Episode 11 - Why politeness doesn't work, with Amena Chaudhry

Buckle up - we're going on a journey today!
After last week's conversation with Nora DiNuzzo about deconstructing whiteness, I wanted to bring you some practical steps on how you can continue the anti-racist work in real life.

And so I called on Nora's friend, Amena Chaudhry, a DEI consultant and anti-racist personal trainer, to help.

Amena and I spent some time talking about
 - how you need to start by building your anti-racist muscles, rather than trying to lift 300 pounds on your first day at the gym.
 - how her DEI work is about treating the cause rather than the symptoms.
 - And why removing conflict in your organization is not a sensible DEI metric.
 - We dig into how systems of oppression negatively affect everyone inside them. Even those who think they're at the top.

And Amena gives us a peek into her Art of Interrupting Racism workshop with some tips on how we can do this in real life.

Once you've listened to Amena,  I'd encourage you to run, not walk, to sign up for her art of interrupting racism workshop on the 19th of September.

Sign up here

Book her as a speaker for your event or organisation.

Go follow her on LinkedIn and make a commitment to act on at least one of her suggestions on how you can interrupt racism in person. , 

So settle down. Join me and Amena on this week's Soap Box. 

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Transcript

Amena, thank you so much for coming to be on the soapbox today.

I'm really, really excited for the conversation that we're going to have and for the things that the listeners are going to get to hear.

Oh, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for inviting me. I'm pretty excited to have this conversation.

Before we get started for those and who are listening, who you on LinkedIn or in the online world can you start by telling us a little bit about who you are, 

yeah. So, I am a DEI strategist and coach and consultant. And so I actually work with clients in two ways. I work with individuals and offer one on one coaching programs. One of my signature coaching programs is for executive leaders and I help them. operationalize and their inclusive leadership skills, really.

And I also work with teams and organizations that are just hungry for systemic change and have tried to things previously that have failed or are just starting and don't know where to start and are looking for, like, that systemic work, doing the work in a way, doing DEI work in a way that, like, creates real change.

Thank you. Systems level change in their organizations. And so I, I work with teams to, and organizations to help bring some of that transformation at a cultural level. And not just at the individual level,

And do you find that you end up working with companies and organizations in a range of industries or very similar?

range of industries, right? I think it just depends on where an organization is in their journey. If they have tried different things in the past and they haven't given up, hopefully, because that seems to be a trend where people try DEI and you know, it's like, I tell people I'm like, I'm your anti racist DEI personal, personal trainer, right?

This is like somebody wanting to build muscle and going to the gym and trying to do push ups with a 120 pound barbell and you. Didn't build that internal capacity first, slowly, and your strength to be able to make that move. And then giving up and thinking, oh, this is just not doable, or this is not worth investing in, right?

And so, like any other part and function of an organization, this has, DEI has particular competencies that are needed to carry the work out successfully. And so I find That I work with lots of different sectors, and it all depends on that organizations, like, where they are in time. Like, are they ready?

Do they know what kind of work they want to jump into? Have they assigned a budget? Do they know that the work is going to cost? Have they, have their leadership done some degree of Capacity building to have an idea of, like, what the commitment looks like, how they're going to have that work integrated in everybody's day to day living and operating the organization.

I think it depends on organizations and where they are and. My work, I do it from a system, like an organizational development lens and less from a what should I say, programmatic or compliance lens. So, yeah, so culture change basically, you know, because DEI work is. Is social change work and social change in an organization is basically culture change work.

that's a really, really interesting analogy. The idea of, yeah, building your strength first rather than, trying to go from zero to a hundred miles an hour.

Yeah. Yeah. And also, , it's less about, like, what sectors I work with is more about the organization where they're ready to move away from doing DEI from a compliance perspective or doing DEI from a programmatic perspective. And if they're ready to have integrated into their operate everyday operations and whether they're ready to have it leader led.

Yeah. Be leader led. Yeah,

Yeah.

no, sure. That makes sense. Cool. That sounds like an incredibly fascinating role, I

Thank you. 

Um, 

never boring.

no.

No.

How did you get into it? What made this, what made you decide that this was, that this was going to be your thing?

Yeah. I would say that as much as I want to have a story where, oh, I could say like I made this decision. I think I had, I had a health crisis actually

in 2020 that kind of pushed me into doing this full time. I was doing DEI work previously. And so like, as a consultant, that's post health crisis.

Um, you realizing that I actually need to like a lot of BIPOCs, right? Realizing after the pandemic that our workplaces are pretty toxic to our mental, physical well being. But DEI work, I would say I feel like my entire life has been leading up to this, to be honest. Like, I didn't necessarily go to school and get degrees thinking that diversity, equity, inclusion, or equity inclusion work is the work that I'm going to be doing.

Um, you know, I, my undergrad is in human biology. I actually wanted to go into homeopathy to be honest. My parents wanted me to become a doctor, but I was more interested in homeopathic medicine. But even then, like, I feel like my thinking was very much rooted in how I do the work, right? So allopathy, which is Western medicine is about treating symptoms, right?

And homeopathy is about finding the cause and treating the cause.

Sure.

And I think, like, I think from a really young age, because I lived a bi continental life, my parents would uproot us every couple of years to relocate back to Pakistan, back home.

Um, where we didn't visit, we would just, we would legit relocate and it would not work out and we would come back.

So this happened like multiple times before I was 20. I'm getting to live. Getting to see two incredibly different cultures and environments and not belonging in either I think has informed a lot of how I've been trying to find belonging in people, culture, places but also seeing the possibility that things can be done differently.

That there are no, like, capital T truths in how you need to human because I think, like, that's one of the things I see with a lot of white leaders that I work with who live predominantly lives in white society, right, in very segregated societies and difference then feels

really awkward and uncomfortable and like, and so, I think that I, that's where a lot of my comfort with difference, like where I've not, all right.

Held one kind of way of being as the right way of being and so just, just, I think that experience in my formative years has been incredibly pivotal in doing the work of trying to help organizations and leaders create belonging in contexts where the systems were not built for marginalized people, 

Mm hmm.

Living in, like, in the US and Canada, I've lived in predominantly in areas and in systems and societies where the structure and the systems weren't created with me in mind. They weren't created for a brown Muslim woman, right? For an immigrant. And. And that is basically the foundation of racism.

It's a system not created for black people

to succeed economically and socially. Right? So I think like my formative years of living between Pakistan and Canada, and then my immigrating to the U. S. later led to that. My professional work has been in learning and development. So I hold an HR certification.

And so that I feel like... That learning and development experience plus my experiences growing up and lived experiences. I feel like my PhD in life,

Yeah. Mm hmm.

my PhD in life. Those are the letters I have after my name along with, like, a lot of the work that I've done in restorative justice related fields.

I feel like all of those 3 paths kind of intersected and sent me doing the work. And so in 2016, I think is when I took on my 1st. The position at an organization and then as of last year, launched my own consulting business to do this as a consultant,

That's very cool. Yeah, this idea that your security and safety is not tied up with the system, so the idea of trying to change that system or make that system kind of work differently isn't as intimidating for you in that respect because your identity is not is, yeah, is not all tied up in it. Like, for, yeah, for white people it's very much like, this is the way things have been, this is the way we do things, why, like, and changing it is scary 

Yeah. And change is scary. But like, for me, change is not just not scary. It's it's necessary.

yeah, it's an imperative, like,

for, yeah,

to

build your own security and safety, yeah.

But like also recognizing like the changing that needs to happen has to somehow be a third way of being or a third way of doing everything and doing society. So, it's not like black and brown people are looking to build systems that only prioritize and create belonging for us, which I think is.

Maybe the visceral reaction sometimes we see on the far right, which is not, you know, it's, it's, it's more of a, like, yeah, the current system. And I would argue that the current systems actually aren't working for white people either, right? They're not, they're very dehumanizing. I think I just posted a few days ago, like, oppression has, systems of oppression have two main gears.

That are interconnected and locked and turning each other and while a bulk of the conversation that happens is like how oppression impacts and disadvantages black and brown folks,

a lot of times, like, the conversation doesn't have is like, well, how does that oppression actually look for white people?

Right? The, this fear of being called out constantly, the anxiety that you're going to say something wrong and get cancelled and all, a whole bunch of other, like, I think factors show that that is not working out for white people at all, either when you witness. Like, so the training that Nora referred to, the Art of Interrupting Racism, one of the reasons I actually developed that and I rolled that out is like, I see that when white people witness something happening that goes against their values, goes against how they want to be in the world, and then stay silent, that is like, that is, they incur a moral injury, and I can see that, and they incur moral injury after moral injury after moral injury.

And that ends up being. A really huge handicap, right? If you keep injuring your knee over and over again, and then you think you're going to do squats. No, that's not going to work. Right? And so, like, I think, like, these systems actually aren't working for white folks either. It's working for a very tiny sliver of cishet white males.

And if that, like, I would love to know, like, what kind of neuroses and mental health issues that they actually suffer with. I don't think that anybody dominant group member or not, when you're disconnected, The way to maintain and allow systems of oppression to be in operation is to be disconnected from other human beings.

I don't think that that actually works out for until the for anyone.

No, there's there's a feminist author in the UK called Caitlin Moran, who has written a lot of different things or aimed at predominantly women. And she's written a lot for teenage girls. And she has recently come out with a book that is aimed at men for, for a similar reason like this idea that she spent so long looking at these systems that have. Oppressed and disadvantaged kind of females that, yeah, she's, and the conversations that she's had with men along the way have made her think that, yeah, similar to as you just said, it's not doing them any favors either.

It's not liberating. I think to be privileged and have unarmed advantages. It's not liberating. It's not oppressive in the same way. It is.

No, of course.

I mean, there's no comparison, but I would argue that the systems aren't working for anyone. And we are in desperate in a desperate place. We're not challenging the system, not interrupting our systems, not being okay with lesser evils and slow progress.

Right? You want to talk about like my soapbox. Well, my biggest

need is like the incremental people sometimes are obsessive. It's not working because we are destroying our planet at record speed at the 

Mm hmm. 

We're destroying our planet. We're destroying community ways of living. And we can see how weak we actually are to something that is microscopic, right?

We saw what COVID did, and it still continues to do to. And that's, like, We need to figure out how to do things differently, we need to find ways to do community again in ways that is holding care for everyone, right? Trying to figure out, like, how do we, how do we human with each other in ways that we can change the systems that we were born into?

And and not constantly look for individual benefits. I think that this is one of, like, the hugest problems, like, not only looking to save yourself and who you immediately care for, your kids or your spouse but that's a big piece, like, moving from an individualistic thinking to a more system thinking of, like, we all need to, we're all on the same boat.

Like, we're all on the Titanic and it doesn't matter if you're at the top at the moment, wondering why is everybody worried about running when we're so when we're 700 feet up and I don't know how to hold half of the Titanic would have been, but like, we're 700 feet up in the air, right? Like, that's what I mean when I say, like, white people are also oppressed and they need to wake up and realize it.

Like, you might be at the top while the Titanic is on its way down, but you're still on the 

Yes, we're still going down.

You're still going to go down. Yeah. And so, so I think change is like, not only possible, like, I know, and I believe change is possible and it's necessary, but it's like, super necessary.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I wonder if you can without, without kind of going into specifics or kind of shouting anybody out, but could you give me an example of how you've gone about changing culture in an organization that you've worked with, or with a group of people that you've worked with?

So my basic, I will say approach is. A systemic approach, right?

Um, so either you as an organization have data that I can work with and use, or I will come in and help you collect data, right? The, I think biggest mistake that organizations make thinking, Oh, we're going to do culture change. We're going to do, we're going to create a more inclusive workplace is to jump straight to trainings and solutions.

Right, without any diagnosis. The second biggest mistake I think organizations make is they collect data, but they don't do anything with it, or they don't know what to do with it. Right, like it's like, it's like, they learn, oh, I need to collect data, and they do that, and they just stop there, or what they do with it is really meaningless, right?

So they collect data before having determined what they're going to do with it. And I think this just comes boiled down to that often, What I would say is that organizations don't have the internal capacity actually to do this work meaningfully and strategically.

I think this is like, sure. I'm biased.

I'm a consultant, but I can tell you I've worked on the inside as well as a DA person. And that was super toxic. Like. You don't have positional decision making power in an organization, you're not going to be able to impact culture change.

Okay. Of

course. 

DEA title you have and how much money you throw at the problem, or how many trainings you do.

And also trainings don't, they're not transformative, right? If culture change. It's a big, it's a big, big job,

right? It's not, it's not small. It's not small change. That's a big change. So you got to use, like, what I will do is I will help interpret like, I have a lenses. I will help you interpret the data in a way that I think inside.

Folks are not going to be able to interpret. I will help you ask the right questions, right? And then help you strategize and figure out like how long term of a plan do you want? Do you want a five year plan? Do you want a three year plan? Do you want a 10 year plan? Right? And then you've got to figure out like.

When you, when, when I help you interpret the data, I'm looking to help you figure out how is the system currently set up. And very specifically, when you want to do equity and inclusion work, this means that implicitly you want to undo inequity and exclusion that is already being produced by design.

hmm. Mm

That individuals are not There's no 1 individual sitting there saying we must produce inequitable outcomes that over the course of the last 20 years.

We're not going to let any black person get to a little bit. Right. But I want, I help organizations see how is your system currently producing an equity and exclusion or maybe equity. Like, maybe there are sets where equity is being produced. By design, and that needs to be amplified or leveraged. And once you see those, like, figuring out, like, what are the outcomes you want to work on?

Do you have 20 outcomes you want to change? 10 outcomes you want to change? Well, pick two that you're going to work on this year. Right? Like, this is, this DEI work is change work, change work, transformation takes time, things happen slowly, so strategically pick which two ones you want to make movement on.

And then I, I help reverse engineer strategies.

Okay.

And so like, I would say that's basically, in a nutshell, how I help the culture of change happen at an organization. Because. And a lot of times I'll just say up front is one of the strategies has to be that the senior leadership needs to do the inner transformation, transformative individual work so that they have the capacity and the muscles

to actually carry and lead the work for their organization, right?

If you are an executive leader, and conflict is something that scares you, you're not going to succeed at DEI work. You need to figure out how to build that muscle. If racialized conflict is something you run from, or how you measure whether DEI work is Succeeding or not, you're not going to, you're not going to succeed.

You're going to, you're going to flop, right? And so reverse engineering your strategies after you figure out your outcomes, but also like, knowing up front, what will be your metrics? How will you measure it? And how will you know that you're achieving your outcomes, right? In what ways will you measure it?

And when you don't identify your metrics in advance, and you don't think about those, then there are metrics you have already, they're implicit, and 9 out of 10 or 10 times, one of the metrics that gets erroneously seen as a measurement is people will be happier or that no one will get upset or that conflict will not happen.

Right? And so, like, if you're thinking. If implicitly, this is your expectation,

The work isn't going to succeed. Like you got to, you really need to figure out like what your metrics will be. You got to figure out what the leads and lags will be. Like there, it just surprises me that there's no other business function that gets invested in strategies rolled out where there isn't very strategic planning happening.

And like, Metrics leads and lags being measured. And so all sorts of metrics are being utilized, I think, to decide whether something is being successful or not. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. So thinking about that thinking about starting with that individual kind of internal work, um, one of the reasons that I wanted to have this conversation with you was hearing Nora's story in last week's episode about journey with deconstructing whiteness and doing that internal work and then how that led on to. Getting more involved even than she was before in in challenging systems and in, and in trying to move for change towards equity and inclusion. And specifically she mentioned your Interrupting Racism course that you that you are putting on. Um,

September 19th. So I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about maybe how you developed that course, kind of what is involved in it. And I'd also love for you, obviously without that, giving away the farm to, to give our listeners some some practical ways that they can that they can interrupt racism and racist kind of events in their everyday life.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so going to the personal trainer metaphor I would say that interrupting a racism or really honestly, right in real time. So sexism, transphobia, any, any, any systemic norm in real time is how you change social systems. So racism is a social system. It's an incredibly pernicious, pervasive social system in the US.

It is. 400 plus years old. It is a well oiled machine. And unfortunately to date, I don't think that collectively you as white Americans, I'm going to speak to white Americans right here. White Americans have not in masses done the work that they need to do to actually reverse and and, and, you know, dismantle some of the system.

Right. I think that's one thing I'll just say, the other thing I'll say is like. We are all born into racism. If you're in the US and Canada is I'll stick to this continent right for today's conversation. Because it's a little different in the global South. I would say in our context, we are born into racism.

It's like, it's like, I want you to imagine that you're born on a conveyor belt, and the conveyor belt is the, is all of it. There's no such thing as off the conveyor belt. That's the system we were born on. Dismantling it has to be done while you're on it, while it's moving, and has to include If you're dismantling, you got to be mantling something, you got to be creating something, right?

And so not only it is, is it a very old weld oil system pernicious, it is integrated into everything that we do, everything that we think about it is also super difficult. To to dismantle for the very reason that we're on top of it all the time, right? Like, that's what makes this work hard.

And it becomes even harder. I think for white Americans, like, we're asking you to dismantle and divest from systems that Superficially, you are actually getting lots of unearned advantages from, right? And so, the training I put into place because again, I think about like all of my life experiences, like my K through 12 education, my or being a parent in the U.

S. and Canada. I think of all the times that I have. Experienced non belonging. I would say 90 percent of that non belonging me not fitting in, people not advocating for me, me not getting the same advantages as other folks, could be removed and could, I could just like, those would not be trauma, traumatic experiences had somebody interrupted racism or Islamophobia.

90%, I can confidently say, would not be an adverse experience. Life experience for me. And so, I, so, and then, like, my experience is, like, where did I learn this from? From interrupting racism myself, from interrupting transphobia, actually, myself, right?

Okay.

From, like, that, that is a social system I have privilege in.

I am cisgender and heterosexual, so, like, I have done advocacy work in those areas and learned, like, how to use my own social power, even though I'm using that social power from a brown body and for much of my life wearing a hijab. So being presenting as Muslim, right? So not being able to like, hide that identity.

And so I would say, like, personal experience, I've learned, like, what works, what doesn't work, you know, and one of the biggest things I've learned is, like, politeness does not work because obsession With politeness is just a shit obsession because it actually reinforces the system. So, like, I have learned the hard way that having the conversation that the afterwards do not work, they actually do not change the system.

And actually, they don't change individual behavior either. And I have, you know, I've had experiences where I thought, like, my response has been to fight back when I was in high school and like, early university years and stuff. And saw how the impact or effectiveness was limited there as well.

Right. I also saw that, like, even when I do the. What I teach, when I do it versus a white woman does it, how powerful the result is when a white person does it versus me. Like I've seen that, right? And and this is, so, so a lot of the process has come from me just accepting reality. This is the system we what is the best way to leverage the current system while we're standing, while we're walking on this treadmill, what is the best way to cause an interruption?

Because the. Your purpose for causing the interruption for interrupting racism is so that that behavior is now repeated by the person who actually did it and anyone else who witnessed it. Right? So, it's a little bit like a bystander. I think training, except that hopefully. Except that the, I think where we need people interrupting racism are in those nice instances where it doesn't feel exactly like.

So, like, Trump's racism is so easy to interrupt because it's so overtly wrong and, you know, that you are not going to get a lot of flack for it, for interrupting him, right? That racism is easy to interrupt. That racism doesn't change the system. Actually, it doesn't even change Trump's behavior, to be honest, and it changes not the behavior of the people that follow him, right?

So I also wanted to say, like, how useless. The energy into interrupting him as an individual is great as a country. Yeah, we needed to not like him, but like him as an individualist forget for a moment that he was a president.

If only.

If only, let's just forget for a moment that that man made it to presidency. Right. But like, Changing like where it matters the most is fighting for the right thing or doing the right thing or interrupting that moment of racism when it's most unpopular and feels most right and feels most right because that is how the system replicates itself into the next generation.

Every time racism has become too overt and unacceptable, we as a society have changed our racist norms. The racism doesn't go away, it just puts on different clothing. And so the form of racism that is most important to interrupt is the form that is the most well dressed. Because that's where the system reproduces and survives.

That's such an interesting way of looking at it that I've never even never even considered before. Yeah, my, my my gut reaction is always to that the worst and loudest behavior is the most dangerous, but you're right, it's not. It's the quiet, polite stuff that's the most insidious that makes, that makes people think that it's acceptable.

Yeah, it's, it's the nice plight forms of racism that is right now manifesting as 85 percent of, or 65%, I forget what the recent statistic for 2022 is, like, DEI professionals being white women. Right, only 3 percent being black. It's, that's the reason where we have the the housing gaps, where we have educational disparities, where we have pay disparities.

It's the normal, everyday, nice people who are enacting. The politer forms of racism, right? And so I think those are the most important and that's where the skill needs to be learned. And I think that's where white people are the most scared to speak up because that's where it feels like you're going to lose relationships.

I'm going to lose my social capital. And and, and so the training is meant to provide a framework. And then an easy process to follow in the moment so that you can start practicing and building the muscle. Obviously, you're going to have to start in low risk situations, and it's like, it's, it's everybody's responsibility. Right. But the responsibility looks different based on your social location. So your, whatever your address is in the intersectionalities of identities. Let's say, right. Your responsibility is very different.

Um, I am not going to tell black and brown people how to interrupt racism, when to interrupt racism.

I'm not going to do that. And I would be pretty peeved if somebody started telling me that I needed to speak up every single time. Then I, that's all I'd be doing, right? I'd be doing it 10, 15 times a day and I would not have a life,

uh, right now. Right? And so, like, your responsibility looks different and the impact is different.

This is, this is, this is. a little depressing, and I know this doesn't feel great to hear, but white people interrupting racism has a massively different impact than a black or brown person doing it, right? There is a reason why you know, it was white men who gave women the right to have abortions.

Right? It was white men who gave women to have the right, white women to have the right to vote. And we can see that, we can see that your, your address of your social identities determines how much access you have to change the system. The social power combined with positional power, especially, immense power, that is how Roe v.

Wade got reversed. Right, it is and so I think, like, when we look at systems, it is really hard. It's really important not to ignore that social power is a powerful fuel and it means something. And what that means is that you have the ability to change systems faster. More permanently than black and brown folks.

I want you to, like, imagine, like, when DEI, so DEI work in the, in the U. S. began as racial sensitivity trainings in the military,

and it has had many iterations since then, and now has become this really weak form of, like, superficial, like, Pouring paint over dilapidated buildings type of work. Like, it's become this superficial cosmetic work that organizations do from a compliance need and from a programmatic place.

Right? And we are way far away from what the racial sensitivity trainings were about. Lily Zhang talks about this in her book, Deconstructed, D E I D, Deconstructed, and she talks about how white backlash. is predominantly responsible for how DEI has failed in many different ways in the U. S. right?

And so when I think about like how much white backlash it takes for something to be killed, right, for initiative to be, to be completely done away with for Roe v. Wade to be reversed, for books to be get banned, for CRT not to move forward versus the amount of noise And civil unrest that had to happen to make sure that Derek Chauvin got convicted, and that was not a guarantee,

right? That shows you how much power your social identity holds in a system, in terms of, like, changing the system itself. I think this is one of the reasons why Martin Luther King you know, as much as people love him today he was, he had like a 24 percent approval rating while he was alive, and this is, I think, the reason why he, you know, in his letter from Birmingham Chill, and in his, I think, last book called Where Do We Go From Here,

Where he talks about and has grievances about white people and says that like white people are not putting in the mass effort that they need to, to educate themselves out of racial ignorance.

And that grievance that he had was because he could see that the white people actually need to want the change for racism to be any meaningful, for there to be any progress towards anti racism in the U. S.

Do you, I mean, this is a hard question, do you think that we are further now than we were then in that respect?

Is this the progress 

no, no, there's not a progress question,

progress question, no, because I know that, yeah, that's a, yeah, that's a, that's a complex question

and, and, and not necessarily a helpful one. No, I think in terms of, in terms of white people wanting the

Hmm.

that do you think

that, do you think we are further along with that? Than we were back then.

I think that like in during the civil rights. Move an area, whatever white people, this is why white folks did not like Trump in power because he made racism a real problem throughout his presidency.

Sure.

And this is why they would rather have a, this is why they predominantly voted for Biden, right? Over Bernie.

Because they need, because. Biden allows for the plight racism to have. It allows you to sit back and be like, oh, okay. I don't have to worry about my image anymore at the moment. I don't have to worry about constantly distancing myself from the complicity of being a white person in a system with all this un un advantage.

So I would say like, I don't know, I would say that, like, if I think about the times when, like, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were alive I feel like white people had to engage with racism as a conversation. I would say that, In that sense, yeah, we, white people today are not as active, right? There is a lot of predominantly the lived experience is that you can actually exit and not,

worry about it because it's not a problem in your everyday life.

it becomes a problem when somebody gets video, when a place. Officer kills a black person on videotape, right? And when, and even then it's not a problem until the black community makes a big deal out of it. Even then it's not a big problem until there's civil unrest. And at that point when you can no longer distance yourself, like why Derek Chauvin got convicted was that his own peers and White folks with positional power could no longer feel like good people by staying aligned with him.

Right. And so, I mean, in that sense, I would say that there's a lot of apathy because they're. There's the, because for the most part, white people live very segregated lives, right? And so, yeah, I would say that in a bizarre way, this is why, like, you heard this a lot. We heard this a lot from black and brown folks when Trump was a president.

There was a lot of relief. An affirmation in that, like, finally, your white community members are seeing what you've been experiencing all your life.

Okay. Yeah. Brought it out into the open.

Mm hmm.

Okay. That's interesting. I mean, it's, yeah, it's, it's a little bit depressing, but it's not hugely surprising, I don't

think. Okay. So as people with more positional power and particularly for, so a lot of my listeners are kind of online business owners or business owners with some kind of platform. Aside from joining a workshop on the 19th of September. As people who have platforms on social media, and I have a lot of conversations about the practicalities and the effectiveness of interrupting, not just racism, but like transphobia and homophobia and misogyny in that online space. And I get differing opinions from people whether that's they think that it's that engaging in those kind of conversations. Interrupting those kind of conversations, jumping on those kind of comments are helpful. And some other people convinced that it's not helpful and that it's best just to kind of either ignore or block or all that kind of stuff. Where do you land on that?

Where do I land? This is a really good question. Right and it's like, very relevant, especially since we did become a very remote people

Sure. Yes.

for a while there. Right. People did. That was the other thing that was like, super relieving was like, remote work. For the first time, I think, minoritized people experienced not being, not drowning in whiteness at work.

And why, like, the percentage of people who want to return to work who are Black is like, I think, under 5%. It's like, it's a really low number. Yeah. Because that's how huge relief is. I can, like, from my own, I can testify that, like, in March, when my employer went remote and we became full time remote, I remember the first two weeks of feeling like this really odd, I felt like, I felt really, I told my husband multiple times, I feel like something's wrong with me.

Because everybody spending 15, 20 minutes on calls complaining about, Being remote missing everybody. I wish we were in person. I wish we were X, Y, Z, and I'm here thinking I'm so glad and I'm just thinking something must be wrong with me. And it wasn't until, like, I think it was, like, my 15th today. Out, being remote, I was on a walk, an incident took place and I realized, Oh my God, it's been 14 days I haven't thought about not being white.

I was like, this is the first time I just thought about not being white and being treated differently because I'm not white. And I was like, I'm not crazy. I have just removed myself from a very toxic place and it, and I'm feeling relief and they're not because they belong in those spaces. I don't. Yeah.

And so it's a really relevant question, right? Because, like, in the remote setting, that's where some, quote, unquote, belonging is happening. So I think it's like, it's, it's a, it's a multilayered question has a multilayered answer, like, I will just say like, bottom line interrupting racism and ism happens in real time in person.

Like, bottom line, for, for you, for the system to change, these are, this is stuff that has to be interpreted in real time, because I know, in person, because I know what's on social media feels like real time, I know it feels like real, right, it has a real impact, it impacts you, but it doesn't actually change social behaviors, so you can go back and forth, like, at most what happens is, Somebody is exposed for being racist in their employer fire zone.

That's still not a social behavior being changed. That's not a system changing. That just means that that one person suffered some consequences, but they have access to a shit ton of other unearned advantages that are going to undo that consequence. It's not really going to be meaningful. And so like, I'm just going to like preface with that to say that changing systems means your in person interactions that you have with people, where there is the possibility that you will lose social capital, interrupting racism and other reasons in those moments, that's where change happens.

That's where social systems get altered a bit, right? Because social systems are, what are they? They're just unspoken norms. It's our muscle memory, the ways that we have learned how to be with each other, the unspoken rules that we are following, right? This is like when you step into an elevator, right?

What's the very first thing you do? When you step into the elevator,

The very first thing you do is you turn around and face the door.

I would imagine stepping into an elevator and like just standing there facing the people.

No, that would be weird.

Huh, yeah. When in your life did you get told that you need, when in life didn't someone order than you teach you to do that verbally?

No, no, not

verbally at all. No.

never. Exactly. That's socialization. So that's an example of socialization that isn't actually linked to any power structures. 

Sure. Yeah. 

not, so we don't have any social systems around who turns around, who doesn't, thankfully, 

That would be very complicated.

Although people have done that with like in the past with glasses and disabilities, but it's a different story.

But like, that's an example of like unspoken rules, right? And so if you want that behavior to change, you have to interrupt it when it happens in person.

Okay.

The norm has to be interrupted, and it has to be interrupted in a way that And you have to do interruptions in such a way that interrupting that norm needs to become the new norm.

Mm hmm.

And what that means is that you, as an en masse, white people need to do the work of their, they need to do their work of transformation. So that en masse, they are interrupting racism to such a consistency. And frequency that interrupting racism is a norm, which means that there is not going to be shame and guilt associated with someone when you interrupt somebody, it's going to feel like they just told you, you have spinach in your teeth and you're going to be grateful right now.

Their response is shame and guilt and defensiveness and all sorts of other things. So, like, if the interruptions need to happen in real time enough for that norm to shift and change that people would seek corrections because the norm is that's become the norm. And I don't think that that can happen on social media.

I don't think that that is. We are wired for connection, and we have been wired to be in community, physical community with each other. And I don't think that socialization can be impacted just on social media. Now, if you see something on social media, do you just walk away and say nothing? I don't think that that's also the way to go.

Right? But I think, like, the interruption has to, like, I think on social media, where I see people kind of lose their way is that it just becomes this long argument for making sense. Massive social and emotional and psychological investment and then all this harm happening that cannot actually be repaired.

Mm hmm.

So I think like, yeah, we need accountability behaviors on social media. Yes, things need to be said, but I think we need to learn how and what to criticize. Yeah, I think a lot of people respond from trauma from a trauma place

That's

definitely 

other people's traumas from from being triggered. Emotional resilience is a is one of the accomplice muscles that I talk about.

And one of the trainings that I hold. It's an intensive that I hold the to know how to do this and emotionally regulate yourself while you do this. And that's where responsibility matters, right?

I think the responsibility of being emotionally regulated, it falls on the shoulders of white people.

Right now, white people actually tone police black people, black and brown folks, you know? How you can say things, when you're supposed to say things, the right time, the right mode, even kneeling was not acceptable. Right? Like, right now, like, that burden of emotional resilience gets put on the shoulders of Black and Brown folks and 

Mm hmm. 

and really needs to be a burden and a cross that I think white Christians and white folks need to actually carry the bulk of that burden to get the change going, to get the new norms established.

So that would be my long, long form 

no, that was great. And, and interesting how it brings us back to what we were talking before we started recording about getting people off their sofas.

Yeah, yes, yes, absolutely. Right. So, like, the, the moments that need to be interrupted are the ones with your spouses, with your children, with your siblings, with your colleagues at the grocery store. So, when I'm leaving a postal office, after dropping my mail off, and I'm walking by a line of people, and somebody tells me to go back home, you, I think, B I T C H.

There are 12 people who needed to interrupt, right? Like, that shouldn't actually fall. That's the moment that you're supposed to interrupt racism. It's supposed to happen in the meetings where I keep seeing something and somebody else and then a white male or white female says it and everybody pays attention to it.

Like, it's those small, what feel like innocuous moments. That feel harmless to the people not being impacted. And so I think that, like, in person, yeah. Your in person interactions and, you know, sometimes they can be phone calls. They can be zoom meetings.

Mm hmm. Sure.

Yeah. 

Okay. No, that's helpful. Thank you for that. If for people who have been listening and are very much like me going, right, these are things that I need to practice more and these are things that I need to work on practically and they want to come along to to your workshop on the 19th, um, where do they go?

What do they need to do?

so they can go to my LinkedIn profile

and on my LinkedIn profile, I have the link that I have put is my link tree link. I'm not using the word link so many times. The 1st 1. Art of interrupting racism is what they, my current offerings are listed. They can go there and sign up, grab a seat. This training is limited, has limited seats.

So people kind of need to grab the seat, their seats as soon as possible. And then that link tree is something that I'm keeping active at the moment. I do not have a website just yet active with my offerings. So LinkedIn is actually the best. Biggest way that they can reach out to me. I'm also actually currently offering white folks for the rest of this quarter.

So the last quarter of this year, I have been focusing and helping people especially white folks get over their fear of being called out. Because a lot of times we're not interrupting racism because they're afraid they're going to get called out in the moment, either by your own folks or by black and brown folks.

Right. And so that keeps them silent. And so I am offering a seven week accelerator to anyone who wants to do one on one work with me in seven weeks, you can completely rid yourself of this fear. Workshop this and be done and over with it. So you arrive to 2024 with some like good muscles.

That sounds incredible. Yes. Everybody with brilliant muscles inside and out. Um, okay. I will put as much of those things, as many of those things as I can in the show notes and and especially a link to your LinkedIn. Now I'm saying link a lot. It's, it's a thing. And yeah, Amina's LinkedIn is brilliant. Generally, so even if even if the workshop isn't for you, for whatever reason you need to go and follow her because you will be challenged and inspired in equal measure, which is how I like my social media. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk all these things through and unpack things with us and give us the benefit of your experience.

I massively appreciate it.

Oh, my gosh. I am massively appreciative of you as well. Thank you for inviting me. I'm having the conversation with me. We need people like you. We need we need we need people to wake up and roll up their sleeves and get into this work with us. So thank you so

Thank you