I'm

.

. Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler.

And I'm Woe.

If you are old enough, or maybe if you were poor enough when you were younger, you may remember those small, square jumble toys that you could find at gas stations and at some toy stores back when

toy stores used to exist. It was a plastic or sometimes if it was fancy a wooden grid with 16

squares, so where there would be an empty spot and then a four by four grid. So you'd have 15 pieces

that were jumbled,

and you could move them around and rearrange them.

And basically the premise of the little game,

which is a way of parents distracting their noisy children in the back seat,

was that when you rearrange those by moving the squares either up or down,

left or right, one by one until they all fell into place, you could see the finished pattern, or you could see the picture, whatever it was. The reason I'm mentioning

this up front is that today's episode is the last in one of these individual squares, individual

pieces of a small puzzle that we have been putting together throughout the course of

the Stone Choir episodes thus far. So each episode is kind of one of those squares. It exists

individually. It shows something. But as interlocking pieces, you get a larger and larger picture.

And the metaphor doesn't work perfectly because these interlocking pieces can be arranged in lots

of different ways because they're all basically just fundamental truths.

I'm going to I'm referencing this explicitly up front because I want to make it plea to you as you're listening to today's episode, which is the fifth and final episode in our series on race.

To keep in mind the pieces that I'm going to explicitly mention up front for this

reason, if as you're listening to today's episode, you and your mind cannot keep in context

...