This is Sarah Cainic, host of the serial podcast.

I want to tell you about our new show, Nice White Parents.

Reporter Hana Jaffee Waltz spent years looking into this one middle school in her neighborhood.

She investigated the school's history, and finally realized she could put a name to the unspoken force that kept getting in the way of making the school better.

White Parents.

How White Parents can mess things up for everyone else without even knowing it.

Nice White Parents is made by serial productions, a New York Times company.

You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

There's a story about a struggling artist living on the fringes of V&E society in the early 20th century.

One day he decided to take a trip down to the Hofburg Museum, where some of the most prized treasures of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were stored.

As he strolled through the museum, feeling generally uninspired by the Hofburg treasures on display, he suddenly became transfixed with a particular object.

It was the head of a spear wrapped in a gold foil engraved with an ancient inscription.

It sent this young man into a kind of trance as he sensed the immensity of the object's power.

We're told that the young man would later say of this event, quote,

I knew with immediacy that this was an important moment in my life.

I stood there quietly gazing upon it for several minutes, quite oblivious to the scene around me.

It seemed to carry some hidden inner meaning, which evaded me, a meaning which I felt I inwardly knew yet I could not bring to consciousness.

I felt as though I myself had held it in my hands before in some earlier century of history, that I myself had once claimed it as my talisman of power and held the destiny of the world in my hands.

What sort of madness was it that was invading my mind and creating such a turmoil in my breast?

End quote.

This moment would spark a lifelong obsession with this incredible object.

You see, this was no ordinary spear. This was the weapon that had pierced to the side of Jesus Christ as he hung on the cross, the so-called spear of destiny.

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