Oh hey, it's been a minute. Hello. I am so glad to welcome you back for a new season of

everything happens. My name is Kate Boller and if you're new here, I'm a professor of history at Duke.

I'm the author of books with sort of medium depressing titles that could make you laugh or cry,

depending on the day, I guess. I am the mom of a third grader who has like a lot of very specific

questions about piracy and I study the stories we tell about whether our lives work out, whether we

are lucky or unlucky, whether we feel like we have the lives we deserve. So on this podcast, I have

conversations with wise and funny and kind people about what they've learned, about hope and joy

and courage when life falls apart. You know, the exact sort of things you wish someone would tell you

when life gets really hard. And so today, I thought I would have a conversation with someone who

knows a lot about what it's like to be us to have that feeling of being cracked open. When you learn

something that maybe you didn't want to, something happened to you or to someone you loved,

or maybe you went into a profession teaching service, ministry, healthcare, just something that

caused you to be so aware of the pain of everyone else around you. So yeah, this is what we do

together here. We have those kinds of conversations, conversations we hope will sustain us for the days

and weeks to come. You are going to absolutely love my guest today. His name is Dr. Ebrum Kendi

and he is famous for his work on anti-racism, but so much of the bravery that we're going to talk

about comes from that initial feeling that he had of being cracked open by a life-changing moment.

A moment he couldn't walk back from even if he wanted to because yeah, once we're cracked open,

if we're lucky, we're sort of open to everything. Dr. Ebrum Kendi is a historian at Boston University

where he also serves as the director for the Center for Anti-racist Research. In 2020,

Time Magazine named him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was also awarded

a 2021 McParthor Genius Fellowship, but wait, there's more! Our guest today is very accomplished.

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