Fast-forward 15 years, two degrees, a daughter, a divorce and a career change later, and I’m again straddling two worlds as metro Richmond’s narrative change officer with theTruth, Racial Healing and Transformation(TRHT) project through Initiatives of Change USA. The W.H. Kellogg Foundation launched TRHT in 14 cities nationwide to help the country move away from the old storyline of white supremacy by telling the truth about history and writing a new, more inclusive version.

I see this happening in Richmond’s conversations about reinterpreting the Confederate statues on Monument Avenue, with the efforts to acknowledge the wrongs inflicted upon the enslaved Africans who passed through Devil’s Half Acre, as well as with the renaming of schools and the efforts to memorialize those whose remains were dumped into a 19th-century medical school well at what is now Virginia Commonwealth University.