It's Tea Time Somewhere: All About Listening and Learning
Here at Taking Route, we desire to make you feel like you are welcomed and belong in this expat community. We want you to be able to see your story and your expat experience reflected in this space. However, we know we can do so much better at having more perspectives and voices in order to more accurately represent expat life.
In this episode, we are speaking specifically about the work of racial reconciliation. In this conversation, we discuss what we’ve been learning, what racial reconciliation looks like while living abroad, and how we’re teaching our children about race and racism.
We can’t “out-write” our experience, so to speak, but it’s our hope and prayer that Taking Route will see growth in the area of better representation as we look inwardly and examine where we can do better and how we can do better. This conversation was important for us to have on the podcast so the Taking Route community can hear where we’re at on this journey and hold us accountable. Thank you for the grace you’ve extended to us thus far. We are confident the Lord — who gathers people from every race, tribe, and tongue to His throne — will continue to lead and make a way for this to be a community that represents a truer picture of His Kingdom here on earth.
Connect with Denise
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Questions discussed during this episode:
What’s your week been like through all of this?
How do I show up if I live in a very monochromatic culture?
What are some things you are hearing and learning?
How are we talking to our families and our kids about this?
Mentioned in this episode:
Mixed Women Instagram account
Latasha Morrison on Instagram
16 Bridge Building Tips for White People
The Taking Route Together private Facebook group
Organizations to Support:
Mockingbird: History Lessons for Adults
Brownicity Membership: Many Hues, One Humanity
Noteworthy Quotes:
“There is privilege there in saying, “oh let me just learn about this,” rather than having experienced it my entire life.”
“I’m asking God every day, “What is it that you want to show me in my own heart that I’m guilty of, that I need to unlearn, or correct?”
“We need to look to Jesus who was and is perfectly just and who displayed perfect social justice while living here on earth.”
“We are very much familiar with saying the wrong thing and messing up day after day, because of language learning, cultural learning. It’s like a crash and burn every day. But we show up — and that’s just for learning language and culture. How much more so should we show up day after day, not letting fear of messing up stop us because this is the work of racial reconciliation.”
“As we study and learn and listen from the Black experience in the States, I’m sure that it’s around — the same experience is around us. It just looks different, it’s covered in a different way. So we’re just trying to use those principles that we’re learning and to carry it out into our [part of the] world.”
“My experience overseas has actually highlighted my white privilege.”
“I haven’t been hearing this, but people have been saying this. I’m reading and listening to things from years ago and people are saying the same thing and I’m just now hearing.”
“Lord, I’m so sorry that I’ve been so blind and so deaf for so long, but yet there’s so much hope and You are working at the same time.”
“Talking to my kids, that’s something I can do. I can train up my children to love all of the people God has made and all their different colors.”
“It’s important that we as parents, little by little, have those intentional conversations and seek out those relationships so that this doesn’t become something our children are still having to protest and seek justice for people of color.”
“Let’s be free to mess up and to apologize and just bring our kids along with us as we kind of stumble through it with humble hearts.”
Related episodes and articles:
Where to Begin When Engaging Anti-Racist Efforts from Abroad (Taking Route)
Unity in the Church with Elizabeth Woodson (Journeywomen Podcast)
Motherhood + Racial Reconciliation (Coffee + Crumbs podcast) **HIGHLY RECOMMEND
Why and How to Talk to Your Kids about Skin Tone and Race with Dr. Lucretia Berry (3 in 30 Podcast)
Children Will Light Up the World if We Don’t Leave Them in the Dark by Dr. Lucretia Berry (TedTalk)
Show credits:
Hosted by Denise James, Alicia Boyce, and Melissa Faraday // produced and edited by Melissa Faraday // content managed by Heather Fallis.
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