Decolonize Yourself: EO – Welcome Episode
Welcome to Decolonize Yourself! A podcast on how to decolonize your mind, body, spirit, and relationships. If you seek to create oppression-free spaces in yourself, in your spheres of influence, and cultivate oppression-free spaces with others, then you’ve come to the right place. Welcome. This space was made for you, for me, for we. Let’s get started.
My name is Dr. SooJin Pate. Some of you may know me as the co-host of the Antiracist Parenting Podcast with my friend Hannah Carney. Some of you may know me through my teaching, as I’m also a writer and adjunct professor of race and ethnic studies with expertise in CRT, women of color feminism, postcolonial theory, and decolonizing methodologies and practices. I’ve taught courses on U.S history and politics, African diasporic history and literature, comparative race and ethnic studies, and transracial and transnational adoption around the Twin Cities area in Minnesota.
I also work as a consultant around DEI, working with companies to increase and advance diversity, equity and inclusion. I suppose you could say that’s my day job or what I do to pay the bills
I’m a proud steward of Million Artist Movement and a member of MPD150 – an abolitionist collective of artists and activists seeking to bring about a police-free city, state, and country. So that’s a little about me and my background.
Why I’m starting this podcast? Well, this summer, I took a girl’s trip with some Korean adoptees. We were talking about the state of our nation, our city – since most of us were hailing from Minneapolis, MN – reflecting on the racial uprising spurred by the murder of George Floyd and the rise of anti-Asian racism we were all experiencing. Some shared that after the Atlanta killings of the Asian American women, none of their white adoptive family members acknowledged the event or even checked in with them. Myself included – no one from my white family checked in with me either. This made us both sad, disappointed, and just plain angry.
As we talked about anti-Blackness and anti-Asianness as being fundamental features in our society and even fundamental features in our families, I mentioned something to the effect that so many Korean adoptees act and think white because we’re raised by white people. And because of that, there’s a real need in our community to decolonize ourselves because we have internalized anti-Black racism and anti-Asian racism given that most of us were raised by white people. We’ve adopted white cultural norms and values and continue to live in mostly white communities and partner with mostly white people. This past year with the movement for Black Lives really highlighted this in the Korean adoptee community and the Asian American community, in general.
But if you think about, in a way, we’re all raised by white people and white culture – all of us regardless of skin color – because white supremacy is the air we breathe. White people not only determine what’s good and bad, what constitutes a crime or not (because they determine what is legal or illegal), but they also determine what news gets covered, what books get published, what movies get produced, what music we listen to, what’s taught in our schools – and the list goes on and on. Not a single aspect of our life isn’t informed and determined by white people. So, in this way, we’re all raised by white people!
And because of that, we’ve internalized the ways of the oppressor: how he thinks, acts, works, treats and relates to others, etc. And I say “he” on purpose because, the people making those laws and decisions on what we see, listen to, watch, and learn in our classrooms are determined by white men. Historically and presently. Patriarchy is a fundamental feature of white supremacy.
Now let’s think about all this within the context of colonization: a fundamental strategy that colonizers used to colonize a people was to colonize their minds. How do you colonize a whole people? By getting them to think like you, to identify with you, to want to be you, the oppressor. That’s how we end up reproducing oppressive systems in our work and relationships regardless of how “woke” we are or how committed we are to social justice. We end up thinking and acting like our oppressor because we are socialized and taught to identify with our oppressor!
This podcast works to undo all that. This podcast seeks to serve as an antidote to the toxic ways in which we’ve ingested systems of oppression in our lives and bodies by providing blueprints on how to decolonize our minds, spirits, bodies, and relationships.
I’ll be featuring guests who will share their journey of decolonization: why they wanted to embark on the process of decolonization in the first place and how they got started in order to a) inspire and motivate you and others to decolonize yourself and b) provide you with a blueprint for how to go about it.
I hope you will join me in listening and learning from our guests. I hope you will commit to decolonizing your mind, spirit, body, and relationships.
Thank you for listening. Please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you listen to this podcast. If you have questions, suggestions, or feedback OR if you’d like partner with me as I help you jumpstart or deepen your decolonizing journey, email me at decolonizeyourselfpodcast@gmail.com. You can support this podcast by becoming a Patreon member. Search for Decolonize Yourself at Patreon.com. Thanks for listening and for working to decolonize yourself.