I am reading adrienne maree brown's Holding Change, a brilliant book on the art and soul of mediation and facilitation and how these techniques can help groups and movements mature with capacity for holding tension. Tension has transformative potential. So often we run from it. Conflict feels like a dirty word. But what if tension makes growth possible? What if values are best expressed in tension with one another? What is empathy without accountability? What is flexibility without ambition or clarity? Tension is an essential component of change.

Nearly every day I listen to hymns and other spiritual songs, including songs without words. Sometimes these songs are instrumental and sometimes they are wordless harmonies. I begin my day this way so as to ground myself in Spirit, breath, and gratitude. Singing prayers has always been a nurturing practice in my family. When Momma didn't know how to solve the various problems that attended our lives, when she found herself at the proverbial end of the rope, she would sing hope back and melodically demand optimisim and possibility to emerge. I have taken to this practice in my adult years. Hums and moans, illegible in spoken language, can carry deep spiritual and emotional resonance. I am reminded of enslaved Africans in the so-called New World whose spiritual songs anchored their being and reoriented their consciousness when enslavers sought to make them "slaves" in form as well as fact, to evoke Frederick Douglass.

I have been fortunate to have studied Black feminist writers for nearly two decades, and I have been utterly changed by them. Every line of Audre Lorde's prose was a revelation. From the idea that our silence will not protect us, to the notion that the master's tools could not dismantle the master's house, from the idea that poetry was not a luxury but necessary for survival for some of us, to the notion that revolution was not just something that happened outside of us but also within us--Lorde captured in words truths that echoed what my soul knew but could not articulate. I devoured bell hooks' works, trying desperately to untangle the ways that patriarchy had wrapped itself around me--and more than that, had become part of me. hooks taught me that feminist masculinity was possible, that I could make love and liberation constitutive of life itself. These women, and so many more, are my heroes. They lived with great integrity and fierce fidelity to their values, sacrificing so much--or perhaps sparing themselves even greater sacrifices--to be in alignment.

I like to think of myself as an open book. As a storyteller, I often share intimate details from my life to illustrate truths that I have been blessed to learn in hopes that others might be moved and inspired. Yet I know that the courage I have today is born of yesterday's vulnerability. It is because I have had the great fortune to have different people at different times in my life listen to me deeply, give me their undivided attention, reflect back to me what they heard me say, and hold my joys just as well as my sorrows, that I am now able to share so openly. Those trust encounters, if you will, formed me and enabled me to see the value in my story, in my own person. For me, trust is about our readiness to hold someone else's story without rushing in to reshape it in our own image.

Trust is a kind of safety, and though I am leery of ever promising to keep someone safe, as if I have that kind of power, I am mindful of the human need to feel safe from physical and psychological harm. So trust, for me, is about a belief in a person's ability and willingness to hold one's story as sacred. A person who is trustworthy, then, has a proven track record of holding and honoring of other's stories, however painful and complex or glorious and unexpected. For me, trust and listening are connected. I am so grateful for peers and mentors who set aside time, energy, and space just to hear more and to hold my experience such that I could clearly see the weight of what I carried, and, in turn, what I asked them to carry, being borne, as opposed to crushing them.

Research suggests that having a growth mindset is integral to being able to repair and forge relationships across lines of difference. If we don't believe it is possible to cultivate cross-group trust, then we will be demotivated to try––enter self-fulfilling prophecy. Social psychologists have designated the term racial anxiety to describe the stress responses that people experience before, during, and after a cross-racial encounter. Those stress responses have consequences that often diminish the possibility of cross-racial trust. In "Breaking the Cycle," Rachel D. Godsil frames the problem this way: "People of color may experience racial anxiety that they will be the target of discrimination and hostile treatment. White people tend to experience anxiety that they will be assumed to be racist and will be met with distrust or hostility. Whites experiencing racial anxiety can seem awkward and maintain less eye contact with people of color, and ultimately these interactions tend to be shorter than those without anxiety. If two people are both anxious that an interaction will be negative, it often is. So racial anxiety can result in a negative feedback loop in which both parties’ fears seem to be confirmed by the behavior of the other." That negative feedback loop gets solidified into a powerful, detrimental narrative which prevents folks from pursuing cross-racial relationships. And clinical psychologists and other mental health professionals often argue that avoiding anxiety-inducing stimuli, without properly addressing them, has the unintended consequence of perpetuating that anxiety.

Exposure, under carefully wrought circumstances, can counter anxiety and can support a person in developing skills for successful navigation. Don't avoid connecting, but do so with great intention while practicing essential skills. As Godsil reminds us, "Direct interaction between members of different racial and ethnic groups can alleviate inter­group anxiety, reduce bias, and promote more positive inter­group attitudes and expectations for future contact." First, tell yourself that cross-racial encounters can go well and that practicing both intrapersonal and interpersonal skills can lead to success. Next, revisit your memory banks in search of positive past cross-racial experiences. If you've experienced it, then you know it is possible. Researchers suggest that this kind of positive priming of oneself before a cross-racial encounter can help reduce anxiety. Need help positively priming? Godsil suggests that not all evidence of cross-racial encounters going well need to come from within. Indirect forms of intergroup contact can work effectively as well, meaning "When people observe positive interactions between members of their own group and another group (vicarious contact) or become aware that members of their group have friends in another group (extended contact), they report lower bias and anxiety, and more positive inter­group attitudes."

Preparation can lessen anxiety. To be clear, by default, many people of color when interacting with white people, and many people of color when interacting with each other cross-racially (particularly when there are clear power differentials at play among them), are well practiced at navigating cross-racial encounters. It is often white people and more privileged people of color that need support in managing their racial anxiety, which, too frequently, led them to make choices that negatively impact (less privileged) people of color. In the spirit of preparation, it is incumbent on white folks and more privileged people of color to research and avoid common mistakes and microaggressions that they could make. Having a clearer sense of the Do's and Don'ts––having, in other words, a social script––is critically important to being able to navigate cross-racial encounters more effectively. For instance, non-Asian and non-Latinx folks should plan to stay away from the well-worn "Where are you from?" question as we now know that it implicitly communicates that the person to whom the question is being directed is being perceived as a foreigner––as an Other, someone who does not really belong. Or, in the gender space, knowing how to offer one's own pronouns and to ask someone else what pronouns they use, in a thoughtful and respectful way, can be a powerful script. Knowing some of the things that are most likely to offend people across lines of identity, particularly when directed at lesser privileged folks, and knowing some of the things that one can say or do to establish a respect-based and dignity-affirming interaction, can increase confidence in navigating cross-racial encounters. It is the ambiguity or the uncertainty about what to do and say and how to do it and say it that can cause anxiety.

Inevitably, however, we will make mistakes, particularly when we are in the position of having more relative power than another person. At Perception, we teach folks how to "fail fast," which is to say, how to apologize and RESET a relationship when one makes a mistake. RESET is an acronym that invites those of us, when we are in relative positions of power and become aware that we've made a mistake that has harmed someone else, to: Refocus the conversation on the other person, Emphasize our apology, Skip self-justification, Explore accountability, and Thank the person for engaging in a reset conversation with us. Learning how to offer a good apology, without claiming our innocence or asserting our goodness, is critical to cultivating trust in a cross-identity relationship. Trust is about our perceived reliability, which is more about what we do than what we claim.

The question that most interests me these days is "what comes after?" Let's say that we were able to topple systems of oppression and injustice overnight or at least in the short term. We would still have to grapple with the toxic brew of ideas and attendant practices that got us here in the first place. What mental models and models of power accrued in such ways as to make domination a way of life for us? What ways of being, thinking, and relating could replace them, in order for us to create something new, something profoundly loving and anti-oppressive? We are so often focused on de-construction that we don't attend to re-construction. Critiquing is easier than creating. What we need is a revolutionary imagination that could help us craft a blueprint of what is possible––vocabularies and languages that could help us imagine the world otherwise. Can we imagine a whole world? A healed world? Can we imagine a world beyond domination, where justice and equity are at the center? Can we begin to practice that world now, to seduce it into existence through how we relate to one another every day? I am working desperately to live into today the world I want to see rather than waiting for some unspecific time labeled "then." If we were in that remade world, what would we say to one another? How would we act? What language would we use? How would we honor the dignity of others? With what tenderness would we address one another? Can we start there today? Can we begin to practice––a kind of dress rehearsal for our collective future? For me, this is where our attention is urgently needed.