169: Summer Kick-Off And AMA About Being Biracial

This summer, instead of spending 50-60 minutes sharing some of the most amazingly honest and thought provoking conversations that we’ve been personally privileged to have (the listen), or doing a deep dive into some part of our collective history that we may have never learned about in school (the learn), or sometimes getting up on our soapbox to get loud and angry about what’s going on in current events and what we can do about it (the act), we’re shaking things up a bit. (Don’t worry - we’ll definitely do all of those things in the fall…).

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Sara BlanchardComment
168: The Overground Railroad with Candacy Tayor

Today we’re going to speak with Candacy Taylor about her carefully researched book about the Green Book, called the Overground Railroad (doesn’t the title alone make you want to hear more)? We not only discuss the immense hurdles and realities for Black people who were just trying to go somewhere by car, but we also discuss topics like sundown towns (you may be surprised to hear that you might be living in one, historically), how institutionalized racism appears through overpasses, and what we all can do to make change right now.

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Episode # 156

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?

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Episode # 152

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.

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Episode # 151

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.

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Episode # 150

We had a different episode planned for this week, but in light of the fight that is going down in the Senate right now, we needed to re-release this episode on the filibuster, with a special introduction as to why we should all care about the Freedom to Vote Act and The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and encourage you to call your Senators to act on the filibuster.*

* If you’re part of the Trump-backed forces of authoritarianism, you probably don’t care. But if you truly want America to be a democracy in its current state (and if you love parts of the Constitution, you should probably be all about this too) - you should be really loudly vocally supporting both bills.

The problem with bills like these though is that, much like a theory like CRT, people make judgments about what they THINK are in those bills rather than actually sitting down and reading them. And, as a great email from Heather Cox Richardson pointed out, “It’s worth reading what’s actually in the bills because, to my mind, it is bananas that they are in any way controversial.” We break this down, and then tell you all about the filibuster, so that you’re empowered to use your voice to protect democracy.

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Sara BlanchardComment