There's gifts I've ever received has to be a bike when I was younger, a pedal bike.

It was a sort of slick little road bike and I remember it was all like it was so it was all wrapped up

it was so obvious what it was obviously because nothing shaped like a bike and I had a little ribbon on it and I was so

I guess for that was a life changer and I'm still sort of big on cycling around my area now so for that one change real low.

Enjoy in every sip with red cups now back at Starbucks.

Hey everybody I'm excited about this week's conversation with Andre Henry an award winning musician writer and activist columnist for religion

news service and the author of the newsletter Hope and hard pills he has a new book out entitled all the white friends I couldn't keep hope and hard pills to swallow about fighting for black lives.

It's an amazing conversation with an amazing young man I'm excited to share this conversation with you coming up next on the Michael Steel podcast.

I think that the holidays feel like frozen noses I love walking with the dog for long periods of time, hopefully it's snowing and you've got to wrap up warm.

So I think the frozen nose and then sweaty armpits because like you're wrapped up so warm but then you're climbing Hampstead Heath and you get to the top and you're like and then you can see the breath but then you're nose is still freezing to top.

Enjoy in every sip with red cups now back at Starbucks.

Well everybody I'm excited to have this brother in the neighborhood to talk about I think a pretty damn exciting piece of work.

It's called all the white folks all the white friends I couldn't keep hope and hard pills to swallow about fighting for black lives and yes we're talking about Andre Henry.

Hey man welcome to the podcast thank you for having me.

I really great having you here you just to jump right into it I love it and folks I love it with an author from the very beginning just kind of tells you what's up and you don't have to even think about it.

So right out of the shoot I'm just going to turn to this this page because it's right here in the beginning Andre what did you know a warning from the author.

And the author says this won't be an easy read and you you you took that approach based off a conversation you have with a friend you know he said you don't write a book to express yourself you write a book because you care about your people and it is evident from this writing.

In addition to where you have positioned yourself publicly that you give a damn about your people I do.

So just to give folks warmed up to what we're about to get into talk about the warning why did you warn us.

You know I wrote that morning partly because I had a group of my friends a group of my black friends reading some of the drafts of this book and they actually encouraged me to let people know that we were going to be trading through some traumatizing material.

Because we were going to recount and we live some of the viral police killings that we witnessed over the past few years and you know many of us we stop watching things like that right we for our own mental health.

And don't don't send me the video whoever the police killed this time or whatever right and my story intersects with many of those stories and I try not to get to the glory details and sensationalize them but I also do want to give those people that we lost you know I

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