'The Sound of the Genuine': Howard Thurman's Profound Message for a Divided Nation
You may see what's happening in the US as progress. You may see it as a decline, and even an existential threat to the future of democracy. You may feel caught somewhere in between—seeing both the progress and the problems—embracing uncertainty rather than clinging to a narrative that only tells part of the story.
Politics and media today thrive on division, leaving very little room for the power of our reason and hearts. We're told to fear the other side, to see them as the enemy, to never question our own beliefs. Yet from this increasingly dominant worldview, I believe we're losing something essential—our ability to truly see and hear each other.
Fear keeps us reactive. It shuts down curiosity. We extrapolate one aspect of who a person is and reduce them to labels—white supremacists, Nazis, woke left, sheeple, anti-vaxxers, anti-science crusaders, conspiracy theorists, racists, transphobes, misogynists, and countless others. We end up knowing less about each other, but assuming we know more.
Howard Thurman was a visionary theologian, educator, and spiritual guide whose work laid the foundation for the civil rights movement. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, radical empathy, and the search for common ground shaped leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and continue to challenge us today.
Below is a profound excerpt from his 1980 sermon, The Sound of the Genuine. It is a beautiful reminder to pause and reflect on what we really seek beneath all the societal noise—and what it means to truly listen, both to ourselves and to each other.
With faith in a transforming world,
Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info
Note: If this resonates with you, explore our Substack on healing the culture wars, where we share real-life examples of social healing and deeper wisdom to break the cycle of polarization.
The Sound of the Genuine
Howard Thurman, 1980, Spelman College
There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. Nobody like you has ever been born and no one like you will ever be born again—you are the only one.
I have a blind friend who just became blind after she was a grown woman. I asked her: “What is the greatest disaster that your blindness has brought to you?” She said, “When I go places where there are people, I have a feeling that nobody knows that I'm here. I can't see any recognition, I can't see… and if nobody knows that I'm here, it's hard for me to know where I am.”
There is something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in your mother, in your father, in the people you can't stand. If you had the power, you would wipe them out. But instinctively you know that if you wipe them out, you go with them. So you fight for your own life by finding some way to get along with them without killing them.
There is something in you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in other people. And if you can't hear it, then you are reduced by that much. If I were to ask you what is the thing that you desire most in life, you would say ... things that I thought you ought to think that you should say. But I think that if you were stripped to whatever there is in you that is literal and irreducible, and you tried to answer that question, the answer may be something like this:
I want to feel that I am thoroughly and completely understood so that now and then I can take my guard down and look out around me and not feel that I will be destroyed with my defenses down. I want to feel completely vulnerable, completely naked, completely exposed and absolutely secure.
That I can run the risk of radical exposure and know that the eye that beholds my vulnerability will not step on me.
That I can feel secure in my awareness of the active presence of my own idiom in me.
So as I live my life then, this is what I'm trying to fulfill. It doesn't matter whether I become a doctor, lawyer, housewife, house husband.
This is not my afternoon. That I'm secure because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself.
And having learned to listen to that, I can become quiet enough, still enough, to hear the sound of the genuine in you.
Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible then for me to go down in me, and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes, having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me. And the wall that separates and divides will disappear. And we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.
Now this is your assignment. And you can never say again that nobody told you.
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