Last episode, we explored how media either reinforces or challenges dominant narratives. We heard about the responsibility of journalism and the media to move beyond the monster narrative and report with context rather than just crisis. But what happens when you're living inside that story, when the headlines are about your father's murder, your community's trauma, your faith being erased? Today, we welcome Pardeep Singh Kaleka, clinical director at Mental Health America of Wisconsin and co-author of The Gift of Our Wounds. On August 5, 2012, a white supremacist murdered seven people at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, including Pardeep's father, the deadliest hate crime in a house of worship in nearly 50 years. The dominant narrative was simple and dangerous: an isolated act by an evil man, a monster. But Pardeep knew that if violence has no roots, then healing has no path. Three years later, he gave a TEDx talk titled "Monster" that refused to let the narrative give society an excuse. And six years after the shooting, he co-authored a book with Arno Michaelis, a former white supremacist. Their friendship became a living example of narrative disruption—two survivors of hate choosing presence over argument, understanding over being right. Pardeep has told his story many times, but I wanted to bring him on to explore it through the lens of narratives and their impacts. How do we challenge narratives that erase communities? How do we refuse the monster frame without excusing harm? And in our algorithmically sliced world, how do we create genuine contact across difference? Pardeep reminds us that we're all just walking each other home if we're willing to show up with curiosity, vulnerability, and grace. This is episode 12, "Walking Each Other Home: Narrative Disruption Through Authentic Relationships".
Today's episode included the following speakers (in the order they appear):
Host: Luke Waldo
Guest:
Pardeep Singh Kaleka, clinical director at Mental Health America of Wisconsin, senior anti-hate advocate, and co-author of The Gift of Our Wounds. On August 5, 2012, a white supremacist murdered seven people at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, including Pardeep's father. Pardeep's TEDx talk, "Monster", delivered at UW-Milwaukee in 2015, challenged the narrative of the isolated, evil perpetrator. He later co-authored his book with Arno Michaelis, a former white supremacist, whose friendship became a living example of narrative disruption.
00:14–04:07 – Luke Waldo
Luke opens from where Episode 11 ended: the responsibility of media to report with context rather than crisis. He sharpens the question for this episode: what happens when you are living inside the story, when the headlines are about your father's murder, your community's trauma, your faith being erased? He introduces Pardeep Singh Kaleka and frames the episode's central themes: how to challenge narratives that erase communities, how to refuse the monster frame without excusing harm, and how to create genuine human contact across difference in an algorithmically siloed world.
04:07–09:43 – Pardeep Singh Kaleka: August 5, 2012, and the Dominant Narrative That Followed
Pardeep describes the shooting: a white supremacist affiliated with the Hammerskins gang entered the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin on a Sunday morning in August 2012 and murdered seven people, including his father, the temple president. It was the deadliest hate crime in a house of worship in nearly 50 years.
The dominant narrative that emerged was immediate and, he argues, dangerous: an isolated act committed by an evil man. Pardeep names two harms in that framing. First, it gave society an excuse by treating the violence as random, requiring no systemic explanation. Second, it placed his community in the backdrop of its own tragedy. The perpetrator became the main character; the Sikh community, the victims of the deadliest act of white supremacist terror in generations, became a secondary narrative presence. People got to know the community as victims, not as people who had been there all along.
13:53–20:10 – Pardeep Singh Kaleka: The "Monster" TEDx Talk
Three years after the shooting, Pardeep delivered his TEDx talk titled "Monster" at UW-Milwaukee. He describes the core challenge he was sitting with: if he accepted that the shooter was simply a monster, violence had no roots, and therefore healing had no path. Calling someone a monster does two things simultaneously: it dehumanizes them (which may feel deserved), and it gives society permission to stop asking how he was created. The narrative of the monster says: we can lock him away, reject him, throw him out. It does not ask: how did a child become this? What systems, conditions, and ideologies were present? Is there a Wade Page in every community?
Pardeep describes the audience's response as deliberate discomfort. He wanted people to feel unsettled by the narrative they had accepted, not because discomfort is the goal, but because lovingly making people uncomfortable is how narrative reality changes. And he wanted people to stop asking "Why are there bad people?" and start asking "How do we prevent people from becoming like this?" He describes seeing that shift in people around him over time as evidence of growth.
30:40–39:48 – Pardeep Singh Kaleka: The Gift of Our Wounds and Intergroup Contact
Three months after the shooting, Pardeep reached out to Arno Michaelis, a founding member of the Hammerskins, the same gang to which the Oak Creek shooter was affiliated. He had questions the shooter could no longer answer, and he believed Arno could help him understand the ideology and the path that led there.
Their friendship grew over years into a genuine relationship: Arno is known as "Uncle Arno" to Pardeep's children; Pardeep knows Arno's parents and brother. They co-authored The Gift of Our Wounds in 2018. Their partnership was, Pardeep notes, never frictionless. They are both strong-willed, they disagree, and they came from entirely different lives. What made it powerful was precisely that: they were real, unscripted, and speaking from the heart. "When hearts speak, hearts listen."
Research on intergroup contact, showing that meaningful relationships across difference are among the strongest evidence-based methods for reducing prejudice, validates what Pardeep and Arno were living. Their most effective strategy was not arguing about who was right, but choosing to be present and to try to understand where the other person was coming from.
41:18–49:53 – Pardeep Singh Kaleka: Narrative Disruption in Practice
Pardeep shares a concrete example from a small Massachusetts town navigating demographic change and community conflict between "growth" and "preservation" factions. Two Hindu temples had recently been established; yard signs and public symbols were flashpoints. His intervention was practical and disarming: he suggested the town hold its next local election at one of the new Hindu temples. The act of using the temple as a civic venue would require community members to physically enter the space and encounter their neighbors as participants in the same democratic process, not as foreign arrivals.
He names the broader pattern: demographic anxiety and demographic shift anxiety are not unique to one place. They recur across communities, and they can either be weaponized to split people apart or galvanized to build connection. His principle, drawn from Sikhism, is that two things can be true and valued at the same time: welcome and preservation are not a zero-sum choice.
49:53–1:03:34 – Pardeep Singh Kaleka: Narratively Trapped and the Path Forward
Pardeep offers a diagnosis of the current moment: we are not just divided, we are narratively trapped. Algorithm-driven outrage feeds us constant confirmation of our existing beliefs. Liberals see feeds of conservatives doing alarming things; conservatives see the same in reverse. The result is a kind of self-righteous certainty that forecloses curiosity. He draws on his clinical work: certainty can itself be a kind of cognitive illness, a rigidity that was once a trauma survival mechanism but now stands in the way of actual healing.
His antidote is not a program or a campaign. It is curiosity, practiced personally and professionally. He stays willing to ask: Why does this narrative land the way it does for me? Why do I feel what I feel toward this person or group? He reframes imposter syndrome as a form of healthy humility, a signal that you are still questioning your own certainty rather than cementing it.
He closes with the frame that gives the episode its title: "We're all just walking each other home anyway, and we're doing the best we can. Give each other grace and compassion. Give yourself some grace." Luke previews Episode 13 with Valerie Frost, Shary Tran, and Tori Brasher Weathers, exploring how belonging is built through lived experience and cultural expression.
Closing Credits
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Luke Waldo 00:14
Welcome to season 4 of Overloaded: Understanding Neglect, where we explore how stories and narratives shape what we believe and how we act, and how we might tell different stories that change the narrative so that all children and families can thrive.
Hey everyone, this is Luke Waldo, your host for this podcast series and the Director of Program Design and Community Engagement for the Institute for Child and Family Well-being, our partnership between Children’s Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Helen Bader School of Social Welfare.
Last episode, we explored how media either reinforces or challenges dominant narratives. We heard about the responsibility of journalism and the media to move beyond the monster narrative and report with context rather than just crisis. But what happens when you're living inside that story, when the headlines are about your father's murder, your community's trauma, your faith being erased? Today, we welcome Pardeep Singh Kaleka, clinical director at Mental Health America of Wisconsin and co-author of The Gift of Our Wounds. On August 5, 2012, a white supremacist murdered seven people at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, including Pardeep's father, the deadliest hate crime in a house of worship in nearly 50 years. The dominant narrative was simple and dangerous: an isolated act by an evil man, a monster. But Pardeep knew that if violence has no roots, then healing has no path. Three years later, he gave a TEDx talk titled "Monster" that refused to let the narrative give society an excuse. And six years after the shooting, he co-authored a book with Arno Michaelis, a former white supremacist. Their friendship became a living example of narrative disruption—two survivors of hate choosing presence over argument, understanding over being right. Pardeep has told his story many times, but I wanted to bring him on to explore it through the lens of narratives and their impacts. How do we challenge narratives that erase communities? How do we refuse the monster frame without excusing harm? And in our algorithmically sliced world, how do we create genuine contact across difference? Pardeep reminds us that we're all just walking each other home if we're willing to show up with curiosity, vulnerability, and grace. This is episode 12, "Walking Each Other Home: Narrative Disruption Through Authentic Relationships". Pardeep Singh Kaleka is the clinical director at Mental Health America of Wisconsin, a senior anti-hate advocate, and co-author of The Gift of Our Wounds. After losing his father in the 2012 Oak Creek Sikh Temple attack, he became a leading voice for community healing, resilience, and faith. With over 25 years of experience in law enforcement, education, mental health, and supporting hate crime survivors, Pardeep has served with the U.S. Department of Justice CRS and led the Interfaith Conference. He specializes in communal trauma and helps public health professionals, educators, and law enforcement develop community-oriented strategies to address conflict, hate, and rising targeted violence. Welcome, Pardeep. Thank you for joining us today. It's wonderful having you on the podcast.
Pardeep Singh Kaleka 03:41
Thank you for having me on, Luke. Great to be with you.
Luke Waldo 03:42
Pardeep, to understand your healing journey and exploration of the power of narrative in your life, let's start at the beginning with that tragic day in 2012. What happened and what was the narrative that formed in the media and our communities after it happened? And I'd really also like to explore with you how did those narratives make you feel and then act? Pardeep Singh Kaleka 04:07
Yeah, no, thank you. So on just going back, August 5, 2012, was a different time in our country. Former President Barack Obama was running for reelection. Summer vacation for me. I was an educator at that time, and on just a sunny summer Sunday morning in August—August 5, 2012—a white supremacist walked into our Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek and murdered seven people, one of those people being my father, who was also the Sikh temple president at the time. And what was supposed to be a Sunday of prayer became a day where an act of terror redefined the way that we understood our existence in this country. It was the deadliest hate crime committed in nearly 50 years in a house of worship by an affiliated white supremacist. And just kind of in the aftermath, the immediate aftermath, you know, just a lot of the dominant narrative of media and communities was just as simple and dangerous: that this was an isolated act of violence committed by an evil man, which unfortunately was typical at that time. Again, also misleading, very misleading.
Luke Waldo 05:30
When you say "typical," Pardeep, you're talking about the dominant narrative—this idea that this horrific act of violence was committed by a quote-unquote "lone wolf," right? Or an evil man or the "monster," as Claudia Rowe, another guest of ours this season, refers to in her episode?
Pardeep Singh Kaleka 05:48
Exactly. You know, exactly—that this was just committed—I mean, like, basically, that violence just kind of came out of nowhere, and this was some isolated act committed by the hands of just somebody who was evil.
Luke Waldo 06:02
First and foremost, while this happened now almost 14 years ago, I'm terribly sorry for what happened to you, to your family, to your religious community, to our community here right in southeastern Wisconsin and Oak Creek and so on. No person, no family, no community should ever have to experience the tragedy and violence that you and your family and your community experienced that day. When you think back to not only the tragedy itself, the loss of your father, and the fact that it was a historic act of violence, as you mentioned, right? So first or—the largest violent act of hate since the Civil Rights era—you have all of these feelings that are, I'm sure, coming up in the months that follow, just because of your own loss, but then at the same time, you're confronting these narratives, right? So, walk us through a bit how you're feeling, first and foremost, in the face of those dominant narratives. And secondly, what were your kind of initial responses? How were you acting in the face of this, especially knowing that people were coming to you as the son of the community's faith leader?
Pardeep Singh Kaleka 07:22
At some points, you know, again, I just—I framed this in the deadliest hate crime committed in 50 years by an affiliated white supremacist. But I think that there was somewhat of a communal nature to this crime, right? And acts of terror are usually that way—that there's an individual impact, and then there's obviously a communal impact. And I know that the way that I kind of operate, even for the past 14 years, really, I don't like to individualize it too much. My individual sort of recovery and healing and grief was not prioritized to myself right off the jump. I really thought about: How can we as a community heal? And I know that sounds like, "Why would you do that right off the jump?" I had the privilege of just really being in this country for some time now. I was 35 years old at the time when the shooting happened. I came to this country when I was six years old. Lived in this country for all intents and purposes. I feel like I am an American—an Indian American, but an American nonetheless. And I've served as a police officer before this. I've served as an educator. The social service career has always been something that I've been drawn to.So the way that I work is really of service to other people. And at this time, when this happened, this kind of call to say, "Well, how will you be of service to your own community?"—whatever that "ownness" is, right? To answer your question, Luke, I think our community really felt alone, isolated, and in a certain kind of way, attempted to be erased—meaning that, while our grief was real, I watched my father's death and our community's pain be turned into a story that felt like it was letting society off the hook. Trauma research kind of shows this, that the way that the harm is framed matters; and if harm is framed as random or individual, survivors lose meaning-making, which worsens long-term PTSD and moral injury.
Luke Waldo 09:43
So let's explore those stories, right? Because there's a couple of stories, obviously, that come out of this, or a couple of narratives, right? You've already named one, which is the narrative of the lone wolf, the evil man, the isolated incident, right? Which, at some levels, as you just pointed out, almost dismisses—not the act of violence itself, right—but the significance of, or the legacy of, right, in some ways. And when I say "legacy," it's not how we remember it necessarily. I'm thinking of legacy in the sense of: Can this happen again? Does this inform us in a way that we should be mindful of what this means for the next time? Because, as we know, sadly, the Oak Creek Sikh Temple was not the last to experience this horrible tragedy. We've seen it time and time and time again since that fateful day in 2012. So that's one of the stories.What was this—tell me a little bit more about the story that was being told about the Sikh temple, about the Sikh community, about your family and your faith community members? What made you feel like your community was being erased, or that they were at some level even kind of invisible in this kind of horrible act of violence?
Pardeep Singh Kaleka 11:02
I—and I think you just hit the nail on the head—sort of the narrative of victimhood, that somehow, some way we were just at the backdrop to what was going on in America at the time; that somehow, some way that everybody needed to show up for us and help this community heal. And I thought that that was—we appreciated it. We appreciated just the support that came in the aftermath. You know, just the day of the shooting itself, as we're going through this, there were people who consciously made a choice to not go home that Sunday. They showed up to the Sikh temple. Many of them had no idea who we were, what we represented, what our faith beliefs were, but they knew that they had to be there and at least in some way serve as witnesses to the harm that has been done.With that said, there was also this narrative of "Who are these people?" There was a confusion of "othering," and within that, you start to realize that we're more valuable as victims than we were as non-victims. So people got a chance to know us as victims, right? And I think that we do that sometimes to communities when they're impacted by something—then all of a sudden we get to know the Haitian community if they're impacted by something, we get to know the Hmong community. And this goes back way before Sikhs ever came to this country. But I think there's a main character, and then there's a person who's kind of in the backdrop. It very much felt like our community, being the victim of this act of white supremacist terror, was really in the backdrop, and what was in the forefront was the perpetrator, the harm-causer.
Luke Waldo 13:00
Yeah, okay, so that's a really powerful way of framing, I think, the sense of what the narrative was kind of coming out of this horrible day in August of 2012—is that the main character is the person who came into the Sikh temple and caused terrible, terrible violence, killed six people, and then himself causes incredible terror right through the temple and the community. But he's the main character, to your point, right? And your family and the Sikh community is kind of the secondary character who is just there, right, in some way. So when you begin thinking about that narrative, when do you recall wanting to challenge that narrative and kind of change the script, and why? Why did that happen?
Pardeep Singh Kaleka 13:53
Yeah, I mean, really early on. Again, I've been here long enough to know that our society, whether good or bad, we glamorize—we have some sort of psychological fascination with the perpetrators of harm, with what we deem as, or whoever we deem as "powerful". Because somehow, some way, we have this strange relationship with power. And I would even put it into a little bit of—we have this strange relationship of what we deem as masculinity and control over, and somehow, some way, we've been steeped in this so long that to me, it's weird, it's strange, but to most people that are kind of growing up in this, it's normal and it's something that is mainstreamed.And so as I'm watching—as I'm watching sort of the media cover this story and cover us, I knew right away that we had to challenge this narrative. But whenever I try to challenge a narrative, I oftentimes start off with myself. And I asked myself genuinely: If I believe that he was a monster, then what does it make my father's death? Because if we go to—if violence really has no roots, right, then healing has no path. And were we going to heal from this, or were we going to let the lasting impact of what harm caused be the story and the narrative that ruled?
Luke Waldo 15:26
No, it's such a powerful way to think about it, Pardeep. Is, you know, when we—when we think about narrative, right? Starting with really kind of a deep personal reflection on: "How does this narrative land for me? What does it mean? Right? What does it tell me about myself?" Right? Is—is a kind of reflection of our society, as we often do, as I've learned a lot from this season. A lot of narrative and mental models—the response to narrative and mental models are oftentimes very, very subconscious. I mean, that's kind of the—that's how narratives work, right? They're shorthand. They're shortcuts right to these images or these belief systems that we have kind of deep inside of ourselves, right? So this practice of "How is this narrative landing with me, and why is it not sitting right?" and trying to understand that, I think, is really powerful. So I want to—I want to kind of work off of that, because a few years later, in 2015, right after this terrible tragedy and the loss of your father and some of your community members, you gave a really powerful TEDx talk titled "Monster" that really reframed your experience and that of the killer's. So I wanted you to kind of walk through that reframing a bit, right? And walk through that day at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the stage, and how you came to that presentation and that reframe, how you developed it, and why you felt that narrative change was important for you and, arguably more importantly, for your audience and for our community.
Pardeep Singh Kaleka 17:00
Now, Luke, I think, you know, when we—when I think back to that time and going through, again, sort of prioritizing communal healing—my community's healing, and the Oak Creek community's healing—it sort of works from that proximity and on. My personal healing was always sort of part of that journey as well. So I think selfishly, I was trying to heal by helping other people through this and not be defined by kind of what happened, but you know, this resilient spirit that I was trying to embody and model.With that said, reframing kind of the narrative around all of this was always there. It was always there. And, you know, the TED Talk "Monster" came from sitting with that discomfort in myself and knowing how I've been conditioned as a young man to understand what monsters are, who monsters are, glamorizing monsters, and understanding the power dynamics that exist with that. As much as people may have thought that this—this was also about, like, Wade Page—and I can use his name, Wade Page, who was the shooter in this—and the Wade Pages out there, just like you said, like there's another Wade Page who is out there. There's a Wade Page that exists in every community in the United States. But part of this was also looking at myself and knowing that there's a monster that exists in all of us, especially us as men.I wanted to make this powerful, but calling the shooter a monster did two things. For one, it dehumanized him, which—he should be dehumanized. And I think people should sit with that, where they dehumanize somebody else. Also, calling him a monster, it felt like it gave society an excuse. It gave society the ability to say, "Yeah, obviously this is a monster. These are monsters". And you hear from the talk, right? What can we do with monsters? We can either throw them away, we can lock them up, we can reject them. But oftentimes we don't say, "You know what? Somehow, some way, society created this monster. Somehow, some way Wade Page was just a baby, just a child, just like every other child, just like my child". We don't often go to: There's a Wade Page in all of us that sits in a place where we've been conditioned. And not to say like I'm falsely equating the Wade Pages to, you know, a person who may be deemed as good in this society and is a public servant and lives his life the right way, but I think if we really want to be better as a society, we better get honest with sort of the spirit that lives in us that resonates with power—and power over, especially.
Luke Waldo 20:10
Yeah, I just think it's so important, right? And I think it's in many ways, as I've had these conversations this season, it's—it's what you just said that for me is kind of at the core of where narrative has so much potential to change us for the better, right? Because you've just given the flip side of where dominant narratives keep us stuck with the status quo, which is this idea of: This terrible tragedy happens, six people are killed, and we're just going to say, "Well, it's because of this monster," and let's move on, because there's nothing to do with monsters, right?But as you pointed out, right? If we—if we really tried to understand—as Claudia Rowe, again, she talked exactly about this frame, right? It's about this—this narrative of "monster." She did a lot of crime reporting in her career as a journalist, and she always found "monster" to be incredibly unhelpful. She called it "opaque," right? It's like, "This tells me nothing about the person". Tells me nothing about why they chose to enter a temple and shoot people. It tells me nothing about why this person has chosen to be part of a gang or to flee from their foster placement, right? It doesn't tell me anything about their behavior and why those behaviors are happening. And I think the point I was trying to make about the power and potential of narrative change for the better is when we do what I think you did in the TEDx talk, which is you really very quickly pivoted to telling the story of your family, telling your story of the Sikh community, of Sikh values and beliefs, and really kind of taking the power away from the monster and giving voice and agency to—as we talked earlier—to the narrative of the victim, and telling a different story. It just—it connects our community in a different way, right, to one of helplessness, as you pointed out with "monster," which is: "It's a monster. We can't do anything about monster". Right? "We destroy the monster. We are destroyed by the monster, and that's where the story ends". Whereas we can look at: How do we engage more positively with our community, not only in healing, but in finding ways to build a community that has less and less monsters, because we invest in that monster when he wasn't a monster—when he was a young child, not only in his family, but in our schools and our systems, so that this doesn't happen again. I think it's super powerful. I'm really curious, as you present the link to the "Monster" TEDx talk (it will be certainly in our show notes, and I encourage people to listen to it), I'm curious from your perspective as the storyteller: It was a huge narrative shift. I mean, you—in whatever it was, 18 or 20 minutes—go from "monster" to a really, very different story, right? What was the audience's reaction, both in that moment and kind of from then on as people engaged with it, I'm sure, online and otherwise?
Pardeep Singh Kaleka 23:21
Yeah, I mean, people were—one thing that I hoped is that the monsters out there kind of tune in and listen to this. You know, I can tell you that nearly every community gets labeled "monsters". I would assume that there's people out there who would deem our community "monsters," although, you know, we were the victims of this. And I tell people this: that no matter what identity you pick up—and some identities are really, really valuable—the identity of being white, black, the identity being Sikh, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, the identity of whatever it is—the identity that you really, really pick up shapes how you see things. So while it may be valuable, realize that you're operating from the framework of whatever that identity is. So identity, being both valuable and sabotaging to the narrative of what truth feels like going forward, becomes something that makes people—when you challenge it, just in even a living, loving way—it becomes uncomfortable. And so people—people were uncomfortable, but that was intentionally done. And I think that when you make people uncomfortable—and this is how we work, obviously, as you know, as support staff or therapists as well—you need to lovingly make people uncomfortable, and that's kind of how narrative reality changes and becomes closer to seeing each other, not because of identity, or whatever identity you have, but despite it. I think there's another part of this, though, the reframing of that, and as that—as that conversation kind of goes on in TEDx. But I think a lot of times, people think that if you don't see the "monster" in this person who did this, that somehow, some way, that reframing excuses what that person did. And you know, I think that's where we kind of get this wrong—is that I think that if you don't reframe that, and if you don't—if you just stay in the vilification process, then we're jumping from headline to headline to headline to headline without really being able to say, "Hey, how do we get better as a society? How do we explain and understand and how do we really, truly make systemic change?" You know, I think over time I saw people—I saw people especially, I think maybe around my circle, maybe—I saw people stop asking, "Why are there bad people?" and started asking, "How do we prevent people from becoming like this?" And I saw that as growth, right?
Luke Waldo 26:16
I'm curious how "Monster" and that presentation and obviously your presence in the community and how you engage with folks from that moment forward—how has it changed how you and others think about the dominant narratives of hate, dehumanization, and violence, particularly against the quote-unquote "other"? How has that changed?
Pardeep Singh Kaleka 26:41
That's a great question. When I think about hate, I think that sometimes it's just too easy for us to prescribe it out for us to say that that's what hate is. For me, being in America since it was 1982 that we got here, there was a part of me that was trying to understand my own existence and where I kind of fit in. And I think I've always had sort of the advantage of "not being enough". I remember—I, you know, as a young man, six years old, with a funny name like Pardeep, growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, just kind of saying, "Hey, like, I don't feel white enough to be white. I don't feel black enough to be black, brown enough to be brown" as we start largely Latinos or Hispanics be, you know, be labeled as brown. "I don't see myself American enough to be American, and I don't see myself even like Indian enough to be Indian".And that got me to a place where I started to kind of like, "Okay, if I'm not enough of these things, well, I just have to step into being myself". Now I go back and say, "Okay, how did 2012—how did 2012 help you become yourself?" It made me really examine not only just our role—it just made me examine our just the way that we understand our existence here. And I don't know why—I kind of know people are like, "Why is it that you didn't sink so far into your pain that you could look at it from that perspective?" I've been able to talk to so many survivors over the last 14 years—of people who have lost their children, people who have lost family members, people who have had so much considerable harm—and really understand hate in such intimate ways. And, you know, I tell people, you know, that day I was close to losing my son and my daughter. If my daughter had just been a little bit earlier or not forgotten a notebook at the house, I would have had to wrestle with: "As a father, could I save my six-year-old and my four-year-old?" But I didn't have to do that, and I lost my father. As tragic as that was, I reflected on a life that he led and reflected on a responsibility that I both have and the Sikh community has. One of our core tenants in Sikhism is—and I'll translate it into English—but it's basically: "I am not good and you are not bad." And that's one of my favorite tenants, because the opposite is true as well: "I am not bad and you are not good." And I think when we get into these discussions of morality—ethical morality—we can operate in understanding hate from kind of a place of judgment rather than understanding. And that kind of keeps going back and forth. And I'm not just talking about politics, but this goes into people who are sort of self-righteous and feel like, "Oh, you know what? I'm better than this person," or "This person is better than that person." Or some people have come up to me and said, "Well, I think you're"—you know, they hold me up to some kind of standard that they don't see in the mirror. And I think that those are all elements of hate, whether it's self-hate, communal hate, whether it's hate that we can define. I don't want to negate and say hate is overly kind of prescriptive, but I think for us, I want to have a deeper, comprehensive understanding of hate, and I hope that people, you know, start in the mirror rather than look out the window.
Luke Waldo 30:40
Well, you clearly have thought a lot about this, and it's—you know, it's rooted in your faith, but you continue this journey, certainly very much in practice. A few years after the TEDx talk, in 2018, you co-author a book, The Gift of Our Wounds, with Arno Michaelis, who was a former white supremacist. So you are not that far removed from your father and many of your community members being murdered by an affiliated white supremacist, and here you are, six years later, co-writing a book with a former white supremacist, right? And so I'm hearing your "I am not good, you are not bad" just kind of going through your head as you are writing this book. How did that project and partnership come about, and what did you learn from one another that led to this book and obviously the many, many presentations that would follow?
Pardeep Singh Kaleka 31:39
Yes, I reached out to Arno even before we ever had the idea of a book. I reached out to Arno about three months after the shooting happened. Me reaching out to him at that time was really a—you know, from, again, this is just the way, the weird way I'm wired, and the way that I can kind of psychoanalyze myself, but I do—I do want to have an understanding of "why". And so with the shooter—the shooter killed seven people, then killed himself, then he—you know, with him went sort of the reasons why he chose that place. And I just had a lot of questions that lingered, and so Arnold—I thought that Arnold would be the best person to be able to answer those questions. Arnold was the founding member of what was that gang—that particular gang that moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from Chicago, which is called the Hammerskins. And so I knew that before I reached out to him and just kind of invited him to sit down with me, have dinner. And, you know, we discussed all kinds of things that first time that we both met. But we didn't come together because we agreed, right? We came together because we were both survivors of hate and we were just coming from a different place. You know, over time, our partnership became kind of a living example of narrative disruption. And you know, I think the thing with us and why the story of our friendship—and it was a genuine friendship, it still is genuine friendship—I still go over to his house, speak with his mom, his dad, his brother, his daughter. He still comes to our house; he is known as "Uncle Arno" to our kids. What was special about it? That it wasn't—it wasn't something that was abstract, right? We were real. We were some people that you could come to and talk to, and him and I would rarely ever prepare any remarks; we would just talk from our hearts, and that spoke to people, right? I think that a lot of times we hear people who speak from their minds, but when—and I say this—when hearts speak, hearts listen. And we, over time, have spoken to so many people who have either self-identified, or their parents have identified, or they were getting into some kind of hateful ideology, narrative, or group, who have come to those talks and then later on said, "You know, I thought about the way that I was leading my life, and just your—both of your lived example was what I needed to hear". So somehow, some way, their hearts were open at that time, and we were able to kind of sneak in there. So, yeah, it's been—it's been a phenomenal ride, friendship. And I hope that we can still keep speaking to hearts.
Luke Waldo 34:55
Yeah, and you know, I was going to ask this question of: How did that act of friendship shift the narrative for people? And I think you answered that with—well, it's in the question, right? I mean, the act of friendship, the authenticity of your relationship, and really speaking from the heart seems to be what really connected with people.And it's interesting, because I've been listening to—and putting together the season—my conversation with Megan McGee, one of the founders of Ex Fabula, our storytelling organization here in Milwaukee. And you know, we explore kind of the science of storytelling and really how there is real hard science on how we do connect with our audience, right? If we're telling a story in a way that really resonates—and you know, stories from the heart resonate. People can connect to stories of vulnerability and pain and love and friendship in really powerful ways, right? So, yeah, I'm—I do want to kind of go back to your point of narrative disruption. What the stories from the mind—what were some of the disruptors? What were some of the—either the stories themselves or the narratives that you were targeting specifically as you and Arno were both writing this book and kind of having these conversations? What did you see really disrupting those narratives?
Pardeep Singh Kaleka 36:25
Yeah, I think just, you know, as we were writing this book, it took some time. We were working together for a while. You know, again, our partnership, our friendship, was a living example of that. But there are studies that show that intergroup contact—to show meaningful relationships across differences—are one of the strongest ways to reduce prejudice.Again, we didn't know that we were living this out at the time. We were just two people who were supporting each other—again, like, heal from the hate that both of us had suffered. Here was one person who was saying, "You know what? I raise my hand and I feel accountable for the harm that I put into this society." There was another person who was saying, "I also feel impacted by hate, and somehow, some way, we need to heal both internally and have a responsibility to others".Working together, I guess—I mean, one of the things that we really have learned over the years: Arno and I are both pugnacious. We both have strong wills, so there's no shortage of us arguing with each other. I don't want anybody on this podcast thinking, "Oh, well, you know what? It was just this great friendship off the jump. They never argued with each other. They both have same worldviews." That's impossible, right? I am a first-generation Indian immigrant who was born on the other side of the world, who came to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and grew up in the identity that I grew up. Arno was born in the United States, dropped out of high school, was an alcoholic, joined a white supremacist group, and lived his existence that way until he was shown love and kindness by strangers who really changed his heart.So we're not going to always see this existence the same way, and I think that's important to put out there. You know, what we started to see was that we're not going to change each other by arguing, by trying to figure out who was right or wrong—we chose and said, "You know what? Let's be effective." And what we found to be effective was changing each other by being present—changing each other by attempting to understand where that other person comes from. And there's just—there's not enough of that that exists, that a lot of us are sitting in a place where we just—you know, we're going to argue and we're going to try to be right over being effective. And when I say "present," I mean that we just don't have enough spaces where we may be present with somebody who disagrees with us. We're psychologically siloed. We are racially siloed. We're just—we're just siloed. We're now, we're algorithmically on social media siloed, so basically, we hear confirmations of what we already believe. And we don't get to a place where we're like, "Hey, let me just sit together with somebody who disagrees with me."
Luke Waldo 39:48
So you—I mean, you've incredibly and astutely diagnosed one of the problems, right? I'm not going to say it's the only problem, right? But the siloing, the almost self-marginalization that's happened, right? As you pointed out, algorithmically, kind of socially, in different ways. You know, over the last decade especially, it seems like it's just gone into warp speed. As you think about the journey that you had from "Monster" to your relationship with Arno to writing The Gift of Our Wounds to kind of your evolution professionally—right, in your career, your education, and so on—that now focuses more and more on mental health and conflict resolution, how have you integrated lessons learned from that journey into not just narrative change efforts, but into just kind of broader efforts to help us break through those silos, right, that are seemingly more and more entrenched? Right? They're just harder and harder to break through. So what—what are some examples that come to mind for you, and if you can share, share a story of that example where in particular you employed some narrative change strategies to bring people together who were in conflict, who mistrusted one another, or even hated one another?
Pardeep Singh Kaleka 41:18
Yeah, you know, obviously I am deeply, deeply involved in the mental health community, and then there's a part of me that's also involved in sort of communal conflict resolution work. Formerly, I was with the Department of Justice Community Relations Service, where we provided a lot of mediation—both verbal and written—and we would respond to community conflict that was happening for all kinds of reasons. You know, an example would be Minneapolis. And what's going on in Minneapolis? Never to quiet any of anyone's voices—whether that's community, law enforcement, with other stakeholders—what we would try to do as a community was really try to get people to sit down and understand one another and hopefully find a way forward. Within the mental health world, I kind of use the same tools, right? Story, meaning, and humanization. I am blessed to be able to not just do this at an individual level, but oftentimes with communities. So when we understand sort of typical PTSD symptomology with an individual, and we start to get into the places of avoidance, fight, flight, freeze, fawn—that happens at a communal level as well. And nearly any principle that is happening at an individual level, you can weave that into a communal level.And yeah, just a really good, just real-world example was a town in Boston—close to Boston, Massachusetts—and this was sort of around the first Trump administration. There's a documentary called "Waking in Oak Creek" that I'm part of. It's a 36-minute documentary that's available on PBS. It's great for students to watch, or communities to kind of gather around and have some discussions. Anyway, we were just having this documentary watch with a community. There was a pretty tight, like, woven like—it's kind of like old-school, picturesque Massachusetts. This community is not huge, but you can see that there was some stress and tension between community members. And typically, I'm just going to call these: either it was the "growth"—the people who were kind of progressive and wanted to really, really move forward in kind of like the "all welcome," "all are welcome" crowd, you know, "everybody's welcome here".And then there was sort of the "preservationists," I called them. And the preservationists really wanted to preserve everything that they held sacred in that town, which included town emblems that depicted, you know, the Bible, crosses, and things like that. And so there was this rift that existed between these two—these two factions. Again, it's like when somebody gets into a certain identity, it feels like they just believe everything that's kind of launched at them through sort of like their like-minded community. So you weaponize these dichotomies. And so it definitely felt like this dichotomy of either you're for people being welcomed here, or either you're for preserving what our town felt sacred. One of the principles of Sikhism that I really, really love is that it forces us to get out of dichotomies and encourages us to support dualities, and more than dualities—meaning that, like, two things can be true at the same time. Two things can be valued at the same time.And I know that there's a lot of folks who agree with that, but it was just—these two factions were just going at each other in the form of signs and this and that that they were putting out on their grass. And so the other complication was there were two Hindu temples. And Hindu temples were going up in this really small town. And one of the things that I thought of when we visited and had this documentary and did the panel was: "Why are there two Hindu temples? Wasn't just like one enough to put into this town?" I didn't really get into that discussion, but I—you know, typically, if two Hindu temples or two temples go up, you know, lots of times there's maybe a sect that is inside that internal culture that disagrees with the other sect, and they live their faith just a little bit differently, right? Anyway, that's not part of the story, but it's probably part of the story where I think there were a lot of people who were asking, "Well, like, our town—our town is really changing, and I'm uncomfortable with this." And the town is getting blacker or browner. I've seen this all rinse and repeat, Luke. This is all over the place: demographic anxiety, demographic shift anxiety, and we just see it all over the place. And either it can be weaponized to split people apart, or it can be galvanized.And so when that was going on, I think I talked—I was speaking to some of the administration of the town. I said, "You know, some of the narrative around your town is that these people that are moving into our town haven't been here long enough to really be part of the American fabric. They haven't sacrificed any blood. They haven't built anything. So some of the narrative is that you're coming into this town and taking advantage of our resources without ever giving back to us civically". We asked the town to say, "Okay, the next election that happens, why don't we put that election in one of these new Hindu temples, or mandirs? Why don't we hold the election there?" That way the people inside can really get involved in the civic process of local elections. And that way you can go inside and know that, "Hey, these people aren't so foreign after all. These people are just people just like us." And the more that we have where you start to create intentional spaces where people have to see each other, right—that intentional presence—the more that we'll realize, "Hey, we're all in this together."
Luke Waldo 48:08
No, I think—I think it's really powerful. Your focus on kind of this dichotomy we've explored a bit throughout this season—this idea of kind of "zero sum," right? That it's like, "If more immigrants, for example, are coming into my community, therefore I lose my identity," rather than thinking, "We are bringing more immigrants into our community who can enrich our community in a way that it hasn't been in the past, right? And we can build a multi-faith community here that's never existed before". Why we are—as you pointed out—kind of stuck in this dichotomy, right, that it has to be this either-or rather than the both-and, right, is I think a really curious space to challenge ourselves when it comes to narrative, right? I mean, even just the either-or versus the both-and narratives, I think, is an important place to start. Because as you pointed out, when it comes to conflict resolution, it's oftentimes because people are stuck in this zero-sum, or kind of dichotomous thinking. It's one or the other, rather than a coexistence of both, right? So, you know, as we—as we continue to kind of on this theme of divisiveness, mistrust, polarization that unfortunately is really thriving right now in our society, why do you believe narrative change in particular is so urgent right now? And is there a particular kind of narrative that you think we should either be challenging or that we should be uplifting in this moment?
Pardeep Singh Kaleka 49:53
Yeah, I mean, you're right that we live in—like right now, we live in an algorithm-driven world with algorithm-driven outrage. I think it's just—we're not even just divided; most of us are narratively trapped. We cement these stories that we tell ourselves without ever—I think sometimes we can—if we intentionally kind of—are we really questioning it? Liberals will have feeds of conservatives doing all kinds of crazy things; conservatives will have feeds of liberals, and liberals will look crazy to them. So we think we're morally that kind of like, "Oh, we're right. We're righteous. This is the truth". So I think we are narratively trapped right now, and that narrative becomes very, very weaponized. There's a huge portion of narrative that creates identity; identity drives behavior—I think experts know this—and behavior then shapes the world. If we want to get better, if we want to heal, we've got to change those stories and make violence—make violence less likely, but also not normalize violence to the extent that we do. For me, I think I just—I try to—I'm fortunate to be able to share the story of the Sikh community, of what I've learned. I continue to try to grow. I never, never feel like I'm "there." I was telling somebody today we were having a discussion about imposter syndrome, and I told him, I said, "Man, I always feel like an imposter. I feel like I'm never there, and I'm always searching". But with that said, I think there's a negative connotation to imposter syndrome. I think there can be a healthiness and humility to kind of saying, "You know what? Let me grow as a person. Let me challenge my own narrative". Let's challenge that, and honestly, it helps me be effective in kind of helping people challenge their own narrative. So: open-ended questions, curiosity. And I'm not coming from a place of like, "Oh, Pardeep is just weaponizing curiosity so that he can get this person to change some kind of behavior that has become a maladaptive coping mechanism." But I'm like—I'm genuinely like, just curious. I'm kind of like, "Why does this person do this? Why do I respond to it like that? Is my response to it like that?" All of that to me—I find that beautiful, this wrestling with this human dynamics. And I think I want to be careful in saying that I feel like I can be understanding. I feel that I can be—and I'm not saying that I'm always understanding—because I think that sometimes there are things and narratives that go against the existence of somebody.And I want to be careful in saying: You know what, we need to—we need to call that out. But again, we can't be so consumed by calling it out that we lose ourselves or lose the healing that needs to happen even with that person. So, yeah, I just—I just think—I think there's a lot of work that we need to do around narratives. I appreciate this conversation. I mean a lot of us—and I know a lot of people that I serve, the clients that I serve—a lot of what they believe about themselves in the world they get online, and you ask them, "Where did you get that from?" "Well, I got it online." "Do you know if it's true? Is it cited? Is it something that's credible?" And I think as this kind of goes forward—meaning this—this social experiment that we call humanity, which has now tethered itself to AI and social media, we have to realize that we really, really, really need to be okay testing our own sort of biases of the way that we see things and almost see things lovingly in a skeptical type of way. And maybe we can—we can go past what we—what we kind of say about each other, and choose to say, "Hey, let me just listen to your life." It's like you've listened to mine, Luke, and I'm like—we both are, you know, outside of this, we're friends, and I think that we sit down and we—we understand each other's—we don't ask—we don't ask the questions about kind of like ideologies and identity as much. Most of us ask about: "How are your kids doing? How's your wife? How are you doing?" And I hope that—I hope as we go forward, we can return back to that.
Luke Waldo 55:04
You mentioned that we're, you know, narratively stuck in many ways. And you know, when I—when I started this season, I talked a lot about how dominant narratives—right, historical dominant narratives, right, that paint a particular group of people in a negative light, for example—are harmful, and that is certainly true in many cases. But what I've started to recognize is that they're oftentimes harmful because they just get us stuck, as you pointed out, right? They just—they just keep us in a place where we become less curious, we—we stop questions—stop questioning, right? We don't even bother looking to see if what we just read is actually real, if it's cited, or if somebody has actually just created it with AI to target our rage, right, that is kind of deeply rooted in us now because these narratives, again, are this kind of patterns and discourse, these things that are just kind of bombarding us day in, day out, for days, years, you know, much of our lifetime, right? It's reinforced over and over and over again, and then we're just stuck to a point, you know, to make your point. And I was really kind of—you know, as I'm listening to kind of: What is the antidote? And you bring up the imposter syndrome, and I too—I share with—I share the sentiment. I think imposter syndrome is a really healthy thing because, you know, as we get deeper into our careers, people occasionally turn to us and go, "Well, you're, you know, you're well-read in this," or "You're an expert on this." And my first instinct is imposter syndrome, right? Like, "No, I don't—there's so much more I have to learn. I can't—I can't be that person." I think that's a healthy thing, right? I think it's not to suggest that I'm going to dismiss my responsibility to react or respond if I have more information than somebody else might on a topic, but it does force us to go, "Do I know the answer?" I was listening to a podcast yesterday with a nutrition scientist on the Trevor Noah show, which has become my—one of my favorite podcasts. And Trevor Noah, like three-fourths of the way through, he said, "What I really appreciate about you is you're a—you're an expert on nutrition science, and you have said, 'I don't know,' about a dozen times." And I kind of love that, right? It shows a level of modesty and humility and recognition that we don't have the answer for everything. We shouldn't. And we have—we have kind of come to this place now where everybody is an online expert, right? We—we all at least pretend to be. And what does that mean? That means we're less and less curious about people. We're less curious about their experiences. We're less curious even about why we might feel rage towards somebody or some group of people. And I think that point is really striking, and—and how we think about these kind of narratives that, right, are keeping us in many ways stuck. How do we—how do we challenge ourselves to go back to what you said early, right? You said early is like, "How do I—how do I get into my own head and go: Why is this narrative landing the way it's landing for me?"
Pardeep Singh Kaleka 58:10
Yeah. I mean, I think that—you know, we talk about this as clinicians, too. I mean, certainty—certainty could be its own sort of mental illness. And to get people who are cemented in certain types of thoughts to think of the gray. In the past, we've talked about sort of good versus bad, black and white. You know, those sort of dichotomous thought processes were symptomology of PTSD—the more rigid somebody was. You know, as much as that might—might have been a survival mechanism of saying, "Oh, that's them. This is us. Those people are bad. We are good". It's an—it's an oversimplification, which is getting in the way of us actually getting to a place of: "Do we—are we actually healing, or are we just trying to be right?" The hardest part to understand sometimes is none of us will ever, ever know, and it's okay, right? We can—we can try to keep progressing forward. And at the end of the day, I feel like we're all—we're all just walking each other home anyway, and we're doing the best we can. Give each other—give each other, you know, grace, compassion. Give yourself some grace and some compassion. Take it easy, relax, right? Let's not be so hard on each other.And yeah, I think just—we've gotten to the place where some—we've forgotten a lot of that, yeah.
Luke Waldo 59:46
Well, I love that. I just love the image of: "We're just walking each other home," right? We need—we probably need to do a lot more of that again, right? Where we're actually kind of walking—walking with one another, trying to see one another, right, and having some uninterrupted time to really get to know the person next to us, right? And I think you've—right, you've talked about how some of the narrative disruption in your—in your experience and your journey has just been that, right? Has just been being on a stage, for example, with Arno and being vulnerable together and showing your authentic kind of friendship and relationship to a group of people who maybe before that moment could never have imagined a Sikh Indian man and a former white supremacist sitting together—sitting together and doing so peacefully and lovingly, right? That act can disrupt it.
Pardeep Singh Kaleka 1:00:47
Yeah, Luke, that's one of the questions that we got most often over the years—was questions or just like this kind of comment of like, "This is so weird." It would be like, "Would you guys understand how weird this is?" And we're like, "No, no, we don't." And they're like, "No, this is—this is—this is just weird." And I think the reply becomes: "I hope at some point it becomes less weird."
Luke Waldo 1:01:16
Yeah, we—we are oftentimes confronted, as you pointed out earlier, with things that make us uncomfortable, right? And if we do so—you framed it beautifully, right? If we can lovingly make people uncomfortable, right? So create a space where people can get uncomfortable, but do so in a constructive manner, right? Not—not in a harmful manner. Do so in a constructive manner—if we can do that more and more, you look back at it a year or two from now and you go, "This isn't so weird anymore," and we've broken through some of these narratives that kept us stuck, kept us divided, kept us mistrustful of one another, and—and got to a deeper understanding of why we got to these dark places. So I really appreciate one—you again, sharing your story, this very, very hard story, and the—and the incredibly inspirational and powerful story that followed. And I think it's a—it's a really, really shining example that many of our listeners can—can pull from when they think about: "How do we confront these really harmful narratives or these complex, difficult narratives that just get us stuck, right, in either—as we discussed at the beginning—sometimes just let us move on from things we shouldn't move on from so quickly, or that give us a deeper insight into why people are struggling in our community, right, and what—what they—what they really need to be in a better place".
Pardeep Singh Kaleka 1:02:56
I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate your audience listening as well. Sometimes that's the greatest gift that we can give each other—is just to listen with an open heart. And I've been blessed to have so many people in my life that I can call friends and colleagues and heroes of mine as well. Shereos of mine. And I just think—I think, like—we do this work together.
Luke Waldo 1:03:34
Pardeep showed us that the "monster" narrative does two things: it dehumanizes the person who caused harm, and it gives society an excuse. It lets us avoid asking, "How did we create this monster? What conditions are producing the next one?" Right now, if violence has no roots, then healing has no path. That's why Pardeep reached out to Arno Michaelis just three months after the shooting—not because they agreed, but because they were both survivors of hate. Their friendship proved what research shows: meaningful relationships across difference are one of the strongest ways to reduce prejudice. But narrative disruption starts with ourselves. Before challenging how society sees hate, Pardeep examined his own relationship with power, with the "monster" in all of us. His faith tradition teaches, "I am not good and you are not bad," and the opposite is true too. These aren't abstract principles; they're practices that force us out of dichotomies. We're narratively trapped right now; algorithm-driven outrage has us cemented in stories we never question. But narrative creates identity. Identity drives behavior. Behavior shapes the world. Pardeep and Arno didn't change each other by arguing about who was right. They changed by being present, by understanding where the other comes from. But there's not enough of that anymore. We're psychologically, algorithmically siloed. So how do we create spaces for authentic relationships? How do we cultivate belonging that makes narrative change possible in our bodies, our communities, our daily lives? In our next episode, we explore exactly this with Valerie Frost, Shary Tran, and Tori Brasher Weathers—voices who understand what it means to build connection across difference through lived experience, cultural expression, and creating spaces where relationship and belonging can take root.As Pardeep reminded us, we're all just walking each other home. Let's give each other some grace. Let's not be so hard on each other, and let's start by listening with an open heart. You've been listening to Overloaded: Understanding Neglect. Until next time, keep asking: What stories shape how we see the world, and how can we tell them differently?
If you enjoyed today's episode, please share with friends, family, and colleagues. Also, leave us a rating or comment so that we can see your reaction and reach more people. This podcast would not have been possible without the support and talents of Nathan Fink, who is responsible for our technical production. I can't express my gratitude enough to Nathan. I'm also grateful to my team at the Institute for Child and Family Well-being at Children's Wisconsin, who drive the Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative and contributed to the ideas behind this podcast. Finally, I would like to thank all of our speakers that you have heard today and throughout the podcast for their partnership, their willingness to share their stories and expertise with me and all of you, and their commitment to improving the lives of children and families. I'm Luke Waldo, your host and executive editor. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.