In this episode, I sat down with Angela Watrous to delve into her journey of making her first documentary, In the Wake of Our Ancestors. Angela shares how her ancestral lineage healing, especially on her father’s side, led her to embark on a powerful journey retracing her family's migration through the United States, from 1636 to today. We discuss the discovery of her ancestor's involvement in Native American genocide and the complex emotions that emerged when confronting this harsh reality.
Through the lens of a white woman grappling with her family’s history of colonization, Angela explores the themes of inherited privilege, grief, and the need for collective reckoning with ancestral harm. This conversation also taps into such questions as, What does it mean to reckon with your ancestral history? And How can we navigate the complexities of grief, privilege, and healing?
Listen to Radical Remembering: Season 2 Episode 6 and find inspiration on your journey towards liberation!
Or watch the full episode on my YouTube channel.
Relevant Links
Radical Remembering Podcast
Website: https://radicalremembering.com/
Connect with angela Watrous
Website: https://inthewakeofourancestors.com/
Connect with Dr. Norissa
Living Liberated app: https://livingliberated.passion.io
Radical Remembering is a podcast that covers personal growth, self-awareness and awareness of topics at the intersection of mental health, spirituality and self-help. Each episode will leave you with intimate knowledge of the liberation process, sprinkle a little healing magic, and leave you with wisdom for your journey into living out your purpose. Stay tuned for the next episode. Thank you for listening to the Radical Remembering podcast! Listen to our next podcast and tell a friend about us.
TRANSCRIPT
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Welcome to Radical Remembering with psychologist Dr. Norissa Williams. This is a weekly conversation where we explore ways we've internalized oppression and consider what it really means to live liberated. Each episode would leave you with intimate knowledge of the liberation process, sprinkle a little healing magic, and leave you with wisdom for your journey. As you get settled in for today's episode, please make sure to like and subscribe. And if you've liked what you heard at the end, please share.
Welcome to another episode of Radical Remembering. Today, we have Angela Watrous with us. So Angela and I met, and we became, I guess, best friends once we started being friends. We were doing a training course together last year to become ancestral lineage healing practitioners. Right?
So you're also what's interesting to me about this is that you're our first white person on the show. And That's cute. Yeah. And there's a big reason for that. There's a big reason for that.
Angela is somebody who I think takes her liberation journey very seriously, her anti racism journey very seriously, and knows the language. And in a recent conversation that you and I had, you were sharing, like, yeah. I think, you know, I think black people I think maybe you were talking about people of color in general feel comfortable around me because I don't whatever you said, it was, like, open. I meant to reply to you and say that it was oversimplified. I was like, no. I think we like you because we could talk shit about white people and you get it.
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, not that I'm just talking shit all the time, but when I talk about the harms of racism and I name white supremacy and the long arm of, you know, capitalism and things and different things like that, There's not a lot of explaining that I have to do with you, Angela. Like, you just get it. And so because of that and because of this great work that you're doing, I wanted to bring you on the show.
So welcome. Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here. Just getting to talk to you for an hour is bliss. So yeah.
Yes. Thank you. So you're working on we can start anywhere, but I wanna jump right in here, and then we'll talk about other things later. But you're working on a documentary in the wake of our ancestors. Can you tell the audience a little bit about that?
Yeah. So I've never made a film before. I've written books, and, somehow my ancestors once I did the ancestral lineage healing, particularly with my dad's dad's line, I kept having images of a film. I knew that my great great grandfather had a town in New Mexico named after him. So anytime you have a British grandfather with a name named after him in this land, you know, there's some colonizing going on.
So I knew that. I was curious about the place. My grandfather was born there. My dad had gone there as a child. I've never been
So I kept having a sense of this, and I just packed up my new film equipment with some instructions from a friend who was a filmmaker and my dad and my dog. And we made a journey, going in reverse, through our ancestors' migration through the United States, from 1636 to today. And as we made that journey back, we learned also that our first colonizing ancestor, Jacob Waterhouse, arrived in 1636 and in 1637 participated in the massacre of the Pequot people, which was something we had never heard of before. We didn't know anything about it, And that massacre is considered the template for the Native American genocide. So, making a film about, like, how do we reckon with our ancestral harm and, how you know, because it's the core of the cultural troubles that we're experiencing today.
And so the theme of the film, the question is when you're born on land, your ancestors stole, can you live here with integrity? I love it. So what are some insights that you've had, particularly I mean, because you're a white woman. Right? And so you're thinking about this through the lens of race.
Right? So what are some feelings that you've had? Because a lot of times, we're so people in America, in particular, so disconnected from our lineages. You came to realize, like, oh, woah. Wow.
Like, I I'm a I'm literally a benefactor of the genocide. I'm literally a you know, I then you knew this before. I'm a benefactor of white privilege and all those kinds of things. What were some of the emotions that arose for you and your father on that journey? Yeah.
I mean, it was complex because particularly when we found out about what happened with the Pequot people, there was shock and horror. I mean, our ancestors and 80 other Englishmen and some other indigenous tribes surrounded the Pequot village and burned their people alive and shot people who were trying to come out. I mean, I'm saying this explicitly because it's horrifying. And at the same time, I was in the middle of this film journey. And when I heard that my ancestor had been part of the foundational genocidal acts, you know, the United States' foundational genocidal acts against the Native Americans, I was like, oh, good.
I'm here to tell the story. I didn't know what story I was gonna tell, but this story absolutely needs to be grappled with. It's whitewashed. It's ignored. It's changed.
You know what I mean? All the narratives I grew up with in this country were like pilgrims and religious freedom and freedom for everybody. And, of course, we know that's just total propaganda. White settler colonization is not immigration as Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz just came out with a book last year called not a nation of immigrants. You know, when people when British people and other European people came here and, like, tried to, like, just take over and instill their culture to a land, brought African people against their will here, forced them to do the the physical labor, and and I'd say emotional labor and spiritual labor of founding this country and then act like these white men did it.
I was grateful that I got to work with the core of this story. So it was super complicated, and, you know, a lot of people talk about, oh, I've heard people white people say, like, I'm afraid to look at my ancestry because I don't wanna see what they've done. Mhmm. And a lot of people talk about guilt, but to me, it's much more about grief. Mhmm.
And I'm here for the grief of the collective troubles, and I think that we have to acknowledge them and we have to grapple with them in order to come together because those cultural troubles were orchestrated. They weren't happenstance. They were completely orchestrated to divide and conquer working class laborers of all races so that the ruling class could divide us and conquer us. And as long as we keep kind of falling into this idea that we are somehow different because of, you know, racial identity. I mean, of course we have a, you know, white privilege and there is racist action and systemic racism.
I'm not denying that, but also, like, as long as we stay caught in that cycle and we're not just, like, sort of looking at how to dismantle that and, like, come together and rise up and say, actually, you can't destroy our planet. You can't have your boot on our necks to make us just do all of the labor of this life. We have to grapple with the past in order to, like, it's so tricky. Right? Like, I wanna use the word unshackle, but then, of course, that talks about slavery and I don't wanna act like, oh, it's all the same.
It's not all the same, but we do but they're, like, the oppression of racism impacts everybody except for the elite. Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. I would even say it impacts everyone differentially, And I think it also does impact the elite, and I'll tell you why.
So 2 days ago, I was doing a training. Right? And it's a racial sensitivity training. And, you know, we're all engaging deeply. It's a mixed race classroom.
And one black woman shared all that she has to do, all the labor involved before she even walks in the door for her work day. Right? And about how sometimes you know, because she doesn't wanna make too many facial expressions. She doesn't wanna you know, her outfit can't be too high and all the, you know, all those kinds of things. And I saw one of the men in the training, a, a, a white man.
I saw him nod. Right? So afterwards, I inquired about what that nod was about, and I was heartened to hear him say that he said, you know, I I thought about how much you like, because of the these these things, these very alive things and because of how white our institutions or how normed in whiteness our institutions are, then I also get to miss out on the fullness of who she is. You know what I mean? So and I also think that in order to do this generation after generation after generation white folks, right, that you you had to disassociate dissociate yourself, numb yourself, and I think you had to give up a part of your humanity, the part that sees, that knows, that loves.
And so there's a part that becomes hardened, and that is a trash storm from generation to generation to generation. And so you lost a sense of you lost your humanity in many ways, right, to be able to coexist as though, you know, all of this other stuff is not happening. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry.
Yeah. It's easier for me to say that as a black person than for you to say that as a white person to say, like, oh, the elite suffered too. But No. I actually think you're totally right. And, you know, when I'm talking about the elite, I'm not talking about, like, the average white man because, like, even that guy's nod, my sense is, like, he has to code switch to go to work.
And, you know, Brene Brown's work talks about how you cannot be invulnerable at work and then come home and be vulnerable. It's like people get, like, more and more and more narrow to what, like, what the cultural window of tolerance is for their expression of their own aliveness. Yeah. And that does absolutely impact white men too. And when I'm talking about, like, the ruling class, like, I'm thinking of people like Trump or Mitch McConnell or Biden or, you know, Putin or, you know, these people who are, like, making a ton of money for a ton like, a very few people.
And, honestly, like, all of them kind of look like comic book villains. Like, there's it's almost like their bodies are, like, twisted in the toxicity of what they're doing. Like, it's not good for them. And, also, they're the ones reaping the, like, financial benefit. But, spiritually, I mean, I think we can just obviously see it's bankrupt.
Yeah. Yeah. So they definitely have some, like, socioeconomic benefits, living the life that they want, no limits in, you know, on their freedoms and all the things. I will talk about that too. Like, there are hierarchies within hierarchies, so no one very, very few people are benefiting from the system as is, but not everybody knows that.
The majority don't know that. The majority of even white people don't know that. You know what I mean? People of color have this lived embodied experience, and we know that unless we bought into, you know, the lies. But yeah.
So how did you get that far back into your ancestry? Right. I mean, it's a good question. I mean, the thing about doing genealogy is, you know, there are very impeccable records for my British ancestors because they were in power. And so their birth, their deaths, their names, their marriages, their children were considered really important to record.
And and so a friend of mine who knows how to do genealogy just got on to ancestry and and looked up the names, which, you know, we know those records are not as accessible for people who are enslaved, for indigenous people who are not even considered citizens or people or you know? So that's complex. And one thing I love about the ancestral lineage healing work is, like, I just had someone message me who was like, I've hit a dead end with the genealogical research, but I want to connect with my ancestors. Can we do some lineage healing work together for that? And I was like, yes.
You know? And then people who are adopted, who don't know their biological family, people who are not able to find the records, you can still connect. I mean, my own ancestral guides are pre colonization, pre patriarchal. They are well before the recorded names, and I have deep spiritual relationships that I've developed with them over time. So, you know, it's both.
Right? I feel the spiritual support of my ancestors in doing the decolonizing anti racist, collective liberation work that I'm trying to contribute my part to, and I can tell this story because the records favor my ancestors. Mhmm. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Yeah. I mean, I was recently within the last year, just even trying to look as far back as my great grandfather, so my grandmother's who was alive when I was alive. Right? And in the Caribbean and I and I I'm pretty sure I don't know for a fact, but I'm pretty sure this has something to do with colonization. People weren't submitting, you know, as soon as people were born.
Right? So, like, my great grandmother was born December 21st, I think, of 1917 or 18, but she didn't have her papers weren't submitted until, like, January. So on record, her birthday is in January. And so when there's, like, this discrepancy, like, you don't really know, and it's really hard to find, like, wait. Is that the same Ignatius as Jeremiah, or is that you know?
Because you knew her birthday, and you knew it wasn't January. Exactly. Exactly. And so so, yeah, there is a lot of obscurity for those particularly indigenous folks and Afro descended folks throughout the diaspora. What is it like for you?
Like, with your ancestors, like, what you've been able to track back, like, how do you hold all of this with the ones that you can find? And You know, most of the fortunate, unfortunate thing is that, like, my living people are so young. Like, my mom is 18 years older than me. Her mom is 18 years older than me. He hit her.
And so I knew. I was 27 before my great grandparents started dying. So in my life, I've known 3 of my 4 great grandparents. Right? And so
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And I'm sure the 4th one that I didn't know, the great grandfather, I think he lasted. I don't know what age he was, but I think I was probably in my teens or twenties before he even died. So those things are a little bit more accessible for me, but not everybody has that, you know, that short of an age distance between them. And for me, it has also definitely been. I've been able to reach a little bit further back with my ancestral lineage healing work, and we should probably name what that is and what that process is too in a little bit. But it has been that.
Like and and then it confirms I have also done, like, DNA tests and different things like that that confirm. When I was younger also, my mother told me about this book written by Eric Williams, who was the first prime minister of Trinidad, and he said that the book is like the documents of West Indian history or something like that. He has records printed in this book about and, you know, I never even have the book right here, right next to me, but I've never read the book. I'm going by what she's told me. And he had told me that the African people in Trinidad were from Nigeria, and they were Yoruba.
Right? So I know that verbally. And then I also took the test, and I see that I am majority Nigerian with but also other parts of, like, West and Central Africa too, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Togo. And that's largely because all those places were really within the Gold Coast. They were one place at one point in time too.
So that, as well as the ancestral lineage healing work. And so to explain to you all and you can help me fill in the gaps, Angela. To explain to you all what ancestral lineage healing work is, it's a modality that was developed by Daniel Foer, and we are both trained in that modality. And so it's a process where in collaboration with a practitioner, you create a ritual, a space of ritual safety, and you are guided into a practice and engagement with your ancestors, right? You start with your 4 primary lineages, like your mother's mother, your father's their lines, I should say, especially if they're living your father's mother's line and your father's father's line.
And then, you know, you get in engagement with them in a spiritual way, of course. You know? And it also has been what I've seen, and also for myself, it has also even developed my capacity to engage and to hear and perceive spiritual information. Right? And so I've learned in the process some really, meaningful things.
And I'll like, for example, in one of our retreats, it was March of last year, I believe, we were I forgot, oh, what exactly we were doing. But on my maternal side, my grandmother's father's line. Right? So they showed me, like, way back that they started in Sudan. Right?
And that they came from another form of colonization is how they describe this. So not European colonization, but Arabic colonization. They should have shown me how they walked across to West Africa and that they were in Mali. Right? And so I was like after that, I was like, oh my god.
Do I have ancestors from Mali? And I go and I look at my DNA report. I do. I do. Isn't it?
Yeah. Yeah. They were also able to fill in some of the gap and tell me, like, in that particular lineage, like, they were warriors and that, you know, some of the ways in which that trouble, that cultural trouble and oppression and colonization impacted them is that there was some sort of trauma. They were warriors for a long time, but with one particular grandfather in that lineage, there was extreme trauma when it was just, like, beyond, you know, a little being a soldier. It was like you know?
And so as a means of survival, they kinda hardened. Right? So they were and they were all soldiers, including my great grandfather was a soldier. And I laugh only because that's not even something that I was fully conscious of for most of my life. He lived in Trinidad while I grew up here. You know?
And so the point of the story is that they were undeveloped in their, you know, in their feminine characteristics of divine feminine energy and overdeveloped in their masculine energy. And I say this, and I give these details to to give image to those of you who are not familiar with ancestral lineage healing and what that process might yield to be able to share, like, some of the the rich details, because I do know that that Afro descended people are at a loss when it comes to trying to find the story and that it it provokes a lot of grief even when when we when we talk about trying to trace your ancestry. So the good news is that there are other ways. There are other ways. In addition to putting your trailer in the description box underneath our talk, I'll also put your contact information, my contact information for those people who are interested in doing ancestral lineage healing work.
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I did ancestral healing work for a long time before that through family constellation work, which, you know, just like anything is deeply impacted by whoever your practitioner is, but also that that practice was taken, appropriated, inspired by, the Zulu tribe and was taken by a German man named named Bert Hellinger. And my sense of that work is that, like, for years, I was letting the troubled dead run through my body, like, trying to heal them through my body in community, and it had a massive negative impact on my health and well-being even though it was extremely powerful and I believe it's real.
I don't think it's like a problem with taking indigenous technology and taking it out of context and out of community because like if I go to a retreat and I or workshop and I do this healing work and then I go back home but I don't have anything to hold me, It does stuff. It opens doors to troubled spirits. The reason that I do Daniel's work, which, you know, he talks about is cultural repair work. It's for people who've lost the practice of ancestral reverence and connection because of either, you know, colonization and Christianization, you know, it's like it was made illegal even for my ancestors in Europe to have ancestral reverence practices. It was considered sacrilegious because it's so I mean, I know you know this from our experience.
We've talked about this before. It's so empowering. I like it rather than feeling like I have an anvil on my back of all my troubled ancestors and, oh, I've done 5 lineages. They were all so troubled. There was so much violence.
Like, you don't burn people alive and then be okay. It sets up a pattern of intergenerational trauma. I had family members who murdered each other. It's not just a harm that goes out. It starts to eat you up inside.
And I was born with that, like, in, you know, on my body, but now it feels like I have a good jetpack. Like, my ancestors who are bright and well in spirit and who understand the harms that they did and and see the impact, see the, you know, see how it's impacted me and the world and, you know, and understand what I'm trying to do. They're so supportive of me that sometimes it feels like I'm moving almost a little faster than my whole body can handle, and I'm like, everybody chill out. You know, like,
I am in a body. You're not.
I have limitations. You don't. You know? But I do think of you know, if the premise of the work is that the dead are real and they're not all equally well in spirit, the unwell dead are holding down the edges of the cultural troubles or holding it down. They're they're taking they're still believing in white supremacy and patriarchy and capitalism and colonization.
They're still holding it down energetically. And so even when the living are, like, trying to take that off of us and be like, this is a mess. We need to do reparations. We need to do recognition. We need to have totally new ways of or old ways of, you know, older ways of doing things.
As long as the dead are troubled and holding it down, it's really hard. There's way more dead people than living people, you know. I think although there's a lot of people right now so but it still seems like probably a lot more dead people. Nonetheless, we need the dead to help us. It's the way I think of it.
So for me, it's always I'm never just doing the ancestral work for personal healing. It's always with eye to collective healing and particularly, like, when I work with European descended people or white identified people, I'm really looking to, like I want to work with people who want their ancestors to support them in, you know, undoing, shifting the cultural this the intersectionals, interlocking systems of oppression. And it's fucking wild. Sorry. I'm swearing on your podcast.
Like, when we do the work together, for instance, like, when there like, when I remember a session where when your ancestors were being liberated from the container of prayer, when they're being ancestralized, when they were well in spirit. Like, I asked all my ancestors to bow in reverence to this and to feel like thousands of people bowing to your people. It's like, every time it feels so moving to me. It's not just me and you. It's my people and your people, and I think it's tricky.
I mean, it makes sense to me why a lot of Black people and people of color would, or people of the global majority would want to do the work with other people of the global majority or other black people. That makes sense to me. And there is something powerful about bridge building. I mean, in our relationship, you know, I think we've felt that, you know, of like, oh, they're transpersonal. You know?
It's not just us loving each other, but it's like our people harmonizing and working well together, and I think we need that for the collective liberation. Yeah. That reminds me of one time when I was I didn't even remember what the issue or whatever. I was and one morning, I was at my altar, and I was meditating, and I just heard this tuning, like, the you like, tuning tuning for whatever it was in the background, and I look over and I'm like, those are Angelo's ancestors because that's how they showed up when you and I had done that work. So it is bridge building and all those things and healing and restoration and different things like that.
And I like that you're what you're bringing up and naming is that we've been trying to go about liberation the wrong way. Right? So in many ways, we've been treating liberation as though it's a cognitive thing. Like, you know, if I just changed my thoughts, I'd be good. And then if those thoughts change my behavior, boom, liberation is done.
If we get a little bit of social power, economic power but what you're naming here is that it is not purely a manifestation of what's in the material world that in order for us to be collectively liberated, we have to do we have to address the spiritual world as well, which addresses history, which addresses ancestry. But there is really no divide between that spiritual world and here because that history is in our bodies. It's in our cell. It's in the morphogenic feel around each one of our cells that tells it, you know, what to turn on, what to turn off, and all those kinds of things. So really honoring that that you've named for us.
I talk about it also in my work, but I'm enjoying how you're talking about the fact that this is only half the story if you try to address it that way. You know? Because we there is an investment, you know, and and when with our unwell debt and keeping things the same. Yeah. And, you know, I guess, just the way that I think of healing almost as, like, sedimentary, like, there's layers, right, of, like there's just so many different layers of healing in our ourselves and, you know, in our relationships, but, like, culturally, there's so many layers of healing.
So it's not like I think, oh, I just need to heal my ancestors and it's all done. It's also not like, oh, I just need to make a film where in particular white identified people can start to see what it looks like to acknowledge, reckon, learn about your ancestry, like, face what happened and be moved by it. You know, it seems like so many people, even all the arguments around critical race theory and all this stuff, right? Like one day I went down a terrible rabbit hole on the internet. I was like, what are people's arguments against critical race theory?
So I googled it and I found this southern white politician, and she was like, this is gonna make white children feel terrible about themselves. I was like, oh my god. This is I mean and, of course, this is not a new argument, but, like, she's a lot of a political web page. This is not just her personal opinion.
She is a member of the ruling class. And for me, it feels like, okay, it's okay to feel, first of all, you know, it's okay to, you know, feel uncomfortable. I mean, you know, when I emailed the Pequot Museum to say, hey. My ancestors participated in a massacre against your people. I'd like to talk to you.
Writing that email and getting ready to send it was one of the scariest things I've ever done in my life. It seems ridiculous because it's sending an email. I send a lot of emails. It's not scary. And so much because I hadn't finished, like, reckoning with my ancestor who was part of that.
Right before I hit send, I cannot even make this up. I went to hit send, and my computer just shut down and died. And died. Not even I mean, it was I didn't well, it didn't die forever, but it just was like, don't Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I was like, why did and I didn't like, why did my computer shut down? Like, and I just was like, no. Okay. Like, I opened it up again, and I was like, if I have to write this email again, I'm gonna write it again, and I'm gonna send it again.
And then I did finally send it.
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And then I had to do some psychopomp work with my ancestor who had said to me when I before even knew what he did, when I dropped in with him and asked if I because I asked the spirits of the land, the first people of this land, and my ancestors, is it okay if I do this project? Before I ever committed to doing it, everyone said yes to me except him, and I didn't know why.
And what he said to me was don't humiliate me. And what I said to him was, like, it is not my intention to humiliate you. It is my intention to find out the truth and name it. And then he and I had to do, like, a whole reckoning process and healing process, and it made a huge difference. And now he is very much in support of my work, my life.
I love him. I know that might seem weird. Like, I love my ancestors. I don't love what he did. He no longer loves what he did.
He, like, drives me in this project. He brings people to me. I just met somebody who lives on another continent who messaged me on my birthday this week and said, I noticed your last name on this website I was on, but didn't know anything about the film and was like, I have this ancestor Jacob Waterhouse. You know, I mentioned all his ancestors, and I was like, I can't believe this. Like, it's like the ancestors are working to bring us together to be like, please please make this right.
I mean, we all make mistakes. That mistake was a horrendous one. I hope to never make a mistake that big in my own life. Yeah. But we can repair it, and I believe we can repair it even after we're dead.
And I will just say the indigenous writer, Pat McCabe, after queen Elizabeth died, she wrote the most incredible Facebook post about, like, like because I was like, bye bye colonizer, see you, dead lady. Like, I wasn't like, oh, the queen. I don't have any romanticization of that shit. You know? Right.
But she was like, we don't wanna hold the dead to their harms that they did when they were living, basically. We need their help. We need her help. Like, I will pray for her spirit to become well. Yep.
And I was I mean, a friend of mine sent it and was like, this is exactly what you're talking about. I was like, wow. I'm so moved. And I I believe that is the work of the ancestral lineage healing we're doing, that's the work of the film I'm doing, that's the work of the liberation work you're doing, and all the anti racist education you're doing. It's like there's all these different layers of, like, thinking, feeling.
We gotta be able to feel it. We have to be able to heal the spiritual part of ourselves and the collective. You know, it's not just one thing. Yeah. I love it.
I love it. You need grief, actually, a little while ago. What does that grief look like for white people when they start to reckon with Yeah. All of us? It's interesting.
You know? You had asked earlier, like, what was it like for my dad? I love my dad so much, and he's, yeah, he's one of my favorite people, and we're so different. He, in the sixties, he lived in you know, my family is from the Bay Area, and he was taking a massage class, and he would, like, drive around the protests for civil rights so he could get to his massage class. I'm like, okay.
You really missed an opportunity. I mean, he wasn't, like, against it, but he wasn't participating. He, like, saw it as a traffic jam, and I too have seen protests as a traffic jam in my life. And, you know, like, before I really understood, like, what was going on, it's like there's, you know, my own before Ferguson, I don't feel like I fully understood, and there's no reason for me not to. I grew up listening to gangster rap.
I heard people saying, like, fuck the police. I I understood something about it, but I didn't understand wholly until I saw American military tanks on the street of Ferguson, Missouri aimed at nonviolent black protesters who were saying, like, you killed our unarmed child. And then something shifted for me where I was like, oh, this is everywhere. This is all the time. This is the way it's set up, you know.
And so that's you know, my dad and I are very different, but, like, in terms of grief, he's not super great at, like, feeling his feelings or emoting or, you know, he kind of feels like shut down or angry or, you know, like or he's loving, but it's I don't know how to explain it. So it's interesting as I'm making the film, and I'm like, hey. This thing happened, and he's like, oh, wow. And, you know, he's so understated. Like, even in the film and the clips, like, you can see in the trailer him saying, like, this is terrible.
Like, I never knew anything about this. You know? And he's not against reckoning with it, but I think his version of reckoning is to, like, just gently acknowledge it and kind of, like, turn away and shut down. Mhmm. And he is almost 80 years old.
You know? I'm just grateful that he's not like, what are you doing? You know? He's like, yeah. I'll get in a car and drive 11,000 miles with you and let you bring me to indigenous people and talk to them.
You know? So, you know, he'll do it. For me, even right now as we're talking, like, I I feel like I'm always a little bit on the edge of tears when I think about how messed up things have gotten. And if it's not, it's not because this is who we are, and this is, like, a natural human quality to, like, harm each other and, like, oppress each other. I don't believe that.
And, you know, just last week, I was watching a video called Birth of a white Nation where this scholar historian, who's a white American, was laying out the details on YouTube. Like, yay laying out the details of, like, in this year, people in the, you know, American colonies were called English, and 20 years later, they were called white. That was the first time in the world, it's like 16/80 something or something. That's the first time in the world anybody was named as white.
Why was that? What happened in those 20 years? And she pretty much lays out that there was a rebellion, an uprising of in white indentured servants and enslaved black people who lived together, worked together, slept together, married each other. They were in community together, and they were like, these land owning ruling class people are oppressing us. And for a year, they were in uprising and uprising and uprising. And finally, the British military came over, pushed that down, squashed that, and there's literal, like, written documentation of the colonists writing to England saying we're gonna use a divide and conquer strategy.
And all the uprising stopped when they started giving the indentured white people a little bit more, and WE Du Bois called that, I think he called it, like, a psychological wage. It's like just giving people, like, the sense that they're important, that made them feel like they were, like, connected to so, like, all these people who think they're connected to Trump, like, he does not care about you. He's not gonna help you get housing or health care or food or work or anything. Like, why are all these people aligned? And it's this thing that's really only been around for, like, 400 years.
Mhmm. And I'm like, we can undo this. Mhmm. Yeah. And I guess an important part of grief too is allowing the feeling and not running from it, leaning into it.
Right? Because as simple as that is, it's countercultural. Right? Because patriarchy, the way whiteness has also been the norm in institutions. To think is what is promoted.
Who cares what you feel? What do you think? You know? So, like, leaning into it and allowing it, not running away from it. Mhmm.
Also named running away from it by, I guess, being defensive, trying to make a joke and make light of hard situations, suppressing it after the conversation is done, and not allowing the continued processing. And, I mean, I say that as I think about what your journey has been. Right? So you said, you know, you liked and you listened to rap and all those kinds of things in your earlier development. So there were some seeds planted.
You grew up in the Bay Area, which is at least explicitly progressive. Right? And Yeah. More progressive issues and particularly if you're near Oakland, there was some change around the time that you were born, some social political changes and consciousness raising around blackness with the blank Black Panther Party being so close. Right?
So there were some sieges. Right? But it wasn't until 2014 that you know, that this big event happened that that you saw in a different way. For a lot of people, it wasn't until Trayvon Martin, and I believe that was 2015. For a lot of people, it wasn't until George Floyd in 2020.
Right? In racial identity development models, both white racial identity models, black racial identity models, and the other ones that there are other models that talk about people of the global majority as well. They talk about, Bill Cross, who developed the first Black racial identity model, talks about that as an encounter experience. Right? So you had been moving through the world, like, oh, wait.
Like, experience. Right? So you had been moving through the world, like, oh, wait. Like, not even thinking about your race, but that you have a race or any of those things. And then there's a big encounter experience, and you see the world completely differently.
Yeah. Yeah. That's something I hadn't heard of before. I mean, I will say it's not like I had never thought about racism or anything like that. I think what the difference is is I didn't understand that it was systemic.
Yeah. Like, I was, like, the birth of my systemic lens, not the birth of my concern. I mean, of course, like, I mean, I was in LA during the Rodney King uprising. And I watched that video, and I wasn't like, oh, I'm sure he deserved to be beaten. Right.
Like like, there was no part of me that thought, like, that's okay. My dad watched all the OJ Simpson trials for instance, and I didn't watch it, but my dad feels very, very adamant. He gets so mad even now if people bring it up because he feels like he was not guilty and that it was orchestrated. And he was like, I watched it every day. Those cops were lying.
You could see that they were lying. They would say different things. They would say one thing during the trial, and the news would say something else. He would call the news and be like, what are you talking about? That's not what happened today.
Right. So I didn't have that experience. And, you know, some of my friends, especially white friends, when I talk about this will be like, well, your dad loved OJ Simpson because he loves football, and I'm like, yes. And he watched it. I mean, my dad is not a scholar.
He has a high school education, but he is able to watch something and see the news and be like, they're saying something different than what actually happened today. Yeah. So it's it's you know? And, you know, I'm not pretending that I'm ever gonna be able to completely undo my internalized white supremacy culture. That's an ongoing lifelong, you know, journey.
And, there are oftentimes where I'll be like, uh-oh, that's weird or, you know, like, you know, even today when we were messaging before this, and I was like, oh, I wonder about the wording of this thing you're sending me. And I was an editor. Is it supportive of you or is it intrusive or like, you know, it's like it's always you know, it's different. It is different. Like, if you were a white friend, I would be like and you were talking about something anti black, and so I'm, like, asking you to reword that.
It's super tricky. Right? I think for me though, what happened with Ferguson in terms of that awakening that you're talking about was I can no longer act like this isn't a systemic intentional thing. Yeah. And I can no longer pretend that it's, like, us on this side or something.
And I right around that time or before that time, like, I'm somebody who was queer identified, and I remember all the stuff about, like, same sex marriage and all of that. And at some point I said to some friends, like, I feel like climate is the only issue that I can actually really get behind because it impacts everybody. And then Ferguson changed that for me. I was like, oh, and then, of course, now people talk so much more about intersectionality, and it's like, I can't extricate climate catastrophe from racism or patriarchy or you know? So all those things are all together.
And I think that, to me, that felt like the birth of my sense of intersection, essential intersectionality with how I spend my life. And I think of Michael Brown as a deep spiritual teacher, and I wish he didn't have to be. It continues to be like a deep source of grief for me that he's not alive. And I didn't know him, but I just felt his spirit, and he was a child. And, you know, just because he was a large child, you know, doesn't mean he wasn't a child.
You know? It's painful. Yeah. Very much so. And the original identity development models, they don't. They don't think that there was nothing before, but that these encounter experiences, now your identity is impacted in a different way.
So what you explained I see what you're saying. Yeah. What you explained speaks of an identity shift. Right? Yeah.
Thank you for clarifying that for me. That makes sense. Yeah. And so what can you do that continues? Right?
And meaning from 2014 until now, this has been a liberation journey for you. I don't know if you would always have said liberation, whatever, but it's been a liberation journey for you, how you get free from and emancipate from the colonized ways of thinking about race and all of its intersections. What I know that you've done a lot of learning, but can you speak to some of that for us? Speaking to, like, what I've learned over this time or what Your intentional acts of decolonization. Mhmm.
If there are people who are looking at this and say, like, okay. Well, I've had an encounter. Now what? Right. What's the offer?
Yeah. I mean, it's funny. When I think back to that time around Ferguson, the first thing I did was reach out to a friend of mine who I knew from Constellation work, who is a black elder, who I really loved, a black queer elder. And I I said, I imagine that you must be going through so much grief right now. Can I make you dinner?
And he and his partner came over, and I made them dinner. And I like, when he was before he left, he was like, I can hear my mom saying, like, you can't ask this, but, like, can I have the leftovers? And I was like, of course. His partner was like, oh my his partner who's white was like, you can't ask that. I was like, he can.
This is the whole point because Right. You know, like, it's small things. Right? Like, just me being like, I imagine you're hurting. Can I help?
Like, you know, I can't undo this all the way, but I can care about you. It's to me, it's a lot about like, I speak out pretty intensely about this stuff on social media, and a lot of white friends have messaged me and been like, you've really given me the courage to speak up more. So that's a thing. And in my friendships, like, I don't know, like, in my relationships. One time my dad picked me up from a trip at the airport, and the first thing he said to me was that they killed another black man.
You know? So it's very much like, no one in my life doesn't know that I care about this stuff because it's the heart of my life. I don't know, I'm an abolitionist. I see the police as a racist institution. I want it abolished.
I want community care and mutual aid. I want the way that things have been set up to be, like, governmentally to be completely different. I don't think about, like, representation. Like, having a black president did not change things. Obama told the protesters at Ferguson to go home.
It's not about, like, representation. It's about a complete dismantling of the way that things are set up. And in order to do that, we have to see how it was constructed against us, and how that impacts us differently. And white people are incentivized to not see that in a way that black people and people of color are not. And so it's much easier to be like, this has landed on me.
This is bullshit. Like, what is this? But white people are given, like, you know, the GI bill. They're given you know, like, my grandparents were able to buy a house in an area that was, you know, blocked from anybody who wasn't wholly white in 1951. Those little bits I mean, they're huge and they're massive.
They impact people a lot, but, like, those little bits of benefit have kept white people from being like, wait a second. This is all messed up. And so it's like about being willing to be like, those little benefits, yep, massive spiritual economic I mean, somebody a a black author, I can't think of her name right now, but she wrote a book called the sum of us last year, I think, that's all about the economic devastation of racism and how the, like, racism is destroying our economy, which I am really hoping to interview her for my film because, like, one anti racist, like, white person said to me, you know, in your film, you're talking about emotional stuff, you're talking about spiritual stuff, but some people only care about money. You might wanna talk to this woman and I get this in here too. It's like it hurts us on so many different levels.
So I don't know. It feels very much like there isn't a day that goes by that I'm not thinking about this stuff. And I I just, like, was in a class with the organization called White Awake, and they were really talking about the difference between liberal anti racism and radical anti racism, and what they said was liberal anti racism is representation, diversity, inclusion, and radical representation is the recognition that, like, 99% of us are being economically oppressed and, like, you know, I would say emotionally, spiritually impressed. That's not quite how they were talking about it for the benefit of very, very few and that we need to, like, dismantle all these laws and make reparations so that it's, you know, we can start it's not that hard. We have the money.
We're blowing all kinds of money on ridiculous murder, you know, but to really somehow just give us, like, a big reset. I I think it's actually totally doable. Yeah. I think it is. I think it is.
So in your journey, I'm hearing, well, lots of intentionality, but I'm learning you. I also know, you didn't necessarily say it, but I know that you've also taken a lot of courses that also keep you, it's like we have to be in rehab. Right? I think it's for the ways in which, you know, in which whiteness has been so institutionalized within the individual, but also within the system and how that keeps replicating itself. So I know you've also taken a lot of courses. Mhmm.
And as we close, I want to ask you a question of cross racial friendships. In Marissa doctor Marissa Franco's book, Platonic, there is a chapter where she talks about cross racial friendships and the things that are necessary in order to have cross racial friendships. Right? How have you been able to successfully have cross racial friendships? I feel safe with you.
I feel like and I don't feel safe with all white people. I start off with, it's funny. The same training the other day, a white guy was like, I wonder sometimes how black people perceive me. I was like, oh, well, when I see you, I'm like, danger danger danger. Right?
Until we engage. And actually the first time that we engaged, I was like, oh, he's okay. He's a safe one. Right? And I I won't give that up because it's because we live in a still racist society, and it's necessary for our survival.
You know? Although there are many other parts of that I wanted that I'm going and and work on giving up. But, anyway, how do you do it? What do you and you shared also empathy, but how you shared empathy with that gentleman earlier. Yeah.
I think it's something about, like, one, I try to be pretty transparent. Like, I'm probably gonna fuck this up sometimes. Please know I want you to tell me. It's not that it's not scary for me or I don't feel worried or, like, feel worried that I'm gonna feel embarrassed or ashamed or something or if I mess up or I overstep or I do something and I'm tracking it. Like, even in this conversation, it's so weird because I'm like, you're interviewing me.
What's the balance of how much I'm talking? So you're talking. I'm talking more than you. I noticed that. It's so I'm tracking that some.
And I try to be as transparent as possible and just be like, any time I mess up, please tell me I will repair this with you, which is a value that I have in all my friendships. But I am really I. I include racialized harm, ignorance. I no matter I mean, what? Like, this is if this has been an identity shift for me for, like, the last, you know, not even quite 10 years, I I have not been living with this reality in the way that I'm holding it as long as you have. And I'm always going to have things I don't see and I don't know, and it's scary.
Like, even as I'm making my film, you know, bio Akumalafe talks about, like, not trying to dismantle whiteness from the, like, energy of whiteness. I'm like, oh, how do I make this film about reckoning with my ancestors' harm, my white settler ancestors' harm without bringing some kind of unconscious internalized whiteness to it. So I ask people like you to be on my consulting team and, you know, have you watched parts of it and look at parts of it and let me know where I'm messing up, You know? And so that's for me, like, with my work, my friendship, my clients, anybody who works with me, I'm like, let me know. You know?
I think that's part of it. And I tell you how much I enjoy Because you said you were speaking and I gave you the example of the black the black woman, how she spoke entering an institution. Right? Me being one of the few black people in white spaces, legit all of my professional life until I left the work until I left and started working for myself. There's a heavy cognitive load as you code switch, as you frame switch, as you manage impressions, as you man deal with microaggressions and stupid things people say, like, oh my god.
I didn't recognize that it was you. Your hair is so different, really. Like, my face is the same, though. Right? And there I got a little bit of pleasure hearing that you have some cognitive load there.
You know? Not you, Angela, the person, but you, the white people. That is because I could thank you for carrying some of the load for me so I don't have to do all the carrying. Right? Like, that's that's what it felt like.
Good. That's what, you know, white people need to do the work because, you know, white people used to enter the space, and it's just like, come here. Hey. How's everything going? But I'd like that you name that you're, you know, that what you're naming is that it that that it's it's this, you know, intentional lifelong process that requires dismantling in our interpersonal relationships and our institutions and what have you.
And I think that that's important. I'll also say from the other side of being, you know, your friend, what made me feel really safe from the beginning is that you named it. I had white friends during 2020, you know, during 2020 when we were all locked down. So there were a whole lot of Zoom catch ups and everything like that. Who do you say shit about race?
Who do you say nothing about George Floyd? And there are people who are social workers, do you know? And I'm not bad talking to them. Should y'all hear this? Love y'all too.
Right? But we didn't talk about it, and that it hurt. It hurts that so we're not gonna name this at one of the most critical times in history. We're not gonna name this. You know?
And it would have meant so much for me and for them to name it and to say, I see you. I see your struggle. I see what you and your community have been going through. Yeah. Without I mean, there's I wanna also name that there are ways that people do that that are self serving as well, and I'm not talking about that.
Totally. Yeah. Born of guilt, and I'm not talking about Right. And I have not sensed that in our interaction, but you also named things too. You're like, you know, like, that's the effect of colonization.
I'm like, oh, shit. You know what I mean? That is the effect of colonization when I've told you personal things or family things and different things like that. And it helps that I don't have to be the one always bringing it up and that you're so working that you also help me hold a mirror to me and say, like, no. You're not crazy.
Like, this is some real shit, and this is some racial shit. You know what I mean? So I appreciate that, And I appreciate this conversation. So now as we come to a close, I wanna remind you to like, share this podcast episode. If you wanna get in touch with Angela, again, it's gonna be in the description box.
Angela always also does restorative empathy counseling. So, in in addition to the ancestral lineage healing, you can also, on her website, found out how you can contribute particularly white identified folk who have benefit benefited, you know, from, white supremacy and white privilege in the country, how you can donate to the film to get the message across to raise the awareness of other white folks about about this reckoning that's needed and how they too can do that. So before we close, Angela, do you have anything you'd like to say? I mean, I wanna say to your nonwhite identified listeners, like, thanks. If you got to hear, thanks for putting up with this the whole time.
I'd be like, what is happening? What's this white lady? Why are we listening to her? Vow of respect and humility, for, you know, any irritation that may have caused and, open to feedback, you know, really from your listeners, not just you. And just that I have, like, the most profound love and respect for you and your work, and it's really truly, like, a joy and an honor to get to be part of it in any way.
So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the time well spent. Bye, everyone. Bye.
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