My Anti-Racism Transformation Journey and a Discussion with Pastor Dean J. Seal

DONZEL LEGGETT: 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 the 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.

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DONZEL LEGGETT: Hello and welcome to the fourth episode of The ARCC of Change with Donzel Leggett. In this episode, I will share my anti-racism transformation journey. Then I will welcome in Pastor Dean J. Seal as we discuss anti-racism and its critical role in the future of the United States and the world, the importance of interfaith collaboration, and finally, the influence of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., while also previewing ARCC's first book club event series, Dr. King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," starting next Tuesday, November 24th. Now let's get started with our show.

So I am Donzel Leggett, host of The ARCC of Change podcast and founder of the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition, or ARCC. ARCC is a coalition of dedicated people committed to eradicating racism and spreading anti-racism throughout our communities, our countries, and the world. This is The ARCC of Change.

So in my last episode, "45 Is Out. What Now?" I briefly reviewed the 2020 United States presidential election results and the implications. And more importantly, described what we must do now to help transform this country by eradicating racism and hate and spreading anti-racism with the ARCC of Change. I explained that at ARCC, we have a two-phase strategy to treat the cancer of racism, one short-term and one long-term. The first phase is the immediate and urgent treatment of the cancer of racism by removing the most visible embodiment of the malignancy of racism, which was voting out of office the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump. And we did that. We accomplished that goal. But as I said, that's not the end. Trumpism still lives. So what we must do now is implement the second phase in our Arc strategy, which is committing to the long-term treatment that's required to rid ourselves of the cancer of racism and keep it in remission. This means doing the hard work of transforming ourselves to be anti-racist, then transforming those in our networks to also become anti-racist and join ARCC and do the same with their networks and so on and so on to spread anti-racism through the network exponential growth effect. And in this way, we all take a stand together and commit to eradicate the cancer of racism once and for all and keep it in remission by relentlessly spreading anti-racism. So that is the what to do now, as I explained. It's about committing to the grind, the hard work that ARCC is all about, transforming ourselves to be anti-racist and anti-hate and transforming our networks to do the same thing. This is the work that only you can do. And only I or we together can do. And if we all do this, one person at a time, one network at a time, and influence those in our networks to do the same, we will change this country. And we will change the world.

So, in this episode, we're going to start discussing and practicing how to start this process of transformation. First, at the personal level. And then with the people in our networks.

At ARCC, we believe that this transformation starts with education. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that intelligence plus character, that is the goal of true education. Therefore, one of the most important aspects of ARCC is to educate. And we'll do this by providing access to support and resources with focus on addressing the following three critical areas.

The first is erasing the ignorance. The ignorance that we have about racism and hate that ranges from the unconscious to the conscious but accepted and ignored, through to the structural, the systemic, and the institutional, and everything in between. Remember that Dr. King also said that nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. So addressing this first is of utmost importance. This is coming to the realization that racism is not only about using derogatory terms or having prejudgments of people based on their appearance, their background, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation, and the like. It's not just about negative emotional reactions you have to people's appearances, but it's also about the unconscious and the non-emotional. But when you still know that you're taking advantage of a certain group standing or benefiting from a certain group based simply on perceived difference, whether it's racial or other, it could be a feeling or an expectation that you deserve something more than someone else without realizing that it's because of your race. It's also about simply opening your eyes, opening your ears and your conscience to what is happening to others all around you, but that you simply don't see because it's not happening to you. This is the acknowledgement or that woke moment of realizing that racism actually does exist, even though you have never seen it or you have not personally experienced it. Look, most of us have never seen a live coronavirus cell. And although there's a global pandemic of epic proportions happening, most of us have not personally experienced the coronavirus. But clearly, we know that it exists. Sadly, racism and hate are global pandemics of even larger proportions. They've been around a lot longer than the coronavirus and they've killed hundreds of millions of people more than the coronavirus. We must erase the ignorance about racism and hate.

The second is building intelligence. Intelligence in the form of knowledge and capability and understanding anti-racism. And that not being racist is not the same as anti-racist. Not being racist is rejecting the idea that there should be benefits for one racial group over another simply based on some perceived racial difference and believing that since you believe that and since you may live by that, that society actually operates that way and that therefore everyone is treated fairly, everyone's treated the same, there is no difference. The anti-racist goes much farther than that by educating themselves on the plight and the condition of others and investigating if there truly is equal treatment and equal access or if one group, including the group that they belong to, that is privileged and is receiving some special grace or some special circumstance above another group simply based on race or some other perceived difference. They uncover the built-in roadblocks and walls that others face but are invisible to the privileged.

And actively work to drive equity by disclosing, attacking, and breaking down the structures of systemic racism and waking up other people of privilege to do the same thing. The anti-racist recognizes that the ingrained structures of racism built into our society and the systemic racism built into our conscience and our subconscious won't simply go away on their own unless someone does something.

And third, developing character. Character in the form of confidence, resolve, and determination to act on the knowledge and capability you build to continually and sustainably eradicate racism and spread anti-racism. In other words, once the anti-racist recognizes those ingrained structures of racism built into our society and the systemic racism built into our conscience and our subconscious that won't go away unless someone does something, they now bravely and reliably become the someone who does something. They consistently speak out, stand up, and take action to break down the structures that support racism and they do what might feel toughest of all. Challenge and influence those closest to them. Those in their personal networks to also reject racism and hate and embrace anti-racism. And take action to spread it.

I also mentioned in my last episode that after the election of 45, my wife and I felt like it was time that we had to do something. This was the beginning of our transformation.

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DONZEL LEGGETT: As I mentioned, this was the beginning of our transformation. We had not been heavily involved in politics before 2017. My wife had door knocked for President Obama's campaign in 2008, 2012, and I had donated to his and other campaigns, but that was the extent of it. I never talked about politics, not at work, not to friends, not even to family. But as soon as 45 was elected, we both knew immediately that this was the time. We had to change. We had to take a stand. We had to stand up. We had to speak out. We had to take action against this hateful message and this hateful administration. We made it our top priority to convince everyone that we knew and even those we didn't know how dangerous this man was. And then we must all stand against him and start organizing now to make sure that in 2020 he would be voted out.

We became very visible in the community. We stood up as leaders. We started taking stands publicly. We started speaking out, taking action. I ran for office and my wife became my campaign manager. She also became known as one of the best grassroots community organizers in the state of Minnesota. We challenged our friends and our family to get engaged as well because we needed everybody to make sure that 45 was going to be out of office in 2020. So we focus all our energy at the state and national level because we thought that things in our community were OK.

As you can probably tell from my podcast cover art, I'm an African-American man. But my wife, she's Caucasian of Italian and British descent. So our kids, who are all adults now, are biracial.

As I mentioned, in 2018, I decided to run for office to help with the midterm push against Trumpism. At that time, we had been living in Chaska, Minnesota, a predominantly white and heavily conservative suburb, for the past 15 years. And we had very little issues. In fact, I'd say that we were fairly happy. It was a good experience. The kids were adjusting really well. They enjoyed their schools. They had a lot of friends. We had good friends, and we enjoyed our neighbors. But I learned something and I was awakened, I'd say, in the last few days of my 2018 campaign for Statehouse. I remember very clearly I was door knocking with a campaign volunteer named Amy, middle-aged white lady originally from Chaska. But she had been living in California for the past 20 years or so. She had just moved back to Chaska with her six-year-old biracial daughter. She was half African-American as well, like our kids. As Amy and I went door to door, we started talking between houses. And I remember Amy telling me that in her opinion, in her experience since coming back to Chaska, it was a very racist place. She said that this was her hometown and she remembered it very well from when she grew up here, when she went to high school here. And she said that, yes, it was racist then, but she said that now it was much worse. She said that it clearly had something to do with the election of Trump in terms of emboldening racists to show their true colors. But she was really, really upset with what she felt was the sadder issue, which was the complicity of most of the other white people in the community who just let it go. In her opinion, many of them just wouldn't say anything or they just pretended that racism wasn't there. And she said that in the school systems is where she saw it most clearly. I remember saying to Amy, "Amy, that does not sound like the Chaska that I know. Are you sure you're not misreading some situations or mishearing some conversations or just seeing some isolated incidents maybe?" She was adamant that she was not. She said this was not isolated. This was pretty widespread. In fact, she gave me very specific examples. With specific names of people. And she talked about several incidents that she was aware of at the schools and that she made the administration aware of, but was simply dismissed or ignored. I remember telling my wife who had volunteered in the schools for, geez, over 10 years. She had great relationships with school administrators and the teachers. She knew everybody. She was very surprised by what Amy had to say. So she asked Amy about it. And Amy told her the exact same thing and gave her even more examples. And Amy passionately challenged both of us, my wife and I, to open our eyes and see what was happening in our community all around us.

Here was this white lady telling me, a black man, that yes, the Trump administration, that she said you're fighting against Donzel, that you're actively and passionately pushing so hard to make sure they get out of office because you believe they're racist, she said you are right, they are racist. Are they emboldening racists? Absolutely. Are they having people spread more hate? Yes. But she said you have got to wake up and see the racism right here in front of you, right here at home. I have to be honest, and say that I was still a little skeptical. But it wasn't very much longer that I kind of was shown the truth. It was about a month later that the first racial and hate-motivated incident in a series of sad and traumatic incidents happened right here in Chaska. These were incidents that actually made state and national news involving Chaska schools. The first one occurred with two white students who showed up at a Chaska High School football game in blackface. And no administrator stopped them at the gate. No one stopped them while they were in the game. No one even stopped them after a few brave kids of color, students of color, approached administration and asked them to do something about it. The two students in blackface still were not approached by administration. There had been several incidents before, actually, that I remember. But I dismissed them at the time because my kids didn't say much about it. They didn't seem to be affected. I assume they were isolated. But because Amy relentlessly pushed me to open my eyes, she woke me up to the truth. This incident was clearly different. My ignorance about racism and hate in my town had been erased. I started talking to more people in our community, especially people of color with kids in the schools. And I started talking to more teachers and asking them specific questions about racism and hate in the schools and the administration's response or lack thereof. I also spoke to many of the kids themselves. What I heard from everyone was very sad, sad because it illustrated a consistent pattern of racism and hate in our schools. And it also illustrated a pattern of the administration not listening, either not caring or just simply not doing anything. I did some research to validate the anecdotal evidence I was hearing from teachers and parents and found that our school district was actually much more diverse than I had even thought, which was a good thing. But on the other side, the disparities I discovered between children of color and white majority students in our district were some of the worst in the state. And because Minnesota has some of the worst disparities in the country, that meant that our school district had some of the worst disparities in the country. We had among the lowest representation of teachers of color, among the worst disparities in learning opportunity and learning achievement, and the worst disparity in discipline occurrence and severity levied out.

From Amy's initial push, I had built much better and holistic intelligence about anti-racism to better recognize the structural and systemic racism that was ingrained in our school district and thus in our community. And now I understood that the conscious and subconscious attitudes of the school board and district leaders needed to be changed and barriers to equity and inclusivity needed to be addressed and broken down. You know, for the most part, my kids had done well in the schools. They had good experiences. But this was not just about my kids. This was about all kids. And in fact, it hurt me to learn from my 27-year-old son when this was all happening that he did experience much of this same racism that we were just now hearing about at that time. He just didn't want to make a big deal of it. And it made me think of all the parents and kids that were dealing with all these issues without support. So I decided to partner with Amy and start attending the school board meetings to speak out and stand up and challenge them to take action on these issues. You know, I'd never been to a school board meeting for any topic. I had never really spoken out publicly about racism in the community before. Even during my campaign for state house, this was not a topic that really ever came up. But now I was aware of the situation. I knew that it was time for me to leverage my character, my credibility, my platform, and my leadership to eradicate racism and spread anti-racism for the benefit of these kids in our community, regardless of the consequences. I knew that there would be friends and community members who would be uncomfortable with my public stance. I knew that it was going to strain some relationships because this is Minnesota. And people in Minnesota avoid conflict. They don't like to talk about tough topics like race. They don't like to hear people that they know speak publicly about something that's controversial. But as Dr. King famously said, it's always the right time to do what's right. And standing up for these kids was the right thing to do. And not just the kids of color, but the white kids as well. Because allowing racism and hate to not be challenged in schools hurts everyone. All the children.

So I started going to the school board meetings to speak out. First, just Amy and me. And we both spoke out about racism in the schools and the community. In the next month, there were more issues. So more people woke up to what was going on and attended the meetings, including my wife, and came to speak out about the problem of racism in our schools. Over the next few months, there were a series of serious race-related incidents, serious enough that to be covered by state and national news outlets, and more and more people started attending the meetings and standing up and speaking out and demanding action during open forum, which had to be extended from 45 minutes to multiple hours each meeting just to accommodate the crowd. A student group made up predominantly of kids of color met with school administrators and also attended and spoke out at school board meetings to share their experiences and demand change. A community social justice group called Chaska Indivisible made equity in the schools a top priority and consistently attended and spoke out at school board meetings as well. And a grassroots racial justice group called Residents Organized Against Racism, or ROAR, formed to organize parents and allies to attend school board meetings and speak out to demand change in the schools.

It became clear that a movement was created, a movement large enough to attract the attention of Twin Cities news outlets who started covering the school board meetings in Carver County.

Now there's still a lot of work to do, but there have been several changes in the right direction since we began this campaign in November 2018. The equity director position was elevated to cabinet level within the school district and the person hired to fill this position, to my knowledge, became the highest ranking African-American hired to that point in the school district's history. The new equity director led the development of the first equity strategic plan for the school district and formed the first parent equity advisory council. And the district recently made even more history and hired the first African-American, an African-American woman to be its superintendent. Additionally, two of the parents who were among the group of regulars to speak out against racism and hate in the schools ran for school board in 2020 and one of them won one of the three seats available while the other had a strong showing finishing fourth.

It is also very important to note that Chaska, the largest city in our school district, voted no to 45, gaining national attention and being profiled in the New York Times as one of the longest standing historic Republican cities in the country that flipped from Republican to Democrat in the 2020 presidential election.

I'll reiterate what I said over the last several episodes. This is not about Republican versus Democrat or red versus blue. This is about values. This is about right over wrong. So tremendous progress has been made on the side of right. And we started to break down the structural and systemic racism and hate in our schools and thus in our communities. Like I said, we lost some friends and some family relationships were strained. But the bottom line for us was that if there ever was a time to make a choice to stand for our values and to fight for right over wrong, that time had come. Not just to get 45 out of office, but to stand up for our children, all the children in our schools, and all the folks in our community. I knew that there still would be some people not very happy with us. But I didn't expect what happened one evening earlier this summer. That story next.

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DONZEL LEGGETT: So it was a Monday night, July 27th. I remember it well because I was preparing for my weekly Zoom call that evening. We started getting frantic texts from friends stating that we need to turn on the Victoria City Council meeting that was streaming because the mayor was going on a tirade and saying things about us. Now, this same mayor had been accused by many people in the area for racially charged overtones in his rhetoric leading up to the state Senate Republican primary. And he was reading this prepared statement at the beginning of the locally televised city council meeting. And in this rambling tirade, once we started watching it, he complained about some of the blowback that he felt was unfair that he was getting for what many people said, again, was racially charged rhetoric. Of all the things he complained about, though, and the "they," the people, these troublemakers who were causing him problems, he only called out two specific names. My wife's and mine. And he literally referred to us as communists. Now, I've never met this guy in my life. I don't know him. Like I said, I don't live in Victoria. I live in Chaska. I wouldn't know who he was if he walked by me in the street, even now. Clearly, he knew who I was, though. And of course, he tried to claim in this prepared statement that he was not a racist. In fact, he claimed to be one of the least racist people around. But we all know that people who say that are simply trying to make something that is absolutely not true, make it fact by stating it and hoping somehow magically it becomes fact. But they can't hide who they truly are.

Let's consider the history of the word communist and its use to denigrate black and brown leaders. You see, calling a black and brown American a communist is one of the oldest indirect racial attacks in the United States against black and brown leaders who speak out, especially those who speak out on race, equality, and social justice. It literally goes back 100 years and everyone who uses it knows exactly what they are doing. As I said, there are many, many other people besides my wife and I who spoke out, stood up, and took action and who were responsible for the really good progress in our school district and our community. But of all those people, he decided to target us. Sadly, my friend Amy, who I spoke about earlier at length, passed away a few years ago. But I'm guessing that if she were still here, she would have been proud that they called us communists because it meant that we got their attention by truly driving social and racial justice and positive change. Regardless, it's still a fact that this has been an active dog whistle tactic. Like I said, for literally 100 years. If you don't believe me, go back and check. It started in 1919 after World War I as African American veterans returned home from Europe and were brave enough to demand to be treated as equal citizens in the country they put their lives on the line for. A 24-year-old federal field agent named J. Edgar Hoover started looking for reasons other than the obvious to explain why black people were demanding better treatment and fighting back against oppression. As if fighting for your dignity and your rights, and in most cases, fighting for your literal life, wasn't explanation enough. He investigated and searched for a communist connection that he thought was there, which of course was not. And when he became head of the newly created FBI, he continued this ridiculous obsession. But now he saw that he could use it as a way to subvert black leadership or tarnish the image of black or brown leaders or celebrities who spoke out. And even white celebrities and leaders who dared to sympathize with the plight of the black community. If you were a black leader or a white leader with the gall to stand up, speak out, and push for action to drive racial change in this country, you were labeled a communist and you were branded as un-American. Which of course shows the idiocy of this because fighting for equal rights for all Americans should be the most American thing that you can do. But it also showed the genius in this tactic because it appealed to the racists who believed that America is meant to be equal for white people only. It also sent a message to those white people who considered themselves to be not racist because it warned them that they could be branded as communists if they spoke out. And it also labeled those black leaders who did speak out and who did push for change as radicals. Who simply couldn't wait for due course and should not be trusted with the future of America. And it didn't matter how you approached it. You could be Malcolm X and challenge in a fiery way. Or you could be Mary McLeod Bethune and have a friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt and work with FDR professionally. Or you could be Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and challenged with love, peace, and nonviolence. It didn't matter. You still could be investigated and labeled as a communist.

You see, one of the key differences in people who state that they're not racist and those who strive to be anti-racist is that those who aren't racist say, wait and be patient. And eventually everyone will realize that we're all the same. While the anti-racist knows that change will not happen unless we make it happen by holding people accountable to change now. Dr. King famously said justice delayed is almost always justice denied. And he was asked to wait on many occasions by those who claimed to be not racist. One of the most famous times was from a group of eight white clergy in Alabama who wrote a letter to King while he was in jail during the Birmingham campaign and asked him to stop pushing so much and to instead be patient because he was causing too much trouble. Dr. King recognized the importance of this opportunity to explain his views and appeal to these men of the cloth to interfaith collaboration for justice and right, and wrote a response known as "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" that not only responds to them in the loving and peaceful tone of interfaith collaboration, but also in the staunch, accountable, action-oriented tone of justice and righteousness.

So in the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his view on the true goal of education, we begin the process of educating our audience today by focusing on erasing ignorance about racism and hate, building intelligence in the form of knowledge and capability and understanding anti-racism, and developing the character in the form of confidence, resolve, and determination to act on the knowledge and capability we build to eradicate racism and spread anti-racism. We will start this focus by helping people transform with a book club study event of one of the most powerful pieces of literature ever written word for word or in boxing terms, pound for pound on appealing for the fierce urgency of anti-racism transformation.

Now, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." This is a historic event for ARCC as it is the very first event of its kind for our organization. It's a four-part series that will be facilitated by Pastor Dean J. Seal, a true soldier of interfaith collaboration and racial and social justice, as well as an ever-learning and admiring student of Dr. King's teachings. Pastor Dean joins us on this episode of The Arc of Change and discusses the importance of anti-racism to the future of the United States, the role of interfaith collaboration, Dr. King's influence, and provides a preview to "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" book club event. All of this is coming right up for you in our next two segments, starting right after this quick break.

The ARCC of Change podcast is brought to you by the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition. Visit us at https://joinarcc.org/(opens in new tab) to learn more about ARCC and join our movement.

DONZEL LEGGETT: All right, welcome back to The ARCC of Change with Donzel Leggett. We're here with Pastor Dean J. Seal. He's a special guest on our show today. I talked a little bit about Pastor Dean earlier, but now I'd like Pastor Dean to tell you a little bit about himself.

Welcome, Pastor Dean. Thanks for having me, Donzel. You know, you and I have known each other for a while, and you have a very unique background and story of how you came into the clergy. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what you did prior, and then what led you to be a man of the word?

PASTOR DEAN J. SEAL: Sure. I'm kind of a latecomer to the ministry. I grew up in the white suburbs of Minneapolis. I was listening to rock and roll as a kid, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and especially Jimi Hendrix. But back then, music had meaning. It had a cultural impact. It was how the anti-war movement built through the country. So we were very much tied into how we had to try to find a way to have an impact on changing the country to make it a better place. I had a brother with some disabilities, mental and physical, and so we knew that there had to be a sense of care for people with vulnerabilities and that you couldn't just kick them to the side of the road. So we grew up Democratic. We grew up as Democrats. In my 20s, I got into singing funny songs with my friend Rob Elk. And we ended up forming a comedy pair called Mr. Elk and Mr. Seal. We wrote funny songs, mostly at Dudley Riggs, which was the same place that Al Franken came out of. Then we moved to New York City and we did comedy in the New York clubs like The Comic Strip and then we performed with Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld and Jon Stewart. And that was when comedy was really coming up. So we got on MTV, we were on the Comedy Channel on the first day it started, which became Comedy Central. We got an HBO pilot that we shot at Paisley Park. It was a big, fat bomb. And then when I went to the seminary, I was writing for the Prairie Home Companion. Before that, actually, I was managing the Bryant Lake Bowl Cabaret Theater at Nightclub on Lake Street, and then the Minnesota Fringe Theater Festival. But I grew up in a Lutheran family. They were liberal ALC. They were into civil rights, and one of my relatives was a Lutheran pastor, Sidney Anders Rand. He was president of St. Olaf College and ended up being the ambassador to Norway. And he said to my mom, if you want to know what an Old Testament prophet looks like, look to Dr. King. So what does a prophet mean? It's not somebody who can predict the future like some magic thing. It's someone who sees what's going on. So like the Old Testament prophets were the ones who went up to the king and said, "You're screwing up. You have to change. This is bad." And sometimes they got killed for that. But they spoke truth to power. That's the tradition. So at a certain point, I realized that Dr. King meant more to me than anything.

Comedy or showbiz. So I decided to go into the seminary. I came out of the theater. There was a thing called Master of Arts in Theology and the Arts. A big chunk of the Bible is storytelling. Jesus was a famous storyteller. His greatest hits are The Prodigal Son and The Good Samaritan. Everyone knows those two stories. You don't have to be a Christian. But those are stories that carry meaning. And a good church service is just like a good theater production. It's an event that you organize to carry meaning to your congregation or your audience. So I wanted to go, you know, and theater comes out of the church. Right? So I was in the Presbyterian Church, which has a focus on education and also has no bishops, which is a great decentralizing thing. And with the liberal Presbyterians, or the PCUSA, Presbyterian Church USA, and we ordain women and we ordain gay people, LGBTQIA, and we give them communion and we marry them. That's where I want to be. And so for about 11 years, I taught religion at Augsburg University part-time after I got my Master Divinity. And I also started a nonprofit called Spirit in the House, which organized educational events, play productions, storytelling, seminars, art exhibits that dealt with interfaith stuff. The nonprofit never found its financial footing, so then when the opportunity came to apply for a job as a pastor, you go to a call and see if it works. The only one that wanted to hire me was the only one where I wanted to work, and that was Shepherd of the Hill. Because they were very socially active, they were involved in housing issues, they were letting homeless people sleep in their church for a week at a time with other churches, and they wanted to – it was a cute thing. They wanted to get a rainbow flag, but they didn't know where to get one. Well, I knew where to get one because I'd worked with a lot of gay performers. And there was this really great store that sold boat flags, right? So we hit it off. And the – oh, let's see now. Where should I go from there? Well, this idea of Shepherd of the Hill. So it's great.

DONZEL LEGGETT: It's really great to hear the background of how you ended up there. I mean, obviously, they've got this vision of trying to stand for the right types of things and social justice. And that's what you want it to be about.

PASTOR DEAN J. SEAL: Absolutely. But it is, I mean, you live in Minneapolis, if I'm not mistaken, and Chaska is where Shepherd of the Hill is, kind of out in what used to be the sticks. Now it's a little bit more developed out here. But it's still an area that traditionally has known to be very conservative. So making the drive out to Chaska, is that sort of a pilgrimage to you to kind of educate and continue to help fuel this socially conscious church?

Well, yes and no. It's about a 20-minute drive. I used to be a chaplain in a hospital in St. Paul, and that was a 20-minute drive. I used to be a youth minister in Northeast. That was a 20-minute drive. So the distance isn't that big a deal, but I knew when I was going into it that I'm – They are going to be with a progressive church in a very conservative area. It's been Republican since Abraham Lincoln.

OK, so but I also know that there was a lot of it was turning into a suburb. I grew up in Hopkins. Which started as a small town. And by the time I was growing up in it, it was becoming a suburb. So I'd seen how that works. And so, you know, they drove, they made the freeway come out there to 12. So there's going to be more and more bedroom commuters and they're building, you know, nice houses for these guys. They're building factories for electronics and, So there's going to be a greater population of more urbanized people who want to live out in kind of the countryside. And Chaska had been the county seat of a farm community for a long time. You know, when our church still has a farmer, we still had a couple of farmers when I came aboard. So, but this was exactly what I wanted to do. You know, in the Presbyterian church, We're called pastors, but the technical term for us is teaching elders. Our goal is to teach. And I've been a teacher. My mom was a teacher. My brothers are teachers. My grandmother used to be a teacher riding a horse onto the prairie, teaching a one-room schoolhouse. It's kind of like the family business. And I thought, we can serve an educational role in this community. Okay. So we can have an impact just by being there. We have a rainbow flag up, and we got an email from a mom once who said, you know, we go to an evangelical church, and my daughter's gay, and she's come out to me, but she can't come out to her friends at church. And we drive by your church when we're going over there. And she said, "Mom, it makes me really happy to see that rainbow flag up because then I know someday I'll find a church that will accept me for who I am." And we sent her back a thing that said we will love her for who she is. Absolutely. Yeah, so we have an impact just by being there. We don't have to convert everybody to be Presbyterians. Our role model gives us a punching weight far above our weight class.

DONZEL LEGGETT: Yeah, you know, it's really great to hear you talk about that story, that wonderful story about the rainbow flag and its impact. And, you know, I've been going to the church now for over three years, and I've heard you preach about anti-racism and anti-hate many times. It seems like almost every message that you give or lesson, like you said, you're a teacher, Almost every message or lesson that you give seems to be centered in some way or work in a message around or lesson around anti-racism, anti-hate, the prevalence of hate still in our society and that we need to do something about it. So there's always a call to action at the end. Why is this so important to you that almost every time you speak, you work these messages in?

PASTOR DEAN J. SEAL: Well, it seems habitual a little bit, number one, because every month I dedicate one Sunday, the third Sunday, to something that Dr. King wrote. First, I did the letter from a Birmingham jail, a piece at a time. That took about a year and a half. And then I was working through The Radical King, which was edited by Cornel West. I'm doing a chapter at a time. That would take about 20 weeks to... So, plus, there's always good stuff, and I really believe that the – Really, what I've learned is, I'm writing a dissertation on this. It's called "The Black Social Gospel for the White Church." If we want the white church to be relevant, we have to have the same kind of powerhouse imagination that the black church does, the black social gospel does, which is it embraces the pain of being Americans with our painful history, and then says, okay, now, what are we going to do about it? So, and I write those sermons as much for me as for anybody else. I'm processing what I'm learning, and I'm sharing what I'm learning, and I'm saying we as a community have to move forward on this. Because, as you know, there's racial tensions in Chaska. There were... Problems with the high school and one of the kids wanted to put up a poster of Malcolm X and they said oh no that's too controversial and I'm going you know I read the guy I read the autobiography of Malcolm X when I was in ninth grade and we knew he was a historical figure in the United States but apparently the principal of the Chaska High School doesn't know that. So there's this gigantic gap in what his education should be, from my point of view, and where it is. So we have to be the ones who go, you know what, no, no, no, you should read that book. It's great. And so we want to – and it's not an alien thing.

For the white church to embrace the cool parts of the Hebrew Bible and then the New Testament, because those are the things that allowed the black church to survive, and the Hebrew Bible is the thing that empowered the Jews to survive. So this has got really meaty material in it to help us get through, for example, this pandemic we're in, but then also to move forward and change the church so that we can be of benefit to the community.

DONZEL LEGGETT: Thanks a lot, Pastor Dean. That was excellent. I really, again, love your passion in terms of explaining your focus. And you mentioned something earlier that I want to go back to, and it's specific to interfaith. You know, at ARCC, we have five core values. And these values are based on the fact that we want to send a very strong message that everyone and anyone is welcome to join ARCC. And the fifth of these values is that all religions are welcome to join ARCC. Whether you're Muslim, Christian, whether you are Hindu or agnostic, it doesn't matter. Everyone is welcome no matter what your religion is, as long as your religion does not overtake our core value and purpose.

To eradicate racism and hate and spread anti-racism. We want ARCC members to always view religion through the lens of anti-racism. So again, I've heard you speak about earlier, you said, hey, I'm a Presbyterian minister, but I'm not here to preach Presbyterianism. I've heard you talk about the importance of interfaith collaboration. And I was wanting you to explain why interfaith collaboration is so important in the mission of eradicating racism and hate and spreading anti-racism.

PASTOR DEAN J. SEAL: Yeah, I think the easiest example of interfaith work is, you know, we have one of our missions is families moving forward where there's no pandemic. Homeless families will sleep in our church for a week and then move on to another church and another church until they can find a place to live. So while they're experiencing homelessness... We try to get them out of sleeping in their car, and we feed them dinner and breakfast so they can save up some money. A lot of them just need a down payment. But when they're there, there need to be like three or four people to keep an eye on them, to help them answer questions. We train them in with helping to keep track of their money. And we ask for volunteers from everywhere. We ask for them from other churches. We ask for them from... Mosques we chipped in in Minneapolis and I and some of the best volunteers we've ever had have been atheists there's some very strong ethical atheists out there and I'm happy to have them so the you know and part of this is also working with other Christian groups there's there's things I'm very I'm very unhappy with the Catholics about not ordaining women and several other things to So what I say is I love Catholics, but I have problems with the Romans. So I have problems with how they run things, but I have no problem with Catholic volunteers. They've got this beautiful Catholic love thing where they just love people, and I'm happy to be around them. But I was ordained to interfaith work. Presbyterians... Presbyterianism is a means of organizing yourself. We organize ourselves by the church is run by elders. The Greek word for that is presbyteros. Okay, okay. So what we don't have is bishops who are telling us what to believe. We have a great deal of freedom of conscience. So in other words, when I joined the Presbyterian church, they didn't ordain gay people. And I said, that has to change. And they said, come on board and let's change it. So that's what happened. So the thing about interfaith work, there was a Dr. King was an interfaith guy. He worked with Gandhi to get nonviolence. And Gandhi was a fan of Jesus because Gandhi pointed out, as other people have pointed out, every religion in the world says love your neighbor. But only Jesus says love your enemy. Yes. Okay, so that's a cut above. And that's something where I go, okay, that's hard. And Dr. King said, took another step. This is what really caught my attention. Dr. King said, we must love the racist. And I went, okay, how do I do that? And I didn't get it right away. I knew where he got it. Right. But I didn't get it. Then later on, I read where he says, we must love the racist because racism is bad for them. So if we can love the racist and understand that it's bad for them, then we can show them some mercy and show them some compassion and understand their pain that they're experiencing by being scared of people who are not the same as them. And so by understanding racism, how this Jesus thing can, can bring through to all other traditions. Loving your enemy doesn't have to be just a Jesus thing. It's also a Hindu thing. It's also a Buddhist thing if people grab onto it. So, uh, I ran my nonprofit was about exploring things. I think the biggest thing I did was about two years on forgiveness. So we had, we explored forgiveness in every different tradition and the different traditions we encountered. So forgiveness is something that every tradition has something interesting to contribute. And, So you can go into any situation where you're talking to people from other traditions, and you go, what do you guys say about forgiveness? And you can have a conversation. So Christianity and Buddhism have a lot in common. There are some people who think that Jesus might have studied with Buddhists in the missing years. But there's this great quote from the Buddha, because if you don't forgive, then you're holding a grudge, right? So there's a couple of quotes from the Buddha. One of them is holding a grudge is like holding a hot coal in your hand that you're going to throw at the guy you're mad at the next time you see him. So who's getting burned? And then the other one was holding a grudge is like drinking rat poison and expecting the rat to die. I don't know if the Buddha said that, but Buddhists say that. So... That's about this very clear thing, which Bonagustus talks about, which is that forgiveness is not about saying that what happened is okay. This bad thing that happened, it's not okay. But what it does mean is that we're going to stop torturing ourselves by turning ourselves over to hate and anger. And that's a restorative thing that we can do for ourselves. So in forgiving, we're doing a healing thing for us. That's who it's for. And so you find these things in any conversation with different people from different faiths. It's fascinating and it's useful. I'm a pragmatic guy. I want things that we can use to heal ourselves and to heal our relationships with other people. You know, one great description of it is from the punk tattooed reverend from the Lutherans, Nadia Bolz-Weber. She's like six foot two and has long arms full of tattoos. And she calls herself a Christocentric universalist, which means she has a universalist understanding that every tradition has something to offer. But she's a Jesus-centered person, and that's how I think of myself. Like, Jesus is my main man, because all faiths, All things do tell you to love your neighbor, but Jesus says love your enemy. One of the phrases that comes up in interfaith work is many paths up the same mountain. That's beautiful, man. That's beautiful. Hey, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back with Pastor Dean J. Seal.

ANNOUNCER: Visit us at https://joinarcc.org/(opens in new tab) to learn more about ARCC. Donate to our cause and join the movement that will change the world.

DONZEL LEGGETT: Welcome back to The ARCC of Change. We are here with Pastor Dean J. Seal of Shepherd of the Hill Church of Chaska. And we're going to continue the wonderful conversation we're having with Pastor Dean. And the next thing I'd like to ask you about, Pastor Dean, obviously, we just had a very historic election, but also one that's extremely divisive. I'd like you to just talk about from your perspective the direct link between racism and hate and the deepening divisions that we've seen here in the United States of America and the threat that it poses to our democracy and relatedly to the instability in the world. And in your view, from what you know of ARCC, you know, how does the ARCC vision, what role does it have to play in eradicating racism and hate and spreading anti-racism, what role does that have potentially in the future of this country?

PASTOR DEAN J. SEAL: Well, I think what we're experiencing is understanding that history isn't about the past. History is about now, and we're making a history now. And a lot of what is, I think Faulkner said, history, the past isn't over. It isn't even past. So what we're seeing now are echoes of the Civil War, where after the enslaved people were liberated, that meant that the slave owners in the South lost $3.5 billion worth of money in 1863, and they've been trying to get it back ever since. So the way to do that, I'm a huge history fan, especially about the American Civil War. And there was a Virginia planter who said, look, it's too bad we can't buy them and sell them like we used to. But if we can control their labor, we can still make money. And if we can deny them the vote, we can control their labor. So voter suppression started really in 1868. And they've been very successful at it for a long time. Now, for a lot of people like myself who grew up in the North, I didn't meet a black person until I was 18 years old, okay? That was the guy I met at college. We said hi over the Coke machine. But there weren't any. There was one black guy in my high school who graduated before I got there. For a lot of us white people, there's just no experience. And if you don't have an experience with people, you can be afraid of them. People are afraid of gay people because they meet a gay person. People are afraid of black people because they meet a black person. People are afraid they'll say the wrong thing. They're afraid people will... They're afraid that the black people will be as racist to us as we are to them. And generally, in my experience, the black people have been outclassing us. I remember when I was eight years old watching the marches in Birmingham and... The white people are banging them with clubs and hosing them down, and the black people were not resisting, and it really registered. It really registered that they're above this kind of terrible thing. So a lot of what has to happen is, you know, James Baldwin said, we should also have not just a black history month, but a white history month, where we teach white history, and we teach these things like the, uh, the destruction of, uh, black wall street and Tulsa three, you know, like what was it? 600 people got killed. Uh, and it teaches that as the history of white people so that we understand that as part of our history. Um, so, uh, the goal here is going to be slow and steady. You know, as Dr. King said, we got some difficult days ahead and, uh, I'm on the anti-racism task force for the Presbytery, which is a regional body around the Twin Cities, about 70 Presbyterian churches. And there's about eight of us who are on the anti-racism task force, which is to do what we can as a mostly white church to bring us up to date on how we can be anti-racist and how we practice as a church. Now, the Presbyterian Church USA... One of the things I brag about is that after the Civil War, they sent a bunch of teachers and pastors down to the South to teach formerly enslaved people how to read. Because reading was illegal for them. If they found out you could read, they'd kill you. So they taught them how to read, and there's a whole bunch of black Presbyterians in the South. So that's one of the things we're proud of. So we're an educational organization with a spiritual core. And what we want to do is teach people about anti-racism, teach people about American history. And there's guys who are against that. Glenn Beck, you know, every once in a while when I'm driving to work and I listen to AM radio, Glenn Beck said they want to teach, they want to make white people feel bad about themselves. And I go, no, no, no, no, no. We want to teach you what happened. And if it makes you feel bad, that's because you're understanding it. That's not because you're a bad person. It's because these bad things happened. And one of the things the Native Americans say is, look, we don't blame you for how many Indians got killed. We do blame you for denying that it happened. So it's like Holocaust deniers. When we have our own Holocaust, we have the Holocaust of 80 million Native Americans, 60 million African Americans. And we've got to understand that that's how the country was built. And then we can move on from that if we accept that. So that's what I get from you guys doing it.

DONZEL LEGGETT: Thank you. That's very, very clear. And, you know, I've also, you know, I gave on one of the last podcasts I gave, I talked a little bit about this fallacy that the segregation doesn't exist anymore. And the fact that the United States, in many cases, is more segregated than it was, you know, 40, 50 years ago. One case in point is churches. Christian churches in the United States, for the most part, are very, very segregated. There's the black church and there's the white church. And I've heard you preach on numerous occasions, not only about the black church's role in leadership, and you've talked about Dr. King and we'll talk about him a little bit more, but you also talked about what the role of the white church should be and where you're disappointed that in the lack of action and stepping up against racism and hate. Can you talk a little bit about what your thoughts are about today's white church and what you'd like to see change?

PASTOR DEAN J. SEAL: Yeah, I want to go back on that and kind of challenge Dr. King a little bit, because he's the one who made famous the line, the most segregated hour in America is noon on Sundays. Um, there's a lot of segregation now, but I think my experience with talking to black folk is that they want to go to a black church. They want to go to a place. I remember one guy saying, I want to go where it's just us. You know, they want to have a community center where the black community gets to be black, where being black isn't so obvious. They're not the only black people in the room. So it's a mixed bag. It's partially that it's hard for white people to go to black churches and feel welcome. It's hard for black people to go to some white churches and feel welcome. My home church, Westminster, had a community of, an active community of African-Americans, but also American-Africans. There was a bunch of people from Ghana. And they ended up just spinning off and going to their own church because they there just wasn't a mix. There was, there was, they were present, but it wasn't, they weren't, they didn't feel comfortable being, you know, a part of moving into a, what's basically a white church. But, to put it in the second context, it's, you know, Dr. King was a phenom. He was a, he was a educational wonder boy. He went into college when he was 15. He had his PhD when he was 22. Most people get it, but, you know, by the 26th, 27th, 28th, he was running a church by the time he was 26, and the Birmingham bus strike just landed on his head. But he knew all the theologians from Europe, and all the theologians working in the United States, and he spells out in plain English where we should go, how the church needs to be an activist church. But the white church, primarily, and this is one of my frustrations with the white church, is that they've kind of pulled back into being a thing about your own salvation. You should be petrified whether you're going to hell or not. So you're worried about your own salvation all the time. It's not what it's about. Jesus does not say, you better behave or you're going to hell. He says, you know, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, tend to the sick, visit the prisons. He's all about doing stuff. So if the church isn't doing that stuff, it doesn't have – your participation in this boils down to being in this meaningless self-indulgence in a form of escapism from the problems of the world. So Dr. King started to realize that for the most part, with some exceptions, the white church let him down. And that led to, you know, his last couple of years, he was pretty depressed. Because he was going, you know, it's all right here. It's all right here. And so my understanding is that the white church just didn't understand that this black guy has much better stuff than anything coming out of Europe. So that's the angle I take. No, no, no, no, no. Remember Jimi Hendrix? Remember Michael Jordan? Remember Hank Aaron? Okay, some of these black guys have got better stuff than any of the white guys. So we have to acknowledge that with Dr. King. Now, I'm a huge fan of him because he was a pastor theologian. He used to write his sermons for anybody who walks in the door, okay? I've dealt with theologians on the graduate level where people can talk to me for three minutes and I do not understand a thing they're saying. Because it's in such elevated academic language that it moves it out of the floor of the church room, out of the floor of the sanctuary. And I want stuff that anybody can get. And Dr. King makes it so I can get it. And that's why when I talk about Dr. King, anybody gets what I'm saying.

DONZEL LEGGETT: Yeah, I mean, that's the thing that I think so many leaders don't understand, or those who are in positions of leadership is it's not always just what you say, it's how you say it, and can you say it in a way that the audience can understand? And I agree with you, that was a special gift of Dr. King's, to say things in a way that everyone could understand, and everyone could have an emotional attachment to it and be inspired.

PASTOR DEAN J. SEAL: Yeah, I spent a lot of time in show business and comedy, and If you tell a joke that nobody laughs at, it's not the audience's fault. Right. Right? So when I'm writing, I have to write it so that I make sure people understand who is the listener understands. That's who I'm writing for.

DONZEL LEGGETT: Right on. And speaking of Dr. King, obviously, we have our first ARCC Book Club event. This is going to be a fantastic event. It's going to be starting on this upcoming Tuesday, November 24th. And it will be on "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." And it will be facilitated by none other than Pastor Dean J. Seal. So, Dean, tell us a little bit about your history with this masterpiece and describe what people can expect from this event.

PASTOR DEAN J. SEAL: Don't remember when I first bumped into it. I think it was when I started teaching and the religion classes dealt a lot with the civil rights movement. There's a book called God's Long Summer, which is about five Christians who are involved in the civil rights movement. And one is a Klan member and one is a Baptist preacher who says that the Bible says nothing about social justice. But they are both Christians. So the letter from a Birmingham jail came up as like this instigator and which is, if anything had any impact on the white church, it was this letter. Okay? So it's the perfect selection to start a book club because it is short. It's, what, 30 pages. You could read it in probably half an hour. But I started every class for 11 years of teaching religion. I started every class with a line-by-line reading. And the thing is that it's so dense and so rich, it takes three hours. It takes three hours to read it and take it apart and unpack it. And it's loaded with beautiful stuff. It fills you in on what history is about. There's new words that broaden people's vocabulary. When I would start talking about it in class, and I'd say, who's read this before? And there might be three or four hands, and I'd say, where did you hear it? And one of them would be in a civil rights class, and the other three would be, we read it in business class. Because it's used as the best example of how to make a convincing argument. So it's just beautiful writing. And then every once in a while you hear the voice of Dr. King saying, "sanctimonious trivialities." And you just know exactly who you're listening to. So it's a powerful thing. For me, it's a reading that gives you a transformational experience. It lifts you up. It tells you what the difference between a just law and an unjust law is. And I told my students, I don't care if you believe in God. This is about what justice is. You know, justice does not exist in nature. We have to create it. And Dr. King said a just law lifts people up. An unjust law pushes people down. And segregation is the example of an unjust law. And that's what he was there to do. And when they came into town and they told him he should quit demonstrating because it made all the racists mad, they called him an outsider. And he said, you know, aside from the fact I'm an American citizen, I'm in Birmingham because injustice is here. And so the goal is. This motivates you to understand that if there is injustice, we have to go and do something about it. If there's an unjust law, we have to break that law. Okay. And I thought, oh, this is cool. Right. This goes right back into my anti-Vietnam days. And Dr. King came out against the war in Vietnam because it was an unjust situation. Number one. Black people were being drafted at a higher rate than white people because white people could get out of it by going to college. And number two, we shouldn't be in Vietnam anyway. It was an unjust war. And as time goes on, we understand how much of an unjust war that was. And guess what? We killed three million Vietnamese. And so we have to understand that when that stuff is happening, we have to take action. Because if you care about justice and if you care about having a country that you're proud of, when it does stuff you're not proud of, you have to take a step to move against it.

DONZEL LEGGETT: Yeah, I think many, many folks haven't really been exposed to the eloquent and powerful writing of Dr. King. The only downside or one of the downsides of the "I Have a Dream" speech has been played so many times. Think that's all that Dr. King ever said that he ever did, that he ever wrote. And, you know, the first time I was really exposed to a letter from Birmingham jail was in the small class that you held for us at church. And my wife and I participated and we both were astonished and amazed that we had never read it before, how rich it was. And for a book of less than 70 pages, it really, every single sentence has power. I mean, for a book of less than 70 pages, it has the content of 700 pages. It's so powerful. And I love the comment you made earlier about how this was maybe a dissertation or a perfect example on how to influence, how to make an argument. And that's how I took it. This was a great example that if I wanted to help drive change, this is the way to do it.

PASTOR DEAN J. SEAL: Yeah, and it's also got more practical stuff. The whole process of setting up a direct action campaign. Which is what the nonviolent protests were about, he spells out the process. And the first thing you do is sit down and think about what's going on and figure out what we should do. And then if you do some negotiating, and if the negotiating doesn't work out, then you take action. Then you hold your protests. You block up the streets. You fill up the jails. And he spells all that out, the whole process of what it was. And what you realize is that this is a whole righteous project. This is a way by which people can take their spiritual beliefs and take action to broaden the kingdom of God, the realm of God. John Lewis said when the police baton hit his skull and cracked his skull, he said, I feel like I've entered the realm of God. So if you want to have meaning in your life, this lays out how you can look for that and how you can make that happen. Fantastic.

DONZEL LEGGETT: Dean, if there's one message you want to leave our listeners with, what would it be?

PASTOR DEAN J. SEAL: Oh, that's an easy question. But I think I can just say that love is the most powerful force in the universe. It's the only thing that can turn an enemy into a friend. And what the spiritual power of love is spelled out by Dr. King in this piece. And we're going to have to love our enemies to turn them into friends. And this is the starting place for that. You know, there's like 14 great anti-racism books out now. I bought three of them and I've read one of them. And it was hard for me to read that just because I'm hard pressed for time. But in this one book, you start there and you can take it from there. And that's what this is about, that Dr. King gave us the path, and we just have to study him and follow him. And in fact, that's what Coretta Scott King said. She said, just read his books. Thank you, Pastor Dean. This has been just fantastic for our listeners and for me. Every time I speak to you, I learn something. I'm very excited to do it, and I want to tell people, bring your teenagers, bring your 12-year-olds and 14-year-olds. They're smart, and this will give them something to bite down on. But I couldn't be more excited to be doing this. I'm a huge fan of you and your family and the work you do at Chaska, and the fact that your wife was called a communist just kind of polishes your bona fides. Because I think what you're doing with this project is great, and I'm really pleased and honored to be asked to help.

DONZEL LEGGETT: All right. Thank you so much, Pastor Dean. We'll say goodbye to Pastor Dean, and I'll be right back after a short break to close out this episode. Thank you, Pastor Dean.

The ARCC of Change podcast is brought to you by the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition. Visit us at https://joinarcc.org/(opens in new tab) to learn more about ARCC and join our movement.

DONZEL LEGGETT: That was a great discussion with Pastor Dean J. Seal. We discussed anti-racism and its critically important role on the future of the United States and the world. We also discussed the important role of interfaith collaboration in eradicating racism and hate and spreading anti-racism. And finally, we discussed the influence of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And we previewed the upcoming ARCC first ever book club event, the four-part series, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" facilitated by Pastor Dean J. Seal.

As mentioned earlier, my wife and I attended this session before with Pastor Dean. It was truly enlightening, powerful, inspirational, engaging and entertaining. There's a reason why this is the first historic book club event for the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition. It will be an absolute delight.

To find The Arc of Change podcast with Donzel Leggett and learn more about the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition or ARCC, please visit us at https://joinarcc.org(opens in new tab). You can also subscribe to The Arc of Change with Donzel Leggett on your favorite podcast hosting sites. Again, please don't forget to join the first ever ARCC Book Club event, "A Letter from a Birmingham Jail" with Pastor Dean J. Seal, a four-part series starting at 7 p.m. Central on Tuesday, November 24th. Again, for more information, visit us at https://joinarcc.org(opens in new tab).

I greatly look forward to our next episode and another opportunity to inspire you to become part of the movement to change the world by ending racism once and for all. Until next time, have a happy and a safe Thanksgiving 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 https://joinarcc.org(opens in new tab). Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And share this podcast to help spread our mission to change the world by ending racism once and for all. Thanks for listening. Until next time, stay safe and be inspired.