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by Danielle S. Castillejo, Margalyn Hemphill
Conversations about faith, race, justice, gender and healing.
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Pre Order Danielle S Rueb- Castillejo's book!Split VisionWhiteness and the American Trauma of SeparationDanielle S Rueb-Castillejo (Author)Phil Allen Jr (Foreword by)https://bookshop.org/p/books/split-vision-whiteness-and-the-american-trauma-of-separation/2f93dc782ae51f71?ean=9798341903371Here is a local bookshop: https://www.eagleharborbooks.com/item/OSAnm6ufR3vrTezaJ16gHQRebecca Wheeler WalstonOn belonging, loyalty, and the Black American experience — 03:42“Now I would say that because of the history of the drop is a drop is a drop, we’re pretty good at belonging. We’re pretty good as a people at, if you want to be over here, come on. But we do question loyalty. We’re hypervigilant. We watch for and pay attention to moves that communicate loyalty and moves that communicate a kind of disloyalty. And I think at least in the case of the Black American experience, and I do want to be clear that I’m talking from the orientation of a Black American experience, that’s where I’m located and I wouldn’t profess to have the wisdom or the experience or the knowledge to speak to the entire diaspora, but particularly because of how the transatlantic slave trade impacted and really created this notion of Black American or African-American, however you want to call it, and the parameters and the boundaries and the rules of engagement that happened on US soil, we’re pretty good at belonging, meaning that if you have a sense of any Black blood in your lineage and you want to be over here, come over here.”On racial hierarchy and access to power — 19:28“Which I think means we have to talk about the spectrum that race or racism exists upon. In some ways, I feel like on the one end of the extreme is the white European on the most positive end of that spectrum, and on the furthest negative end of that spectrum is Black African. And that to be closer to Blackness is to have the lesser amount of access to power and resource, lesser definition as a human person deserving of all those things. And then the closer you get to white, the more access to power, the more sort of humanized you are. And I think in the United States anyway, any other people group outside of those two gets placed along that spectrum for the most part, according to phenotypically, who you look more like.”Danielle CastillejoOn remembering histories of resistance — 25:35“That’s what they know. And so that’s something that my husband’s talked about a lot like, ‘Oh, the vote is so conservative here. It’s the Rancheros.’ And you can hear them start to banter like, ‘Whose fault was it? Whose fault was it? Who did this?’ But it’s even just where people migrated from and their history with empire. I honestly feel like it’s time to be less segregated and more learning from the history of people who have been here a long time fighting oppression. And also for us to realize we’ve been fighting oppression for a long time too, and we’ve done really hard things. We have this own history, and so it’s helping people remember because we know that through remembering there’s a lot of power in that. So that’s what I think. We got to work our asses off.”On organizing locally and sustaining community education — 31:17“Yeah, I just come back to from my perspective and where I am, I think wherever we are, we should work hyper locally with our neighbors and with the people around us. And I think, Rebecca, back to your question of what happens in two years I think is going to be resting the responsibility of all of our individual communities as Latinos to keep educating, keep moving forward, keep knowing history, keep knowing what just happened in the midterms, why it’s important, why healthcare should be a right, why we need to restore the Voting Rights Act, all these kinds of things.”Jenny McGrathOn learning how power operates — 29:25“I’m just agreeing with that. I think I always feel like I’m in this interesting place because I was homeschooled most of my life and didn’t really have a foundational education. And so I often say my brain is like Swiss cheese where what is there is very pungent, but there’s also lots of holes. And so I just kind of assume everyone else understands how US politics work. But the more that I learn, the more I realize it’s intentionally confusing and it’s intentionally withholding and it’s my respon
Sign up here for Missionary Deliverancehttps://indwellmovement.as.me/schedule/6c26b5e3/?appointmentTypeIds[]=99315731Tuesday, October 27th, 20264:30 PMMissionary Deliverance - Danielle Castillejo with Jenny McGrath1 hour 30 minutes @ $35.00Come learn with two former missionaries about the intersections of White Evangelical Christian nationalism and international aid.This is not a place for quick fixes or answers, but an intro to a conversation about what it means to move ethically through these complicated times.Pre Order Danielle S Rueb- Castillejo's book!Split VisionWhiteness and the American Trauma of SeparationDanielle S Rueb-Castillejo (Author)Phil Allen Jr (Foreword by)https://bookshop.org/p/books/split-vision-whiteness-and-the-american-trauma-of-separation/2f93dc782ae51f71?ean=9798341903371Here is a local bookshop: https://www.eagleharborbooks.com/item/OSAnm6ufR3vrTezaJ16gHQIn this episode of The Arise Podcast, Danielle, Jenny, and Rebecca explore the backlash against Black women’s leadership, the positioning of white women within white patriarchal power, and the religious narratives that make exploitation feel like an honor. Beginning with Rebecca’s reflections on accomplishment, authority, and Black femininity, the conversation asks why some leaders must prove their competence repeatedly while others receive authority without adequate preparation.Jenny examines how Christian nationalism and complementarian theology can teach women to understand self-abandonment as faithfulness. Danielle considers how labeling honest conversation “gossip” prevents people from recognizing harm together, connecting that isolation to a larger national pattern of violence without grief, accountability, or repair. Rebecca draws a distinction between being placed in a position of power and having the preparation, substance, and wisdom to exercise it.Together, the three examine how fear, racism, and economic interests interact—and how narratives about immigration, government spending, and belonging can mobilize people against their own communities. The episode closes with a call to vote beyond personal self-interest: to consider whose lives are affected, support qualified leadership, and follow through to ensure that your ballot is counted.Rebecca — Black women’s authority and the backlash against their success01:13–02:51“And so it started this collective conversation around what the country does with educated, accomplished power that is embodied in a Black woman. And whether the country, be it white men, white women, black men, whatever the subsegment is, what are we doing with that? And do we have the capacity and imagination to not only absorb, not only settle into, but also for lack of a better word, submit to the power and authority when it’s embodied in Black femininity.”Rebecca — Leadership requires more than credentials08:14–09:04“Baseline credentials is the bare minimum. After that, I want to know at that level of power and influence, I need to know not only do you have the credential, do you know how to wield it well in a room? And sometimes that means you are in there with a big club smashing things and sometimes wielding it well is not smashing anything. And you have to know the difference and you have to have the savvy and the wisdom, here’s what I’m going to talk and here’s what I’m not. Here’s what I’m going to answer and here’s what I’m not.” Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.
Patriarchal bargaining, belonging, and complicityJenny | 14:55“They were preserving themselves in the male dominated space of, if I call this out, then I'm going to be ostracized, exiled, whatever. And so all of it then becomes this performance of bargaining to continue to try to get power in proximity to patriarchy and white patriarchy.”Rebecca | 16:45“Is it that we need to have a better conversation about power in general and not just the people who are at the center of it, but the people who are in proximity to it and what we're willing to do to stay there, or is there something unique about how that power manifests in white male circles that is distinct?”Danielle | 18:03“The anger was that he got caught. Not that he actually messed up. There was not a sense of remorse, but in the meeting, this is a person that would say all the right things, try to do all the right things in a group sense. But when leaving that place, after having been told, ‘Don't do X or please do X,’ literally goes and does their own entire thing.” Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.
Episode Summary In this episode, Danielle, Rebecca, and Jenny explore how political instability reaches far beyond elections—entering the body, the grocery store, the workplace, and the relationships people have with their neighbors. Jenny describes the physical relief she experienced crossing from the United States into Canada, revealing how much fear and vigilance her body had been carrying. Danielle brings the conversation into everyday economic life through rising food prices, unreliable food systems, and the growing need for neighborhood mutual-aid networks. The hosts examine fear as an intentional political strategy—one that convinces people to distrust their neighbors, align themselves with concentrated power, and blame marginalized communities for hardships created by corporations, billionaires, and inequitable systems. They connect today’s racialized scapegoating to a longer American history of separating poor and working-class white people from Black and brown communities who might otherwise build collective power. Against this manufactured isolation, the hosts offer mutual aid as both resistance and repair. Directly feeding families, knowing one’s neighbors, verifying frightening information, and forming relationships across difference can interrupt stereotypes and restore a sense of shared humanity. At the same time, they wrestle honestly with whether local action can become large enough to produce meaningful structural change. Ultimately, the episode argues that fear keeps people divided, while mutual aid helps them remember their interdependence—and potentially recover their collective power. 1. The body crossing a border “When we drove across the border, I—not totally unexpectedly, but uncontrollably—just started crying. I knew my body was holding a lot being in the States, and just stepping away and crossing into another land, immediately my body was like, ‘Okay, you can rest a little bit for the next two weeks.’ It’s been mostly restful. It’s also been complicated, because it feels like such a gift to my body, while also recognizing what my body—as an American in a car with American plates—represents to people here.” —Jenny, 01:27 2. Food insecurity inside an affluent community “We have a lot of mutual-aid projects going in our little neck of the county. Neighborhoods of people are collecting set lists of things because food banks are overwhelmed. They collect it, we put it in a bag, and then some random things get tossed in—paper towels, toilet paper, toothpaste, whatever is needed. We’ve been trying to provide canned meat as well. Last month, we had twenty-five or twenty-seven bags go out, and over two hundred people were fed. This month, we’re hoping to do double. We’re in a pretty affluent area, and there’s still a high need for food help.” —Danielle, 06:34 3. The promise of proximity to power “So much of it is determined by the people making the most money. Billionaires are doing just fine right now. I think it’s the same kind of myth that created whiteness—the idea that if I align myself with the people who hold the most power, I’m going to be okay. Maybe that works for a little while. It’s so much more appealing to believe that the next president is going to make eggs cheaper and make all my problems go away than to say, ‘We actually have to face this entire system and figure out how to shift it so that it becomes equitable and sustainable.’ That is much slower and harder work.” —Jenny, 11:46 4. Caring about the person beside us “Even if I don’t individually take on changing the world or fixing the entire system, there is a simpler, localized perspective: I actually give a damn about the person standing next to me. I care that something, even if it isn’t affecting me directly, is affecting them. If we could care about that alone, we wouldn’t fall for the lie that because something doesn’t negatively affect me, I can afford to ignore it. It might be much more personal than taking on the whole system. It begins with deciding that I care about the humanity and safety of the person standing next to me.” —Rebecca, 13:02 5. A culture that locks itself in “What the documentary boiled down to was the culture of fear that is so rampant in the States. If you travel to many places outside the United States, not everybody walks around with this same paranoia, fear, or distrust. Someone said, ‘We view you locking your door not as locking someone out, but as locking yourselves in.’ I’ve been sitting with that. How do we get people to stop fearing their neighbor before we can get them to care for their neighbor? If you are constantly fed messages telling you that your neighbor is out to get you, it becomes really difficult to reach
“Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life.” ― Percival Everett, The Trees Jenny — Vulnerability becomes the scapegoat “It felt like a projection of vulnerability. We don’t want to acknowledge how precarious one medical bill could be, one school bill could be. And so I think there becomes this hatred of whoever represents vulnerability. And right now that feels really loud for the immigrant community. There’s this vitriol from privileged spaces because we don’t want to sit with how precarious our privilege is and how that squeeze is happening. And so what always happens? There becomes a scapegoat rather than looking at, wait, how do we address the systems that are squeezing us so that we don’t have people in these vulnerable situations in the first place?” Rebecca — Masculinity and the inability to say “I don’t know” “Having watched him, the ways in which I now understand how men are not allowed to say things like, ‘I don’t know, and I’m not sure. And I need to look that up.’ … There’s something there in the ways in which we are allowed to be in society that I think can invite this: Dude, why can’t you just pause, step out of the room, go look it up, and then come back and cite the person from whom you got the answer? Why can’t you just say, ‘They’re an expert and they’re telling me the answer is this, so that’s what we’re going with’?” Danielle — Who gets imagined as belonging “Someone told me that because of my pain and zeal, I make a lot of unjustified charges against various groups of people and that builds more barriers and walls between white people and Latinos. And it was just like—yeah, because in the end there’s this internal bodily drive to live in a certain kind of reality, to see the world from a certain kind of space. And you don’t fit in that reality. I don’t fit in it. My family doesn’t fit in it. Your family doesn’t. So therefore, you vote based on your reality…. It’s better without you. No matter what, as long as you’re gone, our life will be better. Who cares about healthcare? As long as you’re not here, life is better.” Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.
A major thread of the episode is the relationship between immigration rhetoric and broader racial control. Danielle and Rebecca argue that calls to “secure the border” are not only about the nation’s geographic borders, but also about who gets counted as belonging, qualified, safe, or fully human. They connect immigration enforcement, birthright citizenship, anti-DEI backlash, voting rights, and gerrymandering as part of a larger project of redrawing the boundaries of American life around whiteness and power. The conversation also turns inward toward betrayal within communities of color. Danielle speaks with grief and anger about Latino communities voting against their own ancestors, families, and cultural memory, while Rebecca reflects on the pain of Black men and other communities of color supporting a political movement that has openly threatened their own interests. Together they ask what stories people have to believe about themselves, their communities, and America in order to align with power that intends to harm them. Rebecca offers one of the episode’s central metaphors: America as a survivor choosing to remain in a familiar cycle of violence rather than step into the uncertainty of a freer world. She describes the country’s attachment to white male narcissistic violent power as a kind of domestic violence cycle, where the known threat becomes more tolerable than the terrifying work of standing without it. The episode closes with Rebecca naming the exhaustion of Black women and Black communities being expected to remain at the front lines of every fight for justice. She frames stepping out of the room not as abandonment, but as a defiant and resilient act of self-care. Danielle and Rebecca end by questioning the stability of integration into white institutions, noting that access may have produced real success, but that success remains unstable when institutions can reverse commitments the moment political cover appears. The episode leaves listeners with a sober but clarifying truth: survival, solidarity, and resistance may now require refusing the old bargain that marginalized communities must keep sacrificing themselves to save a country still choosing domination. Rebecca — on safety and the Black or brown body “We need to have a brutally honest conversation about the one Black kid in the all-white room. We need to have a conversation about how that isn’t safe. Nobody is surprised by that sentence. It might not have been one we said as brutally and blatantly as it is being said now, but I guarantee you that has been the worry all along: the ways in which it is not safe for the Black or brown body.” Danielle — on no justice coming “Yesterday I said to Luis, ‘There will be no justice for Lorenzo. There’s not going to be justice. There wasn’t justice for Renee Nicole Goode. There wasn’t justice for Alex Preddi. There’s no justice coming down for this dude.’” Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.
Rebecca In this country, what we do with adoption is this notion automatically that adoption is a good thing, and whoever is in the role of adoptive parent is the hero of the story. That usually means the story of the adopted child, and however they came to be in a position where adoption was an option, is villainized in a way that is often inaccurate and radically oversimplified. It’s told as if the adopted child’s story begins at the moment of adoption, as if there was not something that happened before or during. It sets up this dynamic where there are clear heroes, clear villains, and a kid in the middle who has everyone writing their story except the kid to whom the story belongs. The frame is problematic to me. The fact that we don’t know how to address it is problematic to me. What is true for that kid at the time of adoption? What is true for that kid ten years later? What is true for that kid thirty years later? There’s no conversation about that at all. There’s no vocabulary around what that means to identity and culture. Jenny I reread a book called Kisses from Katie, which was very popular. Katie Davis was a white woman from the States who went to Uganda and adopted fourteen Ugandan daughters by the time she was twenty-three. In one of the last chapters, a child’s biological mother comes and takes the child back to the village in Uganda, and Katie Davis writes as if it is absolutely unjust that a child would be taken from its mother. There is seemingly complete obliviousness to the children she has who were birthed by someone else, who have stories there. It’s like there is no history or narrative because God has called her to be mommy. That call is unquestioned and unproblematic, and it is really heavy. Danielle What comes up for me is the Supreme Court ruling and Amy Coney Barrett having adopted Haitian children and then voting to end TPS status for Haitians. That is where our books overlap. That is literally psychotic to me. How are her kids going to make sense of that at some point in their life? Right now, they have to survive and do whatever they need to do, but the reality shift required to live inside that world is so great. Theme 2: Transracial Adoption, Cultural Severing, and Identity Loss Rebecca When you’re talking about transracial adoption, I think it’s twofold. There is the issue of being a member of a marginalized community adopted into a majority family and having to navigate the explicit or implicit, conscious or subconscious racism that exists in that dynamic. To have to navigate that from inside the four walls of your own home is a thing unto itself. But the other piece, which I think may be equally harmful in a different way, is the absence of the collective identity space that shapes who you are. Whole parts of your identity go unacknowledged, undeveloped, misignored, because you have been removed from the womb of your cultural and ethnic identity. I don’t think there is enough language to talk about how significant that connection is—not just to your family of origin, but to land, extended family, and the whole collective group. Oftentimes for the adoptive kid, I don’t have vocabulary to describe what it is that I don’t know, except I have this haunting whisper that there is something I’m missing, and I can’t even identify it because I don’t have enough access to the cultural knowledge to tell you what I’m missing. Jenny It makes me think about Indigenous residential schools and the phrase, “kill the Indian, save the child.” What makes adoption acceptable is that it is actually adopting these kids into whiteness. It is not bringing them with their Haitian culture and language and pride in the same way TPS holders have. A month ago, Sean and I stood with the TPS community in front of the Supreme Court when they heard this case, and it was an entire day of songs and stories and such beauty in the various cultures represented by TPS countries. That is what is being killed. That is what is not allowed. You can come if you adopt whiteness. Danielle I think we have sanitized the abuse and harm in European-dominant families here in the States, in evangelical white churches, schools, and other places. We are told that the white families adopting these children are not perpetrating harm. But I’m looking back at it today and thinking, no, they are perpetrating a lot of harm. So you have a child coming out of one set of harm and having to navigate another set of harm. It’s a double whammy. Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.
Danielle Pull Quotes “I just love the competition of it and seeing how far people can push their bodies and how far they can go. And I love team sports. I didn’t used to like soccer, but I’ve been watching World Cup games with Luis, who’s my partner. Since Mexico played the United States, we watched that game in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico together. And that’s one of the last times the U.S. won. We were down there, and I remember cheering and looking around, and Luis was like, ‘Don’t cheer. You’re going to get us in trouble.’” “I started getting out of my skin this morning listening to stories about the international teams arriving in Mexico and being met with mariachis and food and dancing and celebration, and then hearing about teams arriving here and being locked in rooms, strip searched, cavity searched, and the best Somali referee being sent back. He can’t referee here, which is freaking insane. FIFA has its own problems, but this is the contradiction: we’re supposed to be hosting the world, and yet we’re treating the world like it’s dangerous.” Jenny Pull Quotes “I have a love-hate relationship with soccer because I had three older brothers and they all played soccer very seriously. Two of them went to state, one of them was first team all-state for Colorado. Every weekend was a soccer tournament. By the time I was old enough for my parents to ask if I wanted to play, I was like, ‘No, I hate soccer. I’m going to do dance.’ I still like that choice. I prefer dancing more than soccer, but soccer is the one sport where I actually know what’s going on and know the rules. Anything else, I just dissociate and have no idea what’s happening. I do like the snacks that often come with watching sports, though.” “I saw the story about the referee not being allowed in, and it made me think about the question of hospitality. We are hosting the world, and yet as a nation, as a government, we are acting as though we hate the world. It’s such a weird time. I honestly would not blame countries if they said, ‘No, we’re not actually going to go at all.’” Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.
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