In this episode of the ARISE podcast, Danielle, Rebecca, and Jenny are joined by Michael Thornhill, author of The First, The Few and The Only, for a powerful conversation about tokenism, racialized stress, embodiment, integration, and the cost of being “the only one with your face in the room.” Michael shares how the book emerged from years of writing, research, vocational rupture, and a profound bodily crisis that forced him to reckon with the toll of chronic racial stress in Black and Brown bodies. Together, the conversation moves through the meaning of “mirror memoir,” the quiet violence of tokenism, the limits of institutional belonging, and the painful question of whether integration has ever truly led to freedom. Michael names tokenism not as an accident, but as a structural imposition that keeps Black and Brown people carrying the cost of systems designed to consume them. The group also reflects on impossible choices facing marginalized communities—from civil rights struggles to current immigration cases—and considers whether liberation requires reform, revolution, departure, resistance, or all of the above. This episode is an invitation to tell the truth about what our bodies have known, to honor the stories buried beneath survival, and to ask what becomes possible when we stop mistaking endurance for freedom.
Michael Thornhill’s book, The First, The Few and The Only, is available through the official book site and shop. The site describes Thornhill as an AfroCuban author, consultant, and recovering DEI practitioner whose work explores race, erasure, tokenism, and mixed identity in North America.
Book / author links: https://www.thefirstthefewandtheonly.com/about
Official book site: https://www.thefirstthefewandtheonly.com/shop
Instagram: @thefirstthefewandtheonly
Telling the Truth and Taking Your Story Seriously
Michael
“The first thing that comes to mind for the listeners is you need to take your story seriously enough to tell the truth. If you're going to write anything… you need to be honest. And if I remember your question correctly, to anyone who's the first, few, and the only, what that means is if you've ever been the only one with your face in the room, when you enter a room, you find yourself counting how many brown faces are there all the time at the church, on the school bus, in the youth group. If you've gotten so used to counting that you forget you're doing it, this book is for you.”
“I wrote something called a mirror memoir and what that means to me is a phrase I coined to basically reflect what black and brown people do whenever they get together and discuss what's happened to them in a white world, that whether across lunch tables or whispered in hallways, you end up regurgitating something that happened to you and then next thing you know, the space between you becomes a mirror because you're kind of like, ‘Oh yeah, that happened to me too.’”
“They feel well worn. They don't have their shock impact. There's not as much of a recoil and of course they feel old, but they also feel not polished in a sense of pedestal, but in a sense of a smooth rock that's been beat up by the waves against this cliff and they're like gems now. It just feels like something that's been well beaten down to the point of beauty and I feel it and yet it also feels good to name because it's like my body isn't the cage for it anymore.”