[applause]. Layla saad. Her book, me and White Supremacy group on online group. She calls it good ancestors, people who live a legacy for others to follow. Shes a writer and podcast author. She lives in and her husbands and two children. So, we are very excited to be able to talk with her tonight. We also are very excited to announce that this very new book has already released as number eight on the New York Times bestseller list. [screaming]. [applause]. And number 88, on usa today. So with that, layla thank you. Layla i am very happy to be here. Can you hear me. Host there is a technical problem. This never happened before. So now you can hear me right. So i will ask a question and i will and this mike over to layla so she can hear you. Im going to start with this really fascinating book. An really great exploration of the topic of or that we are all interested in talking about tonight. But in this book youre asking why people in particularly white people of the United States like me. To confront the racism, its an uncomfortable process. Can you talk about what motivated you to tackle this is a writer. Layla yes, it is so interesting because ive been asked this question so many times on this tour and i think if i had known before embarking on this journey if i had known what this journey was going to be ahead of time i might not have necessarily have chosen it. The work that i was doing before, i was a life coach in a business coach i wasnt doing anything controversial or you know, anything that would make people uncomfortable. If anything, i would say i would take care of you, i will help you grow your business. But in 2017, when the charlottesville, the you write rally happened. It was a turning moment for me. I remember seeing the images of the men marching in the streets which we can all remember, the racial slurs and everything. It was a lights just clicked over for me. And i had things that had been brewing up inside of me for many months. About things that i was observing the Life Coaching space. Wellness and personal growth space. I could see was White Supremacy. Those people who look like me, or the minority. People who looks like the majority of people in this room, where the majority. I wanted to know why. Why wasnt the case. Was it because people like me did not do this kind of work for we being excluded. From being seen as the experts. So, i wrote a letter, and a political need to talk to spiritual white women about White Supremacy. I was addressing things that are brought up within me. I was asking people that space to look at, you say you want to change the world and heal the world. You say youre all about love and light. You say, you dont see color. Racism is running rampant in the space. We need to have a conversation about it. So get started on that journey through this letter. And it went very viral. Very very very viral and so, fastforward one year later, when night after thinking about what they learned that time since we started having this public conversation and i grab my phone and i started asking what if you learned about White Supremacy. Within i observed in it. What i had experienced about it. I started listing out dozens of these things. I really thought not many people are going to want to go on this journey because it doesnt sound fun, it sounds uncomfortable and hard and i woke up the next day and there were so many people who said im scared but in and we started that challenge and i had 19,000 instagramfollowers and at the end of the 28 days that number had more than double. We had people coming in every day to do this work so its been an incredible journey because while it came from a place of the anger and grief, from charlottesville and what i was seeing and then the curiosity of what had they learned so the, you started this on social media, as you describe. Which is i feel like a very millennial way of writing a book. So what made you then want to try and convert that social media experience intoa book . Is there had been anybody in this room who took the original instagram challenge mark it wasnt incredible and incredible experience because it was for the first time people having very public conversations around their own unconscious racist thoughts and beliefs. And it has never seen it done before in that way. It was behind a pay wall or in a private setting, anybody could come on my page and read what was beingsaid and i knew from day one that this was a very special thing that was happening and i had to Pay Attention and i knew by the end , it had to become a book. Because there were people who were watching the challenge were too scared to join in and iknew they wanted to do the work. But they were afraid. And that because of the transformations that i had seen i knew it had to go beyond a challenge which i knew i would never run again. It was hard to read. Were never doing that again but it was so incredible that it had to go beyond that live experience so i decided to turn it into a workbook and the great thing about doing that was i was no longer constrained to the instagram caption size and i could write and i had learned some things. I didnt realize how hard it would be for me and for the people i was asking to go on this journey so what i did with the book was let me just prepare you for what youre about to experience let me equip you for a journey its going to be very uncomfortable so we included extra things in the pdf workbook. And having gone through it in those intro pages, you help get the notion that this is not like work, this isnt something you can do without a real heavy amount of effort because its going to ask you really hard questions. Yes. The exercises that come in the workbook, obviously when you get themonline you did that in a particular order. You have to think about heres a one, heres a two and are asking different and more challenging questions. So it gets harder. Somebody start and says im good. And you know, they start seeing themselves after seeing theircomplicity, they start seeing these issues. How did you decide when you are doing it the first time was the right order did that change when you put into a print book or did it modify . What were those decision points . The night that i received the download of what the challenge would be, i actually received dozens. I wrote dozens of these things down. Then when we started day one which was just the nextday when i woke up and thought oh no, im going to do this thing and now i have to do it. And from day one when i was like let me just choose the easiest one it is my privilege which i know some people have heard of the term so its a good starting point, as i began to say that see the way people were engaged on that post, no, you happen it makes sense to the thing that comes next is to build on what justhappened. Because you know, at first it was like i said the night before and the next day so my plan had been justto share them in order that i had received them in. But it didnt make sense to do that if it was going to be a sequence children. So i was there intentional each day about what was going to come next. And that same order and the same prompts have remained the same from the challenge to the pdf workbook to the hardcover book. Its the same. But you were definitely composing that order as itwas happening. Absolutely. And the responses you were getting. One of the main things that was important was not to do week 2, the date to 16. Thats a hard week. Thats the week we look at race stereotypes, cultural appropriation, the things most wellmeaning people do not want to be associated with racism dont want to admit to. If i had gone to that in week one, most people would have shutdown. Because consciously, the way that many people see themselves is im not racist. Because i know who racists are and they are the bad people, theyre the ones who marched in charlottesville, im not one of those people so i cant even hear this. So in week one we thought start with what i call the basics and what does do is allow you to understand that White Supremacy is not a fringe thing that only some people do, its actually this whole system and this whole belief in this consciousness that all of us have been conditioned to finding different ways so when you get to week two, you are more open to the idea that maybe i do have antiblack thoughts. Maybe, since i had all these other things that seem to resonate with things i know ive doneand said and thought. And then on that same line you were talking about how the people were seeking and that was helping you guide which challenge you were putting to them next and then they started order things. The other thing you mentioned in the book is obviously the difference between the book and the challenge was that it wasnt just your voice out there. As you were posting these things people were responding online. And then some people who might have been working through the issues as a white person trying to adjust or confront or deal with this, there were other people chiming in. Women of color, other voices that were adding to the conversation read how did that influenceyou then when you went to great workbook . The Biggest Surprise to me was that out of nowhere, black women i knew and didnt know to help facilitate the work. Voluntarily. And they didnt have to do that and my instinct was to try and protect them. Dont look at this, you dont want to read this, its not nice but they showed up and helped me facilitate the work and they collectively have been so integral to me. I had two of my closest friends here who are sitting up front to our black women and they, you know, its that sisterhood and that working together that is so integral. When i went from the challenge to the workbook, now i was alone and it was just me. But this support that they get and the challenge me to push more as well. Yes. Because there were some voices in there that were like no, cut the bs. Go deeper. And it helpeda lot. So this is to some extent a book that has definitely yourwriting but a communal support behind it , that had an influence on , a very different type. Thats so important because nobody does anything alone. Nobody does anything alone. Were sitting in the American Writers Museum and we get to see the legacy, the body of work, incredible writers, some of whom are just everything to me and i stand on their shoulders because the work that they did so informed the work that i do. Thats awesome. So i think part of the book is this notion of journaling, youre asking people to write, asking them to engage with these questions and write their responses read theres a Writers Museum so my question becomes why is it more important for them to write the responses been just have a conversation with someone around these questions or think about it. Why do you want journalingto happen . There are two answers to that question read the first one is when i first started having conversations about race andi wrote that letter , i was, it was like a street vessel every day on social media trying to invent white women, this is real. You do this. And it was exhausting. It was really exhausting and what i found instead of telling, asked, it slipped things. It made it easier on me and it made them more open to having the conversation so thats one part of it but the other part is when we just, if were just thinking about it, if you read thebook and think about it , you see things at an intellectual level where youre processing it here but youre not processing it inside so when were talking about racism, racism is not an intellectual study. Its people live lives. Its their lived experiences so that has to be matched with a live embodied experience of trying to understand your own unconscious thoughts and beliefs because they dont theoretically harm peoples color, they actually harm people of color so its important to use your whole body to put pen to paper, to write out and bring to the surface things that when you just consciously think about themare not there immediately. I agree fully in the power of writing to have things happen and change. In the introduction to the book you talk about the need to be a good ancestor , can you tell us what that means, what does the phrase mean to you . Good ancestor i think save my life. And help me to be able to sit here and have this conversation with you now read in a way that im ableto have. When i thought about, when i first started doing this work and how hard it was, i went from being somebody who, i just said i was a light coat. I was very optimistic, very hopeful, very positive and when i wrote that letter and began to experience the very nice women who were in my community suddenly have this reaction of what Robin Dangelo called white credibility which is that many white people are not used having nuanced and complex conversations around race so when the conversation is more often they had a very sometimes violent reaction to it read its offensiveness. Its getting angry. Its getting up and walking away. Its saying things they would have never said, they couldnt even imagine that they would come out of their mouse or crying. And so i went from being that hopeful positive person to a very negative, very pessimistic, very hopeless because i couldnt see if something that, if this work had been done for the amount of time that we know its been done which is deliberation and inequality for people of color, its been going on so long and i could rethink read things that had been written by writers like audrey lord and read it and think you could have written this today. The same experience ive had today i needed something bigger than what i was seeing. To allow me to continue on the journey. Because i couldnt do it from a place of resentment and hopelessness so this idea of being a good ancestor went beyond me. It became about my children and my descendents. It became about the people who will come after im gone so i use that. I have it on the cover. I was the podcast called good ancestor podcast because i needed it but whats been interesting is so many people have resonated with it for themselves and i think for people who have White Privilege in particular , the what it inspires for what it activates within is this idea that i didnt create White Supremacy. But i absolutely benefit from it. And why people who came before us didnt fix it. It didnt dismantle it, didnt change it. Perhaps i can do what i can do right now in this lifetime to create a different future for those who will come after im gone. So its been a thing as i said, selfishly it was for me but it is has helped so many people. And can you tell me or us some of the people you feel left the kind of legacy you want to leave you would consider that ancestors . [laughter] i will say before i say the people that we all know, i would actually, the first people are my parents and their living ancestors today. And you know, when i got the news of New York Times just as we were arriving here, i called my husband first and then i called my mom and at 2 am, but i woke them up and told them because theyare , everything they poured into me make me who i am today. Everything. The spirituality, the ability to write and speak, everything i get from them so there first. But after mom and dad , our writers. We were sent over there waiting and theres an image of Octavia Butler on the wall and i look in the book, open it and close it with her words. As shes a huge influence for me, audrey lord as wellwho i mention as well. Lack, feminist women who did this liberation work in different ways. Octavia butler was not an essayist, she was a Science Fiction writer but i spent i think it was 2018, 2019 reading her entire collection and if you read the parable of the chalice and the parable of the sower, the character in that book is what inspired me to be a good ancestor and she documents everything, this character and it reminds me how important words are. The power of words because theylive beyond us. They live beyond us. Thats great. So you mentioned theres a months worth of content in this book and really its more than a month worth of content because you discussed the idea of people being able to walk through it and that 28 day cycle but they could easily go back to it but you really want them to step through it in the order in which its kind of put the first time though we cant go over all of these concepts do not and we want you all to buy the book and to doityourself, to do the work as you mentioned. Its important for people to do the work if they want to engage with this content so i just wanted to ask you about three, that i think is as i read through it, hit me so i want you to. See yourself in them. Yes, so i want to know how you define them and how do you want someone like myself to respond to these concepts the first one is white silence. So the first, just to zoom out a little bit, but the aim of this book is for people to understand that White Supremacy conditions and has infiltrated all of us. And what racism is isnt just what we can all point to say that person being racist. But its these unconscious thoughts and beliefs and behaviors which you take as normal for its not that bad, and then understand that those things actually perpetuate White Supremacy and or they maintain it in place by their nonaction. And so white silence is oneof those things. Being silent when you see the racist happening again, im not just talking about being somebody call someone a racial slur but seeing somebody being mistreated, racially rest in normal situations and just thinking is it worth it to say anything . Is it my place to say anything . Does anyone even notice if i say anything and thenchoosing to stay silent, that actively keeps it in place. Its not neutral, if not a neutral behavior to be silent in the face of racism so i was saying earlier you didnt create it. You didnt create White Supremacy, nobody here alive created but you maintain it and white silence is one of the ways in which you maintain it. That even just the scroll through facebook and you see something from someone you knew in high school or you see something from a Family Member and you ask the question and i going to confront this here in social media, and i going to . Theres different ways you can talk yourself into silence, talk yourself into not saying anything and making a case for life is worth it and moving on. Did anybody actually get harmed and moving on, was it that bad . Were they having a bad day, maybe they didnt mean weight theres different ways you talk yourself into white silence. I thought that was one, you also talked