Thank you so much, Liz. Yes, I do the Us and Them. I’m Trey Kaye, and I do the Us and Them podcast, and we tell stories of America’s cultural divides. And what I’m here to talk about today is how I learned empathy from a textbook. I was kind of hoping that Andy Goodman, if he’s still here, would go, huh. So this is how it happened. It’s 1974. I’m a seventh grader, and I’m riding my school bus to John Adams Junior High School. And as we’re going past the gate, there is a group of women who are standing just to the side in there. There are a bunch of moms, and they’ve got these homemade signs. How do we do this? They have these homemade signs that say, get the dirty books out of the schools. And I’m thinking, dirty books? Are we going to be reading Playboy in school? So this is what was going on. In our county, our local school board of education had adopted a new set of language arts textbooks. Now this is 1974. We’re just, the Vietnam War is still going on. Watergate, President Nixon has just resigned. Silver Rights Movement, Women’s Movement, all of these things are happening right now. And these textbooks are designed to connect or to relate to a mandate that our state had adopted in West Virginia to address America’s multicultural society. So these would have been the first books that students in Appalachia, but in other parts of the nation, would have read Jimmy Baldwin, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes. And with regard to the Vietnam War, they were encouraged to get children to talk about these things and to ask questions and to maybe challenge authority. The local protesters got incredibly angry about this. They believed these books challenged patriotism, that they undermined the authority at home, that they had a specific attack on Christianity, and that in many cases they just believed that they were lewd and vulgar. The local fundamentalist preachers got involved and they animated their communities. These communities had mothers come out in protest and these mothers had husbands and the husbands were often coal miners who came out of the mines and they encouraged other union workers, whether they’re truck drivers or bus drivers, to go on strike and it shut down the economy in this area for about seven counties. There was violence. Those were bombed with dynamite and Molotov cocktails. There were school buses that were sniped at by snipers. They never had children in the buses, but still there was a message being sent, don’t send your kids to school. And to put a cherry on the Sunday of all this that was going on, the Ku Klux Klan marched through our city of Charleston and held a rally on the capital steps. This was pretty crazy stuff for a 12-year-old kid in this community. And I didn’t really understand what was going on at that time, but I’ve come to believe or come to know in my documentary, the research of my documentary, that this was a message that really went to textbook publishers across the country. Their message was when we put out textbooks, we do not want something to happen like what happened in Canoa County, West Virginia. So fast forward 22 years. I’m now in Brooklyn, New York and I’m in the living room with my girlfriend. She then became my wife. And we were doing the thing that we liked doing most, which was watch documentary pieces on PBS. There was this fantastic multi-part series documentary called With God on Our Side, The Rise of the Religious Right in America. And it was over several nights and after the first night they teased that the next night they were going to talk about the Canoa County textbook controversy. And I said, honey, we’ve got to watch this. I lived this. This is incredible. And there’s going to be this woman and her name is Alice Moore. And back when I was a kid, we thought that she was a freak. She was the school board member who initially challenged the textbooks. And she pretty much kind of unleashed this whole controversy. She was the one who sparked it. And people on my side of the tracks who were people who supported the textbooks, most of us, we thought that she was crazy. There were pictures of her, like a witch on a broom. I said, honey, we’ve got to watch this. And so the next night we were there with our popcorn and we were watching this documentary. And Alice came on and I remember my first thought was, well, wait a minute, she didn’t say something crazy there. Well, she’ll say something crazy later. And then the next time she was on the screen, she said something. In a way, I found that I didn’t find what she was saying was crazy, but I didn’t agree with her. And then this light went off in my head. And the light, there was a voice that said, Trey, what she is saying is that she believes that she has core values that she believes that are under attack. You have core values. What if you felt that they were under attack? And then I thought, if I was in that situation, I certainly wouldn’t want to have people who were diminishing me, ridiculing me, and making me feel as though I was insignificant and laughable. So years later, I made my documentary. And when I was making it, I wanted to reach out and try to get a hold of these preachers and the protesters and the various people, because I didn’t think the peace was going to be worth anything if you didn’t hear their voices. And the person who I wanted to speak with the most was Alice. And so I tracked Alice down to her home in Tennessee is where she’s living now. And I remember, actually, I remember when I first called her on the phone, my knees shook as the phone was ringing. And I was afraid that, I don’t know, she was going to call me a liberal journalist from the liberal media or something like that, or that she was going to scream in me or yell at me or be the witch on the broom that I thought she was from when I was a kid. But she was really warm. We talked for a while, and she seemed to like me. And I found that I really liked her. And when I met with her and I sat down, I remember how back in the day, she always showed up to events where she seemed so well put together with the nice, smart-looking outfits and pearls. And she just looked fantastic. But as I was sitting with her in her house, she was wearing a house coat and a pair of jeans, and she had a smelly dog by her feet. And I remember doing what we radio journalists do, just stand an arms length away with a microphone. And she just seemed like a real person. A real person to me. So as was said in the announcement, the documentary came out. It won three major awards. And after it was over with, I continued to have my friendship with Alice. We kept talking. And we, at that point, could be more free about what we discussed. So we talked about religion. She wanted to save my soul. We talked about politics. She thought that Barack Obama was a Muslim communist who was not born in this country. We talked about our personal life. She told me about the first time that she was kissed. A real relationship. And we argued a lot, too. If you listen to the Us and Them podcast, Alice is on some of these episodes. And you can hear us argue. And you can also hear us love each other. And what I realized in these conversations and in these arguments with Alice is that in many ways she was giving me a fantastic gift. Every time that I spoke with Alice, it was as though I was putting a face on this other America that I had no way of understanding before. That she was my touchstone for how I could connect with that. And every time that she received a phone call in Act in Tennessee from her friend Trey, there was a phone call coming to her from her other America. When we made the textbook documentary, I went to Charleston, West Virginia to give a forum. And we had a reunion of the protesters of the textbook controversy. And Alice was there. There were several other people who were on stage. That’s actually Alice and I at that forum. And this was 35 years after the event. And it seemed that the protesters and the book supporters had not progressed at all in 35 years. They were still bickering about the same things, the same things over and over again. And at some point, an exasperated moderator looked to me and said, Trey, can you make any sense of this? And all I could do was think of how when I was making this report, I remember driving around in my car listening to Rush Limbaugh. And at that time, the Senate was debating comprehensive immigration reform. And there was a group in the middle of this, if you might recall, called the Gang of Eight, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, I think Joe Lieberman at the time. And Rush Limbaugh was excoriating the Republicans, just giving them grief. Or compromising. I remember him saying, I do not want to compromise with liberals. I am not here to reach across the aisle. I am not here to compromise with liberalism. I am here to defeat liberalism. And I remember thinking to myself, defeat liberalism, is that possible? And if you flip it, can conservatism be beaten? Can it be defeated? And I said to the audience, here we are in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia. I bet 50, 100, 200 years in the future, there is going to be an Alice Moore here in West Virginia. And there’s going to be a Jim Lewis. He was the guy on the face of the book supporter side. And the only way that we’re going to get through this is not by defeating one side or the other, but we’re going to have to get through this together. You know, when I do this work, sometimes it is really hard. I’ve heard a lot of talk this week about the presidential election, and a lot of people seem still to be in despair over it, somewhat I am. And it took a big toll on me mentally and physically. And I’ve this year done something that I’ve really never done in all my life. Everybody has been saying, you know, Trey, you need to start meditating. This is the year I started. And I do it every morning. I did it this morning. And I pray a lot. And I pray before interviews, sometimes the interviews I meet with people who are so entrenched in their beliefs that they’re unmovable. And that’s the time when I pray the most, and that’s the time when I meditate the most. And the prayer that I pray, it’s just a very simple prayer where I say, I will not mind be done. When I say that, it’s not really a religious thing. I know we say words like, I, or something like that. It sounds like we’re invoking the Bible or something like that. But it really is, for me, just being cognizant that there is something bigger. There is something bigger in the work that I’m doing. And that I am here not to score a big interview, not to win another Peabody Award, that I’m here just to do service with these interviews. And sometimes I feel when I employ this empathetic understanding approach in my journalism work, I feel that those hard interviews, those people sometimes melt a little bit. And sometimes I melt a little bit as well. And then there are sometimes where sometimes it’s just a little bit too hard. Usually I was in Charleston, South Carolina for the penalty phase of the Dillon Roof trial. And my work or my assignment was to connect with people maybe from his family or from people who were the families and friends and survivors of the victims. This was incredibly difficult work, especially when connecting with the victims, families. They see people like me not as a them, really to their us. When I was with them, I was very aware of my skin tone. And I was very aware of the fact that they saw people in our profession, journalists, as somebody who was looking to exploit their stories. It was really difficult work at a time where I was being seen as a them to their us when I really felt that I was on their side and all I wanted that we could agree on that we was that we were us and not us and them. There was one day, was the day after the jury had decided that Roof was going to be given the death sentence. And I had a meeting scheduled up at Mother Emanuel AME Church. And I was meeting with somebody and I had no idea that the victims’ families were meeting in the church parking lot to get on a bus to go and hear the formal sentencing. And while I was there, I happened to be standing a few feet away from a man who I’m assuming was one of the survivor’s families. And I just greeted him good morning. And as I did that, a woman came out of the church and she came like a guard dog, just kind of charge at me like, who are you? What are you doing? And she just kind of shooed me off of the lot as though I was some type of interloper. And my adrenaline just pumped up and I didn’t feel like I was there doing any harm and I didn’t mean any harm. But I got and I understood exactly what it was that she was concerned about. She was really being protective of this man. That I went and I did my interview just after that. And I came back, the interview actually went very well and I came back to Mother Emanuel Church because I had one more appointment with them before I left town. And as I re-entered the parking lot, my knees were shaking. I felt like this work that I was doing just seemed so out of line, it was striking a wrong cord. And I remember knocking on the door, the very door that Dillon Roof walked through on the night that he committed his atrocities. And I greeted the person who was there to meet with me and she said hello. And almost as soon as those words came out of her mouth, I just broke down and started crying. And she said, what’s wrong? And I said, this is really hard. This is really hard to be spending here all week hearing loved ones talk about the people that they’ve lost to spend time here in this room where that loss took place. This just is a really, really difficult story to tell. And at that moment, I realized that I was practicing a different type of empathy, different than sitting with Alice with the smelly dog at her feet and just listening to her story. This was a time where I had to realize that true empathy was about knowing when a story is not ready to be told and when somebody is not in a place where they need to be badgered to tell it. You know, sometimes I feel that in this work that I do with the Us and Them podcast, I am somebody who is trying to save the world. And I realize that sometimes when that is your intention, if you are to do it right, sometimes you need to know that in doing so, you are the one who might need to be changed. Thank you.