George Floyd has been laid to rest, but the conversation around race relations in America is just getting started. It’s been a long time, generations perhaps, since America talked this much about race.  Positive steps are happening, but there’s so much to be done. Oprah Winfrey is one of those asking today “Where do we go from here?” Tuesday night, in the first of two town halls she is holding on the subject Winfrey spoke to “black thought leaders, activists and artists about systematic racism and the current state of America.” Here are some of the moments that stood out.

Oprah Winfrey

“We can’t move forward without calling out that pain. Watching the life seep from George Floyd’s body caused a kind of universal shock and pain. For black people everywhere, we recognized that knee on the neck.”

“Isn’t it very much like in the days of Jim Crow when black men would be lynched and dragged through the town as an example for other people to see, watching black men be shot on camera and nothing happens is a triggering thing? There’s this memory that we have of everything that’s gone in the past, so when this keeps occurring, it is re-traumatizing.” 

Nikole Hannah-Jones, Founder of the “1619 Project” 

“We’re thinking too small, because this is really a time where we can expand on Black economic inequality, that’s fundamentally what we need to be addressing, We can’t just be talking about policing. If we’re going to talk about that, we also need to be trying to put forth an economic agenda that would have to include reparations, because there is no way without actually paying reparations to the descendants of those enslaved, that we can deal with the economic gap that Black people perennially have.”

David Oyelowo, Actor “Selma”

“I had made the mistake of thinking that things would be different for my son. I say mistake because I had watched things progress in some ways, but then the knee on the neck is so symbolic of so much. It’s something that I hadn’t realized that I had internalized in a way that makes it difficult for me to function. I hadn’t realized how deep the wounds were. I have spent so much of the last two weeks crying. One of the moments where that began was when I went to speak to my son and I didn’t have the words, because George Floyd wasn’t resisting arrest. So it’s not like saying to my son, ‘Put your hands on the dash, don’t be confrontational.’ Those conversations are already emasculating to basically say, ‘Forget about justice in an interaction with the police, come home alive.’”

Watch part one of the town hall above. Part two airs tonight on OWN at 9pm ET.