You're listening to a special archive presentation of TED Talks Daily. This talk features racial literacy leader Howard Stevenson, recorded live at TEDmed 2017.

There's an African proverb that goes, the lion's story will never be known as long as the hunter is the one to tell it.

More than a racial conversation, we need a racial literacy to decode the politics of racial threat in America.

Key to this literacy is a forgotten truth, that the more that we understand that our

cultural differences represent the power to heal the centuries of racial discrimination,

dehumanization, and illness.

Both of my parents were African American.

My father was born in southern Delaware, my mother, North Philadelphia, and these two places

are as different from each other as east is from West as New York City is from Montgomery,

Alabama.

My father's way of dealing with racial conflict was to have my brother Brian, my sister

Christy and I in church would seem like 24 hours a day,

seven days a week. If anybody bothered us because of the color of our skin, he believed

that you should pray for them, knowing that God would get them back in the end. You could say

that his racial coping approach was spiritual for later on one day,

like Martin Luther King.

My mother's coping approach was a little different.

She was, you could say, more relational right now, like in your face, right now.

More like Malcolm X.

She was raised from neighborhoods in which there was racial violence and segregation where she was chased out of neighborhoods and she exacted violence to chase others out of hers.

When she came to Southern Delaware, she thought she had come to a foreign country,

she didn't understand anybody.

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