Racial Justice from the Heart with Dr. Amanda Kemp

Kelly: Can you share with us who you are and your pronouns?

Dr. Amanda: Yes, my name is Dr. Amanda Kemp and my pronouns are she / hers.

Kelly: Wonderful. What would you like us to call you? I want to call you Dr. Amanda, but I’m not sure if that’s what you want.

Dr. Amanda: Yes, Dr. Amanda would be great.

Kelly: Okay, cool. Dr. Amanda, where are you from? And what are some key highlights of your journey thus far?

Dr. Amanda: I was born in Mississippi. I was born at a time in 1966 when my mom couldn’t give birth in the white hospital. But I was raised in New York City, in the South Bronx, in foster care. And I’ve lived in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Long Island, probably Manhattan before we went into foster care. So my journey starts with that complicated beginning. So when people say, “Where are you from?” I usually say New York as a shorthand, but I haven’t forgotten that my roots are in Mississippi. And I would say that in terms of key points in my journey, in terms of me being here today, it was thanks to some amazing change makers, institution builders in the 1960s and 70s who made pathways for kids like me to come out of my neighborhood and, you know, go to college. So I went to Stanford and then I graduated with the PhD from Northwestern. And in both of those places where I’m from, never left me. And so I was interested in how could I use the opportunities, the education I was getting to change the world. So that motivation, even though it’s manifested in different ways over time, that motivation has stayed with me. After graduate school, you know, I worked in the academy, so I taught at the college level for about 10 years, which I enjoy to some extent. But one of the things that I notice working, you know, at university – So my first stop was at Cornell University – and one of the things I noticed was that the academy is really built for people to acquire knowledge and display knowledge on an intellectual level as if it’s really only in the role of the mind – that we change or that we that we know, that we that that that’s how we learn. And as someone who is teaching race and African and Afro-American studies, what I knew was that the mature was having a emotional impact on students and I wasn’t trained to deal with students as emotional feeling, embodied beings. So eventually I got tired of the conflict of being in the academy and having these whole-body people, but having to deal with them as if there were only minds. And I moved on to my first love, which was theater, and I formed a Theater for Transformation, a professional touring company. I did that for six years as my main expression of desire to change the world. And eventually I decided I wanted to start my own business for profit enterprise with the social justice mission. So I created Racial Justice from the Heart. And that is primarily what I’m doing now, although I still work with my theater company and we are going to be premiering a new work called the Transformation Symphony in September 2021. No, 2020.

Aurora: Beautiful. So, Dr. Amanda, so for those who may be unfamiliar with Racial Justice from the Heart. Can you share with us what it is, what you’re focused on, what you’re hoping to achieve?

Dr. Amanda: Yeah. So Racial Justice from the Heart is my baby. And basically, it’s bringing together mindfulness self-compassion practices with racial justice. Because what I found as someone who was working for racial justice, who’s organizing in my local NAACP and, you know, going to various black lives matters kind of events. And what I found was that my pain, my despair, my frustration at the status quo was actually wearing me down. And it wasn’t making things better for my family, especially for my son. I have two black teenagers and my son sent me an email when he was about 16 from school one night like three o’clock in the morning. He sent me this email where he told me that he could see that his life didn’t matter as much as his – as the white kids in his school. And he he told me about crying and, you know, just pounding a tree and his frustration. And when I got that email from him, I was like, “I’ve got to do better. I’ve got to do more. And holy crap I had no idea that all this stuff was affecting him so deeply.” So, around the same time I started doing this self-compassion work, just investing in growing weekly to classes to learn more about my mind and also ways to take care of myself because as a giver, as a change maker, I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t have models for doing that in the change making world and I didn’t know that it could actually materially affect how I showed up. But it did. And it was this combination of things of wanting to do more, wanting to do better for my child and noticing the impact that self-compassion work was having on me and my ability to show up and be with people who had different understandings about race and who didn’t understand race as a system and all kinds of things of that nature. All of a sudden I just had this expand that capacity to do racial justice from my heart. So my business, my life’s work is really to help people who care about racial justice, to do it in a way that we can do it over the long haul and also to do it in a way that connects with our joy. And to do it in a way where we could keep building the movement rather than having us get polarized so quickly into us versus them. So that’s like the background on the philosophy of the company, and so concretely what we do is we provide private mentorship to people, but mostly women who want to be more effective either as facilitators or trainers or who want to be more effective as you know, leaders in their organizations or in their faith communities or at their schools for inclusion and equity.

Dr. Amanda: And Dr. Amanda, do you focus predominantly on women of color, white women. What’s the break up or demographic of who you’re helping in supporting.

Dr. Amanda: I would say three quarters of the women who are clients right now are European-American and then about a quarter are women of color. Something like that. I finally have trained someone up enough to take on more the mentoring of other white women, so our senior trainer, Erica, Dr. Erica Fitz, works primarily with our European-American women and I work with the women of color in terms of private one to one mentorship.

Kelly: And I’m so intrigued by the European-American naming. Why do you use that term, Dr. Amanda?

Dr. Amanda: Yeah, I use the term European-American because I have an agenda. I have a secret agenda, which now I’m being public about. And that is I want to to begin to wean white people away from whiteness. I want to have people of European descent be able to identify whiteness as a system that was created only to harm an oppressed people who were considered black or indigenous. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are responsible for what they’re individually responsible for, what that system has done. I also want to have people think about their ethnic heritage rather than of themselves as white because if you’re Irish or Italian or Ukrainian or Greek, you were not white when you first got to United States of America. You had to be allowed into that club. So I want people to get in touch with what has whiteness caused them, how they were historically disciplined into whiteness. Because I think we have a common interest in dismantling whiteness. But it won’t mean the end of your lineage or who you are or the gifts that you bring a bit, your ancestors were brought. So I want to interrogate – give people pause and reason to interrogate their ethnic identity, visavis whiteness, not just visavis, you know, people of color.

Kelly: I love that. Thank you. So we know you from taking one of your courses about having conversations about race and racism. So what what are your goals for transforming conversations about race?

Dr. Amanda: Wow. OK, number one, my goal is that average, not the super cool, super advanced, highly motivated people of European descent, but like the average European American person will stand up and say, “Wait a second, I think that there’s something wrong with this process because we don’t have people of color in the decision making or we don’t have people of color in the shortlists or, you know, why is our student disciplinary situation looking like this?” I want to have people who are of European descent is raising the questions amongst each other in a way that holds other people accountable, but also in a way that doesn’t shut down the possibility of change. So that’s one of my goals is I really want to have people of European descent acting when people of color aren’t in the room. And even if we are in the room, I want to have them be running the point sometimes, and by the point, I mean, think about an arrow. How long can you have the same person, you know, always breaking down the resistance? Meeting with the conflict or the reprisals. You want to have different people taking the point at different times so it’s not just, you know, as a group or the same person, you know, reliably saying, “Hello, we have to think about X, Y or Z.” So that’s one of my goals. And then in terms of women of color, people of color, my goal is that we learn to treat ourselves with compassion, that we wean ourselves from the value system of white supremacy culture, that we get super interested in liberation, and, you know, values that serve us. And then thirdly, I’m interested in people of color being able to honestly talk to each other and acknowledge the ways in which we’ve been socialized to see each other as less than or more than or somehow the enemy, the competition. I guess what I really, really, really, really want is for people to be able to let down their defenses and and be super present bare human beings with each other.

Kelly: Well, I really want that for white people, too. I’m sorry. European-American people as well.

Aurora: And I’m going to guess that you see different challenges cropping up as you and as you do this work with white people versus people of color.

Dr. Amanda: Yeah.

Aurora: Can you share? What are the challenges that you’re seeing?

Dr. Amanda: Well, with white people, people of European descent. There is this ongoing need to just constantly raise awareness about what racism is as a system. And to disturb or disrupt their narrative of U.S. history because usually their lived experience as individuals doesn’t prepare them or doesn’t spur them to really look at what whiteness has done historically to people of color in this country or how whiteness has altered their individual heritages. So there’s that work to be done. I want to empower more white people to do it with each other. And I think it’s good information for everybody. But if we’re going to change America, we have to have more white people who have a narrative for themselves that goes beyond guilt and shame or jigoistic, you know, “We’re the best, we’re the best, we’re the best.” So, there needs to be recovery of their histories and their experiences so that they have a place to fit in the narrative that isn’t just as, “oh my God. Once again, we we’re the bad guys.” Right. I say this because if you ever go – you know, and I’ve been lots of schools because I have kids. So, you know, I was always asked to come in at certain times of the year to talk about certain things like Kwanzaa or, you know, MLK or Black History Month. And when my kids were in preschool, I forget what they asked me to talk about, but it was something history historical and I realized, “These little white kids need something, a model because if I just tell them the story of how people who look like them screwed up, they actually have nowhere to go except into defense or guilt.” And then I honestly think every group besides white people but every other group, including black people, we need to look at how have w been trained into anti-blackness. So when I taught an intro to American studies class for which, you know, there’s a lot of resistance. But when I taught it one of the things I premised on was that when you come into the United States, every group is having to decide how closely it wants to align with blackness. Or more specifically, how to not be aligned with blackness in order to realize the American dream. So even people with of African descent with dark skins rhetorically trying to distinguish themselves from African-Americans or local Negroes in order to have more opportunity or not to be, you know, so negatively stereotyped. So anyway, so if I had my drothers, we would all do this reckoning with like, “Wow, how we’ve been so conditioned into anti blackness.” We’re going for empowering all of us to make conscious choices and to put our energy, our money, our attention into that which is going to feed us or nurture a new way of being. When I’m thinking of as liberation culture.

Aurora: Yes. So you you mentioned that. You mentioned that one of your goals was to help people of color, women of color to have a greater intention of liberation. And and so share with us what does that mean, Dr. Amanda?

Dr. Amanda: So some of your listeners might be aware of something called white supremacy culture characteristics – so that’s – you can find it anywhere, just search that, Google it. So Tima Okun and Kenneth Johnson and a bunch of other people put together this list of characteristics that they see as part of white supremacy culture that especially manifests in organizations. So there are some things on there like perfectionism, either or thinking, yeah, more is better, everything is urgent. All kinds of toxic ways would be that make our workplaces difficult.

Kelly: I remember reading that list and being like, “Yes, oh my gosh, that’s my life, huh? I do that. Yeah, I do that. That too.”.

Dr. Amanda: Exactly! Cause it’s it’s actually part of what we think of as professional culture. Yeah. It’s like what you should be like to succeed. Avoid open conflict. So I had a student – you know, when I say student, this is a lady who’s in her early 70s. So someone who I was mentoring a white woman say to me, “Well, well, what’s the opposite of white supremacy culture? Black culture?” And I said, “No, it’s liberacion culture.” And to me, liberacion culture is this is is all about creating structures that encourage us to be present and connected with our feelings and our bodies, our breath. It’s like living life at a pace and in a way that recognizes our humanity and that we’re on an ongoing journey and that everybody’s important, including you. And nobody’s perfect, including you. And we all need a measure of grace and forgiveness. So you get the flavor.

Kelly: Yes. Dr. Amanda for president. Yes. Yes, that’s right. We want a lot of that. I’m so intrigued as to your compassion and just seems like loving relationship with women of European descent. It does that how how are you able to to have such love and compassion for us?

Aurora: I’d love to hear your question because I get that question all the time, Dr. Amanda.

Dr. Amanda: Boundaries.

Aurora: I think I’m going to adopt that one.

Kelly: Boundaries.

Dr. Amanda: Honestly, I couldn’t do the work that I do without having Erica on my team. So Erica’s European-American and as she has shown herself more and more able to embody what I’m teaching, I push her more and more to work with European-American women. I want to give to European-American women on my terms. And when I give more than I – what’s good for me to give, it comes out. It comes out as resentment. It comes out as “I’m too tired.” So, for example, how white women. We did a webinar called “How White Women Can Talk of Women of Color about Race.” And the first couple of times I did it, I was very happy to do it. I feel like I was doing a service for everybody, for white women, for women of color. You know, we’re all going to this is all going to benefit all of us. But then when I did it a few more times, I started feeling like, “OK…”And then a few more times because there was a problem with the technology and finally, I was like, “Okay, I’m not doing this anymore.” So I think it’s very important for women of color who in relationship with white women or who are partnering with white women to stay in touch with ourselves. You know, when we’re giving in a way that feels like it’s mutually beneficial and I feel good about it and then to pull back, as soon as you start feeling like you’re giving blood, you gotta stop that. In my opinion, it should always be mutual.I should never feel drained. And my team, actually, my daughter, who’s on my team and my business pointing it out to me that, “You got to stop doing that, mommy.” You know. So, for example, we used to do free strategy sessions. Kelly, in fact, you know, was one of the people who was on the phone with and and we decided, “OK, yeah, we don’t do anymore those for free.” Because the amount of stuff that you do for free can leave you feeling under nourished or like you are replicating a pattern of white women’s needs, being placed above your own or being centered at the expense of your own as a woman of color. And the other thing is that we now have a training for facilitators and coaches and trainers that we’ve launched this year. And that is intention that has nine people in it. I think four people of color five or people of European descent and I launched that because I needed to grow my team. So that more people are doing that kind of one on one mentoring that really makes a difference for people, but that is less and less my place to do.

Aurora: So I hear you say a couple of things that are resonating. I do think that anyone that is embarking in working, supporting anti blackness work, racism work, human work. Self-care is critical. Boundaries are critical. And what I also hear you saying is white women or people of European descent helping each other get through the learning curve and the awareness curve.

Dr. Amanda: Yeah. I was just thinking, in fact you know that to get mentored by me, if you’re a white woman is going to become more rare in my company and more costly. And the reason why is because there is an additional tax on me to mentor most white women through where they are. People who are more like my peers. So people who are training, other people who’ve been around for a while, done a lot of their work. It’s it’s it’s a different quality of mentoring than people who are just waking up or just getting started or who haven’t yet started raising awareness and doing change, making work amongst white people. So I’m just starting to say, OK, well, you know, my first couple of years I did a lot of work with those people and I have I’m super proud of how those people have moved along. And that’s not for me anymore. And the other thing is to have a frank, compassionate but accountability partner who is a black woman when you are a white woman at any stage of your journey os a huge accelerator. You’re gonna go deeper, faster and be better, quicker than even if you had another white woman mentoring you.

Kelly: Amen I’m blowing kisses to Aurora.

Dr. Amanda: And and I think you should pay for that. I think more of us need to pay for what we value. Black woman who mentored me, I pay them. And I think it’s important to pay people money, not just compliments or, you know giving shoutouts.

Kelly: Yeah, I mean, money’s energy. My papa always says if you you know, “If you pay nothing, it’s worth nothing.” Yeah.

Dr. Amanda: Yeah, and there’s a you know, I had a white woman send me an email asking me about my prices and one of these she said to me with something after I had already given her an hour of my time for free. She – her follow up was something like, Why worry about poor or I forget her terms. You know, whenever poor people of color having access. I call B.S., I just call B.S. You know such contradiction in that. So I think white women really need to put their money where their mouth is. And part of reparations work is paying for the services of people of color, wherever and whenever you can.

Kelly: That is right.

[] So I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m nodding my head, as Kelly and I get are embarking on setting up our patron, and this is exactly the conversation that we had. I said we’re gifting white women who are at all different stages in their journey of waking up, of awareness, of understanding our collective history, the role of European white people – Is is is that there’s there’s work there’s legwork that you’ve got to do on your own. And I love it because Kelly always talks about how women of color are at the PhD level and how white people, white women are in kindergarten school.

Kelly: And we’re so used to it being handed to anything being handed to us, not us actively seeking it out, not us having to, you know, necessarily look inward, excavate things we weren’t planning on excavating or didn’t know we we needed to. I mean, it’s a very passive sort of way of being. And I just rember first getting into my work and being like, “holy shit. Black women are the apex of this information, and we are here bumbling and stumbling around like 3 year olds in a doctorate classroom. We have no idea what we’re doing. We’re run up or down the aisles ripping up papers.” So there’s a big. Yes, I hear you. There’s a big learning curve and there’s plenty people out there to get the information from. But what I hear you also saying, Dr. Amanda, is that we are hurting we as white women and women of European descent, people of European descent, we have been hurt by whiteness as well. And that’s hard to qualify and quantify some to people.Do you find that that that’s something that you need to quantify or qualify or people are feeling it they don’t know what it is?

Dr. Amanda: Well, when you look at the white supremacy, cultural characteristics, most of those characteristics end up hurting all of us who work by them or who’ve been trained into them. So think about perfectionism. Think about what that costs you in a day to day way. What it costs you in terms of your energy, in terms of maybe how much goodness you have to spread with your children or your spouse when you’re in this perfectionistic mode of thinking. Think about how either or thinking has made you led you to make bad decisions, things that. Then you try to go back and fix. But, you know, it’s the damage was done.

Kelly: Or made you think you’re a bad person, a permanently bad person.

Dr. Amanda: Yes. Or if you think about like fear of open conflict. Who like how has that slowed things down? Because you were afraid of having the conflict come out in the open between you and the other person or the conflict between two other people that wasn’t you. But as everybody knows, it’s there and you keep having the same battle again and again. But it never gets resolved because professional culture requires us to keep it suppressed.

Kelly: There’s probably European-American women out there thinking, wait, there’s another way.

Dr. Amanda: Right. You know, yes, there is another way. There is another way. And in fact, you know, that’s our next webinar, really is how to be a facilitator or trainer who embraces conflict, because I think right now most of us are trained into conflict as being leading to loss of control and break it breakage damage. So we’re either, you know, where somebody might die literally or metaphorically. So our nervous systems are jacked up like, you know, we don’t want to go there or we’re a little bit addicted to conflict, you know, and so we feel like nothing’s happening until we’re in some kind of crisis mode.

Kelly: Or I see it in European-American families, I see where the conflict and drama that gets drummed up is not actually about the thing, the core issues of what is happening here. And there’s like all this like smoke and mirrors of drama and conflict that really is is it’s not about that. There’s such underlying things that haven’t been said, that haven’t been heard, that haven’t been felt.

Dr. Amanda: Yes, yes, yes. And as the other thing is, white supremacy culture is feeling is, quote, not appropriate end quote. You know, to bring your feelings to work, pretend like you don’t have feelings about what was just said or what you just read or the training you went through, you know, act like you’re just a creature of the mind. And we’re all going to it’s going gonna be better. And I think we all know that that has an emotional impact on us. It’s just it’s part of what keeps us stuck is this white supremacist emphasis on the mind to the neglect of the body and the spirit.

Kelly: So if our listeners aren’t at the point of being a facilitator or a trainer of yours, but they are wanting to become more comfortable with being uncomfortable and having more conversations about race, how and where would you direct them?

Dr. Amanda: I would definitely start with checking out your hidden biases. Start with checking out and investigating your hidden or implicit racial bias. We do a five day challenge. You know, that’s free for people to participate in. We also have a very low cost, you know, product that people can, you know, watch and absorb privately or share with the group if they want to, you know, learn with a group of friends or coworkers. But I would definitely start with their hidden biases. If you go to our Web site, Dr. Mandar Kemp.com, you can definitely do our free masterclass on how to talk about race because if you have an immediate need, this is going to help you. But I think to really become a partner with people of color and dismantling whiteness, you need to start looking at yourself.

Aurora: Bingo.

Kelly: Where when this airs, we will be in the middle of a big challenge of doing them in white supremacy. Book of Layla Saad’s This five day challenge is a great one. We’re going to link all of this in the show, notes the Freemason class, the Web site, all that good stuff. When Lewis Eragon. So we’ve been talking a lot this season about intergenerational wisdom. What inter-generational wisdom would you like to impart to our listeners?

Dr. Amanda: So when you say that I immediately think of my daughter. My daughter is 18 and the first thing I really think it’s important for younger women to know is you own your body? Oh, you own your body. You always need to stay inside your body. And to do that, you actually have to get in there because of the way our society is, because of the way most of us are nervous systems react to trauma, can be little trauma doesn’t have to necessarily be hugely dramatic trauma, we leave our bodies and we model ourselves on our parents and our parents are so often out of their bodies. You know, as a black mom, you know, my daughter, you know, models herself after me. And because of the trauma I grew up with and the trauma my mother grew up with and what her mother grew up with. We’ve left our bodies a lot to survive. We need now to cultivate practices to stay in the body, return to the body. You know, like meditation is just returning back to the breath. It’s not trying to have any thoughts. It’s just the intention to keep going back to your breath. Well, I think it’s important, important to keep going back into your body. Keep going back to your body because two thirds of your brain is below your neck, so your your mind is up there, you know, inside your head, your brain, but then you have the heart brain and you have to gut brain. And when you’re not in your body, you can’t access the wisdom coming from there. You can’t temperate either. So like if your gut is like, “Oh, my God, oh my God, there’s just that certain group or that gender out there,” it’s going to react and you’re not in thre to work with it. So you’re going to have an immediate physical, instinctual reaction. That doesn’t involve the brain that’s in your, you know, in your head. So that’s my first thing is, is we have got to return to the body and keep coming back to the body and loving ourselves. I guess that’s my second thing, is cultivate a practice of self-love and self-acceptance, because when you have that strong foundation, you can be with any uncomfortable information. You can be with with complex situations and work your way through. Oh, and the third thing I would say is a mentor. Everybody needs a mentor, somebody who is ahead of you. And by that I mean who’s ahead of you vibrationally. Somehow, the way that in which they’re loving or living is like you want that they think they have a perspective or an overview that you don’t have in your own life every day that, oh, yeah, they help you to come back to that. They’ve been through something that that may be similar or very different from you, but whatever they’ve been through lets you know that your difficulty can be gotten through too.

Aurora: Beautiful, beautiful. So, Dr. Amanda, that is the question we’d love to ask you is, what would you like our listeners to opt in to? And we’d love to have you answer that question. What’s the opt in for white women? And what’s the opt in for women of color?

Dr. Amanda: So let’s sort of women of color. I want you to opt in to yourself, love and your self care as your first priority of the day. And I don’t actuallt mean you know, get your nails done make sure your dreads twisted. So I recommend that women of color opt in to self-care and self-love. And to me, that begins with getting back inside our bodies. Finding a mentor or some resource that’s going to help you repeatedly come back into your body and come into loving yourself, because this is the foundation for everything else that you do with your day. I created this C.D. called Black Girl Magic because I wanted to give women some like meditation tools and, you know, guided yoga experience to to find that. And then for European-American women, I recommend that you do that e xcavating of your hidden biases, and I recommend that you honestly I recommend that you take the master class that we have on how to talk with women of color, because it tells you some steps that you need to take prior to a conversation, during a conversation and after a conversation so that you have the best chance of creating partnership and mutual understanding.

Kelly: Wonderful, wonderful advice. What’s next for you, Dr. Amanda?

Dr. Amanda: So I feel like what’s next for me is writing. I am going on a writing retreat in Trinidad. And there I am editing a book specifically for black women about how to make a contribution without sacrificing ourselves.

Aurora: Well, we cannot wait to read that because, you know, I look at that, Dr. Amanda. You know, as someone who grew up with a high, high notion of service, a high high notion of creating change and making a difference, the lines were very, very blurred for a long time on doing that work without making sure that my cup was filled first and me not perceiving that as something selfish. So I certainly will be buying a copy of your book as I continue to hone my skills and master the art of self-love, self-care, self appreciation and compassion.

Kelly: And I’m not done unearthing my biases by any means. Keep on digging.

Dr. Amanda: Yeah. But you know what, I feel like you don’t have to get to perfection to keep moving along. You know, because it’s like each one teach one. And so just like, you know, Aurora today, you’re probably in a different place than you were five years ago.

Aurora: Yes, indeed.

Dr. Amanda: And and so what you could give to somebody today is different than what you could have given five years ago. But that doesn’t mean that you didn’t give five years ago. So, Kelly, each step along the way, you got a little bit more that you can pass on to somebody else while recognizing that you’re on the journey. Please don’t not extend yourself to especially other European American women until you get to the point of you got it all figured out. As we move along each one, pull one.

Kelly: Dr. Amanda, we so look forward to seeing you talking with you again. We know this is not going to be the last time. So hopefully you’ll have us back.

Aurora: Appreciate so much the time with you today, Dr. Amanda. Much love and a big, big, warm hug.

Aurora: Wow.

Kelly: Wow. wow, wow. I’m still not over the whole “European American” phrasing. It makes so much sense! We need to recognize “whiteness” as the oppressive system that harms all of us.

Aurora: Girl, I am 100% there with you, but I’m telling you know it’s going to take some adjusting for me to say “European American.”

Kelly: Me too!

Aurora: We want to hear from you. Who are your mentors on the pathway to liberation? How are you honoring their work? Find us on the socials @the opt in.

Aurora: I just want to take a moment to thank you for being here. For staying present and tuning in. By joining us in these meaningful conversations, you are opening yourself to the world. You are expanding your understanding of society. You are taking those first steps towards liberation.

Kelly: We know how important this work is. And we want to keep doing it, but we need your support. You can pledge a contribution to our patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theoptin.

Aurora: Thank you so much.

Kelly: Music for this episode is by Jordan McCree. And the Opt-In is produced by Rachel Ishikawa.

Kelly: Talk soon.

Aurora: Bye.