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What’s the Point? Dialogue for Beloved Community

When I was in my early twenties, I was in a car traveling on Highway 17 in New York, on my way to visit my boyfriend who lived in upstate New York. A friend was driving. We were having the kind of earnest conversations that twenty-year-olds have, letting our minds wander along with our hearts. My brother slept in the back seat, leaning against the window. The dark night and blurry scenery wove a cozy cocoon where we could all relax, enjoying each other’s company.

My friend and I were startled out of our cozy warmth when flashing lights jolted into view. A police car had pulled up behind us, following us. Did it want us to pull over? We looked at the speedometer—we were driving just a mile above the speed limit. We nervously pulled over onto the side of the road. The lights and sudden shift in movement had jostled my sleeping brother, and I heard him groggily attempt to make sense of what was going on. “Are we there already?” he asked sleepily, from the back seat. The officer tapped on the window before we were able to answer my brother. My friend rolled the window down and instead of receiving the usual request for license and registration, he was asked to step out of the car. The officer had his hand resting on his gun. They walked together out of earshot of the car. My brother and I sat in the car, confused and anxious, unable to make sense of what was happening. We watched the officer and my friend talk, at first with visible tension in their bodies. After a few minutes, I saw the tension slowly dissipate—the officer’s hand slid off his gun, his shoulders dropped, his posture relaxed.

My friend walked back to our car while the officer walked to his. I was even more confused. When my friend got back in the car, he sat quietly for a little while. The police car drove away, and then my friend started the car and we got back on the road. My brother and I kept asking him about what had happened, but he seemed reluctant to tell us. Finally, he spoke. But I could tell, as he was speaking, that he was wishing that what he was saying wasn’t real. “The officer saw us passing him on the road. He saw me—a white man—in the driver’s seat, and you next to me, a Black person. And he saw your brother in the back seat. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t being kidnapped.”

None of us knew what to say. I felt a rush of anger in my body: like a slap. Before I could really feel the anger, it became shame. Hot and overwhelming. I felt as though this officer’s racism meant I had done something wrong. I could tell my brother was vibrating with anger, but he didn’t know how to navigate what had happened either. We were all silent. We didn’t talk anymore about it, we turned the radio on and finished the drive in silence. This officer, who had seen Black folks and white folks driving together, couldn’t conceive of us as being part of the same Beloved Community.

After that incident I avoided any interaction with the police. Several years later, I was driving in a rural area, this time alone, again at night. As I took an exit ramp, I switched lanes on the ramp to make the left turn I knew was coming. Again, those flashing lights appeared in my rearview mirror. I was terrified. I took out my phone and called 911, telling the operator that I was being pulled over and was going to drive to a gas station so that I could stop in a well-lit place. As I drove three minutes to reach a gas station, I started trembling. By the time I parked and the officer approached me, I was shaking and crying, tears streaming down my face, taking hiccupy breaths. I didn’t know what PTSD was at the time, so I didn’t know how to soothe my dysregulated body. I felt so exposed, so unsafe. The young, white police officer at my window looked alarmed when he saw me.

“What’s wrong,” he asked.

“Nothing,” I stammered. He looked even more perturbed.

“Do you have a weapon? Are there drugs in the car?”

“No,” I said, tears streaming heavily.

The officer kept trying, confusedly, to reassure me. “You’ll be fine. Everything’s fine.” I continued to cry as he explained, “I pulled you over because you switched lanes on the ramp. You’re not supposed to do that.” He left without giving me a ticket. I sat in the brightly lit gas station, shaking and crying. In that moment I realized what was terrifying: I did not believe that this officer would see me, see my humanity. That he would see me as part of his Beloved Community, someone deserving of care. I was convinced he would see me as a threat, an outcast from his community, so that my life was in danger from his traffic stop.

As I write this, I hold so much compassion for each person in these situations. My white friend, who did not know how to respond when racism thrust itself into his sedate life. My brother and me, being reminded once again that even when we’re doing nothing at all—sleeping, chatting, riding in a car—someone who does not see us as part of their Beloved Community will make assumptions about us that could have had much worse outcomes. My traumatized self, being conditioned to not only believe that a white police officer would not see me as a person worth protecting, but that there was no way either of us could see each other as part of Beloved Community. And the officer, faced with a visibly scared Black woman with no clue of how to make things better.

I wanted to write this book because the idea of Beloved Community—a world in which my brother, my friend, the two police officers, and I all belong—has been so powerful a part of my journey, both for healing and as an activist for social change. I was first introduced to the idea of Beloved Community when I read these words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr:

The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.¹

As I read various expositions on what Dr. King meant by Beloved Community, I came to an understanding that resonated with me. Beloved Community was, for me, family. Not Norman Rockwell characters gathered around a beautiful table full of food, laughing and smiling at each other with no apparent tension or conflict at all, or the families torn apart by the effects of generations of capitalism and white supremacy ideology, always sniping at each other and jockeying for status.

Rather, when I think of family as a metaphor for Beloved Community, I think of people, connected by love for each other, whose well-being is intertwined. People who see the full range of each other’s human expression, regardless of how we present—angry, sad, happy, scared, in pain. I think of people who know, at a visceral level, that regardless of how much money, resources, or social capital they have, they cannot be happy if anyone in their family is suffering. I think of people who truly understand interdependence, who know that their capacity to thrive is dependent on the actions of others, just as those others are dependent on them. Beloved Community is a world where we see each human as family. Where I’m willing to speak up and tell you when your actions have been too costly for me or those around me and invite you to consider a different action. Where I listen when you call me in, inviting me to notice how my actions impact you and those around you. Where we are willing to engage in the dance of dialogue, moving between empathy and authentic expression, to create a world that works for all.

Dr. King and many others have focused on one aspect of the essential work to create Beloved Community. They speak of the urgency of changing laws, changing the social structures that position some people securely at the table while others scramble outside, hoping to gather enough scraps to survive. Dr. Ibram X. Kendi rightfully decries “uplift suasion,” the belief that if those from marginalized groups show up in all their strength—smart, accomplished, embodying the characteristics of those inside the room—then those in the room would recognize their worth, their humanness, and welcome them in.² As Dr. Kendi pointed out, years of research show that what creates a shift in attitudes is not proving to those with power and resources that we’re just like them but instead changing laws to mandate entry into the room.³ Once we’re in the room engaging, interacting, and living, attitudes change.

I agree with all of this. Opening the door and creating access is essential, however, it’s not enough to create Beloved Community. I think of a family I know. Biologically related, this family had decades-long history of strife. Some folks didn’t feel valued by other members. Some members were openly disdainful and excluded other members of the family. For many years some family members were never in the same house at the same time. I was at a dinner that the matriarch of the family had decreed everyone had to attend to honor an elder who had passed. The resulting gathering was as far from Beloved Community as one could imagine. Folks in the room didn’t know how to respond when the inevitable misunderstandings arose. They resorted to old patterns—judging, blaming, shaming, attacking. Some folks left early, swearing never to return.

This pattern happens in larger societal configurations when groups come together. I’ve been in organizations where there’s been racial conflict. Folks say they’re willing to come to the table, to heal past pain in order to advance their mission. But after the first statement that stimulates pain, however unintentional, people retreat into defensive, closed positions. Despite their stated desire to shift old dynamics, they didn’t have the skills to speak up and call in those whose actions were painful for them, and they didn’t have the skills to know how to respond differently when harm was named. We often don’t know how to set aside the constraining patterns of the world we’ve been given—one that says some people are bad, hopeless, seek only to take advantage and harm us. We don’t know how to step into a world of Beloved Community that lets us see that our healing and liberation is inextricably tied up with the healing and liberation of everyone around us, even those who have caused us harm.

Creating Beloved Community

External change—change to structures and laws that govern how society works—is needed to create Beloved Community. Laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which, among other things, made illegal employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin—are a crucial step. However, in addition to these external changes, I believe there are internal and interpersonal changes that need to happen. Dr. King identified an important strategy to creating this change: nonviolence. Nonviolence, as the path to creating the changes in social structures that are so urgently needed, sets the stage to create Beloved Community.

What do we mean by “nonviolence”? First, I like to start by saying what nonviolence is not. It is not stoic acceptance. It’s not sitting back, experiencing harm and inequities, and waiting for people to change. Uplift suasion is a form of that. A Black elder I know speaks about how he was raised. He was told that no matter what a white person did, you accepted it. You didn’t protest or raise a fuss—instead, you continued to do what you needed to do to accomplish your goals. In doing so, white folks might feel shame, might come to look past their prejudice and see how you were carrying yourself, acknowledge the amazing things you were doing, and would thus be motivated to change their attitudes toward you and the race. Although there is strength in this perseverance in the face of unbelievable challenge, this degree of acceptance and reliance on hope that the other will recognize and change their behavior is not nonviolence. Nonviolence is also not inaction. It’s not avoiding confrontation with those who are taking action that is harmful. So often I hear people complain bitterly to me, stating, “I want to create harmony. I want to be nonviolent” in order to explain why they are not speaking to the person with whom they are unhappy and instead venting to me.

Nonviolence, in the context of antiracist work, is taking powerful action to directly address the causes of harm and inequities. When we take nonviolent action, we can speak up and resist harm while holding a commitment not to do harm to another. When we act from a commitment to nonviolence, we understand that the society we want to create is not possible if all we seek to do is switch who is holding power and who is being harmed. Although that switch may offer relief for those currently being harmed, it does not create a meaningful shift in society. Instead, we’re all on the same cosmic scale of privilege and injustice, going back and forth between which group is experiencing inequities and which group is enjoying society’s benefits. We can only create a society grounded in Beloved Community when the scale is dismantled altogether so that all can benefit.

Once we have adopted a nonviolent stance, there are a few other frames of consciousness we need to adopt to create Beloved Community. An important one is the shift from an us-versus-them duality or multiplicity to one of shared humanity. Shared humanity does not mean that I don’t acknowledge the social and cultural differences that exist. When I look at my siblings, I see each of them as unique individuals with significant variations in how they show up and move through the world. However, even as I recognize these differences, I am always connected to their membership in my family. They are both family members and unique individuals within the family. It is the same for Beloved Community. I can see and honor the various representations of human creativity and expression, the cultural differences in life experience, that manifest in folks from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Even as I look at that, I am connected to each group as embodiments of what it means to be human. In fact, I’m aware that the elements that make us human are more salient, and have more consistency in expression, than the elements that sometimes seem to manifest as group differences. Shared humanity does mean searching for the shared elements that connect all of us humans. Many thinkers have identified some of these elements. Dr. Rosenberg, the person who developed the principles and practices of Nonviolent Communication, identified one important element—the needs that motivate the actions of humans around the world.⁴

Regardless of the external differences between humans and between groups of humans, every human needs food, water, air. Every human needs safety, beauty, connection. Every human needs opportunities to contribute to others, acceptance, and knowledge. When I can stay connected to these and the many other facets of our shared humanity, I can recognize myself in another person. I might mourn that they are attending to their human needs by taking actions that are confusing or even abhorrent to me. But even as I mourn and resist those actions, I recognize and value the shared human needs driving the actions. From this place of connection to our shared humanity, I can find a path in which we can work together to find actions that better meet all our needs.

Once we are firmly grounded in our shared humanity—the needs that motivate all our behaviors—we can find ways to step into nonviolent action when our needs are not being met. When I don’t recognize another person’s shared humanity, it’s easy to judge them, to say that they are being selfish, bad, evil. There is a comfort in these kinds of moralistic judgments. If something is painful for me, then I can label whatever is causing my pain as bad. I no longer see the person taking the action or the elements of our shared humanity that are prompting their action. Instead, I can focus just on getting the painful action to stop at any cost. The moralistic judgments we have learned to impose on others serve us, but at a great cost. They support us in noticing when something is not working for us and taking actions to change that behavior. However, moralistic judgments move us away from Beloved Community because they make it all too easy to lump folks into an “other, bad” group that we don’t have to care about or engage with.

Of course, we need to have some way to judge when we are being harmed, when something is not working for us. As we work to create Beloved Community, we can move from moralistic judgments toward more needs-based judgments. When something is not working for us, we can go back to those elements that define our shared humanity. We can tune inward and ask, “What is important to me here? What am I longing for that this action is preventing me from having?” And we can ask, “What is the other person longing for that is leading them to take this action?” Instead of seeing a person or action as inherently bad, I can stand fully in my experience and request change while seeing them for their humanness.

I’ll share an example that illustrates why I would want to put the energy into seeing someone who has harmed me as part of my Beloved Community. I had an experience in college that impacted me for decades. Many years later, I learned that sadly the experience was not unique. I graduated from one of the “elite” high schools in New York City, where my love of English literature and writing was honed. Despite challenges in high school, I always excelled in my English classes. As a sophomore at my local community college, I was excited to take an eighteenth-century literature class. When I learned I could choose any author for the first paper, I chose Jane Austen, the writer whose work I had devoured over and over with my best friend in high school. After proudly submitting what I thought was the best paper of my life, I was shocked when I saw my grade—F—scrawled on the top with no other comments. Naively, I went to the professor, certain it was a mistake, but he told me that he knew I had plagiarized since “Black people don’t write like that.”

I was devastated. I was convinced something was wrong with me, that there was some way that I had not been “enough” so that he could recognize my talent. I became afraid to write, never voluntarily writing anything, always turning in course-work or reports at the very last possible minute. I spent the next fifteen years judging myself. In order to heal myself and remove the block that so constrained my written expression, I had to free myself from judgments of both myself and that professor. First, I had to stop judging myself as inadequate. Instead of looking at myself and seeing someone who was inherently flawed—not smart enough, not resilient enough, not strong enough—I had to find a way to transform those self-judgments. Once I truly understood that that professor’s comment was rooted in white supremacy ideology and not a valid indictment of me, I started hating him, judging him as a racist who had so terribly impacted my life. And I still didn’t write—I knew there were others out there like him who would never see me.

I hadn’t really transformed my self-judgment. Instead, I shifted my judgments from myself onto that professor. I was living in a world where either I was wrong and bad, or he was a flawed and evil person. Shifting the judgments onto him and beginning to see myself as capable had some positive impact. I began to write a little more, finding “good” folks who were “not racist” to read my writing. And each time I doubted myself, I would remind myself that he was the one who was bad. He was the one who was flawed. That strategy got me writing again, but not in a way that was grounded in the healing and peace that could only come from being part of a Beloved Community. As long as I saw that professor as inherently evil and unredeemable, I was scared. Although I felt empowered to write and begin to share my voice, I was always waiting for the next evil, racist person to show up and tear me down. As long as those people existed, I knew viscerally that I wasn’t truly safe.

What truly created a shift for me was learning how to transform, not relocate, my judgments, both of myself and of him. I looked back on all those long years when I silenced my voice, convinced that I was not smart or capable enough to undeniably prove I had value and that I was weaker than other Black folks who had experienced the same kind of racism but wrote unabashedly. Instead of the moralistic judgment that my reaction was completely unhelpful and a sign of weakness, I began searching for those threads of shared humanity I had with other folks, including those who responded differently than I had. I tapped into all the things I was longing for, all that I did not have access to when this situation occurred, that led me to respond in the way that I did. I wanted so desperately to see my self-worth reflected in the eyes of those around me. I wanted to know that I would be treated fairly and be offered helpful feedback that would support my growth. I needed to know I was accompanied by others who shared my understanding that the professor’s words were not grounded in any reality I could recognize, and who could support me in navigating the pain of that understanding.

When I think of how much I longed for those things—accurate reflection of my worth, feedback that enables growth, shared reality, and empathy, I feel such deep sorrow for the young adult who was navigating this intensely painful experience alone. In the absence of any support or any hope of getting these needs met, I withdrew from activities like writing to prevent further harm. This made sense. With that realization, I was able to hold my younger self with gentleness and acceptance. But my healing was not done. As long as I conceived of myself and others like me under siege by people I could not even begin to understand, who I could only perceive as evil, I would not feel safe. That world felt unpredictable and completely out of my capacity to impact.

Reclaiming my power meant I also had to take steps to transform my judgments of that professor. I started to get curious. If I were to think of him as a member of my family, one who did something that was devastatingly painful for me, but family nonetheless, I could ask myself, “Why would he do this? What threads of our shared humanity would possibly lead him to act from a place of stereotyped beliefs?” I will never know why he took the actions he did. But I began to imagine. What if he, too, had been a victim of white supremacy beliefs, told over and over again that Black students were inherently not capable? What if that paper was so far above anything he had ever received from a student of any race that he could not imagine a student, much less a student from a race he had been taught to believe was an inferior one, could write it? If he truly believed these things, could he have given me that grade because he was trying to uphold academic integrity?

I can understand how confirmation bias would limit the information this professor took in, causing him to look for information that was congruent with his assumptions about Black people. His inability to see past the stereotypes he held might then contribute to his flawed decision to assign me to what would be, for him, a more predictable role of a Black student who was incapable, a decision that supports both his belief system and the academic system he treasures. I could even imagine that he might see himself as helping me, giving me the F without reporting me to the dean, so that I would learn quickly that plagiarism was easy to catch and avoid more serious consequences down the road. When I started to wonder about those things, I was able to entertain the possibility that tragically the professor was trying to do the best he could from the very limited perspective he had.

This did not mean that I was okay with his actions, however. Imagining these things didn’t lessen or invalidate my pain. I continued the work of recognizing and tending to the many ways that, years later, I was still impacted by his action. I still needed support to work through the self-doubt and procrastination and anger. And I still believed he had a lot of work to do—acknowledge and repair the impact I (and likely many other students) had experienced, grow his awareness of his racist bias and how it fits into a pattern of educational racism, and learn strategies to remove this bias. My considering his perspective was not to drop myself or let him off the hook. Instead, imagining the professor was acting out of care from a place of misinformation gave me some possibilities on how I could approach a dialogue with him. Before I could envision the common threads of Beloved Community that might have motivated him, I had no hope that any dialogue with him would be effective. Once I could connect with his humanity, I saw the possibilities for calling him into a different awareness and understanding of the capabilities of all humans. I could imagine with this new understanding, if his integrity was stimulated, he would mourn the impact of his actions. I could imagine a path where he could become an advocate against the kind of stereotypical beliefs and actions that harmed so many Global Majority students like me.

Contemplating this possibility allowed me to imagine a world where events made sense—tragic and horrible, but conceivable. And it was not a world in which my only choices were to blame myself or blame someone else, where I was always at the mercy of other people’s judgment. This allowed me to stand in my own truth when I received racist messages like the one I got from that professor and to entertain hope that as people like him encountered more people like me and were themselves given feedback about the impact of their actions, they could shift. I became more willing to risk sharing my work because I had hope that more people would be able to engage with it fairly, and I knew how to protect myself even if they did not. I slowly began writing, one piece at a time, leading to my ultimate risk in writing—sharing this book.

Transforming judgments was a necessary part of my process, and it’s an important practice for those working for Beloved Community. When we transform our judgments, we open the door to dialogue, to invite someone to become aware of the huge cost of their actions and to take steps to change and mitigate that cost. People need to know when and how their actions are impacting others in order to have a hope of changing their behavior. I usually think of this action, of speaking up about harm one is experiencing, as the maintenance work that sustains Beloved Community. A thriving community needs a healthy feedback system. We need to be able to call each other’s attention to a part of the community that is out of order and work together to find the steps to fix it. This necessary function is one of the hardest for communities to manage. If we think of community as a complex machine with sentient parts, each part needs to be able to say to the other, “Hey, right now there’s a part of you that’s rubbing on me this way. It’s wearing out this joint and preventing me from moving as fully as I can.” And since each part of the machine is committed to the whole Beloved Community’s thriving, the part that gets that message would ideally say: “Whoa! Thanks for telling me. Let me adjust to see if this works better for you so we can all be more effective.”

Sadly, though, this is not happening. Instead, communities of all sizes and purposes struggle with this essential feedback function. Some parts of the community believe that once a part is no longer working, the best thing to do is to respond harshly. And other parts never learned how to accept feedback openly, without pushing back or crumbling. If the machine could talk, we’d hear the parts utilizing moralistic judgments. Some might say: “Hey, you, over there. You rubbed me in this way. You’re bad and you’ve got to go.” Other parts might join in, saying: “Yeah, disconnect it from the rest of us. It’s hopelessly bad.” And the part that was called out might respond with defensive anger, saying: “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. You’re the one who needs to change.” All while pushing harder and causing more harm. Or it might respond with fear—“I am bad. I’m hopeless. I deserve to be an outcast”—and freeze, bringing the whole machine to a halt. This pattern of using moralistic judgments is not helpful. These judgments disrupt the complex machinery of community and cause us to discard community members. If we keep throwing out parts of a machine, eventually we’ll have a broken machine, barely achieving its goals, and a collection of discarded parts ready to be picked up and used by someone who might harm us. The current tendency to cast moralistic judgment and blame thus harms our Beloved Community. It fractures us and prevents us from creating a path to true accountability and change, one grounded in acknowledgment and full understanding.

Accountability as a key to Beloved Community is rooted in our awareness of true interdependence. It posits: “I am aware that my thriving is connected to your thriving and yours to mine and that our community cannot thrive if either of us is failing. I acknowledge there are times when I might do things that impact you. I want to know of that impact so that I can take action to address it and return our community to its full strength. In those times when I experience impact from you, I commit to letting you know about it, as often as necessary while continuing to cherish you as a member of my Beloved Community. This allows you to take the actions necessary to address the impact and return our community to full strength.”

As we hold to this principle of accountability, we realize the importance of our words and our intentions. I shared my experience with that professor to make evident how moralistic judgments can get in the way of our creating Beloved Community and how needs-based judgments can support necessary change to maintain Beloved Community. It’s definitely possible to develop a moralistic attitude toward even that duality: moralistic judgments are “bad” and needs-based judgments are “good.” There’s only one right way to call someone in and anything else is harsh and bad. Even here, we can take a step back and examine what it means to call someone in or out. We can apply the same framework of looking for the threads of our shared humanity to understand why someone might choose an intense, angry calling out over a gentler, compassionate calling in.

Although we’ll explore calling in and calling out in more depth later in this book, it’s sufficient now to remind you of a time when you’ve exploded with anger. Were you feeling hopeless after having repeatedly tried and failed to raise awareness of an issue? Were you responding from a place of deep shock in the face of an unexpected action that stimulated intense pain? Were you deeply afraid, responding from a place of panicky fear that your well-being and possibly even survival were at risk? Responding with harshness in any of these moments is understandable—we’ve all done it. We might find it easy to hold compassion for someone who shares their pain with a gentle calling in that arises from a place of more emotional resourcedness, practice, or even fear to speak with intensity. But we can also choose to bring equal understanding and compassion to someone who expresses their pain with intensity, even when it might be hard for us to receive the intensity and to choose a different response. As we work to build Beloved Community, we can welcome a fierce authenticity in all its forms, for authentic feedback enables that maintenance work that we need. And we can work to manage our own reactions to the form of the feedback, whether a calling out or calling in, and glean whatever insights the feedback can offer to support our taking actions that align with our values and goals.

As we learn of these elements that are essential to creating and maintaining Beloved Community we may wonder if the effort is worth it. Why would we invest the time and energy, the emotional labor, to see the humanity of those who take actions that result in our harm? Why should we not see this commitment to align with Beloved Community as yet another burden placed on those who are less resourced that makes it easier for those with more resources? We do this because we want to change the habits of dualist thinking, of us versus them, good versus bad, winner or loser, that have defined so many generations of human culture. We can choose to hold only ourselves and members of our communities with the caring, fierce authenticity that can help our communities thrive. But each time we treat those we deem different, bad, irredeemable in ways that ostracize and diminish them, we reinforce that value system in ourselves. The system that says some people are worth saving and some are not.

As that system gets reinforced, in addition to diminishing our effectiveness, it becomes only a matter of time before something we do, or someone else does, causes us to apply that system internally, not just outwardly. We see this as groups fall apart, unable to recover and stay connected to each member’s worth when we discover that some folks don’t share our preferred strategies, or even more quickly when they do something we don’t like. We see it turned inward, as people judge themselves harshly for not meeting some standard, often internalized from white supremacy culture, they have set for themselves, lashing out, checking out, even ending their lives because they don’t have the practice of meeting everyone with a compassionate request for change when things are really tough.

Without even knowing it, we have begun to engage in Authentic Dialogue. We are starting to address the element of consciousness here. The more we can practice the elements of Beloved Community with those we struggle to identify with or humanize, the more capacity we build. Chapter 2 takes us into another element of the consciousness of Authentic Dialogue, acknowledging and freeing ourselves from the impact of white supremacy beliefs. For example, knowing about white supremacy culture, if I can find a way to see the humanity of my professor, speak up about the harm I experienced, and let him know what steps would mitigate that harm and prevent future harm, then I will have those skills available to use with any community member whose actions I don’t like. I work on creating Beloved Community so that I strengthen the mind-set that lets me have the quality of relationships and trust I seek with those I care about. And as a bonus, when I bring those whom I previously saw as enemies into my Beloved Community, when my fierce authenticity has called them into action and inspired change, then I also have more people who can help me on the long journey to create Beloved Community.