From Racist Cult to Anti-Racist! The Story of Lori Kelly

This is the ARCC of Change with Donzel Leggett, a podcast from the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition, an organization dedicated to eradicating racism and hate and spreading anti-racism. Listen as Donzel talks about relevant topics that will inspire you and help build your capability to take action and change the world. Because none of us are doing enough as long as racism still exists. And now, here's your host, Donzel Leggett.

Donzel: Hello, and welcome to the sixth episode of Season 2 of The ARCC of Change with Donzel Leggett. In this episode, I welcome ARCC member Lori Kelly to the show to share her incredible story of perseverance, strength, and humanity as she transformed from growing up in a racist cult to becoming an anti-racist activist. She also explains why it is possible and imperative for any and all of us to spread anti-racism and anti-hate and change the world. Now, let's get started with our show.

I'm Donzel Leggett, host of The ARCC of Change podcast and founder of the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition, or ARCC. Our vision at ARCC is to build a racism-free world, and our mission is to provide inspiration, education, and support for you to transform, practice, and spread anti-racism.

This begins with our three-step process for personal transformation to anti-racism. The first step is erasing your ignorance about racism and hate. The second step is educating yourself about anti-racism. And the third step is building the character and confidence to stand up, speak out, and take action to spread anti-racism and anti-hate and make positive change happen.

This process is designed so that any one person can make a difference by committing to anti-racism and anti-hate and then influencing others to transform and start a mini-movement. A mini-movement grows and combines with other mini-movements started by individuals until it eventually becomes a large enough movement to change the world.

Any single one of us can make this happen. If you influence five or ten people in your personal sphere of influence, they can influence five or ten people in their groups to do the same, and so on. You can go from being one person to starting a mini-movement of more than 100 or even 1,000 people driving and spreading anti-racism and anti-hate.

I talk about our process of transformation and spreading anti-racism every episode, and I believe in it wholeheartedly. I've done it. But I'm a realist. I know that, for many of us, this is much easier said than done. Even for those of us who badly want to make this transformation and wholeheartedly commit to transforming ourselves and others to spread anti-racism and anti-hate, all the crazy things happening in our world today can sometimes make it feel like an unwinnable fight.

In the United States alone, there have been more than 400 mass shootings already this year. It's quite possible we could have more than 1,000 before the year is done. No other developed country in the world has this problem. There's nowhere in the United States where you can consider yourself safe. Not churches, malls, concerts, or movie theaters. Not grocery stores, as we saw recently and tragically in Buffalo. And our poor children aren't even safe in schools, as we've seen repeatedly over the last 20 years, including one of the most recent, worst, and most heart-wrenching tragedies in Uvalde. Not even parades are safe. Since our last episode, seven people were killed and 46 were injured during a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park.

Our kids can't look forward to going to school or even attending a parade without worrying about mass shooters. And once again, we continue to see unarmed Black men shot and killed by police at alarming rates, even with increased visibility through news coverage, social media, and police body cameras.

In Akron, Ohio, just recently, a 25-year-old man named Jalen Walker was shot 60 times by eight officers as he fled from them. Yes, he was running away from them and was unarmed at the time. It was all caught on their body cameras.

And let's not forget that there is still a war in Ukraine, instigated by a Russian dictator, that continues to rage on, even if it is no longer front-page news. Millions and millions of people have either died or been displaced from their homes.

Our climate continues to warm at an alarming rate due to human activity and is nearing irreversible levels, while the U.S. Supreme Court has just ruled to reduce the authority and ability of the EPA to enforce environmental regulations. This is happening while glaciers millions of years old, which were not expected to melt for thousands of years, are melting right now and breaking off into the ocean, raising sea levels and warming the climate.

And speaking of the Supreme Court of the United States, last month, it reversed Roe v. Wade, making it illegal in many states for women to make choices about their own bodies. This is the first time in modern history that the Supreme Court has voted to take away personal rights in this country. This is not just about women's rights. This is about the rights of all of us.

We continue to hear more and more unbelievable details from the January 6th Commission hearings. Anyone, regardless of political party or affiliation, who is paying attention and listening to the facts has to understand just how precarious democracy is in the United States right now.

With all of this going on, it's easy to understand why so many of us feel despondent and defeated, as though no matter what we do or what actions we take, nothing will make a difference. But no matter how despondent or defeated you feel, we can't give up.

Sometimes, we need to meet someone or hear a story about someone who, against all personal odds and despite all the crazy things happening around us in the world, our communities, and our country, continues to have hope and believe that she, as one person, can still make a difference. As Dr. King said, it's never too late to do what's right and to stand up, speak out, and take action.

My guest today is such a person: a prime example of the resilience of the good that the human spirit is capable of. Her name is Lori Kelly, and you simply must stay with us to hear her incredible story of perseverance, strength, and humanity in her determined campaign to spread anti-racism and anti-hate. Lori Kelly joins me next.

The ARCC of Change podcast is brought to you by the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition. Visit us at joinarcc.org to learn more about ARCC and join our movement.

Donzel: Okay, we're back with our special guest, Lori Kelly. Lori, how are you?

Lori: I'm great. I'm doing really well. How are you doing?

Donzel: I'm doing great. I'm doing even better because I have a chance to have you on our podcast. In the last segment, I talked about you at the very end and how inspirational your story is. But before we get into it, maybe you could start by quickly introducing yourself. This is going to be fun.

Lori: My name is Lori Kelly, and I'm currently in Key West, Florida. I have worked for many years as a librarian and a college teacher. Now I have my favorite job ever: I teach GED to students in the local jail, and I like it a lot.

Donzel: That's fantastic. I can tell just by the energy in your voice that it's a passion of yours.

In the prior segment, I talked about all the challenges people are facing right now. It's a crazy world, whether we're talking about mass shootings, Supreme Court decisions that aren't helping women's rights or the environment, or the war in Ukraine. With all the pressure people face, both in the world and personally, they sometimes need someone they can look to as an example of how we can't give up. No matter what, we have to continue doing something to make a positive difference.

I mentioned you and your story, but I didn't go into the details because I wanted you to share them. Maybe we can start at the beginning. Tell us about yourself.

Lori: Okay. I was born in Southern California, in San Diego, about 63 years ago. I was raised like a lot of other people. I don't think that if you passed me on the street, you would have thought I was anything other than a generic white kid.

However, my parents were born again when I was probably in kindergarten. I was raised in their church, which looked like a normal Baptist church. But it was also a very fundamentalist evangelical church. At the time, I didn't know any different. It was just my life. To be honest, I did not meet another person outside of my church and that religious setting until I was out of college.

The best story to encapsulate where we were coming from is what I remember about Dr. King's assassination. I remember sitting in the pew while the pastor led us in a prayer of thanksgiving because the Lord had moved aside this barrier to His will. I didn't even know who Dr. King was at the time.

Within my culture, we did not know anybody outside of that culture. That was the norm. We believed we knew the right thing because we understood the Bible in a certain way. We were constantly surrounded by enemies, and anybody different was considered part of the world. There was a foundational sense of paranoia that we grew up with.

What's been interesting to me over the years is that when I tell that story, people often ask questions like, "Where did you grow up?" as if I grew up on some remote Deep South KKK farm.

Donzel: Right. I think we're beginning to see that this kind of paranoia-based religious fervor is incredibly common and has become very powerful in our community right now. So many people are just now being introduced to this part of our culture.

Lori: Yeah, it's very, very interesting.

Donzel: Like you said, it's such a dangerous part of our culture because people hear religion, they hear Christian, they hear church, and they think it must be good. But just hearing you speak, it sounds like, in retrospect, some of the teachings were racist. Some were misogynistic or anti-women, or against anyone who wasn't part of your group. Can you tell us more about what you experienced?

Lori: I think that's a good point because the paranoia and separateness weren't directed only at African-American people or racism. There was also an assumption that men were the head of the household and that women needed to remain under their umbrella of protection at all times. That meant that, as a young woman, I had no autonomy or ability to speak. Women did not speak in the church setting, and that carried over into the family setting, too.

We were taught that our purpose was to find a spiritual leader, a man who would marry us and direct us for the rest of our lives. I learned from an early age that it wasn't safe to push back against that. Women would go to the pastor or the pastor's wife for counseling because they were being abused, and then they would be sent back and hurt badly. Really badly. It was their fault because they had not been submissive.

Donzel: Oh my gosh. And this is the environment you grew up in?

Lori: Yeah. And to me, it was normal. I accepted it. That also teaches you early on that being a woman is something dangerous, something God does not like, and that you are constantly a temptation.

I was enough of a reader and curious enough that I wanted to know why God did not like me. So that's what I focused on when I went to Bible school. I went to the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, which is now a university in Los Angeles.

Donzel: Okay.

Lori: They offer regular four-year degrees and graduate degrees now. I did my senior thesis on the feminine attributes of the Godhead because I wanted to understand what God really thought about women. It was a survival thing for me. How could I make sense of everything I knew and everything I believed was true when it all told me that I was a horrible person for no good reason? I was also taught to be afraid of everybody outside of my small group.

By reading and learning on my own, I discovered that there were different ways to interpret the world, different ways to interpret scripture, and different ways to practice Christianity.

I started making connections with people who identified as Christian but were involved in social action. I learned about groups like the Catholic Workers and Evangelicals for Social Action, which I joined because I wanted to learn more.

But as I learned and changed, there came a time when I lost my connection with my former life. Sometimes, there's just a bridge too far.

I graduated from college, moved to New York, and started working in a group home for people with intellectual disabilities that was run by a Jewish ultra-Orthodox group.

Donzel: Wow.

Lori: I'd never lived anywhere outside of my little Christian bubble. Now I was in New York, and I no longer had contact with the church community. My family wasn't there to support me in that way; they had their own things going on.

What I found was that the African-American people who were my coworkers helped me understand how the real world worked. They taught me basic things, like how to take the subway, because I had never been exposed to those things. I'd been in that bubble for so long.

Through their generosity of spirit, people were kind to me. That's how I was introduced to the real world. And it was impossible not to see racism because it affected me.

Donzel: Yeah. What I was going to say is that I'm curious about your thoughts at the time. You grew up in what you describe almost as a racist cult, a church that was misogynistic, and I'm guessing you were in this bubble, not exposed to people of color or many different kinds of people, whether Jewish people or Black people.

Now you're in New York, working with these folks, and they're helping you. Were you afraid at first? What were your initial reactions?

Lori: I was just incredibly naive. I think we were raised to be afraid of everybody. The flip side of that is that you also develop this sense that you're a total nerd. You have zero social skills, and the rest of the world probably hates you because you're an idiot.

There was a real social awkwardness at that age. Everybody else understood jokes and movies and all that stuff, and I didn't. There was a lot I needed to learn.

I was also, to be honest, dangerously naive. I couldn't judge safety on the street. I remember walking past a person who had been shot at the local all-night bar and not knowing where I should be or how to move myself out of that situation.

I also remember police officers stopping me often to question me. They would ask, "Why are you in this neighborhood?"

Donzel: Really?

Lori: And it was my neighborhood. It was a matter of, "Why is this white lady in this neighborhood?" They weren't trying to arrest me; they were trying to get me out of there.

But that taught me that a lot of the dialogue we hear among white people about danger is just theater. It's something I end up talking about a lot with the kids at the jail.

Donzel: Yes.

Lori: They have a very romanticized idea about being gangsters. If I say, "Oh yeah, I came of age in Oakland, New York, and Brooklyn," they want to know whether it was like what they see on TV. And no, it's not. It's people in neighborhoods. It's just people trying to get by.

Donzel: That's right. This narrative, this theater, that Chicago is a dangerous place and that all these neighborhoods are dangerous—when the reality, as I spoke about in the first segment, is that America is a dangerous place. Churches are dangerous now. Schools are dangerous. Little kids can't go to school without fearing they could be shot.

I remember going to the Fourth of July parade as a kid, excited to see it. Now kids can't even go to parades without worrying. There's nowhere in this country that's safe, yet there's this theater that says it's the neighborhoods of color that are dangerous.

Lori: Right. And the flip side of that theater is the idea that we need to build some kind of barrier so that we can remain safe.

I think we don't realize that we make each other safe. Communities and neighborhoods make each other safe.

There's a book called Dying of Whiteness that I think is really interesting in this part of the conversation. It's written by a public health doctor who looks at statistics about health and viability and why those have dipped so precariously, especially among white people. There are decisions, lifestyles, and untreated racism that are damaging white people and causing them to die at a faster rate than they ever have. Suicide rates are going through the roof.

That's part of safety that we don't think about. We prefer to think that danger comes from people who don't look like us. But the danger is also that we, as white people, aren't healing the damage racism has done to ourselves. That's where we're killing ourselves.

Donzel: When Dr. King talked about that very thing, he said that racism is bad for the racist.

Lori: Absolutely. That's exactly what you're saying.

Donzel: I'm curious: As you started your career and worked around all these Black people who took you under their wing, treated you like family, and taught you about life, what was your family's or your church's reaction to this?

Lori: That's a good question. I can tell you a story. I got really sick on the F train one day, and my friend Cornell took me all the way out to where my parents were living in New Jersey at the time. You had to take a train and then get on a bus. It took forever. He took me all the way out there, so we didn't arrive until five or six in the evening.

He dropped me off and made sure I was safe, but my mother would not let him stay overnight at the house.

Donzel: Man.

Lori: She told me that the neighbors had seen him come into the house.

Donzel: The neighbors had seen him come in? Wow.

Lori: Whether a neighbor actually had or not, I doubt it. But in her head, she was so much more concerned about what some fictional neighbor might think that she sent this person all the way back—

Donzel: After he went out of his way to make sure her daughter got home safely.

Lori: It was about a three-hour commute to get out to where they lived. So, yeah, they were not good. They were not good. But I didn't know how to speak to that with them at the time. It took a while.

Donzel: So you didn't confront them aggressively about it at the time. You had to grow into that?

Lori: Yeah. I pushed back, but in that setting, I didn't have the power to do much of anything. Plus, at that time, I was really sick. I had mono, and I was bedridden for months.

It took a while for me to find the vocabulary and for them to realize that this wasn't an aberration. This was who I was. If they wanted to see me, they needed to be okay with my people. My mother never got to that place. My father did, to a certain extent.

Donzel: Okay. All right. So after New York, what was the next part of your life journey?

Lori: Then I moved from New York to the Bay Area, to Oakland. I lived in Oakland and Berkeley for about 20 years.

That was an interesting time because it was the 1980s and 1990s. The culture I moved into was very Afrocentric. It was a switch. I think that was probably before your time, but it was especially true in the Bay Area. We were transitioning from the Panthers' civil rights culture, which I was fairly familiar with.

I grew up around places like Marcus Books and community centers where—

Donzel: I've been to Marcus Books. It's unbelievable. My son graduated with his master's degree at Berkeley in June, and we went for graduation. One of the places he took us was Marcus Books. I didn't realize how big and significant that store was.

Lori: Oh my God, yes. I remember I was super broke at the time, and they let me sit in the front and read all of Audre Lorde's Uses of the Erotic because I couldn't afford to buy it. They were such good people. I'm glad it's still there.

Donzel: It's still there, going strong. Fantastic.

Lori: What was interesting was that, as the activist culture shifted to a more Afrocentric culture, I had to reassess what my position was as a white person. Some spaces started to become a little more exclusionary. I think for good reason at the time. People needed a safe place to talk through their own experiences.

There were times when I needed to back off. I learned a lot about forming friendships and doing work based on the project that needed to happen.

Donzel: Yes. And figuring out what I could contribute to the project that needed to happen, focusing on that rather than asking, "Am I appearing to be an anti-racist white person?"

I saw a lot of my white peers get distracted or leave because they didn't feel there was space for them. They felt awkward. They wanted to figure out a way to make sure everybody knew they weren't racist, but they never got that continual validation, so they left.

That's an important part of being anti-racist or anti-hate. I understand that I'm supportive of women's rights, and I will fight for women's rights, but I'm not a woman. There are times when I may not fit in. That doesn't mean people don't think I support them. It just means I don't fit in, and they need space.

I think this is important for white people to understand. Some white people may get their feelings hurt because not all Black people are in the same place. Some people have experienced much more trauma than others, and they need space.

This is an important point about the growth we all need to experience when we're working toward anti-racism and anti-hate. We can't get our feelings hurt so easily.

Lori: Or we can get our feelings hurt, and then we do the work we need to do to heal those feelings. We don't turn to the oppressed person and say, "Let me talk this through with you so I can feel better."

Donzel: That's right. Perfectly said.

Lori: I think it's just a relief to be able to say, "Hey, sometimes I'm racist." That's okay. I'm on a journey. Why wouldn't I be? I was raised in this culture. We all have work to do.

It's not 100% my fault. It's the structure we all share. And if we commit to breaking down that structure, then we can talk strategically about where I'm best used in that work.

If people see the work and I keep my mouth shut when necessary, they're willing to partner with me. It just takes time. None of us is perfect, and all of us have bad thoughts at one point or another—thoughts we're not proud of. But what makes us good people is our actions and our ability to logically say, "That's not the right thing. I'm going to do this instead." It's all about the choices we make.

Donzel: Yep. Yep. And even if I catch myself thinking something, I can recognize, "Oh, well, yeah, of course. That's the world we live in." I'm doing whatever I can to make sure younger generations don't have to live in that world. We can see progress. We can see that.

All right, thank you, Lori. This has been the first half of our fantastic conversation. We're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back with the rest of Lori's incredible story.

Visit us at joinarcc.org. Follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and like us on Facebook.

Welcome back to The ARCC of Change with Donzel Leggett. We're here with our special guest, Lori Kelly, and she's going to continue her story. When we left off, she was finishing her time in Oakland. Lori?

Lori: Hey! All right, so I finished my master's at UC Berkeley and worked for the library system in Oakland. It was great work. I loved it immensely.

I got recruited for a position in Fort Myers, Florida. They had a small African-American library, and that was the kind of work I had been doing. They flew my partner and me all the way out to Fort Myers for the interview.

I don't know if you know much about the library world, but libraries are broke. They never pay for anything. And they flew me across the country just for an interview. Two people.

Donzel: Wow. Almost as far as you can go in the U.S.—from Oakland, California, to Southwest Florida. That's crazy.

Lori: So I knew something was up. I drove around and found the library. It was this tiny building that used to be the restroom for the tennis courts in the Black neighborhood. I visited the library and said hello to everybody before the interview.

The next day, I went downtown to the big library for the interview. It was just on the other side of the railroad tracks, as they say. They had this huge, beautiful new library with acres and acres of books and all sorts of things.

After the interview, they were going to take me on a tour to show me some of the library branches. The director of the library system didn't know how to get to the Black library.

Donzel: Wow.

Lori: So I had to give her directions. This was in the 1990s. We were still seeing the remnants of segregation and redlining.

That was exactly why I got the job. They had been sued for discrimination because they had a Black library that used to be a tennis-court restroom, while on the other side of the tracks they had this fancy white library. Nobody in their library system wanted to work in the Black library, so that's why they flew me all the way from California. They had to hire somebody from far away.

I was thrilled because this was my dream job. But I was coming to Fort Myers from Oakland, where I was used to being in a multicultural setting where we shared progressive values. It was different there. I had never lived in the South before.

My partner, who was from Southeast D.C., was more comfortable with it. He used to say he was more comfortable around Southern white people because they show you who they are.

Donzel: And I'm imagining, from the way you're talking, that he must have been Black or African-American.

Lori: Oh, yeah. He's definitely Black. He wasn't an intimidating person—he was a small, light-skinned Black man who was incredibly intelligent and really funny.

In California, people would do that purse-clutching thing when he walked by, but they would calm down when they saw me with him and realized he was a safe person. Then they'd be embarrassed because they'd forgotten to be liberal for a minute.

In the South, it was very different. The sheriff told my partner that he had pulled him over because they had his license plate and were watching him. He told him he should never touch white women.

Donzel: And they knew he was your partner?

Lori: They knew. It was a small town.

I remember doing a children's story hour with some of the kids and reading a book called Teammates. It was a beautiful story about a white baseball player who befriended Jackie Robinson and put his arm around him.

Donzel: Pee Wee Reese.

Lori: Yes, that's it. Pee Wee, yes.

I asked the kids, "What would you do if somebody called you a name like that?" In Oakland, we were all nice to each other, right?

The kids looked at me like, "Miss Kelly, when them boys come by with the guns, my grandpa and my dad and my uncle have this barrier that comes out in front of the house. They've got rifles, and that's how we handle that."

These were elementary school kids. They literally said that when the boys came by their house with guns, everyone knew they had to get behind the partition while their grandpa and dad got their rifles. There was no Pee Wee Reese.

Donzel: No, there wasn't.

Lori: This was a little farther east from Dunbar. There are old turpentine towns out there that are left over from the time enslaved people were forced to harvest pine for turpentine. The people living there are surrounded by others who would kill them.

While I was there, we built a new library for Dunbar. It's a beautiful building, and it has the largest collection of African-American resources on the entire west coast of Florida. It's a great library.

After that, I recruited an African-American librarian to take my place, and I took a job at a school library farther east.

During my first year there, a group of middle school kids shot and killed the high school's music teacher.

Donzel: Oh my gosh.

Lori: They killed him because he'd caught them doing something on campus, and they'd heard he was gay.

The sheriff came out and trained us on how to recognize gangs. He described stereotypical Black and Latino youth and told us to watch out for kids wearing their pants too low or buttoning their shirts all the way up.

But the gang that had killed the teacher was made up entirely of white kids. They were all white students from the middle school next to where I was teaching.

Donzel: Really?

Lori: Yes. So the training on recognizing gangs was about how scary stereotypical Black and Latino gang members were, even though the shooters were a white gang.

Donzel: That's unbelievable. Even with direct factual evidence, racism still took over the mindset.

Lori: Yeah, because there are just some things we do not want to see. I think white people do not want to see how we're killing each other, so we push that off onto others.

We started a scholars club for students of color. We took them to colleges, worked on homework together, and did that kind of thing. We did some good community work, but it was hard. It was really hard.

I'm thinking about how you often talk about having difficult conversations with other white people.

Donzel: Yes.

Lori: I am just now realizing that there came a point in my life when I didn't have those conversations anymore because white people wouldn't talk to me, simply because of who I was. And that's okay.

We could still work on things together. I can tell you a story about the woman who was my coworker in the small library farther east, where the gang incident happened.

She was incredibly conservative and initially very uncomfortable around my partner and me. Then she went through the phase of, "Oh, I like him. He's an exception." She liked me, too.

Later, her son got AIDS, and she was in the closet about it. She couldn't tell anybody. I was the only person she could talk to. I could tell her what medicine he could take, which support groups he could go to, and where to find help.

When there was something that needed to be done, something we could work on together, we were able to do it. Because we formed that kind of relationship, I think she learned to extend some of that empathy more broadly than she had before. Her family eventually started to notice and complain.

Donzel: Really? About her friendship with you?

Lori: And about her change. Small things were changing.

I guess that's it. It's not so much about having a conversation as it is about walking a path together.

Donzel: Walking a path together. What we're talking about is that there are some people in our lives, or people we come into contact with, whose mindsets probably aren't going to change. So we have to decide where to put our personal energy.

We say to start with those who are influenceable. You mentioned that some of your peers in Oakland saw themselves as anti-racist, but their feelings got hurt when they weren't always invited into certain spaces, so they left.

Those are the people we want to reach. Am I going to try to talk to someone riding around with a flag saying all immigrants should get out? Probably not. But am I going to influence someone in my network who isn't standing up and is just trying to stay silent? That's who we're trying to reach.

We're trying to reach people who think that if they don't say anything, maybe they can pretend racism doesn't exist. Maybe they think that saying, "I'm not a racist," should be enough.

Those are the people we're trying to influence. As you build your confidence, you can talk to some of those other people who are farther down the path. I've done that and have been able to convert some of them. But you have to build your confidence and personal wherewithal, and you have to be willing to give up some of your peace to do that. Not everyone is in a position to do that.

What we try to do is help everyone find where they can play a role. It could be a conversation. It could simply be walking a path that others see and think, "That looks like a different way to do it."

Speaking of what you were talking about earlier with the church, you eventually moved to Key West. What's different about Key West that seems to bring you peace?

Lori: There are many things that are different about it. Key West, at least when I was growing up there, was an Afro-Bahamian city in many ways. It still has vestiges of that, and it has been a very accepting place for a wide range of people. I like that about Key West. I like that a lot.

It's changing because it's gentrifying. That's another area where there's work to do: trying to maintain livability for the people who are still here and aren't rich.

Donzel: I know you're doing a lot in this area to try to help people. For those who don't know much about Key West, it's a small island at the tip of the Florida Keys, about 90 miles north of Cuba.

It was an affordable place for a long time. My family immigrated there in the mid-to-late 1800s. There were a lot of Afro-Bahamians, as well as people from Cuba and of Cuban descent. More recently, there have been many people from Haiti, and now there are a lot of people from Eastern Europe.

It's always been a place where people could come, work, and live together. I think the motto is "One Human Family."

But over the last 20 years, it's become so expensive that many Black families have left. A lot of the Cuban neighbors aren't there anymore either. They just can't afford to live there.

But there's still work to be done. You still need teachers, physician assistants, librarians, bus drivers, and people who work in the service industry. I know you're doing a lot to help people continue to live there. What are you doing?

Lori: I don't think of it in terms of helping. I think of it in terms of trying to build my community. It's a survival tactic for me. It's purely selfish. I want to build the community I want to live in.

That means I'm not alone. Especially someplace like this, which is so vulnerable to climate change and sea-level rise, and so vulnerable to gentrification. There are so many ways we're not sustainable, practically speaking, but we've got to survive. Helping each other survive is what builds community, and I think that's what helps us reach across some of those barriers.

I try to be as practical as possible. I volunteer at a farm on Stock Island, about a mile away from here, and help with the garden. We have a community garden, and we use it as a model to grow things people can eat and grow in their backyards—things that grow easily in this incredibly humid, hot, tropical climate.

It's a big learning curve to figure out how to feed yourself from the ground here. We can't grow the vegetables you see at the grocery store. We have to learn to grow vegetables from Asia, Africa, Hawaii, and other tropical places.

That's a really good conversation to have with people in my neighborhood. It's something we have in common.

For a lot of the kids I work with, it's surprisingly the first time they've been to the beach. Many of the kids in our school district have parents who are working two or three jobs. They're living in public housing, and they have responsibilities when they get home because there's no childcare other than them. They don't get out often.

We live someplace where people pay $500 or $600 a night to stay and visit our beaches, but these kids have never been because there's just no time. Our city is set up not for us, but for tourists.

Many of us don't feel welcome in those other places. Having a space that welcomes those kids has been life-saving for some of them during COVID. I'm not exaggerating. I've had students call me who were suicidal. I don't have an answer for them, but I can take them somewhere where we can sit and pet a goat, look at the water, and work on a chore together. It helps. It really helps.

That's one way I find that working on things together builds community for me, sometimes in a way that a conversation can't.

I'm no longer with my partner, and I'm just a single, older white lady. So my relationship with the Black community is very different now. I'll find myself doing that head nod when I see someone on the street, and then I realize, "Oh, yeah. That's not me anymore."

Donzel: Well, you shouldn't feel bad because I do that when I go back, and they don't know who the heck I am anymore either. No one down there is a native anymore. Even if you see a Black person, they may not know me.

Lori: So I'm just learning a new place in the community and trying to figure it out as I go along.

Donzel: Yes. I really like what you said because I do think it's true. It's great if we can feel for other people, but the reality is that we do good things because doing good things makes us feel better.

Lori: Absolutely.

Donzel: And that's okay. That's part of this. Earlier, you talked about how some white people may have health issues because of pent-up anxiety. I haven't read that book, but I do know that when you do good things, you feel better about yourself. And when you feel better about yourself, you feel healthier and feel like you can accomplish more.

Simply by adopting anti-racism and anti-hate, you bring peace to yourself internally and allow yourself to flourish.

I think it's wonderful that you're doing all these things, as you said, for selfish reasons—to make yourself feel good. It's making everyone else around you feel good, too.

Lori, if there's one thing you want to leave our audience with from this conversation—which has been tremendous, especially hearing what you've overcome and the challenges you've dealt with to help all of us realize we can't ever give up—is there a singular message you'd like to share with us or leave the audience with?

Lori: You know, I think what you said—that we can't ever give up—is so hard right now because we're taking a beating, and I don't see any clear fix. Realistically, we're in a time when our empire is crumbling.

Donzel: Yes.

Lori: I don't see any clear response to the fact that my island is going to be underwater in 30 years. That's the reality we live in.

Donzel: So how do you keep going? How do you have hope in that setting?

Lori: I think the key is shifting in two ways. First, shifting from charity to doing the work we need to do to keep ourselves safe. That's something that brings joy, and we're going to have to do it because we have to keep ourselves safe. That means we need to form community. We need to work together because that's where the joy is.

Maryam Kaba always says, "Hope is a discipline. It's a practice. It is not an emotion."

The day Roe v. Wade was overturned, I got a bunch of texts from women because it was terrifying. You take some time to say, "Yeah, let's deal with those feelings," but then you have to do some work. What's the work we're going to do?

If you're going to text me, we're going to do some work. We're going to get people together. We've got a list of local resources, and we're working through it. We met at the farm, had a bonfire, and talked strategy. Now we've got another community to work with, and that brings joy. It should always bring you pleasure.

Donzel: Thank you so much, Lori, for sharing your truly incredible story. I've talked to Lori multiple times, but every time I talk to her, I leave not only having learned something new, but also feeling inspired to do the work.

And that's what ARCC is all about. Our vision is to create and build a racism-free world. We're going to do that by helping people build the confidence and character to spread anti-racism. Hopefully, Lori has helped bring some of that confidence to everyone listening.

Thank you again, Lori. We hope to have you back soon.

Lori: Hey, this was so much fun. Thanks. It was a real joy.

Donzel: Visit us at joinarcc.org to learn more about ARCC, donate to our cause, and join the movement that will change the world.

To find The ARCC of Change with Donzel Leggett and learn more about the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition, or ARCC, please visit us at joinarcc.org. You can also subscribe to The ARCC of Change with Donzel Leggett on your favorite podcast hosting sites.

I greatly look forward to our next episode and another opportunity to inspire you to become part of the movement that will change the world by eradicating racism once and for all.

Until next time, stay safe and continue to ask yourself, "Am I doing enough?" And remember that none of us are doing enough as long as racism and hate still exist. Thanks for listening, and goodbye.

The ARCC of Change podcast with Donzel Leggett is brought to you by the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition. To learn more about ARCC, donate to our cause, and join the coalition, visit joinarcc.org.

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