I'm Perry from Santa Barbara and I support the slowdown meeting a wide diversity of poets

and their outstanding poems takes my mind and heart to a higher place.

A truth that feeds my day away from the debilitating misinformation or the plagues us.

Join me by making a gift to the slowdown today.

Go to slowdownshow.org slash donate.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

Several years after college, I moved to Providence, Rhode Island.

My neighbor in the apartment upstairs heading out the door introduced himself

as I was bringing in boxes to my second floor walk up.

Noticing the chessboard beneath my arm, he asked if I would like to play games in the evening to get to know each other.

I appreciate it his warm.

We were both relatively young in our careers.

Like me, he commuted to Boston daily to work.

Over several weeks, the game along with the Samuel Adams beer was a welcome ritual of winding down while making a new friend.

Have it only one two games out of two dozen, he began to notate our moves on a piece of paper.

Then after another week of losses out of frustration one evening, he flipped the board and said exasperatedly,

but you're black.

He apologized.

We never played chess again.

All my life, I've encountered such damaging beliefs that somehow intelligence levels and a human's relative worth are based solely on phenotype.

One of the deeply harmful and insidious ways white supremacy wounds people is having them believe they are superior to or less than based merely on skin color.

There's a deep sadness in not seeing each other as whole human beings and not recognizing the gift and potential beyond bureaucratic designations that confine us.

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