Tell It Like It Is: The Moment I Knew

There are moments that cleave our lives into before and after.

For some of us, those moments arrive gently, like dawn breaking slowly over familiar landscape. For others, they crash in like lightning—sudden, illuminating, impossible to unsee.

In this installment of our Tell It Like It Is series, Jamal Skinner, founder and Executive Director of the Fort Collins Cultural Enrichment Center, shares one of those lightning moments with us: the day he realized that teachers and people in authority were treating him differently because he's Black.

We know that undoing racism isn't just political work or social justice work—it's deeply spiritual work. It requires us to confront the lie that some people are worth more than others, to dismantle the systems that separate us from our fundamental interconnectedness. When we work to create spaces where every person can flourish in their full humanity, we're participating in the sacred act of building beloved community.

June 8, 2025