I’d spent my career developing solutions for the downstream effects of racial injustice, but I realized our nation had yet to truly tackle what was polluting us from upstream: America’s deeply ingrained and often unconscious belief in a hierarchy of human value. It is the myth that built America, fueling unfettered land confiscation from Native Americans and unprecedented enslavement of Africans.
To jettison that belief, we developed the Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) process with the input of more than 150 experts and 40 community groups. Since then, two dozen college campuses and 14 communities, from Dallas to Alaska, have created their own TRHT processes, and the results have been tremendous: greater community cohesion, more diverse voices, and events that promote healing.
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2020 has felt like a repeat of America’s worst moments. First, during the pandemic, the country’s original indifference to black and brown life and exploitation of black and brown labor felt achingly present, as people of color were more likely to be essential workers and thus exposed to the deadly coronavirus. That injustice and grief charged the air. Then came the lightening: video of George Floyd being suffocated to death by an officer of the law.
