: I don't mean to. [laughs]

Andrew: If the plate comes around, I might open my wallet.

Dr. Val: In the plate, I am putting my participation in the Peace Corps.[laughs]

John Blake: No, I don't mean to be, but, because you, you, you both ask really good questions and you're prepared and so I can talk this way. I've had a lot of interviews where people don't really know what I'm talking about, or they focus on different things. But people, you know, they, I think they think it's this kind of a, like a magic negro story where I'm saying that if we just hug White people, racism will disappear.

Dr. Val: I'm not getting that energy from you at all.

John Blake: No.

Andrew: Part of the, what's beautiful to me about the book is, is that it lives in this nuance 'cause I think you hear the outlines of the story. Poor Black kid grows up in a Black neighborhood, goes to college, becomes a journalist. There's sort of like, you immediately fill in a bunch of details of like, oh, I'm sure I know how this story goes because we've heard this story before and there's like the certainly the White community desire for an easy solution to racism, which is like, well, yeah, if there were just more Black people like you who would just eventually come to give grace to their Aunt Mary's, then maybe we could solve this whole problem. But I think the, the beauty to me of the book and of your story and, and the way that you share it, is that, you don't give up on the hope, you don't give up on the potential for radical integration to actually transform the country, but also you have a clear-eyed look at what it takes to do that. That it is radical work. That it takes deep, hard work. I mean, you can't read your story and not come away with an appreciation for the challenge and the struggle that it was for you to get to this point. It was not an easy step to come to some sort of, you know, detente with your Aunt Mary who, who there was like all sorts of reasons to not ever read her letters. There's work involved in that and, and yet it is, it's not impossible work. It's hard work, but it's not impossible work and it's work that if we can do, there is like a better future out there for us.

John Blake: Well said, beautifully said. Thank you Andrew. Yeah.

Dr. Val: Yeah, I'm, I'm leaving this conversation just feeling really grateful for your parents and all of the people who came before them who chose this radical love and radical integration in the face of all the opposition. And, just those of us, the three of us included, who are, are choosing the path of togetherness that just feels worth doing and, um, I'm just really grateful for, for you both.

John Blake: Thank you.

Andrew: Yeah. me too. You, you, you right at the end of the book, “My very existence is a testimony to the power of ordinary people to remake America.” And I certainly took that away from the book. I hope listeners will get a sense of the power that is in that, that we all have, uh, an opportunity to remake America. And yeah, really grateful for, for you writing the book, for you, coming on the show and, uh, for all your work.

John Blake: Thank you for inviting me and thank you for the great questions and, and you were so knowledgeable and prepared. I appreciate it.

Andrew: Absolutely.

Dr. Val: Awesome.

---------------------------

Andrew: So Val, what did you think?

Dr. Val: His story was a remarkable, remarkable story, that actually does leave me incredibly hopeful about what's possible. I want to dig into the idea of a closeted biracial person.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: So, in listening to Mr. Blake's story, I realized that I had the expectation that if you were biracial with a Black identity, that you would claim that Black identity. And for me, that felt important because within the Black community, I see safety and love and a community that will care for you when racism slaps you in the face and you weren't expecting that. And so historically we know about the one drop rule. If you have one drop of Black blood, then that was enough to enslave you. And so I think I was, I was holding on to some of those ideas, and I feel the need to, to apologize for those thoughts, for putting people in one box, right? Because, If I had parents of two racial identities, I would not want to feel like I had to just pick one.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Val: I'm grappling with that, but it was Mr. Blake's story that just made me pause. And I think that's one of the powerful things about stories, like it makes you pause in your thinking, challenge your own thinking, revisit the thoughts that you may have had. And I think that's important to do.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: I mean, did you think at all about the closeted biracial comment?

Andrew: Yeah, and, you know, I appreciate he makes a distinction between systemic racism and the power that's involved in that. But I found it powerful to hear him name that his Black community was very hostile to White people. I like, feel my hesitancy even right now in bringing it up because the drive to find false equivalency is strong, but we'll see like White people don't like Black people and Black people don't like White people. So everybody's even. And I don't think that's true in the slightest.

But I do think that there's a powerful story that comes out of his experience of growing up in a place,rightfully so, I'm sure like well deserved, reticence to be accepting of White people. I think that community probably came by that honestly, but that is still like a real part of his experience that added to the challenge of finding his own kind of racial identity and coming to understand himself.

Dr. Val: Yeah. You know, to be in a notorious section of Baltimore, where still to this day, we know that the community is underserved it's not surprising that there is anger there and it made me sad and like you said, I'm, I'm sure that anger was warranted and it sucks that communities who are angry at larger systems, have to express that in ways that hurt their own communities.

Andrew: Yeah. It speaks to the power of relationships, it's justifiable to be angry at the system. It's justifiable to feel outrage for being underserved, and a lack of relationship makes it easy to channel that towards the most obvious culprit, which is White people. And that makes sense. But I mean, to me, the more hopeful version of it, because I do think his story is hopeful, is ordinary people can remake America. So, we can choose a different path. And the way that we choose a different path is through relationships, right? And the way that we build relationships is through contact theory, is through being with people, but not just physically in proximity to people, but being with people with these specific conditions being met.

Dr. Val: Say more about contact theory.

Andrew: Yeah. I think contact theory is really interesting. Gordon Allport initially proposed it in 1954. And I think it's been updated since 1954, by other researchers, but there’s sort of a series of prerequisites of like conditions that maybe they don't all have to be met all the time, but the more of them that are met, the more likely it is that this intergroup contact leads to decreases in prejudice, decreases in animosity. And so those things are equal status between groups, common goals, intergroup cooperation, the support of authorities, laws, or customs, positive norms around intergroup contact, personal accountability, and empathy and perspective taking.

Dr. Val: And all of that takes me to his father's experience, right? Being a merchant Marine and literally every one of those conditions being met and the world still reminded him he was Black when all of those conditions were not in place.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Val: Yeah. When Mr. Blake starts talking about meeting the rest of his family, you and I were like, jaws were dropped and, one person in particular that just stands out to me is Aunt Mary.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: And, how frustrated he was with Aunt Mary for, I think in the way that he described it for her not being genuine in why she had not built a relationship with the family, and then to know that Aunt Mary continued, even when the letters were unanswered, to write Mr. Blake…

Andrew: Mm hmm.

Dr. Val: …to try to build a relationship with him. For me... Really helped me understand that, I don't know as much as I think I know about how people are growing and changing and developing,

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Val: There was growth and change happening for both of them. They both had to go through their own process to get back to one another.

Andrew: Right. Like you said in the conversation, right? Not everybody is ready to be in a place to extend grace to Aunt Mary. And that's understandable and that's real and that's right. And, he found himself in that place eventually. And it wasn't just because of Aunt Mary, right? He also had a multiracial religious community that he was a part of. The work was happening in other places and he was building up the muscles and the stamina to engage in those kind of things and that was part of, I think, what led him to a place where he did have the, the grace to be able to open those letters and read them. And, fortunately she had also had the grace and the stamina and the courage to put out there. Like he said, she had given me everything that I needed in those letters and he just had to get around to reading them.

Dr. Val: Yeah, one thing that I really appreciate just about his professional work is that he has learned that facts aren't enough to change people, right, that it really is about relationship. We can give all the facts, we can have like, a short term racial awakening where people are engaged and then they tap out and, but it's like we've been saying for two plus years now that… and connecting to that contact theory. It really is that relationship that you have with people across difference that matters. And those things take time. We can be incredibly intentional in our schools. Like I said, I think that's the place where we can be the most intentional and will help save our democracy. But it's not going to be in one icebreaker, people. Right? It's not going to be like the PTA bake sale. That's not going to do it. It's all of those conditions that you listed before.

Andrew: Right, and being met day in and day out and people will become ready to, fully participate when they are ready. I mean, right, you imagine forcing Mr. Blake and Aunt Mary to sit down and have coffee together when he's 19. That is not going to result in grace. That is not going to result in a relationship. Finding that time and that space and letting them do their work is, was the thing that worked.

Dr. Val: What's breaking my heart right now is like, I'm thinking about a 19 year old Mr. Blake and how his past experiences, with that side of the family or with his growing up in Baltimore could have really made it difficult to sit down and have that cup of coffee. Right. And strangely, I feel that the end of the story offers us so much hope, right. It's so weird. Cause I feel so much pain around like all of the things that he shared and he experienced and his family experienced and that, that separation and rejection and fear and all of the things that kept them from being a unit, you know…

Andrew: Yep.

Dr. Val: …and there's still hope….

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: …in that story.

Andrew: Yeah. You talk about active hope, he talks about a muscular hope, the internal work that he was doing, whether it was through his church, through his reading, through his, you know, work as a journalist, that internal work wasn't guaranteed to pay off, right? There was no promise of a relationship with Aunt Mary but it was the hope that by doing this work, by coming to terms with his own internal issues, by working on his muscles of grace and of empathy and of connection that that would lead somewhere better. And where that was, was probably unclear, but there was like some hope in doing that work. And that feels like really the hopeful part of the story to me is if we all believe in that hope, if we can all get behind this idea that if we work out these muscles, if we put in the effort, we don't know where it's going to lead, but it will lead somewhere better that that hope is sustaining. If we believe in the power of relationships, if we believe in the power of proximity, if we believe that it is through relationships and not through statistics that we actually end racism, that, we change hearts through hearts, that how we reach people's heart is by people coming together and putting in the effort to be in relationship.

Dr. Val: You know, that sounds like both a demand and a promise, my friend.

Andrew: That is the demand and the promise of integration.

Dr. Val: The demand and the promise.

Andrew: So grateful for Mr. Blake coming on for sharing his story. The book is awesome. Listeners definitely get it and read it. And, as you can tell from the interview, he's a great storyteller. So it's definitely worth picking up. There'll be a link in the show notes.

Dr. Val: You can also tell that it will encourage lots of reflection and conversation. So, press share on this episode right away. Just really get involved in understanding your own thoughts and feelings around some of these ideas.

Andrew: And then if you do... send us a voicemail about it.

Dr. Val: Oh, please. Please.

Andrew: What are you thinking about this episode? What did Mr. Blake's story make you think? What's coming up for you? Send us a voice memo speakpipe.com/integrated schools, SPEAKPIPE.com or go to our website and hit the, ‘leave us a voicemail button’ or just record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us podcast@integratedschools. Made a desperate plea for voice memos last episode and you heard our call. We have an amazing voice memo that came in. And let's take a listen to this from Sarah, lovely reflection on the beginning of the school year.

Sarah: Hi, Val and Andrew. I'm not quite prepared to share, but I just saw it in my email and I thought I'd go for it. My name is Sarah and I live in Western Massachusetts. And my child just started first grade at our local neighborhood school. And, I'm actually gonna start crying because I can't tell you how grateful I am [pause] for him to be in this diverse school. And, um, I just can't, I know you all know, but the richness that I'm getting and he's getting from this public school is just blowing my mind. We always knew we were going to choose public school, but I had significant anxiety from April before he started kindergarten until he started. And I was just questioning myself, am I making the right decision?

I just felt a lot of judgment from a lot of different places, um, mostly from myself, but I just want to say that the work you all are doing is incredible and, I've listened to many of your podcasts and I've shared it with a lot of people that have chosen to choice their kids to more privileged White districts or send their kids to private schools. What I'm trying to do is interrupt the narrative. Like I know people that have already made their choices. You know, and they're very staunch, and this is what's best for my family, and I, I really try to not, um, judge that, um, although I do. But more like, trying to interrupt what they're saying to other families. I'm just trying to say, please be cautious of what you share when you hear rumors of things of our schools because these toxic narratives are really crushing our public schools.

But my experience, although there's certainly lots of challenges last year in his kindergarten class. There was a lot of big behaviors, chairs being thrown, you know, some concerns for safety. The richness, though, that he's getting from being in school with so many different types of people feels so, so deeply important. So thank you for all your work. I will continue to support you. The little bit I donate financially, forever, and, I will listen and I hope you all are having a good fall. Thanks again.

Dr. Val: Thank you, Sarah, for sharing your story. I think people need to hear it. I'm sure you are not alone in these thoughts and you have absolutely been a model of what this work is like in real time. So thank you.

Andrew: Absolutely. Yeah. Love those reflections. They certainly relate to, trying not to judge, but judging anyway. Certainly relate to the, you know, the...

Dr. Val: I have a halo, Andrew. That's…

Andrew: You don't judge, Val. That's just me?

Dr. Val: That’s why I apologized at the beginning of this episode.[laughs]

Andrew: Yep. I don't think listeners will be shocked to find that you're a better person than I am, Val.

Dr. Val: No.

Andrew: Yeah, really grateful, Sarah, for that. The idea of interrupting the narrative is so important in changing the way people talk about things, so. Listeners, send us your voice memos so we can play them on an upcoming episode. Really grateful for that, Sarah. And, if you want to also be like Sarah, go over to patreon.com/integratedschools and send us a few bucks every month to help us keep making this podcast. We would be very grateful.

Dr. Val: Yeah, we appreciate you. We expect lots of downloads of this episode and every episode this season and that's all on you sharing the good news with your community. So thank you so much for doing that.

Andrew: Absolutely. Val, it is, uh, a deep honor of mine to get to continue to be in this with you as I try to know better and do better.

Dr. Val: Until next time.