How do we disrupt patterns of white supremacy and racism at home? Guests Jasmine and Mo of the Parenting is Political podcast join to share their experiences, advice, and compassion. We're in this together.
How do we disrupt patterns of white supremacy and racism at home? Guests Jasmine and Mo of the Parenting is Political podcast join to share their experiences, advice, and compassion. We're in this together.
There are some great podcasts out there by and for LGBTQ plus families. What I learned about the podcast and the website parenting is political. I listened to the most recent two episodes and I was hooked. After you finish listening to this episode, I highly recommend listening to parenting is political, especially two recent episodes on urgency and perfectionism with me today. To continue the awesome conversations started on their own podcast are the hosts, moe and jasmine. Mo is a queer gender non-binary person and jasmine is a queer, cisgender person. Together they raise their blended family in Arkansas where things are always political. Parenting is political, is a digital project that seeks to shift to the conversations and narratives that surround family and parenting, moe and Jasmine present culture, influencing conversations via their podcast and provide resources for the community via their website. So welcome Mo and Jasmine.
Speaker 2:Hey.
Speaker 1:Um, so the question that I ask everybody as we start all the episodes and you can both answer is who is in your family and how was it formed?
Speaker 2:Go for it man. All right. Well in our family it's um, jasmine and myself, Mo and we have our oldest daughter's Zahra who just turned 12. Our middle daughter Addison who is nine to bias is our older of the two. He's about to turn, what is it, eight, that's almost a nine, but that's how old last news. And then, um, we have a little baby who just turned one whose name is August. And then we also have um, two dogs, which are also very a giant wiener dog named Kevin and a tiny little rat terrier named Bruce. Kevin full name is Kevin Bacon Alexander, which is critical information primarily so that when we're at the park we can scream, don't pee on that Kevin Bacon.
Speaker 1:That sounds so satisfying to get to. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1:What then inspired you to create parenting is political both as a website resource and as a podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll take that one. Since it was my idea to jasmine was like, I'm going to help you mo. I recently found myself without a job as a nonbinary person living in Arkansas, which was unfortunately pretty common and our youngest child August had just been born and so I decided instead of trying to go back and find a job where I would be treated fairly, that I would just hang out at home with August and help raise that little one and in my free time I just kept thinking, man, I am in love with podcasts. I love listening to them, but I have not found like a parenting podcast that is inclusive of who I am as a person. I didn't want to keep listening to these podcasts about the seven best tips of how to get your kid to take a nap when you want them to or like what to do on your family, vacation to Disney. Like those things just are great for some folks, but they didn't apply to me as a non-binary parent in a blended family. I'm with black kids and a black wife living in the south and all of these things mixed together. It's just it. I'd never found that. So in my frustration, I was venting one night to jasmine and I said, I just want to start my own and I'm going to call it parenting is political because everything about our lives is political and she goes, you should. And here we are when you're later. I'm fumbling our way through, uh, making these podcasts that are just driven out of a desire to have conversations centered around, um, what it means to exist in a society and just based on your existence, if you're outside of the norm as just resistance and how, how to show up and, and, uh, take care of yourselves and that and be gentle with yourselves and also continue to push, push the boundaries of radical living, which is just basically existing.[inaudible] that makes sense.
Speaker 3:I think that often what we were running into is that, uh, is this reality. We of course, we know that sort of like this libertarian archipelago of violence exist, right? That uplifts the quote unquote traditional family, which is super rooted in white supremacy and cisgender patriarchy and those values and we know they're inherently, they're inherently violent and that they erase queer families. The other thing though is that there is also the left and some of the kneel liberal movement in, in political conversations really just only normalized heteronormative relationships. Um, it's typically two cisgender queer folks who are playing man and woman sort of energy that heteronormative, um, expectation of how families are built. And so as you know, one of the things that we've talked about previously is we're also like non-monogamous people and so interested in really important for us to say, Hey, there is nothing, quote unquote unwholesome about our pure family. And that everything that we do in life is a political choice, right? It either seeks to support the status quo, which is rooted in patriarchy, capitalism and anti-black white supremacy or it subverts it. Um, it comes into direct conflict. And so we wanted to create a space where people could have those conversations, they could explore what does it look like? I'm being open and consenting and informed. And how you create a culture of family and the story of family itself. And I think that we've been doing a pretty good job so far.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'd say so. So those, the, the two episodes that I had mentioned earlier, you did an episode on urgency and perfectionism. So how did you decide to focus those episodes on those particular two characterizations of white
Speaker 3:supremacy culture? Yeah. Um, we have a resource and we link to it on our site that is a part of a training, um, resource that several folks developed in community with one another around how white supremacy culture shows up in organizational settings. And we believe that it's not just organizational settings, right? It's any, any kind of a system or partnership that's developed within that infrastructure of an organization or life. Um, and so we chose those particular episodes because we saw in the questions and the comments that folks would send us or email things they, they would always ask around, I have this respectability, I have this need for my kid to not make these mistakes or we know that things are really politically, uh, violent in this time. And I want to teach my child how to be an ally, but I have to do it now because it's otherwise it's too late. And so we just sort of the tenor and tone of how people were approaching things since then. We, um, recorded an episode on conflict, you know, open complex, which is another habit of white supremacy. So we're continuing in that work. But those two in particular perfectionism and urgency are pretty pervasive in parenting manuals in what we were told to be as parents who are children and caretakers. So
Speaker 2:yeah, we, we definitely wanted to focus on those two. I think because of that centering it back on the parenting, it's just so hard to overcome that idea of like I have to be the perfect parent. Um, but s so much in society defines perfection as a standard of whiteness or a standard of being cisgender standard that's compared to heteronormativity and we were trying in their heart and those episodes was to kind of course correct how we were defining perfectionism and how, who gets to set that standard even in the first place and why it's a myth. And a second place and how, how you as parents or as individuals are caretakers. Because our podcast is also for folks who aren't, aren't parents who, um, are just existing them in the world. And it's also for folks who take care of young kids but don't consider themselves parents. Um, to just really like focus on not falling into that trap of perfectionism. And then to also kind of bounce off of what you said with the urgency episode, we just have noticed, especially since the 2016 election, this sense of like, I have to do this now. It has to be done because I want to stop the next terrible thing from happening and I'm just going to jump in. And it just kind of like snowballs from there. And it's usually done in this sense of like, I'm this like white savior person who is needed in this instance and I'm going to jump in and not think about it. And it's like very harmful. And if we relate that to parenting of just like this sense of urgency to make sure that our kids are being taught x, Y and Z or even like super basic like everyday stuff like we have to get to the store in two minutes so I don't care that you're having a meltdown about this. We have to go and keep this schedule and like Dah Dah Dah Dah Dah. And so just try to like on our end of things to just really provide concrete examples of how in everyday living on a very small scale and very micro scale and then also on like a very large scale in our society, what it means to push back against that idea of perfectionism, innocence of urgency.
Speaker 1:Are there ways in which perfectionism and urgency and th that white supremacy culture uniquely impact Queer families? You, you've mentioned that a little bit, but I'm really interested in talking about that more.
Speaker 2:There's like basically the gist of our podcast. You know, kind of going back to what I had said in a previous answer about who gets to create that standard, that sense of urgency that we feel, um, is a, it's a, um, it's a standard that was set against, you know, white supremacy. Patriarchy is capitalism able bodied, um, cis-gendered standard. And so for Queer familie s and families that fall in all iterations outside of that standard, we will never match up to that perfection, right? It, we're set up to fail from the very beginning. And so it deeply impacts us because not only are we striving for a standard that wasn't meant for us, but we still feel that, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3:Our society socializes us toward transphobia and queer phobia. There is a lot of pressure. Like we can talk all day about the external pressure, but the internalized messages we often do not address. Um, and one of those that I see show up with so many families that we have touch points with is this, there's only one right way to be like a good queer family. And it's around how the system of patriarchy and white supremacy and capitalism use tokens to uphold their, their standard. And so you'll have queer folks who are in their forties and had found themselves in heterosexual relationships and only just are realizing the depth of their queerness or that their gender, um, was wrongly assigned to them at birth. And that they have a different way that they are identifying or expressing themselves and then they, they build so much pressure to change their story or to be ashamed of it or, or not lean into that story because the, there's the real quote unquote Cinderella Story. Acceptable story of queerness is like, I came out when I was young and I knew when I dated and I fell in love and then I got married and we bought a Volvo and, or Subaru. Yeah. And we got a golden retriever and then we found a donor and then we had a baby, right? Like it's, it's the blacks so rooted and like classism and Whiteness and accessibility. But for some people it's like, Yo, I, uh, got married to a dude and wasn't, didn't understand and went through a bunch of trauma and came out as queer and now my non-binary wife is raising three of my children and we had one together with someone that we borrowed their sperm from. Right? Like it's, it's not this clean cut story. And often those stories are pitched as like mistakes or too messy or they would confuse other people. But families come together in all sorts of ways. We can have conversations around perfectionism and not, and not realize that we're really applying this pressure on ourselves to have the ideal family story. But no, there, there is no wrong way to be a queer family.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I, I had an episode not too long ago where it was myself and two other people with queer parents and talking about like divorce and our families and how difficult that can really be for people going through a divorce. But then for the youth, you know, or, or adults of, of those queer folks because so often queer spas, people with LGBTQ parents feel a pressure to, to uphold that perfectionism. And we have to be happy, our family has to be healthy and happy and we have to be doing great in order to like prove something
Speaker 3:right and just so much social pressure of hide what's happening because if they see that queer folks can't keep it together, it will prove that we didn't deserve to be a family member or that we shouldn't have been given the rights marriage. But listen, heterosexual people have been jacking up the institution of more than family for far longer on the books. So, uh, if anything, I feel like we're improving it and we're expanding the, the definitions of boundaries in love and, and what makes up family
Speaker 1:[inaudible] yeah, something else that you had brought up and one of the episodes talked about hierarchy in our families and how that plays into urgency. And so I really, really liked that. How you discussed how a sense of urgency can amplify those hierarchies or those sort of unequal dynamics in families. You know, you talk about I'm the parent and we need to do x right now and without having then that time for discussion and other voices. So in your, in your own family, what are some of the ways that you've taken more time to deconstruct those hierarchies or, or think about them as parents and then also like together as a family?
Speaker 3:Yeah, we just did this last name[inaudible] we're over, you're chuckling cause we were like, oh goodness, we were having this conversation because an extended family member is for a job in the New England area and we of course are in the south. And uh, Mo really wants to pursue some educational opportunities that aren't available to nonbinary people in this area. And we just had this moment of clarity of, oh okay, we probably going to have to move again. And we just moved in April. And before we even got into the official planning process, they said, well, we have to put this before the kids and we have to have a conversation, uh, because we made some commitments to them around school. And you know, this is a part of shaping their lives. And so we sit down with our kids and we say, nothing's in stone right now, but here's what we're thinking. We'd love your feedback. We'd love to see, um, where your input is. And that's just really our attempt to deconstruct this hierarchy of we, you know, have power as far as your parents. So we know that what is best for you. And also trying to model consent and interdependence in the context of family so that our kids, whenever they become adults and whoever they decide to have any kind of relationship with, they have a blueprint of how to negotiate their needs and communicate, right? This is a time for testing and experimenting for how, for them to advocate for themselves, for them to disagree in a way that's safe for them to escalate things that they think should be escalated. And if they can't do that in the context of family, where do they learn that usually out in the world after the time has passed for them to develop those skills and it's incredibly painful, um, psychosocial developmental process to have all these pressures on you as a young adult and have no skills around being able to be in principle struggle or your needs and negotiating the needs of the collective and whomever else you're engaging with. So that's really how we try and deconstruct our full power family.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I, um, I spend, you know, a lot of my time with those Kiddos and um, I tried to do it on a very like, micro level and so that usually comes down to like, Hey Baba, can I have this sugar item? And I'm like, okay, well like as the parent who could take all the power and say, no, you know, we're not going to do that right now, or whatever. I say, well, what do you think? Let's talk about it. Like if you have this sugar item, do you think that'll affect how you're going to like be able to follow directions whenever I say it's time to clean up the front room or do you think that if you could have the sugar item right now, you think that you'll still be able to be in control of, you know, your responses and your thoughts and your actions and if they say, yeah, I think I got it, Baba, I think I can do it and I'll be at, cool, go for it. Try it out, try it out. Because that's just so opposite of how I was raised. I was raised as this like autonomous like robot. Like I just had to follow the directions. I never questioned it. And then I got to college and graduated college and I didn't have that life plan set out for me anymore. It was like you got to it out on your own. I was like, I don't even know how to make a basic decision because like I've been told my whole life, no or yes and don't question it. And because I was the person in the family who didn't have the power because of the hierarchy of like parents making the decisions and kids don't. And we just don't believe in our family that just because like we're older that we can control our kids, they're not ours to control. They're, they're ours to like help understand the world and the impacts of those choices. And our job as the parents of these beautiful children is to like, just offer our wisdom and our devices as best as we can. But we, we don't want to be raising a generation of kids who don't know how to do this
Speaker 3:empowered in jobs. I think the other like striking layer to that around our race shows up is, uh, you know, and of course is our, a, is a transgender girl. So there's also implications there, but black children are socialized everywhere externally to accept authority, particularly like white state authority. Um, and to be like, Here's control of your body, here's control of your thoughts. Anti-Blackness is the control and subjugation and ultimately leading to the violence and destruction of black lives. Right. And so the last thing we want to do is condition our children to completely be okay with power and control from hierarchical powers. Right. It's, and so we want to always be mindful that we're not siding with those oppressive dynamics in society and conditioning our children to accept those standards. Right.
Speaker 1:But no, as, as you mentioned, that was so different than your own experience growing up. So I imagine there's gotta be moments where you have to like remind yourselves or like do those like personal check-ins or like step into another room, breathe a little comeback in, you know, so w what have you done to enable you to do that? Because that's something that it seems like you really have to think things through in prep and like, you know, also be present, you know, as another person in, in that, you know, family cohort.
Speaker 2:Oh, totally. Um, I mean it's, for me it's like, it's, it's a lot of conversations with jasmine and we have with each other about like how we were raised and the implications of that as we are parents now. But honestly, a lot of it's also like I make mistakes and my family calls me out on it. Yeah. And they go, hey, that's a, we don't actually, we don't actually believe that. Or like that's not how we're going to like show up in this space right now. And so I've had to learn how to receive that feedback from my kids and from my wife in front of my kids. This idea of like we're usually, we're very scared of conflict or being corrected. We want it to be private and secret because we are afraid of what that might mean or what that might say of us. I'm in a way to push back against that is to practice it our own families. Right. That's the place where we were starting. The other part of it, either half of it is I go back to my kids and I apologize s like the main like society, you never hear of anybody encouraging parents to go and apologize to their kids because that quote unquote will be like, you served their power and they'll not respect you anymore. But we just think that that's so false and we think that it's so important to show young folks that like we make mistakes as older people as adults. And, and it's important that you realize that like you deserve an apology and you deserve the chance to be like, Hey, that hurt me and I didn't like that. And for the person who you know is older to be like, you're right, I'm sorry that I did that. I will try my best. Here are the steps I'm going to take to make sure I don't do that again.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So K so accountability, regular habits of repair.
Speaker 1:Well, so something that I've been thinking after listening was white supremacy culture touches everything from how we learn to public transportation and access to it, to health care and for LGBTQ families and people like we're not that standard model. So we are men or non-binary people having babies where two people, two men adopting and who need parental leave that is not built into their work policies. You know, we're queer spawn whose school is holding a daddy daughter dance or you know, a mother son something. And so like, again, our family doesn't fit into that. So I'd love your, your thoughts on how can we be pushing back against these, you know, forces that want us to fit that certain model.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I think that one of the most beautiful habits of resistance that's happening in our, all of our movement spaces is just sort of like this punk rock spirit of I like we can make it ourselves, we can do it ourselves. And instead of trying to reform a system that was designed to harm us, right? Like a lot of the family movement stuff is designed to harm us and to um, ostracize us or a racist. We are creating our own spaces. So I think it takes all of us in every cross-section. It takes folks like us who are trying to inform culture and just develop stories. It takes research, it takes policy change and then it just takes practice. But so many of us are conditioned to want to be excepted by CIS Hetero society that we want to go to those daddy daughter dances and we don't want to plan our own. We just want to be included. But what we don't realize is once we're there, it's, it's harmful. The messaging doesn't change. And to be present just for representation Sake is not justice. So justice is that self determination and that powerful spirit that I often see in my black movement spaces of how can we make something that is appropriate for our culture and our ecosystem. So I love seeing families creating their own dances and you know, figuring out new radical ways to, to school or unschool their children. Those kinds of things are the solutions and there's a critical mass that happens, right? The more of us who are finding ourselves in spaces that were
Speaker 2:we're passionate about and we're showing up fully as our authentic selves, then more people are invited and it's you being vulnerable and authentic and then soon like it's a room full of us. And some of us just have the capacity to just like keep living, you know, because like our living in our existence is resistance enough. Absolutely. And taking good care of yourself and taking good care of your family is not selfish. It's like literal resistance in a system that wants to squash you. There's no right way to do it. And so in the middle in that middle ambiguity and like that gray space of just like, I wish there were a model but there's not and like we're going to push back against that idea of there needing to be a model. We just always encourage folks to just like rest take care of yourself as well in the media.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We have to hold intention trying to build this brand new world, this like speculative fiction world where black lives are centered, queer black lives in particular Trans folks, right? But we also know that we live in the constraints of this current existence. And so for some people getting, you know, quietly attending a daddy daughter dance is there harm reduction and that is completely valid. Not everyone has to be this like organizer disruptor who's sticking it to the man. So how has being a parent changed your perspective on the way that these negative outside forces are impacting you? You know, there is a saying in addition to all the hundreds of other things. I do in this role, I'm also a licensed therapist. And one of the things that you learn as you go through that system of training and exploration is that each developmental milestone where you experienced trauma, when your child hits that milestone, even if they haven't experienced trauma, user re-experience it with them. And so for me, as I was developing a critical consciousness or sort of like what people call woke, you know, when I was waking up to all of the things, all the trash that is a part of our, the framework of our society, I realized how complicit I was and how much I was a participant in that system. And I just had this intersection where I realized I could recapitulate those harms that I'd experienced as a young person and I'm still facing as an adult or I could choose a different way as much as possible. And so it really became about conscious parenting at each moment that I'm able to be present and make choices to no longer condition my children into that violent system and no longer be complicit in it. But kids are really young people are really good about bringing us back to ourselves in the present moment and acting as mirrors. And I didn't like the version of myself that I was seeing reflected back at me in so many ways.
Speaker 1:And did you seek then the like being around other parents or therapy, you know, as a licensed therapist? Like, so when you saw those things, what did you, what did you need and what did you find in those moments to help you through that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it took a lot of internal work around therapy for my own traumas because you know, there are some big t traumas and little t traumas and then a lot of it was just political education[inaudible] and rejecting standards of parenting that is really commercial and mainstream. And then just being in relationship with my child instead of being, you know, I'm the parents or know how to do everything and I'm just going to do this thing. I'm going to raise you, I'm going to rear you. It became, we're in a relationship, so how do we, how do I listen to you? How can you listen to me and how can we figure out what the way for it looks like? And my kid's relationship with me is going to be different than everybody else's. But really I just have this beautiful collective of parents who are trying to figure out how do they also raise their kids in a way that is just and oriented toward liberty liberation and we just workshop stuff together and we're just really honest and vulnerable with one another and it's messy. There's no, you could not buy a book to parent in this way, although we are working on that.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I think for me, I had a very different experience. I was an instead of parents. So Jasmine had already when to, when we fell in love, she had already had three kids.
Speaker 3:The U haul on our second thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1:yeah.
Speaker 2:You're going to be asking for those. And so I jumped into like this whole family system thing that was already kind of going for me. However, I am a white person and I found myself, I'm suddenly in a relationship with three beautiful black kids. And so for me, I started a very rapid education of what it means to be black in America, um, particularly what it means to be like a black kid in school, in America. Um, and so I started to do a lot of self education around basically how to not be a terrible white person.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The anti racism, political education. Yeah. It's like a iron man if you're going to raise a child. Yes.
Speaker 2:From a different race. I just feel like everything has changed for me since I've been a parent. I guess to answer your question around how we understand this, because I, I never would've had these experiences this intimately had I not been in a relationship like this. I don't think,
Speaker 3:and I have to name that even as like a queer black, black feminist, I did not have an analysis or practice, meaning I didn't have a practice. And, um, anything that informed the philosophy of my life around gender identity. And so when my, when my child who I designed male at birth, started showing some developmental manifestations that were in misalignment with a gender that I had wrongly assigned, it took me like I had to come to terms despite the fact that I was in the community who I knew Trans Women in the world. It took me evaluating my own internalized transphobia and figuring out, okay, how do I take care of this kid? How do I show up? Um, and, and support this self determination and dignity that is owed to this child. And so I also had a rapid, like moe had to come to terms with history of white supremacy. I had to come to terms with the ways in which queer folks in particular perpetuate transphobia and violence. And during that time, of course, moe was also on this path of psychosocial development around their gender identity and expression. And so, yeah, it's just been, and it's, it's one of those things, right? Like if someone reveals something to you about themselves and you love them, and justice orients us to transforming in service of that person's wellbeing.
Speaker 1:Any final thoughts or even a thought of like, what's next? What's next for parenting is political,
Speaker 3:what's next for us
Speaker 2:next? And like you said, we're going to continue our series on exploring what the characteristics of white supremacy culture are and um, how they relate to us as individuals and us as parents or people who are taking care of young kids.
Speaker 3:And we've got a book proposal together and look for literary agents, uh, to, to, to, to do that. What we said, we write that manual about what does radical parenting look like, what can those real tangible resources that we can get in the hands of folks. Yeah. So hopefully a book will be coming soon and we're just live in our queer black life here in Arkansas.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, I really, really appreciate it. Thank you both so much. Again, encourage everybody to now take a listen to parenting is political and read in, check out the website. So, uh, thank you Lauren. Jasmine, thank you so much.[inaudible] again, thank you for joining us today. Please rate, review and subscribe to outspoken voices. You can find outspoken voices on our website, soundcloud, iTunes, stitcher, and wherever you get[inaudible]
Speaker 4:your podcasts. You can find family equality council@familyequality.org and on Facebook and Instagram at family equality and on Twitter at family underscore equality. Until next time. Remember that love, justice,
Speaker 1:family and equality is what brings our families together.