In Part 5 of the Lessons My Mama Taught Me series, I reflect on a powerful truth my mother lived by: being hateful is incompatible with being whole. The episode opens with a spoken-word poem about the distances we travel to understand one another and how the differences we see on the surface often dissolve when we look more closely. I then share the story of my mother, a white woman raised in a small, religious town, who chose love over prejudice when she married a Black man in the late 1950...