You feel committed to healing the racial divide. This call to meet the moment reverberates within you as an energetic drive, faint whisper, or longing in the heart.

For many of us, the murder of George Floyd lifted this call to the surface. If you are new to conversations about racism, this event likely was a painful epiphany: How did I not pay more attention to this? If you’ve been exploring this for years, Floyd’s death may have felt more like a reawakening: It’s time to deepen my commitment. If not now, when?

Either way, you feel inspired to take action that draws upon your deepest gifts and stretches you.

However, it isn’t obvious how to put your best foot forward or what more you can do. To complicate matters, it rarely feels like the right time to bring up a different perspective, and it’s tiring to not know what to say and not feel heard when you speak. So you keep getting knocked off balance. It’s tempting to blame yourself, others, or the polarized environment, but you know there’s a more nuanced explanation.

To begin, the question What more can I do? is deeply personal. It is about discovering which dimension of this reckoning (Police violence? Wealth inequality? Health disparities? Organizational inclusion?) calls forth your great longing—and how to bring to it your deepest gifts. This isn’t simple.

Then there is the loss. Meeting the moment demands new capacities for meaning-making that put at risk who you take yourself to be. This change of identity is monumental, calling for resolve, compassion, and patience. No wonder it’s hard.

These conversations are complex. They evoke powerful emotions and can bring up what Resmaa Menakem calls racialized body trauma, an activation of your nervous system with deep yet hidden origins. Navigating these dynamics calls for perspective-taking and the realization that each person generates their own emotions. Even if you’ve developed these self-authoring capacities, it’s tricky to access them in this tense and complex arena.

Another source of difficulty are “partial guides,” thinkers who, though sharp and good-faithed, offer incomplete explanations. The “colorblind” school correctly identifies the arbitrary nature of racial categories yet bypasses the exclusions and violence of American history. Many in the antiracist school rightly document how far we have to go yet deny real progress, get caught in shaming, and reinforce racial essentialism. Meanwhile, anti-antiracists stand for free expression and the story of progress yet often rationalize away past and present injustice.

Finally, there is American history. Studying key events and how they interrelate places today’s challenges into context, and wrestling with history’s contradictions is essential to sizing up a path forward. Yet Americans tend to look forward, and when they do look back, it’s often at either progress or brutality, rarely both.

It doesn’t have to be this way

When you have the opportunity to explore American history, reflect on your own experience, and reimagine the future in a psychologically safe environment, you get rooted. When you practice taking multiple perspectives, your stance expands. And when this happens in community, you feel support on all sides.

That’s why we created Stepping Up: Wrestling With American History, Reimagining Its Future, And Healing Ourselves.

Our promise to you

In this six-month course, we will personally guide you through a journey of regaining your balance, finding your footing and voice. We will explore the call to act, where it comes from, and what it means. We will identify the losses that arise and the collective story they embody. By naming specific conversations that test you, you’ll learn how to practice embodying your noblest intentions with skill, grace, and clarity. This isn’t easy work, so you’ll tap into the improvisational blues/jazz approach that is both American and Black American. You’ll discover how to improvise your way through the thorny briar patch of life, so you can swing and flow with complexity. Grounded in this spirit, you’ll appreciate what’s true and useful about antiracist thinkers and their critics and fill in what they miss with supplemental perspectives.

In the words of our colleagues at the Post-Progressive Post, you’ll help mend the torn social fabric of American culture by embracing the positive values in the traditional, modern, and postmodern worldviews. When you step up, it is to this higher ground. 

By the end of this course, you will feel secure in your true voice, one rooted in both your life story and the American democratic journey. Now you are ready to speak with confidence, deepen the conversation, and create new levers for change. It’s no longer necessary to choose between ignoring our past or letting it sink you into despair. Your mind and nervous system now can embrace America in its rich complexity: both the beauty and the ugliness, the dignity and the disaster, “the marvelous and the terrible,” as Ralph Ellison put it.

Instead of wondering how to connect with others, you are part of a community and in rhythm with colleagues. Instead of feeling cornered into single points of view, you comprehend a range of perspectives. There is now space within you for appreciating the truth, goodness, and beauty in many worldviews. As confusion and despair subside, you gain access to moods of openness and possibility. An inner desire to do something positive has become a clear picture of how your strengths can meet the moment. By finding your footing, you have found your voice.