Welcome to the IUPUI Center for Translating Research into Practice Scholar of the Month Conversation. We're so excited to offer you these series of conversations once a month, where we get a chance to talk to a scholar here on our campus who's doing some amazing and exciting work. My name is Steve. The We guy serve as the Associate Director for the IPI Center for Translating Research into Practice. And it's my opportunity now to share some information with you as I welcome you to this wonderful opportunity today. So allow me to share my screen, and, bring some introduction to you today. Here, we're going to talk with Professor Calmer Thompson in a little bit. But before I introduce her, I do want to cover some important information about what's happening. And first is to give you some background, if you're not familiar with our center, we like to recognize and honor our founding director doctor Sandra Petrono, who's a professor emeritus in Communications and a translational researcher herself. And when she came to campus with her, then husband, who is the then Chancellor, still husband, but then Chancellor of our Campus Charles Bans. What she noted was that a lot of the work that happens here in Indianapolis at our EPI campus is, in fact, translational. It's generating or taking generated knowledge, working with others and solving problems in our community. And it was her hope that we could expand that, honor it, celebrate it, and do more of it. And so our executive director now is former Chancellor Vance, who serves as the director of the center, and he is quite Quite happy to continue in this role to encourage our faculty and our staff on campus to partner with community and solve problems and share that and share that knowledge with folks. So as we get together today, a few reminders. Hopefully everybody's familiar with Zoom, but just as a reminder, to keep your microphone muted. You're welcome to have your camera turned on. We will endeavor to have some conversation later, so we hope that you'll turn on certainly your video then and join in. But you may also use the chat feature to write down questions or comments as some people already are If you're interested to know, we are recording this presentation. So if you have friends that are not able to see it, and they will be able to see it later, and they could see many of the other recordings that we have on our YouTube channel. Of course, because you're here, you're going to get an opportunity to fill out one of those fabulous post evaluation surveys. So please let us know what you think about this and keep in touch with us. Speaking of keep in touch, there's lots of ways to keep up with us. One of the things we offer is credit, if you're looking for a con continuing education credit, you can sign up by going to IU Expand and taking credit for attending these events. We have lots going on, and we hope that you'll follow us in lots of different ways through Facebook or Instagram or on Twitter. And as I mentioned, we have a YouTube channel. We try to share some of the exciting information that's going on, and we offer lots of opportunities to get together and celebrate and talk about translational research. One of our partnerships is with the library. And the library is a great partner in helping us get out the work that people are doing that might be in academic journals. If they have something called Scholar works. And if you go to our featured page and say, for example, click on doctor Talmer Tompson, you could see her more specific page, but then you'd also have a chance to see some of her academic publications that are in what's called Scholar works, which makes it available to all of us. We don't have to go to a particular journal. Then you could click on the Scholar works page at the library, and to see all of the amazing work that all of our faculty are doing, that is in fact available to you. In general at any time. So we hope that you'll take advantage of that opportunity and see the work that people are doing. Coming, we have an exciting February. So we have our annual keynote address coming up, but also our scholar of the month, we're featuring Paul Mullins, who is one of our initial avance community scholars. And so we're going to take a deep dive into looking at the exploration and the power of community impact and the work that he's done around Invisible Indianapolis with his amazing partner, S S Haya, who is also a fellow and part of that program. If you don't get enough in February of us, please join us for the keynote address. It's something we do annually this year. We're bringing in doctor Mark Becker, who has done some amazing work with student success in his past, and he's now doing some even bigger work across the country. And he's got two opportunities. One, you can join us in the community on March 2. It's a Thursday night, and we'll be at the Bonner Center at 6:00 P.M. Or you could join us on Friday on the IUPI campus at noon. We'll be talking about a different topic. But please join us if you're interested in hearing anything about these two topics and go to our website anytime where you can keep track of that information. But today, we are here to talk to our dear colleague, Professor Calmer Thompson. She's a professor of urban education studies in the School of Education and also coordinator for the Counseling Counselor Education program at the School of Education. She's in a transition, but she's agreed to come and talk to us today and give us some thoughts, and she's posed a question for her talk title and conversation title, which is what would our interactions look like if we were really serious about ending racism. It's a pleasure for us to welcome her here. I'm going to unshare my screen and ask her to get ready to share hers and to unmute and to let her Um, get us started on this topic. We're very anxious to hear from you. So please give a warm, silent, Zoom, welcome. There we go to doctor Calmer Thompson. Thank you. Thank you very much for that introduction, and I appreciate and really am grateful for the opportunity to give a talk today. This will be a reflection of some of the work that I've done for many, many years. And so I will jump right into it and share my slides. I thought I had it all prepped up and sorry about that. I'm going to go from the very beginning. Okay. And again, the topic of my talk is what what our interactions look like, if we were really serious about ending racism. And I'm a psychologist by training, and I consider myself a liberation psychologist, and a liberation psychologist is someone who is looking at how we can pay attention to those social ruptures of our lives that have an impact on individual people and on our interactions with one another. How do we do that? And I'll focus on a theory in particular. And it's on my particular iterations. And I contribute to the theory and conduct research relating to the processes of change, also on racialized violence and also the promotion of peace and liberation. My life's work is centered on how we can develop a sense of well being, really, based on knowledge, and often the knowledge is painful, and it's about racism and how do we now apply it so that it becomes something that we can free ourselves or liberate ourselves from. Again, it's based on liberation, psychology, because it's focused on rupturing social forces that create distress and conversely the forces that promote optimal well being. The theory I'll talk about is racial identity theory, really identity development theory, and it's one that's often misunderstood. So I ask that if you have certain conceptions about it, to maybe leave yourselves open because I know it's talked about quite a bit. But I think that one of the reasons why it's not well understood is that there actually are many. There just is not one. There are many, and the one that I've been working on is one which deals with processes of change, to things that we can do to recognize and then do something to get beyond it. So going right diving right into it, I want to start with assumptions, and I'll just go and cover about three assumptions or qualities about racism. We all have different ideas, and it's very important that I begin with just what is it that I'm talking about with regards to it? With each one of these, I'm also going to talk about their significance. To this idea of where we are and where we can be in terms of our interactions with one another. So this idea that racism is a devastation. It's a malignancy. It's based on power relationships. It occurs. It has an impact on individuals and groups. It begins, and it starts off at a societal level, and it interacts ongoingly. It's synergistic. It is two pronged. I'll talk about each one of these. It's centered in violence, which is one of the contributions that I've been making, especially in the last ten to 15 years. And also, it's a contributor to our fixations, our individual fixations and so called regressions in our psychological development. I want to first tackle this idea of a two pronged nature of racism because this is something that is not always attended to, especially when we think about the media. Now, I'm sitting I have here a quote by the well known figure W ED Boys in 1920. This is a book written to show that these observations have been made for a very, very long time. And in this quote, he's talking about the devastation that occurred in the Congo by the Belgium. And what occurred is that on the one hand, there is this catastrophe that occurs, this ruthless destruction, this shattering of every tribal law, the int introduction of criminal practices, and so forth. And on the other hand, the fields of Belgium laugh, the cities were gay art and science flourished. It's important that we recognize that racism is a structure that creates this level of unfairness. It's more than just an ideology of who's superior and who's inferior. It serves this idea of uplifting or ascendancy of white Europeans and the idea that there is an inferiority or There is this almost pathetic, unfortunate, in some cases, the conditions by which those who aren't. Now, I wanted to point that out at the global level, just to give you an illustration of a liberation perspective because we know these things are transferred and translated on personal levels. And we can see that in a lot of different examples, even in a way that we talk, My students know this well that I talk about coded language, the ways in which we codify language. And we can say things like in the news media, and especially in media, where there might be attention to the recent decision by Florida decision makers about taking away advanced placement African American studies, where the concentration is on how unfortunate it is and how there is a great deal of problems or challenges to it by members of the Black community. Well, Hopefully more will come out as a result of it, but often we sit and we stay with this particular portrayal as it being one sided. It isn't merely something that entails doing away with something for a lot of different reasons, but the potential is there. For there being racist actions and that benefit are that serve the interest of those who are maybe keeping with those ideas. We can think of that squarely and specifically as whites, but we know there are others who can sign on to this idea because it can seem just natural, just an inevitability. These are the things that have happened. It's important for us to recognize the two pronged nature of it in a lot of different ways, which I believe I can perhaps go further and showing as we go forward. So those are the two pronged natures of ways in which we codify, but the next issue is that racism is centered in violence. And this is much of the basis of my own work, and I've categorized it into four different groups. And I want to make sure that I hit all of those. One is the idea of racialized violence? Racial violence is often something that people will know right away when they hear about an act or an action. And it typically would involve say a person from a historically oppressed group, violated group, say, Black, African descendant people, and may be exacted at the hands of whites. The idea of racial violence and it's physical. Racialized violence is really getting more into the literature and peace psychology. It's a phenomenon that has evolved over time and refers to direct structural forms of violence. It draws, as I said before, on the piece literature by examining the ways in which violence is more than physical violence. Physical violence precedes other forms of violence, accompanies it and follows it. This definition also draws on historical analyses combined with research from various fields of study. And in my intersecting roles as a liberation psychologist, scholar, educator, and activist, these are the things that have kind of been brought to bear and has contributed to the theory. It's a global phenomenon. I'm going to talk specifically about African descended people, but I'll return to the idea of how racism really affects everyone. The Durbin in 2001, the Durbin Declaration and Program of action adopted by the World Conference against racism, racial discrimination, zenophobia, and related tolerance intolrance. This is by the United Nations. Acknowledge that the plight of people of African descent is growing, not lessening around the world. Standing squarely on the position that the conditions under which Black people face has origins in the 400 years transatlantic slave trade and in slavery. This report is cited as stating, even Afro descendants who are not directly descended from slaves face the racism and discrimination that still persist today, generations after the slave trade. We know we have ample evidence of the global phenomenon. And I'm referring to in places in all reaches of the world, certainly as a part of the scattering of Blacks throughout of African descended people throughout the world, but in other places, the Middle East and Asia and so forth. We normalize violence, and there can be a lot of things that are brought to bear in this, but we have good data to support, for example, that we can normalize violence. It has its impacts on us, and I'm referring now to the United States. But we have really good research that suggests that the normalization of violence, especially as entertainment has an impact on people and especially on children. With regards to children and its impacts, the introduction to violence, how it's used, even in terms of punishment, physical punishment, and so forth, which gets pretty normalized. Those things have been dealt with, and we have to understand the impacts of racism on this particular form of violence. There are several good sources that deal with this very well. And I'm going to just mention a couple, Jeffrey Canada, that's Jeffrey with a G, in his book called Fist stick knife Gun. Is a really wonderful work in which he talks about this. The American Psychological Association website has research that talks about this idea of the impacts of violence. And also, there's an interesting, very fascinating book by Stacy Patton, titled spare the kids. Why whooping children won't save Black America. And it's referring specifically to the disproportionate numbers of Black families in the US who use corporal punishment relative to other racial groups. Now trauma is something I want to spend a little bit more time with. I'm going to make sure to check my time. Yes. Okay. I'm doing okay. So I wanted to talk about trauma in a lot of different ways. But I wanted to start off with a quote by Sadia Hartman, who's a professor at Columbia University, who visited Ghana and did an exploration of a study of the impacts of the slave trade on Ganan current Ganans. And she also wanted to explore this sense of longing that she herself as an African American have. And has always have as many African Americans, a longing for an understanding, even a connection that would bind them us to African people. And in the conversation she was having with a young man who was also visiting Ghana. He was Black American as well. They were sharing their experiences, and he said that it feels like when I'm here, it feels like the entire family. My entire family is out here with me. It's like visiting my grandmother's grave. My father, my cousins, I mean everyone. And she responds and she's talking with him. And she says, I've never felt so alone in my life. It feels like the crash to me, not the grave. It's the place where the car hit the tree and your mother and your brother died. And your father survived, but he's become an alcoholic. And it's like he's worse, too. He's dead, too or worse. But it's just a regular street for everyone else. Now, both the young man and Hartman have different feelings and experiences, but this notion of intergenerational trauma, it really colors our lives in ways that really have just relatively recent has been giving some attention among the psychological field. Treatment for trauma is deemed medically necessary. Trauma is associated with extreme levels of stress which can lead to physical pain, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, digestive issues, respiratory complications, you name it. Treatment of trauma entails expertise in which practitioners determine the best conditions for disclosing what happened, then guiding clients in their coping. With racial trauma, finding this expertise can be difficult because practitioners may tend to be reluctant to raise and discuss racial events and racism. For example, white practitioners might avoid these discussions because they can harbor guilt, shame, disbelief in the existence of racism, or they can consciously or unconsciously contend that such talk might merely cow toe to a sense of victimization, and that that can be unhelpful. Now, I'm characterizing this in terms of racial groups, not to sort of b offer blanket generalizations, or to talk about patterns, and I'll talk later about the issues of complexity. Ca that's really key to this talk. Not white practitioners might avoid racism talk too, because it might summon their own experiences of stress and trauma. Either way, Blacks and other people of color who experience racial trauma may have difficulty finding practitioners who can capably help them through their distress. Black and other people of color who seek these help. This suppression of racism is an unfortunate because it's given the benefits. There are benefits. There's research that shows that there are benefits to discussing racism. We have this knowledge. We have this wherewithal. We have good theory that talks about how we work through these issues, however painful it is. It is difficult. And the study of African American women, those who frequently, who experienced frequent everyday racism and reported that they kept it to themselves were shown to have shorter timers. S shorter Telemar length is an indicator of chronic stress exposure, aging and morbidity. When we look at other research that's been done around the world and in the United States, where much of the research I'm drawing from. We find concepts like weathering. David Williams from Harvard University who conducts research on stress among Black Americans and people of color in general talk about this idea of weathering. Sociologist Olan the pattern talks about a social death. We're talking about the ways in which it wears and tears on humans. It's a form of violence. Seeking therapy for racial trauma may seem odd to many African American people as there are stigmas related in general to seeking mental health care. I know this is changing in some ways because since the pandemic, there was sort of an onslaught of people who were in a very desperate situation, there were mad been increases in those who are now seeking that information in that service. According to the American Psychiatric Association in 2019, although the rates of mental illness of mental illnesses in African Americans are similar with those of other racial groups, disparities exist in mental health care services. This report also concluded that African Americans often receive poor quality of care and lack of access to culturally competent providers. I would also surmise it could be racially competent providers as well. The organization also reported that only one in three African Americans who need mental health care receives it. Because of these challenges, the American Psychiatric Association formed a presidential task force in 2020 to address racial disparities in mental health care and education. The American Psychological Association went even further by issuing a statement of apology for the the organization's contribution and complicity to racism, and by creating a commitment to put forth resources to resolve these problems in accordance to organization code of ethics. APA is admitting to things like, you know, contributing to this idea of intelligence testing as, you know, legitimate ways of doing, you know, for the years, the history of doing that and other really heinous acts that's gone on for many many years. This statement was published in 2021. Going back to this idea of a two prong, we have to understand that these metters have relevance in terms of their imperative. Who it serves. Who racism serves? Who it doesn't? Does it create this idea of people who are doing more poorly relative to others? O African descendant people doing more poorly relative to whites. One can easily argue that racism is taking its toll on all of us. I make that argument as well, not evenly. It doesn't do that, but it certainly does. And this is why the theory, although portraying the development for whites, racial identity theory then for people of color is different, and insist on dedicating attention to the ways in which racism affects all of us. Now, this is where I'll talk a little bit about the theory, again, checking on my time. Okay. And I want to talk about one of the things that it does. I'm talking now about the individual, what kind of impacts racism has on individuals, and also it's a developmental process, and I wanted to cover that. I had fun with the use of stock photos, so I'm going to go ahead and jump into some of that. It has an impact on the person. We are social beings. We're informed about who we are and our sense of worth and all of that through our involvement with others and spiritually. We are looking at racism in its fullest and as its impact and its devastation impact. We have to look at all sides of it, and that gets us to this idea of looking more completely and At people. We have to look at the things that go on in the workplace, at home. Of course, intra psychically or within the person as a person may have doubts about self relative to others, maybe racially similar, others, racially different others, and so forth. The development occurs in a patchwork way. In other words, there is an ascendancy. There's a going forth, but it can ebb and flow. There can be false starts. The final status, if you will, of the words as I lead us, is with on an individual level, an embrace of complexity, a comfort or confidence of self and of others. It's as much an individual development and embrace of self as it is, an embrace of humanity. The last picture I have that it talks about shaped by family and society. I saw this picture of a woman and dressed beautifully. You know, we're shaped by ideas of what we wear, what's considered beautiful, the things that are normal, the normativity of everything. That also becomes woven into it. The idea of how racism enters into it. So with regards to development, there can be fixations. There can be regressions, and I put that in parentheses because we can't theoretically return directly to a place we already have been because we've already been there, we've learned some things. But regression, we can go back, we can say, Well, I'm learning things. I'm developing. I'm becoming a little bit more attuned to the way that I can be to humanize more. However, it's scary. It's such an upheaval of everything I am and everything I've been told that I'm going to regress. In doing so, that regression can also mean discrediting people, dehumanizing though. Well, that person is the one who's responsible for all this turmoil that I'm experiencing and so forth. It's difficult in a statement. It's a very, very difficult process. But the theory is about this notion that we have the tools for helping to facilitate it? When I say helping, I don't mean only from the perspective of psychologist and other mental health workers? It's important for psychologists and other mental health practitioners to know people are seeking our help as practitioners in order to feel more fulfilled, to feel more whole in our lives. What better way for us to see people more whole than to see every part of them and not be fearful or reluctant to understand that there's a piece. We need not lobotomize matters of racism. We need to bring it all. We need to fold it in in order to do that. Again, it's not easy stuff, but it becomes very, very important, very important. So I'm going to go next to what would our interactions look like if we were serious about ending racism. We would recognize that its nature is steeped in relationships with others. It's very important that we understand that relationship. It's understandable we recognize the roots of it, that we not see it merely as discrimination or prejudice. We need to avoid the codification that goes on and really pay attention to what it is and to be able to identify it. The more we understand it, it's often sort of the fear that it's going to send us into sort of an immersion, or almost as if we're not going to think about anything else but that. And part of the development might really entail some of that, but that's probably a natural progression of something that is a sinister malignancy in our society. But when we operate from a perspective of maturity and racism, we want this knowledge in order to become better to see each other more fully and more completely, and therefore is more human. Second I have here, racism is fundamentally violent. What better way than to oppose violent, to be a peace advancer than to see people more holistically. Se people as whole. We understand it's hard work, and we make altal in some ways to making things better or avoiding sidestepping and so forth. But in doing so, we essentially are not tackling the roots of the problem. We are really just perpetuating it unfortunately. So the opposite of being violated or experiencing this violence on all different levels is to take part, to understand our agency as people, to be involved in social action, to be as cognizant of the things that are going on, to be as aware, to understand the humanity of others, to understand that when we briefly or not so briefly characterize people or a person as one thing, it's an act of dehumanization. And if we also Are complicit in the level of unfairness of any form. It also is consistent with this idea of racism because that's what it's bases on, violence, dehumanization, certainly unfairness. Code language I mentioned before, I won't go back into that, but we have to be very careful. My students know that I'm really pretty careful about language, and I talk about let's practice. One of the best ways to develop those neuro tran those neuro pathways is through practice, and we do have to practice. We'll fumble, we'll fail. We're imperfect. We're fallib. But we still need to do it in order to advance further what's going on. We have evidence that there are already advancements. So I'm not this is not a gloom and doom. We need to really capitalize on those things. Finally, we want to recognize that our reaction to racism is complicated by other forces, including past traumas. And the four best things we can do is to learn, to reflect, get help when it's needed and to participate in social action in all forms. I know that's going very, very quickly, but I'll just want to have a couple of ending words before I take any questions. I realize I'm going over time. And that is to say that a good theory, and I believe racial identity theory based on mostly the work of cross and Helms, particularly helms and looking at processes a chains, and she's a professor Amerita from Boston College. And in my own work, looking at issues of violence and peace advancement. A good theory about it and its impacts on our life is one where there's going to be discomfort and even some pain with the jarring information, but that we anticipate it, that we work with people, that we take measures to encourage and help deep reflection. This is what the essence of growth and learning is. It is to bear with it, and we bear with it when we have support. We have those who are rallying around us, and we're saying, Yeah, we can do this together. The theory talks about flexibility and thinking, immersion of experiences, constant reflection, deliberate action, and it is really akin to a life and death experience because when we do involve ourselves in social action, it can be with great risk as well, risk, not only in terms of feeling rejected, but also risk physical risks as well, but we can do it, and we need to do it with humility, and we need to do it because it's essential to our quest. For realizing our potential as members of the human family. And with that, I'll end it, and I thank you very much. And I have some references here. These are just a select view of references, but there certainly are more that I've mentioned before here. So but these are the ones that I wanted to make sure that you have. Let me before I end, Martin Barro I mentioned him here, and I have a special connection with the history of this person. A recent award I received was d by Martin Mara, and he was the person who first began some of the writings and calling it liberation psychology. Thank you. Well, thank you, doctor Thompson. And as I understood, you had a several questions to pose to us that might help us with some conversation about this? So I'll ask you to unshare your screen so we can see each other. And it's our tradition that we would send out a copy of the information that you shared with us. So if folks did not get a chance to get the references, they'll be sent out to you in a follow up e mail so that you'll get to have a better access to finding that information. So, what are the questions that you're posing to us that you wanted us to think about? Well, one of the first questions. I'm sorry. No, go ahead. Yes. Go ahead. Okay. One of the first questions I had was regarding this idea of a stigma, and that is the stigma in seeking help. This is really clearly that help is needed. And the oh, okay, great. I'm glad that I have some help by miss Mc Lucas. U within your communities and however you define it, is there still a stigma? Do you believe there is a stigma in seeking help or when people are, you know, are under distress? And so I have here for yes or no, but it also means it also invites you to contribute to some discussion about that. So the question that's posed, and you should be able to see this on your screen that you can answer to a simple, yes or no question is, in your own community, however you choose to define it, is seeking counseling or psychotherapy help a stigma. Is it to help a stigma? We have quite a few responses, people who are taking advantage of this opportunity to respond. And it's kind of So few more of the group are saying, yes, and some were saying no. So what's your response to that, doctor Johnson? Um, Your response to the poll? You're saying Right. What's your reflection of what you're seeing here in terms of how people are responding to us? Yes. Yes. So I see here that, of course, there are many differences in terms of how people are defining their communities, but the idea that there is 64% are saying that there is some stigma to you know, the idea of seeking help. And my response to that is that the good news, in my view, is that I believe that we're turning an important corner, especially in terms of the training issues for people in the mental health. You know, discipline disciplines because there are many, counselors, social workers. The idea that we are paying much more attention, we have some in the past, but now we're doing that can give us some optimism for the future. And so it's my hope that maybe if we were to conduct this poll more expansively to a larger audience, and we had a similar result, maybe in a number of years, we would see something very different. Was there another question that you were going to pose to us? I'm not I wasn't sure how many there were. Yes. And I believe those are, here we go. Here's a second question. So the second question says, would seeking help from racial trauma be considered a stigma? We want to make sure people have time to respond. So if you've had it if you. You're interested in answering this question? Yeah. Help. Yes. Help conversation? Yes. And as I'm doing this, I want to just acknowledge, I'd see so many very familiar faces and I want to say hello. I wish I could name everybody. Personally, but I can't. But I also just have to maybe just do a very special shout out to one of my colleagues from Uganda who is on the call today, doctor agari, very glad that you were able to make it. So Yes, There was a little bit of conversation in the chat. Thank you, Doctor, from Africa for encouraging conversation. You're so glad that you're here. Oh, good. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I have a relationship with C ambogo University in Kampala. So I was hoping that my colleagues, at least one, would be able to attend. I I'm missing anybody else, I apologize. I apologize for that. So that's challenging. Yes, a time difference and all of that. So Seeking would it be a stigma? So this is a little different than the first question where 50% 52% are suggesting that yes, this would be and no, for others. That's hopeful, you know, that that would not be seen as traumatizing. That's very, very hopeful. I like to think that people are putting faith in But this is also not necessarily the question was not necessarily referring only to psychotherapy or counseling, seeking help in any kind, and there are many forms of seeking help, of course, seeking help from many times people have had to create their own sources and resources within communities because they had no choice. So seeking help could go on in a lot of different ways. Maybe my question could have been better cast. But I appreciate the responses for sure. And what it's telling. I see one question, too, and that's from I call her sister, Shirley, but she's Julie Alexander. And she's asking about internalization or internationalized racism. And internationalized racism. I'm assuming that you're referring to the idea that it's global. It's a global racism, and that we again, we have plenty ply proof of that. And I was referring specifically to some of the evidence of an African descendant, you know, that is influenced or that African descendant people are affected by. But we know that racism exists in all corners of the world in all countries, and I don't mean as felt by experience by African descent people, but people of Asian descent and who are Native Americans and indigenous people all over the world, Latino, we know all of these things and we need to pay attention. So as we're looking at the one thing I forgot to mention was the two prongs, we also know that there are multiple prongs that grow out of that emerge from this true prog system. If we have this prong that says, these are the people who are deserving, these are the people who are not Then there can be, I don't want to oversimplify, but there can be a way in which people, you know, sort of rearrange themselves and their either individually or their groups to say, Well, I'm closest I'm closest to the top. The irony is that people are maybe even acknowledging that they're not going to get to the top, but that's just close to it. That's the irony because again, it's fundamentally a devastating system, which makes so many assumptions about super human superiority and inferiority. So I appreciate that. And my good friend, doctor Martada, is asking the essential role of communication. We would interact with people by recognizing one or more roots that I've proven Yes. We do tend to distance ourselves on the basis of race and racism and the ways in which it plays into our lives. Some of that distancing can happen within groups. And we can have distancing that occurs on the basis of socioeconomic status or skin color, or with other groups by saying, well, you're not quite like us, because we came here sooner than you did because we come from this particular region of that same country, whereas you come from another and so forth. Again, this is not mere, like a sense of just I feel good about, my belongingness. Uh, doctor General Gente, another good friend who's also about language and ability, exactly, ability levels in which we will say that this makes us better, this makes us. We can have pride in where we're coming from and who we are without exercising this level of unfairness and sort of cow towing or just sort of you know, signing up for Well, therefore, I can look down on this particular group. I can look down on the urban poor and Black people there they're deserving what they get. I can look down on and so forth, and so on. We find ourselves arranging ourselves within this structure. And when we arrange ourselves in the structure, we don't end it. We don't bust it open. We find ourselves working within a sinister system of unfairness and belt on violence. We want to break out of it. The idea of advancing peace is to say, no, we can be a healthier people. We can see ourselves as part of the human family when we avoid those kinds of things, those arrangements. We understand, as doctor Matata was saying, too, we understand the roots of where that comes from. We have to understand those things, and including with what doctor Denalt talked about with language and so forth. And doctor Harris is talking about the idea of identity crises, their own families deal with due to being of mixed race and immigrant families. How would you define what is what is occurring in youth today, having difficulty with cultural identity? I would say that we have to understand that the roots of it come from these structures. They come from these ideas. Of inferiority and superiority. People can really believe in their heart that is there is inevitability. There is a certainty of how this arrangement is made. There's no question that it is just there, not merely that it is unfair and that it's been created in an unfair way and it's generated and so forth. But it simply is. That that breaking into that, disrupting that also disrupts trauma, and it disrupts the violence that continues to go. It helps create people to participate and to lead social action. And that becomes very, very important. And thank you also for Latasha Role and your question. Seeking therapy is the best way to engage in family therapy. Because of normalized violence, especially of children. So I seeking therapy for racial trauma the best way. I think that family therapy can be a very important resource for people, very important resource. You have to go with someone who knows what they're doing. And who is able to really engage and talk about this in ways that are healthy, and that shows that they understand it fully, and that their mission, their goal is to see forth this idea of a release from a goal towards a more human person, which is the person, the individual, as well as others as human beings. So it can work, it can be involved. Other things are also important. I know sometimes we might put too much emphasis on psychotherapy. We might put too much emphasis on that. Yes, it's expensive and so forth. And it could be one of those structural issues. Some people have it and some aren't. We need to deal with that as well. We need to find ways to make it more accessible. This idea of Of people who are helping. And by the way, I also want to mention, it's not only the idea when I look at racial identity theory, I only don't think about it in terms of psychotherapy. I look at it in terms of when we're in positions of influence. So we can be educators, you know, can be influential over students, parents, over children, and so forth. You know, I the different roles in which we have this influence, we can use these same things. We can use these in different ways, but we can use these same things. We can come with we can be equipped with an understanding of these things. We can encourage flexibility and thinking. We can encourage people to not to denigrate or to put others down because it makes them feel more uplifted. This is all part of what I see as the piece advancing element of racial identity theory. Doctor Thompson, I want to thank you for sharing so much valuable information with us. And putting it in a frame that we can really understand and integrate into the various ways that each of us come to these discussions. I know individually as a social worker that works with children, I particularly, thinking about the idea of trauma informed care, et cetera. And I heard you say too, there's many ways that people seek help with this, and you just said again, how important it is it. We think about this in every level and every layer and how we talk about it. And Unfortunately, we don't have enough time for these conversations. But what I hope is that people are taking away some ideas and some encouragement to go forth and continue to have these very important yet difficult conversations, but because we need to. And we thank you for framing it in such a way that's so inviting, but also that we can take away that we can use. And you've given us some resources that we can follow up on. At this point, what we like to do with our time is to thank people and officially end the program because we know that many of you have to get to the next thing. We hope one of those next things that you'd come to would be some of our next events. I reminder that we have another scholar of the month. Program in February on the 24th, where we will be talking about the work of doctor Paul Mullins. And then later early in March, I would say we have our keynote address, and that's open to anybody. There's two opportunities to hear doctor Mark Becker talk about his work in encouraging student success, and that'll be the community at the Bonner Center just near campus on Thursday, March 2 at 6:00 P.M. And then on campus at IUPY, on Friday, March 3 at noon. We hope you'll come and do that. And we will stay online here for just a couple of minutes if people would like to have that after conversation and get in the things that they need to say. But we know that many of you have other appointments and meetings to go to. So we thank you for coming. This was an incredibly well attended event. Excellent information, and you're motivating us to continue these conversations. A big thank you to our speaker today, doctor Thompson. And please look at the website. I'd like to see more information about her and her work and then watch for that e mail that has the follow up information and that invitation to give us some feedback about today's event. So thank you. And then we'll let people go. But as I said, if there are others that do want to say something, you still have the chat feature, and you're welcome to unmute and share a comment with doctor Thompson.