Ep 69: Q&A Or Q&Stay?

In this week’s episode, April and Tracie talk about how questions around racial justice often come from a place of “stuckness,” keeping us from making real progress on racial justice. They discuss ways in which you can work through your questions to get past this stuckness. 

Check out our discussion/reflection questions for this episode:  https://joyousjustice.com/blog/jews-talk-racial-justice-ep-69

Find April and Tracie's full bios and submit topic suggestions for the show at www.JewsTalkRacialJustice.com

Learn more about Joyous Justice where April is the founding and fabulous (!) director, and Tracie is a senior partner.: https://joyousjustice.com/

Read more of Tracie’s thoughts at her blog: https://www.bmoreincremental.com/

Support the work our Jewish Black & Native woman-led vision for collective liberation here: https://joyousjustice.com/support-our-work

Learn more about Racial Justice Launch Pad and join the waitlist: https://joyousjustice.com/racial-justice-launch-pad

Read more about Black and white children's reactions to “The Doll Test” here:https://www.naacpldf.org/ldf-celebrates-60th-anniversary-brown-v-board-education/significance-doll-test/

Listen to our episode on urgency here: https://joyousjustice.com/blog/jews-talk-racial-justice-s2e3-flip-the-script-on-urgent-action

Listen to our episode on “staying humble and keep going” here:  https://joyousjustice.com/blog/jews-talk-racial-justice-ep-68

Read about learned helplessness here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/learned-helplessness

Learn more about land acknowledgements here: https://nativegov.org/news/a-guide-to-indigenous-land-acknowledgment/

Learn more about the “5 Whys” here: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_5W.htm

Check out Emily Guy Birken’s book, End Financial Stress Now here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/End-Financial-Stress-Now/Emily-Guy-Birken/9781440599132

Transcript

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- [Tracie] Questions are foundational to learning, but sometimes we hide behind them, using our questions to create a kind of stuckness, a confusion we use to hide from responsibility or change.- [April] This is "Jews Talk Racial Justice with April and Tracie".- [Tracie] A weekly show hosted by April Baskin and Tracie Guy-Decker.- [April] In a complex world, change takes courage.- [Tracie] Wholehearted relationships can keep us accountable.- Happy, somewhat proximate, it would have been about a week and 1/2 ago to winter solstice, everyone. It's so good to be with you on the podcast. Tracie and I had a very interesting discussion this week, that something that we both spent time thinking about individually in our leadership and work around racial justice, and we're putting our heads together to think about this, which is that, obviously, just in general, in the human experience and certainly, within the Jewish tradition, all the more, questions are sacred and revered and a critical part of the learning process and are moving forward in the world in terms of making the world better and asking questions. And in the context of racial justice work, and I likely suspect, or I'm pretty sure, as well as other adaptive challenges, but as we know, we really like to zero in and move thinking forward around racial justice in our conversations together, in that context, I have seen over the years, and I've shared this with various organizational clients individually, but I think it's something that I would actually love to start to get out into the ether. And so I thought it would be fun for us to unpack and look at, yes, and I always like to add some nuance because of different ways I've been targeted by racism, what I say gets flattened and turned into something that I'm not saying.(April laughs) Questions can be valuable, and there can be patterns that arise around chronic confusion that people attach to certain questions and overly place their emphasis on that question and get sort of absorbed with it in a way that they lose sight or track of the fact that there's lots of other things that they can get answered right now that will move them forward. And so I wanted to unpack how and where I see this showing up. Where I see this playing out is when people... So then there's such a dynamic and energy around the resistance and frustration and fear or whatever the negative emotion is around the question not being answered, that when they bring that question to learned teacher to get it answered, they're still trapped in the confusion loop, even as the teacher, they've so internalized the confusion and the disorientation that even as a thoughtful responses coming their way, they greet each insight with more confusion, and they just stay stuck. It's kind of like a bottomless pit. And so I'm just really excited to unpack this, because I actually haven't heard other people talk about this, and I think it's a thing that's worth talking about and being thoughtful about and bringing some mindfulness to.- We're specifically thinking of instances where it comes up for us as facilitators and teachers where a participant or a student will in a Q&A have a very specific question. So that's kind of the context that it often comes up for us, but it's it's broader, this idea, this asking of questions is broader, and I think that there are several dynamics that play out. It's not always exactly the same pattern, but there are several patterns, and they end up having similar results, I think, so.- And can I say more about that scenario? And what I would say is that what I've seen is that in the context of sessions, programs, lessons, different programming and educational spaces around racial justice, when people, typically white people, and in our case, white Jews and white Jewish-adjacent folks, ask questions in a Q&A session or in the midst of a program, at times, not always, but at times, there's a pattern that I see playing out very consistently with similar traits where you can just feel their energy... It's a question, at times, they may say, like they've been in a stuck, it's a stumbling block for them, they will often name it. This is a question that they really grapple with, which potentially implies to me, which I just thought that they've also potentially asked other people for this question, but they're in a state of chronic confusion around it and then someone shares a response, and almost always, either they're... they look like their wheels are turning, but more frequently, they look dissatisfied, and like the confusion has continued, even if this person just gave them, at the very least, insights that should have opened up new possibilities for them to chew on, or just straight up gave them a pretty solid, clear answer around it, which I just had this thought, that I don't wanna go down this rabbit hole right now, but actually, with my trauma counseling hat on, to me, also potentially says that their question is actually related to some other unhealed thing that actually isn't about that question, but they've attached that old, unhealed pain or unresolved energy to that question, and they're bringing that stuckness from the healing that they didn't get around that old hurt that's somewhere in their aura and their energy field and their hurt, is trapped energy that they're now attaching to that thing. And I want to contradict, I want us to offer some insights that can help folks, if you have a place in your life and also I just wanna name here, relating also with his trauma-informed lens and potentially in other ways too. I think I might have talked about it on the podcast, but I recently realized back in May that I had chronic confusion around my Native heritage, that an impact of the oppression was that I was very clear internally about my identity, but when I went to show up in any way as having being visible around having Native heritage, I had a huge cloud of chronic confusion and in my case, which is different for everybody with their chronic, it could be from a hurt and... It could be for any number of reasons, but for me, it was because I've heard so many times that I'm not Native, that I'm not Native enough, that I don't look Native, that there have been so many racist remnants of genocide culture or active genocide culture that had been thrown my way, personally, to me and also just in the ether, about how everybody says they're Cherokee and they're not, despite the fact that I know who my relatives were and are, but it was so thick, right? And that, so I just kept looping, right? So I want to say this, to do what we often do on the podcast to say that, if this is you, which it very well may be and you have a place where you're stuck, I think it's a part of the human experience at times in different ways to have places where we're stuck, so we're not trying to shame it, or say that it's bad but to give people tools and resources to help us move forward when stuckness arrives around questions and where people stay stuck in that question. I have seen repeatedly over the past 10 plus years of engaging in and leading racial justice work and education, that this pattern can get in the way of people doing meaningful work around racial justice, that it can slow down someone's learning experience in a moment, and or it can become quite a significant preoccupation, that in its extreme, leaders will publicly or privately just say,"I can't get over this question and I can't move forward in the work, and anywhere in between."- I know that in the beginning of my journey, I also used questions, especially directed at potential teachers. I was trying to solve dissonance in myself, and or I was bypassing. Gonna "I" statements so that no one feels attacked, and I'm gonna remember years and years ago, the very first time I ever heard about the studies with kids where they showed white kids and black kids, either drawings or dolls that were otherwise identical, but their skin was darkened or not and both white and black kids predictably identified the black, the representation of black children as being somehow dirty or not as smart or somehow less desirable. Yeah, somehow undesirable. And I the very first time I read the study I was like that obviously-- Lies.- I mean, they're just drawing that have been shaded in different colors or dolls that are the exact same plastic mold with different colored plastic.- And I'm saying black is beautiful and brilliant. That's what... No, I'm saying.- Oh, of course, of course.- Okay, sorry, please continue.(April laughs)- Of course. The first time I read or heard about, and I don't remember precisely'cause it's been years, but the first time I encountered a story about one of those studies, I wanted to see the data. I was like, well, that was just those kids. I didn't wanna believe that it was true, it was too awful. And so I my questions after reading that were, well, who were those kids? What was the study? Show me the data. Was it repeatable? I didn't want it to be true, and so I was asking sort of the questions that would refute the truth of what this study showed, which, by the way, folks, has been repeated again, and again, and again, and again, and with always the same heartbreaking results. I have to acknowledge that though it came from a place of my recoiling from the truth, the reaction where I doubted the narrative of black folks, is racist, right? Because it didn't match my life experience, I questioned the veracity of it, and that is a racist outcome. And later, in my journey, as I accepted the truth of racism, particularly as I became more aware of the truth of police brutality against black and brown folks, my questions were more like, okay, now I see my privilege, how can I use it? How can I fix this? How can I make this better? We've talked about this before in the podcast, that I wanted to fix it now, now, now. That was the that urgency impulse. Again, because of the dissonance of how awful, the truth is, I think that the act of asking a question actually can have a lot of things behind it. April, you've named some of the getting stuck in trauma, I'm naming getting stuck in sort of the dissonance, but it in all of them, there's sort of a stuckness-- Oppression pattern.- And stuckness and oppression patterns, they can keep us from actually moving forward in either actually making change or supporting change or dismantling racism in our hearts or in our organizations. So anyway, I wanted to name those things, I think that it can be hard to hear, I certainly couldn't have heard in the moment when I was like, how do I fix this? I couldn't have heard like,"You're stuck in urgency, like, learn to sit with it.", which is what I had to do. I'm not sure that I would have been open to hearing that because I was stuck. But that is ultimately... And that comes back to last week, stay humble and keep going, like, I just had to keep going and get more and more tolerant of the dissonance.- And that wasn't... And those help that you needed, which I think is another dynamic hearing people talking about, "What's the question or the question or the question or the question?" That's another piece of it, too. As a part of it was also that the question you were spinning, because you were asking a question that it was actually what you really needed to resolve was something that was happening below the surface that was also hard to look at, that you couldn't look at, so then it was getting redirected to that and I think that's what I mean about the piece, that's a different way of saying what I'm saying in a slightly more sophisticated way that I can't fully put into words right now, of that it's like referred pain. Is that it's a certain kind of question that ends up being referred pain that actually doesn't, it's something else that needs to be resolved, like somebody having fear about raising a question with a certain person or a certain group of people, I think that might go back to, at times, where is their sense of self-worth and confidence to stand by what they believe in and trust that they'll be okay on the other side and believe in the merits about what they're saying? Or it could be something else like that. I think I wanna switch gears a little bit and talk about some other pieces related to this that have shown up in my work that different people find intriguing and agitational and helpful and maybe not helpful. So, related to this chronic questioning, I wanna expand it out further and I've noticed and I started a couple years ago before we switched up and the demand got too high. We switched mostly into cohort learning, but even in those cohorts, I did this too, is that I decided to adapt and kind of retire the traditional Q&A set up, and I've started to ask participants at times in advance and at times in real-time, and either way, it's tough for folks because we don't have any muscle or lots of folks don't have any muscle around this, but I want us to collectively, for those who are interested in this, make an effort to start to change this, and shift what would be question and answer time into time to share insights and some wins along the way, and questions tying to things that we've learned, because I often hear in Q&A sessions tons of chronic stuckness. And in some spaces, I think there is tons of chronic stuckness, and I've been in spaces with groups of people who are Jewish professional heavyweights, with a number of people who I know have been learning and making strides in this work. Now, as I'm saying it right now, I think what might be concerning, is I want us to find a way, but I'm just gonna put it where I want it to land, is there's got to be a way we can figure out to acknowledge and celebrate accountability and wins in the context of a learning space in a way that's not virtue signaling. And also, I think so part of this is also I think, just like in any number of cases, certain behaviors are appropriate in certain contexts, and other behaviors are not. Hypothetically, one can eat food with their hands in certain contexts and other times in an American context, you wouldn't eat food with your hands from a serving plate, okay? It's similar with this too. I think part of what's happening here is that people think racial justice is so confusing and there is nuance, but it's actually just like other areas of our lives, we just haven't had exposure to that, and it's that in certain contexts, certain things are useful and in other contexts, and as you start to get more acclimated to this, it will become more common sense with time. But it makes sense now, because of chronic and deeply ingrained segregation and pervasive institutionalized racism that it's not so obvious to certain folks. Anyway, so back on track here, so what I'm saying is that, at least when you're learning with Tracie and me, and in certainly in spaces where other facilitators are lifting this up, as an instruction, I want people to share insights. And so that's a little bit different than say, wins around racial justice, although in some of our programs, too, when we're asking professionals and supporting professionals through taking on different projects, I want them to share those wins too around the work that they're earnestly doing to advance this, which in the context of a learning space is fine, right? I'm not saying that they should get up in front of their whole community and say, "We've..." Whatever it might be, we had a meeting in which we included racially equitable shared agreements, probably don't even say that they should probably just do that, okay? But if that's something that you weren't doing before that you were terrified about, I want you in our program to have a space to say,"That was terrifying, but I got to the other side, and it's actually going well." Or "There are challenges, and I have questions about that now, but I also feel proud that I took that risk." because people aren't doing that with regard to racial justice and I think that that's an important component of learning in general, right? And so all of this to say, I've been interested in contradicting Q&A sessions where it's just all about to, at the risk of being crass, but what I would say instead of like the magical brown Jewish lady at the front of the room, or on the big screen in the Zoom room, is the fount of all knowledge. There's a myth of the magical Negro in American culture, right? In Critical Race Theory-- It's a literature literary trope.- Yeah, right?- Too.- And so and I see that playing out, and I want to contradict that. I mean, I do like to think of myself as magical, but I want everyone else in the room-- You are magical.- Thank you, and I think we are all magical and I want every other person in that space to start to own their magic and their value and everything they bring. I want to be in a space where I want to be a part of Q&A sessions that are not Q&A sessions, that are insights, that it's a reflection session that includes lifting up insights and or things that we've learned. What have you learned recently about racial justice? And how is that's sitting with you? And sharing out and beginning to practice what it looks like in little micro doses to competently and maybe even confidently engage in conversation about this in ways that honor our self-worth and our inherent goodness, and just micro dose what it looks like to start putting on training wheels and do this and move out of the space of chronic confusion and chronic helplessness.- Well, I just think related to this, the other side of this, which I think we've talked about before is sometimes they're like the learned helplessness, right? Which I think is related-- Exactly, it's very closely related, exactly, yeah.- So I'm thinking of a space that I was in where the person leading did a land acknowledgement of the Indigenous People on whose land they were, and then there were all these questions about, "Oh, how do I do that?" Right? Which to me, ultimately felt like learned helplessness, we all have the same research assistant, Google, but instead of asking like-- Google.- Right, right, but instead of ask, doing that research, like, "Oh, that was a practice that looks pretty cool that I would like to learn more about and maybe participate in," they ask the person who did it, which, to me feels like, yeah, a little bit of that learned helplessness, and it's not actually moving our work forward together, but it's keeping us stuck in work that we could do ourselves, anyway.- Playing small and maintaining the helplessness, exactly. I recently read this book, and a few of my takeaways were as follows, I thought that was really interesting. Along with response like that isn't great in the context of a panel discussion or a program, but if you're in a learning space with Tracie and me, and one of our courses, or the like we're at open space, we want to encourage this sort of shared analysis, or "I read this piece, and what really stuck with me that has helped to deepen my analysis or awareness was this, and either relatedly, I have an unrelated question or relatedly, I was curious what you think about this thing." Is this insight I have applicable across the board, or is this more something that's just good for me to know inside and now figure out other ways of navigating this with skill in terms of my work across lines of difference? Or whatever it might be? That has a very different energy. And so I want to encourage each of you, if you aren't already doing this, and some of you are, some of you are phenomenal allies who have been doing this for years, but there might still be a place in your experience where you might embrace this a bit more, and what I would say is that I think some people have fear around either virtue signaling or seeming arrogant, but what I would say is that in its best form, that's a really... One, it's exciting. I enjoy hearing people's insights and progress. I feel relieved of every little bit of evidence I see of instances of white people owning their learning journey, and then asking for help when they need it. I think that is a beautiful thing. And if it comes out as boastful that separately, but to say, "I am overjoyed, I've been so confused about this thing and I recently realized that it's a little embarrassing to share, I thought these two things were the same thing, but now I'm starting to understand that they're not. Is that right? The view is what I've heard, and if that's the case, that opens up different..." Is to share these little mini personal wins that aren't about external competition, it's just about each of our own learning journey. So I'm here for that and I want us to engage in that, I encourage you to do more of that, what I've just said, and in the event that, because I know at least for Tracie and me, from what we've shared, or just I think for most people, there still might be a place where you get hooked around something and there's something that's like,"Oh, I have this question." And either I want to get it answered or I keep coming up to this question, is people often tend to think In all or nothing where they need to obsess on it, or they need to ignore it entirely, and that doesn't seem desirable to them, so then they obsess about it. But what I love, just this concept of putting something on the shelf, is something I learned in the context of interfaith work but I love this concept, and I've used it in multiple ways ever since, of there's different things we need to discuss or certain things we need to decide, and those are big things. So in the context of that program, it was we need to figure out how we're going to raise our future kids one day and there's lots of things about ourselves and other pieces that we need to figure out first. So let's just take that, it is important, let's just set it on the shelf for right now for us to come back to later, and now let's spend time looking at our own partnership, our own religious trajectory and spirituality, how it's been in our lives, how it was for our parents, how it was for our grandparents. What are moments in our lives that matter? What are things that we want for ourselves? What are we willing to share? And how are we willing to reach across lines of difference? And do that work. And it's actually quite similar to racial justice, where there are these big questions, but actually working through some of the earlier parts may very well change the shape of the question, and there are lots of other questions and learnings that can be done and momentum and strengthening that can be done. So it's the equivalent of that someone is really struggling on how to get a cake to rise and not cave in, right? And there are so many other things that that person can work on around perfecting the batter, making other dishes, building more confidence in the kitchen, figuring out that maybe they actually don't even like making that cake that much and they've been doing other things, and they're actually really loving raw cooking, or they're really loving making stir fries or some other variation of baking like bread, where the caving isn't as much of an issue. There's so many other facets to the work, and from a metaphysical perspective, but also strategically, there is immense value in doing things that bring us relief, and temporarily putting something on the shelf and saying "I'm going to continue..." Now, now we don't wanna put it on the shelf or avoid it and continue down a path that we only like, but we can alternate between doing challenging work and then taking on something that's more at our speed and building our momentum and our strength to the point where we have more analysis and a more solid foundation to more readily handle the heavier, more complicated material.- I wanted to actually just quickly bring us back to sort of the scenario where one is asking a question in a learning space. I think that April, you named that when we're teaching in particular, we like this insight model rather than a Q&A, and I wanted to lay out explicitly, we also were teaching in these cohort-based groups that we do, there's some sort of thing, some sort of learning that should have been consumed in advance, whether it's videos of us teaching, or where we send out to other thinkers work, and so having conversations about those insights, in particular around the things that we got together to talk about, which I think does then translate into the panel. So if even in the panel, depending on the agreements of the group in terms of how questions will go in that panel scenario, I don't think saying like,"Oh, I read this book separately.", that might feel weird, but if you say, "Wow, when you just said... that made me think... and I connected these things that had been disconnected.", that actually is useful to the whole group to help kinda further the learning. And so I just wanted to name the container that's sort of around what April was describing in the examples that she was verbalizing, the templates that she was verbalizing. There is sort of a container around it that helps make it all the more useful to the group with whom you are gathering.- Thank you for clarifying that Tracie, because I was, specifically, when I was talking about that, I was in my mind thinking about more of the open-ended Q&A sessions. I do with different organizational executives, different leaders who are in a circle learning about these things in a more of a free form, so thank you for that. So that's exactly right. So I was referring to spaces where people are on different journeys, where it's not a shared learning experience, but they're a donor, they're all getting funding as educators and they're doing a session about racial justice, then in that case, I want folks to share what you've learned recently, or what are some recent insights or things you've been considering or different anti-racist or racial justice strategies that you've tried on and some insights about how it went, and if there were specific pointers, I could give, grounded in something that you're actually working on, because out here in theory-lands, even when I lead trainings, part of my work that I often don't say explicitly is that people really struggle when you bring it too far out, it's too far out of your experience and it's just like, "Am I for or against affirmative action?" And a lot of the things, we don't even... It's more of a, what's the word? It's not even about... Whereas what is your story from when you were a kid? How has race impacted your life? What are your values right now about this in day-to-day life? Let's unpack and look at that and get out of the punditland and big political debates. Let's ground this back in, how is this showing up in my day-to-day life? Where's it not showing up? Where would I like it to show up where are there challenges that are arising that I'd like to resolve? And working through those different facets with something that's actually tangible and workable, right? To give a slightly different example, just to, I think it's what I'm saying is clear, but it's sort of like getting into a group and leaving a discussion about Jewish continuity. This is perfect, actually, because this is how it plays, and when people, when groups of Jews, I find generally have a conversation about that, there's lots of chronic, in that case, worry, and also confusion."Well, I just don't understand kids." As opposed to, either for a specific community or even the people in that room, what are you doing in your day-to-day life that invites other people who are Jewish? If Jewish continuity would be something you care about, let's break this down, how does that play out in how you live and lead? And what are concrete actions that you take with your children and grandchildren, whether they are in interfaith relationships, or single or whatever it is? What is your relationship with Judaism, rather than the theory? First of all, start with, what's your relationship with Judaism? And from there, what does that look like for you and your personal practice? Separate from any organizational things, what would it look like if around the country, a bunch of Jewish grandparents from a place of love and appreciation from different facets of Judaism they love and gave openhearted invitations to their descendants and other people in their community to join them at their Shabbat table, to join them in an act of Tzedakah? Just from that simple bit, I'm not saying that's the solution, right, but to ground it in, how is this actually playing out in your life? Because things are big and scary when they're in theoryland, but when we get it back down to a place of ourselves individually and explore where we are and what we want, and what truly our values are and our behaviors are, and are they in alignment? And how can we implement this in our individual lives, and then also extend that out fractally? We zero it down to our individual fractal and into our communities, then it starts to become much more manageable and doable. And there's still that bigger thing, that we get to have increasing insight on how we're taking care of this and how we can help other professionals do this thing, because by doing that, but actually starts to address this bigger piece, which we can't actually do anything about. We can do stuff about, we can do things within our individual system and then also too, for those who, when they have that position are working at the systemic level, then they can start to do that at that level too.- I think that this example was really useful. I hope that listeners, you can see how the... I can imagine the question, "What do we do to ensure Jewish continuity?" That's the question that's posed to the like fount of knowledge, and the different outcome from that question versus the one that comes back that says, "Well, what are you doing in your life to help make Jewishness attractive to the next generation, to help make young Jews feel-- And to yourself, quite honestly.- And to make Jewishness attractive to others and to yourself, to make yourself and other people feel fully seen and embraced within Jewish spaces, those questions, what are you doing? Or, what could you do? Versus how will we ensure? I totally hear the stuckness in, how will we ensure?'Cause it's not actually a question, it's a worry, right? It's a fear. It's not actually a question, it's a fear. And so the question then, when we get into the much more inner and in the weeds-- Drill down.- Then that's something we can answer.- That's so good, and I think you just hit the nail on the head. Ooh, that's so good, right? Is that I think that that's at the root of a lot of the chronic patterns, is actually fear, which brings us back to engaging in the five why's, is what's the question behind the question? What's the issue behind the issue, behind the issue, behind the issue? Which gets back to that piece of the thing that's like a challenge someone's dealing with in their life and what a big meta question around, How do I deal with people in my life who are in this place? Or how do I deal with Jewish continuity?" Is that if you ask the five questions, most likely, it's going to map back to a need or a fear in your life, which we're totally capable of addressing, which then has a ripple effect, kind of like a stack of mattresses or a domino effect on addressing those other things by resolving the root source of the challenge, right? So why are you concerned about? And ask yourself, and so there's five why's which I recently learned through a book that Tracie's sister wrote. Can you remind everybody what it's called, Tracie, about financial management and mindset work?- Yeah. Yeah, my sister Emily Guy Birken, her book is called "End Financial Stress Now","End Financial Stress Now" and well, she has several books, that's the one that I think I recommended and she works with the five why's a lot to help you get behind your money issues, like, why do you wanna do this? Well, why do you wanna do that? Well, why? If you go back five whys, is what she teaches. She didn't originate the five whys, but she does use them.- She cited that it came out of engineering, which I think is so cool, is that it actually originated in engineering where there was a problem in a process, and people will say, "Well, why is this happening? Well, why is that happening? And how do we get back upstream to the origin?" And similarly, whether it's around racial justice, Jewish continuity, financial matters, whatever it might be, another tool that we would love to toss in there and resource that you can engage, if and when you're stuck, we've given a few different forms of tips and suggestions, if you can engage with, and if it's hard for you, do it with a partner, find a confidant or a friend, who you feel comfortable talking about, whatever that issue is, because questions are great, but it's not great when we get stuck in a mud puddle of a question that we can't get out of, and we start splashing and getting the mud on other people and helping them, encouraging them to get in mud puddles. We don't wanna be in mud puddles, we wanna be going on this journey together.- [April] Thanks for tuning in. Our show's theme music was composed by Elliott Hammer. You can find this track and other beats on Instagram at @elliotthammer. If this episode resonated with you, please share it and subscribe. To join the conversation, visit jewstalkracialjustice.com where you can send us a question or suggestion, access our show notes and learn more about our team. Take care until next time, and stay humble and keep going.