Today, we’re so excited to speak with Ruchika Tulshyan, journalist, founder, and speaker and author.

Today, we’re so excited to speak with Abigail Hing Wen, the author of both the New York Times bestselling book Loveboat Taipei and her newest book, Loveboat Reunion.

Today we are here with Sybil Amuti, the founder of The Great Girlfriends platform, to talk about friendships, community, and so much more, especially as it relates to women.

Community. Gentrification. Generational wealth. Low status. Brain drain. When you read those terms, what comes to mind for you? If you know what those words mean, have you thought about how they play out in your own neighborhoods?

If you’re listening to this episode at the time of release, we’re three days past a momentous anniversary in United States history - and one that you may have never heard of.

There are those moments when you watch something or learn something, that changes how you see not only yourself, but our history, along with the future, completely differently.

Today we have the true honor of talking with Jelani Memory, the founder of A Kids Co, who sits down with us to talk about something that’s close to our hearts: talking to our kids.woman of color.

Middle age. What comes to mind? Next question: When you think of a woman who’s aged somewhere between her early 40s and mid 60s, who do you picture? And if you’re not one of then, when you’re thinking about women in this age range, how do they show up in your daily life? Do they show up? And, what race is the woman you pictured?

Depending on your answers, and your own stage of life, you’ll process the conversation with our next guest in different ways; something personal to you, or something that you might need to open your eyes to, especially if you’re in any sort of people-facing business. No matter what, it’s a conversation that we should all be having more frequently. For us, our big takeaway was that there is more than just the maiden-mother-sage concept to the trajectory of womanhood: there is also the queen phase. That’s midlife. And that’s what Valerie Albarda talks with us about, to make sure midlife women are not made to feel invisible - with the extra layer of what it’s like to be a midlife woman of color.

Have you ever felt like you don’t belong somewhere simply because of one or more of your identities? Being biracial, we’ve felt that way in various settings - sometimes all White crowds, sometimes Asian affinity groups. And sometimes in rooms full of men… anyway, you get the picture. And what we can say is that growing up that way leads to a lot of introspection, learning to tune into our own intuition to listen to the messages it’s trying to tell us, and working to stop prioritizing our brains - which, if we’re honest, can justify and try to explain away a lot and make us feel like we’re not “enough” and need to keep going - and listen our body’s messages instead. It’s something we are still working on. I don’t know if we can say it enough - we think the inner work of self awareness is the foundation of being able to do the outer work of tackling racism. And it’s work that people of all races can be part of.

That’s why we’re so grateful that Kim Thai of Ganesh Space was willing to take the time to speak with us today about her experiences as a queer Asian woman, a person who brings mindfulness to her spaces in order to help dismantle internalized oppression.

Warning that today’s episode does drop a few explicit words in it, so mind those ears.

If you’ve been on LinkedIn recently, it’s likely that someone you know has liked something that our next guest has written - because her posts are just THAT GOOD. But it wasn’t just her LinkedIn activism that made us want to sit down with her today - it was some impactful articles that she wrote, including one for Cosmopolitan in 2019 and one for the Harvard Business Review in 2021, that made us excited to talk about something that we haven’t really touched on, on the podcast to date: colorism.

If you’re sitting there asking yourself, what is colorism, or what does that have to do with race, systemic racism, and how we look at people - then marketing and advertising, as we’ve known it to always exist in the United States, has largely been doing its job. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right job - in fact, today, we’re going to talk all about why it’s so important to understand colorism as a fundamental piece of our systems that affect us all (like racism), and also the very personal impact that it can have on people. We’re here to learn in 2022, and to keep asking those questions that make us think deeper and challenge what we’ve always been told.

One thing that we’ve found to be true, from discussions around the book, to how to have uncomfortable conversations around the dinner or holiday tables, to sharing the stories that we are so lucky to be able to get to do on this podcast - it all comes back to how this work, the hard work of inclusion, anti-racism, and how to make lasting change, has to start first from within. We have to see each other as humans first, and find those commonalities so that we can then address our differences. Cancel culture isn’t working out. We need bridges in order to be able to see that new world.

This skill of looking within - it’s something that we talk about so much with our kids and their learning but something that we, as adults, largely brush to the side as one of those nebulous “nice to haves”. But that’s where we go wrong. We need empathy now more than ever, and today’s guest, Syah, is here to show us how to approach conversations - and indeed, all the spheres of influence that we each hold - with that empathy that we need to make intentional, lasting change. There were light bulb moments for both of us throughout this podcast, and we’d love to hear if any came up for you all as well.

One of the questions that often has come up around our recent publication of our book (leave us a review on Amazon!) is what it was like to write the book during the end of 2020. And one of the things that always sticks out to us is that the problems, the racism, the treatment of non White people in this country that we wrote about in great detail throughout the book, didn’t get fixed in 2020, or 2021. In fact, every single chapter that we wrote in the second and third sections of the book has reoccurred numerous times over since we wrote the book. We’re not in some post racial world here. We didn’t fix racism because people suddenly realized that it was still happening sometime in the summer of 2020.

And our next guest knows that all too well. Tamara Winfrey-Harris wrote The Sisters Are Alright in 2015, and just released a second edition to this book this year. Not because racism is over, or we figured out intersectional feminism, or that we’re even all on the same page - not at all. The second edition includes so much more information about the stereotypes and experiences of Black women in America, what we need to know when it comes to intersectional feminism, interracial friendships, and simply co-existing with and respecting everyone. In the end, the sisters are alright. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a ton of work to do - so start by listening in and reflecting on your own perceptions, experiences, and things YOU can do differently.

Our next guest is not only the author of a book we both can’t wait to read - Decolonizing Wellness - but also talks specifically to those individuals who are at the intersection of BIPOC and LGBTQ identities. When you think about bodies, beauty, and self-care, that’s often a group that gets lost, not only in popular consciousness but also in media portrayals of what is considered desirable or attractive. And, when you’re struggling to be seen, or fit in, or even survive - this can be devastating.

This was yet again one of those conversations that we didn’t want to end, and each of us walked away with different ways to think about not only our own bodies, but what we put in them, how we interact with those around us with regard to wellness - especially kids, and ways in which we can better support and understand the struggle of marginalized individuals when it comes to preconceived notions of health and beauty.

When we sat down to talk with our next two guests, we were already big fans. They had presented as part of the Embodied Social Justice certificate course that we had taken together this summer, and their theme was clear: how we end racism. In one generation.

So, if your immediate reaction is one of incredulity, then maybe you need to hear this episode more than you think. Because their method is not one of hammering hard facts into people’s heads - it’s an approach based primarily on love, compassion, and our shared humanity. We talk in-depth about the conversations that can bring seemingly opposite people together, even when issues of politics and race would normally divide them. (And - if you’re looking for more tips on how to HAVE those uncomfortable conversations that may be happening in the next couple of weeks around your own holiday tables, we’ve got those details in depth next week!). At the end of our chat, we realized that this was the conversation we all, collectively, need to have, if we’re really serious about moving the needle when it comes to racism.