The Pre-Work

As you gain knowledge around gender and sexual orientation, the hope is you will live respectfully—in mutuality and joy—with and among people who fall all along the sexual orientation and gender continuum. With the guidance of Melvin Bray the three panelists Sharon Groves, Cedric Harmon and Crystal Cheatham discuss our capacity for affirmation and consideration in our relationships.

With guidance from host Melvin Bray, Sterling Freeman explores rest, respite, and joy as important tools for health and wholeness for BIPOC folks navigating their racialized experiences. Tori Williams Douglas and Sharon Groves explore why whiteness feels the need to police BIPOC joy. Together they offer a healing alternative of forming relationships of accountability as acts of self-love.

With the help of host Melvin Bray, Cedric Harmon and Crystal Cheatham address the misconception that gender operates on two poles—male-female, boy-girl—when in reality gender, much like sexual orientation, sits on a spectrum, both at the chromosomal level and the social level. The challenge is that many believe we have to operate at the two poles and therefore don’t enjoy the beauty of the spectrum.

Sterling Freeman and Tori Williams-Douglass demonstrate how the simple question, “How is race operating here?” can help you unearth the hidden assumptions, power, and privilege at work in situations that produce persistently inequitable outcomes.  Sharon Groves and Melvin Bray introduce the idea of story as a way of improving one's vision.

With the help of host Melvin Bray, Cedric Harmon and Crystal Cheatham discuss the fact that we all have a sexual orientation, which impacts how we interact. They also disrupt the notion that LGBTQ life is aberrant, proposing that, perhaps, aversion to it reflects a fear of exploring the range of attractions and desires in all of us.

With the help of host Melvin Bray, Sterling Freeman explores the language and concept of Internalized Racial Oppression, how it manifests, and what we can do to confront it. Tori Williams Douglass explores how our language and social habits allow white people not to see themselves as a collective ethnicity with cultural norms, history, and biases that are not universal.

With the help of Melvin Bray, Cedric Harmon (from Many Voices) and Crystal Cheatham (from Our Bible App) we examine the spectrum of human sexuality, beginning with an acknowledgment of our common misunderstandings of sexuality, including the idea that sex is the totality of human sexuality.

With the help of Melvin Bray, Sterling Freeman (CounterPart Consulting) introduces the foundational tools for racial equity work and the importance of the affective aspect of the racial equity journey. Tori Glass (White Homework) introduces how whiteness works and takes up space from a neuroscience perspective.

Gun violence; a woman's right to choose; trans rights and Black Lives Matter—the list goes on. Where do we start our social justice journey's now that we are engaged with the world around us? It's time to tune into The Pre-Work.