Episode Details

Jenny (02:14):

I have been thinking about conversations that I've been having and things that I've been seeing lately about this new found anger and rage for MAGA friends and family members. And I think this facade of hope for a long time that I had been called Hyperbolic and I'd been saying I was overreacting or I was paranoid, and then when things continued to escalate, there was the sense of, okay, now they'll see. Now they'll see. And really feeling like there's pretty much not more that could happen that would lift the veil of where we are in this current moment. And so then to still have family members not rejecting Trump, not rejecting Christian nationalism, not rejecting white supremacy, it has been really challenging to think through what does relationship mean right now? What does it mean from a privileged body too? I'm really hesitant, and Danielle and I have talked a lot about this, that it's a very white thing to be like, ah, I'm just going to not talk to you and I don't feel like that's necessary. And if people are saying, you just need to not talk about politics with me, what does it look like to hold my own integrity and be in relationship with people in this moment? I am struggling to know what that looks like and how to do that.

Rebecca (04:20):

It makes me think I'm getting ready to do, you guys probably saw this, but I'm going to do starting Monday, a group with Jen Murphy, and the name of it is Rebuilding Hope. And I think Hope has something to do with what you just said, Jenny. I am not sure how it plugs in, but I do think there's, what I hear is what do I do? Do I just give into the, they're never going to get there, and what does that mean for our capacity to stay connected in any way? Or do I still hold something of this hope that might even feel foolish in this moment of someday? Maybe somebody's going to get there.

(05:18):

And it reminds me a little bit of, I probably said this before in here too, there's a podcast between a conversation between Tahi cos and Ezra Klein, and in some ways they end up talking about this question of hope, although I don't think they use the word necessarily, but one of the questions that Ezra Klein it keeps asking is like, why do you keep putting everything in this long historical arc? Every single thing that we're talking about in this moment is sort of this question to Tanya. She comes like, why do you keep putting it in this long arc of history? Because that feels too heavy. It's too much, right? That's too dark. And in part I think at least the way I interpret coats as an answer is because that's where you access this kind of hope that over the long arc of history, something will shift and bend towards something that feels like justice. And that's sort of bringing Martin Luther King into this conversation about the long arc of justice. But I think Coates's answer is something of that's where we gather the capacity and the strength from the past in order to actually stay in the present with the kind of insistence for something good to come out of all of this. So I don't know, there's something in that sort of narrative and that history that I want to borrow from to say, unfortunately, this is not a new conversation in this country.

(07:13):

It feels that way because it's new in my lifetime. It's new in our lifetime, it's new in our generation, but it's not actually new to the country. And when you look over time, there has always forever been this strain of Christian nationalism and white supremacy, and yet we are still here and we are still here with moments like Bad Bunny in the Super Bowl still happening. And so I think, at least for me, in part, the answer to your question is I have to borrow from that space in order to have the capacity to stay in this one. And it occurs to me that I was born in the seventies post civil rights legislation by the time I was in high school applying to college, affirmative action