the uplift
elevating and amplifying women's voices and issues in higher ed.
the uplift
Summer Session with Christina Holmgren & Jayne Sommers
For our Summer Session we’re running a fan favorite playlist: a combination of the most-listened-to episodes as well as listener-requested favorites. Our Summer Session gives you a chance to revisit episodes you may not have heard in a while or even to listen to episodes you might have missed.
Today we're replaying Episode 26: In Community: Interracial Feminist CoMentoring, with Christina Holmgren and Jayne Sommers at the University of St. Thomas. Here's your link to the episode's original show notes.
If you're enjoying the podcast, enter a chance to win a free book! Head over to Apple podcasts (or your fave platform) and leave a review on the uplift page. Once a month I'll randomly select one of that month's reviewers to receive a $20 gift certificate to bookshop.org. You get more summer reading, and I get to help you build your library! It's a win for us both.
So grab a nice tall glass of your favorite summer beverage, pull up your favorite outdoor chair or grab your hammock, and enjoy a few moments of summer, on me. I’ll be somewhere doing the same. 😎
Let's connect! Come find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook.
I also coach women leaders (individually and in groups) and facilitate campus workshops. Learn more at the website.
Have a question about whether I can help you? Just ask! I actually love getting emails from listeners. 🧡
Hey there, welcome to Summer at the Uplift. For our summer session, we're running a fan favorite playlist a combination of the most listened to episodes as well as listener requests. Our summer session gives you a chance to revisit episodes you may not have heard in a while, or maybe even to listen to episodes you might have missed. You'll notice, at the end of each episode I tell you how you can be entered in a monthly drawing for a $20 gift certificate to bookshoporg. That's for real and that wasn't part of any of these original episodes. I had this giveaway because I was thinking what would summer be without a good reading list? So grab a nice tall glass of your favorite summer beverage, pull up your favorite outdoor chair, or even grab your hammock and enjoy a few moments of summer. on me, i promise you I'm somewhere doing the same.
Speaker 1:Hey there, welcome to the Uplift podcast, where we talk all things leadership for women in higher ed. I'm Carol Shabryus and I want to help make your leadership path a little easier, a bit brighter and a hell of a lot more fun. Here at the Uplift, we mash up real stories, real feelings, real theory and occasional f**k bombs, all to help you become the kind of believing, awesome leader you would love to follow. I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump in.
Speaker 2:I've been thinking a lot about that. How do white women, how might white women, start to bridge this relationship around trust without actually taxing the black woman? What might that look like?
Speaker 3:When you are not in the room. When my black woman colleague is not in the room, how do I honor? and bring forth what I've gained from that relationship in her absence.
Speaker 2:And also before the relationship has been created, when she is in the room. I think that's the added layer of life.
Speaker 2:When she sees it, when she's there, then she trusts that it's happening. When she's not there, that's the very least that starts to bridge the trust. Before you can be able to do that, of course, you're getting the context that you need so that when you are in the room in a leadership meeting or something, you can provide insight with that additional context without speaking, for So it's nuanced, but I think that's how you start to bridge the gap. I've been thinking about that a lot. How do you build that genuine relationship without going to the black woman and being like, hey, let's be friends?
Speaker 1:Last year I taught a Gen Ed course designed to introduce first year students to the idea of culture. Instructors have a lot of leeway with this course, as long as they cover some key material. I decided that the best way for me to teach students about culture was to teach them to see power, so we spent the first half of the semester exploring power in texts the students brought to class, music videos, ads, memes and so on, as well as some required readings for the course. We spent the last half of the semester learning the process of deliberative dialogue. Our goal with deliberative dialogue was to teach the students a method for resolving wicked problems, problems they share as a group that don't have a clear, straightforward solution and therefore require group consideration and compromise to move forward, and I saw deliberative dialogue as an excellent opportunity for the students to see power in action and practice power in action and experience navigating power in action. I chose to do this in part because I thought, in a course about culture, students would benefit from seeing that they are part of the culture of the university and, as such, they have power to identify problems and not just protest but actually choose a set of actions designed to address a problem of their solving. After the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 and a year of pandemic learning, we were hearing a lot in higher ed about equity, justice and race, and so, to be honest, i expected that when the students identified their wicked problem to work on together, they would choose something related to race. I was very surprised when, instead, they chose to focus on mental health and the ways the institution was not meeting their needs. Now I want to be clear that the students did really good work. They were active in the process. They dug into questions about their campus experiences. They listened to each other, raised alternative perspectives and even objections, and they came up with a number of ways that the university could better support their mental health, and they were able to share those ideas with the provost and a few deans, an experience which, i think, for many of the students, helped them see the issues of power we've been discussing all semester Since the class ended.
Speaker 1:Whenever I've talked about the class and the deliberative dialogues process we went through, i've often shared my surprise that, instead of choosing to discuss how to address racial inequality on campus, the students chose to focus on mental health. I chalked that up to having some distance from the protest-filled summer of 2020 and also to that year of pandemic learning, when many of those first year college students were finishing high school by taking virtual classes and having few, or maybe even no, social and extracurricular activities. It was not surprising to me at all that they came to their first year of college feeling exhausted and estranged, and at the time I thought it was really obvious that they would have identified this difficulty that they all experienced, even across differences, across identity categories such as race, gender, class, ability and so on. So I was surprised by where we ended up together as a class, but I didn't really interrogate things much further than that And I might not have We're not for this week's guests.
Speaker 1:You're going to hear firsthand from Christina and Jane in just a few moments, so no spoilers here, but let me say that over the course of the several weeks I spent getting to know Christina and Jane's work, i was also listening to the podcast seen on radio. In particular, i listened twice to season two, which is called Seeing White. In this season, the host, john Beeman, and his regular guest, dr Chenjarei Komunika, investigate how whiteness was created and continues to be sustained every day in the US. This is a remarkable podcast series And if you haven't yet listened to it, hit pause now and go add it to your podcast list. No, seriously, go do it, i'll still be here. Okay, really, i mean it. Pause, go add this podcast. Okay, thanks for doing that.
Speaker 1:I learned so much from this series. I imagine I and every white person listening learned not only some new truths about history, but some new things about ourselves. This series prompted me to think deeply about what my own whiteness has meant to me throughout my life, how it has helped me and how it operates in conjunction with my gender, my gender expression, my educational level and my socioeconomic status, and I'll have more to say about that in future episodes. Here I simply want to make space for conversations about what the season of seeing whiteness is about. It's about seeing the codification and infrastructure of white supremacy culture in all aspects of our lives in the US.
Speaker 1:And as I thought more about what it's like to swim in whiteness and be oblivious to it, i revisited what I taught my students when I taught them to interrogate power dynamics. Yes, we talked about race as a social construct and we analyzed a variety of visual texts from this particular perspective, but we always analyzed external sources, images that were not of ourselves. Sometimes images were like us or even reflected parts of our identities. So, for example, students sometimes brought in photos taken over the weekend during activities they participated in, but we never used that as an opportunity to turn the lens in.
Speaker 1:I didn't ask that work of any of the students, not of the many white students, nor of the Filipino student, nor of the two American Indian students. I didn't ask it of the neurodivergent student, nor of the student who came out to class as andro-sexual. We just never went in And it never occurred to me to ask the students to do that. And I think now that not going in was likely a contributing factor to the students choosing the wicked problem of mental health. And again, i want to be clear the students did great work. I'm not criticizing what the students did. Instead, i'm realizing now that the way I set the course up, what I asked them to interrogate and the ways I asked them to interrogate those things was a contributing factor to them not choosing to address race or racial inequalities on campus. In other words, i thought they were choosing a topic they cared about, which I think they did, but I didn't really interrogate the ways my own teaching and my own blind spots created the context for them to choose a topic that felt safer than it would have felt to talk about race. Another way of saying this is that I expected them to identify race as their wicked problem and when they didn't, i attributed that decision to agency, to the students' agency. But my thinking has been reframed over the last month and I see a lot more at play here, including my own collusion with and conditioning in white supremacist culture. Those students are on my mind this fall because I was so fond of them and I miss them Also.
Speaker 1:The last few podcast episodes on intergenerational communication and mentoring are salient for me personally and professionally, as I engage with women around the country about what women's leadership can look like, and today's episode takes us even deeper into these relationships across typical boundaries, as my guests explore the concept of interracial feminist co-mentoring. Today's guests are Christina Holmgren and Jane Summers, both of whom use she-her pronouns. Christina is a Black cisgender woman scholar and educator with over a decade of experience working within higher education. Her leadership experience includes the recruitment and retention of diverse student populations with a focus on accessibility, inclusivity and equity. She currently works as the program manager in the Graduate School of Professional Psychology at the University of St Thomas in St Paul, minnesota, where she also serves as an adjunct instructor of advocacy, changemaking and student development theory education. Her scholarship and research interests include racial and social identity development, trauma-informed pedagogical practice, black feminist thought and culturally-sustaining pedagogy. Jane is a white cisgender woman. She's also an educator, scholar, parent partner and community member. Prior to becoming a full-time faculty member, jane spent a decade working in undergraduate student-facing positions at a number of higher ed institutions. Her current appointment as an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at the University of St Thomas allows her to pursue her teaching and scholarly interests, which coalesce around transforming education to serve, honor and center the lived experiences of historically excluded populations. Jane works in community with others to identify, resist and interrupt the exclusionary influences of white supremacy, heteronormativity and ableism in higher ed.
Speaker 1:While I've known Jane for a long time, i've only recently learned about the work she collaborates on with Christina.
Speaker 1:When I did learn about it, i reached out to Jane to invite both of them to the podcast, and the response I got surprised me a little bit. I got back a list of questions about my intentions, and as I read those questions, i thought I was reading suspicion and concern about my motives, and that surprised me. But as I learned more about their work together, it became clear why suspicion and concern would emerge around me and also around my request. I'm an individual white woman with a microphone asking to share the thoughts and words about interracial, feminist co-mentoring of a black woman and a white woman who were speaking very particularly about their experience. Neither Jane or Christina was interested in having me speak for them or co-opt their message, and as you listen to them talk, you'll understand why. And so since my purpose on this podcast is to elevate the work women are doing without claiming or co-opting it, i am now going to step aside and give you Christina Holmgren and Jane Summers in community and conversation, with a few questions for me toward the end.
Speaker 3:Yeah, okay, When we hear the word mentoring, I think we're usually expecting something like the idea that there's a mentor who has sort of this level of knowledge and this level of access and this level of expertise that has allowed them to successfully play the game. And for us that game is higher education. And again, this is assuming that the mentor knows the way. It also implies that the mentor holds sort of all of the valuable knowledge and that the mentees or the folks that we are mentoring are novice and really they have nothing to offer to the relationship really, but are more sort of sponges for what the mentor might have to offer. And that's just inherently really hierarchical. I mean, that's really sort of putting the mentor at the top, putting power with the mentor, really assuming that the mentee is relying on the mentor.
Speaker 2:Right. Right, And what I think we both appreciate about this feminist co-mentoring model is that it really dismantles that approach right. So it allows both folks in the relationship and in relationship with each other to act as a teacher Both can be teachers, both can be learners. It gets rid of this kind of assumption that I know more and really takes in value of a lived experience and how that is showing up in the space. So it really challenges this idea of getting away from like emotion and how we think about emotion and allows us to really bring that into the relationship. And I think what's at the foundation of a really successful interracial feminist co-mentoring relationship is that both black women and white women are sharing power and partnering together in that relationship. But in order to do that, there has to be this recognition of the historical trauma that black women are bringing to the collaboration and the emotional trauma that black women are bringing into that collaboration.
Speaker 3:And I would say also alongside that which should be happening for both folks. Again we're acknowledging the relationship between a black woman and a white woman. There's also the need for the white women in these relationships to understand our connections and our contributions to the trauma, and not just contemporarily in the moment, but throughout history. What does that play in our relationship dynamic?
Speaker 2:Right And recognizing that it's always at play right. So the racialized experience is not just the black woman's racialized experience, it's the white woman and the black woman's racialized experience, and even though we might not acknowledge the whiteness, it's still a part of the dynamic. And so a commitment to this co-mentoring interracial feminist relationship is this recognition that I, as a black woman, have what I'm bringing, but white women have to continuously recognize how race is showing up in the dichotomy And if you do that, there at least breeds opportunity to build trust and to redistribute power and hopefully transform the learning experience for both parties.
Speaker 3:Should we say a little bit about who we are and kind of our relationship to higher education, our experiences in higher education, and then talk a little bit more about kind of what our relationship looks like?
Speaker 2:Yes, so I am Christina Holmgren. My pronouns are she, her, hers. I am a black woman. I'm a cisgendered black woman. I've been working in academia for over a decade, and my experience in higher education, working with faculty, working with students and staff, has really been continuously learning how to negotiate my sense of self and my sense of agency, while simultaneously carrying this emotional labor and managing my emotion in these predominantly white spaces. While I don't speak for all black women, i think that's a very common experience.
Speaker 2:Too frequently, black women are really asked to give up their personal or professional autonomy in order to mitigate the discomfort of other folks, typically white folks, typically white women.
Speaker 2:That's the demographic that we are encountering most often in higher education, and so, while these incidences have increased you know my feelings of isolation I've also come to recognize that they're not unique to me, but they shouldn't be normalized in the way that they have been historically, and they continue to be.
Speaker 2:I think this is a reality for a lot of black women in higher ed, and black women are often gaslit into thinking that their experiences aren't real, and so we are told that what we are experiencing on a day to day on college campuses are, you know, anecdotal that we're making a mountain out of a molehill, and we feel like we're really screaming from the top of our lungs Like we are being mistreated in higher ed. We are, you know, not being hired for roles that we're overqualified for, we're not receiving tenure that we're disproportionately being impacted by student evaluations in negative ways. No one's really listening to us, and so, despite all of this scholarly evidence of the experiences of black women, we really feel like we're kind of screaming into a void, and so I think that is why I wanted to tackle this dynamic between white women and black women, because it's so common, i think Right.
Speaker 3:Thanks for sharing a little bit about what you bring to this conversation. My name is Jane Summers. I am a white, also cisgender woman, an educator. I've been in higher education for a very long time. I started out as a hall director, as many folks do, working directly with students in student affairs for a long time, and I've been in a faculty position for a while now And in my path as a faculty member I too have felt isolated, but not because of my race.
Speaker 3:For me the isolation has come from knowing what feels wrong about higher education and wanting to dig into that and have those conversations and speak truth to power, and feeling like I haven't really been able to find collaborators to do that thinking with me And I think we'll probably talk about a little bit of what might feel risky about that for other folks. And so I have navigated that a little bit And I have an undergraduate minor in women's studies and those courses were paradigm shifting for me. But I realize this was in the late 90s, early 2000s And our instructors did everything they could to make sure that we had access to some of the most cutting edge thinking around feminism. It was still relatively colorblind and without really robust and centered consideration of the ways the lives of women of color are uniquely affected by the intersections of sexism and racism. So that was big to realize that my experience in the world was shaped by sexism. And then subsequently I've really worked to gain a deeper knowledge of the ways white feminists have historically failed to recognize these intersections of race and gender and unique forms of oppression, marginalization and violence that shape black women's lives. And I work on a daily, hourly basis intentionally to really interrogate the ways my socialization as a white person into white supremacist culture shows up in my pedagogy, my advising, my writing, my relationships and, of course, my parenting and engagement with my community. And so I'm grateful that you and I have been able to work together around the reality of race in our relationship.
Speaker 3:Recently, you and I wrote a paper about this idea of interracial feminist co-mentoring And I remember seeing the call for papers come into my email and I thought, well, there's a call for papers, maybe I'll get to it later, i'll see what the deadline is. And you forwarded it to me and said hey, did you see this call? I consider you to be a mentor to me. Would you want to do some of this writing together? And you and I had already been doing some writing together. But in that email I realized that I was a little surprised that you were inviting me to do this with you. It wasn't the surprising part that you wanted to maybe collaborate. But when you said that you considered me to be a mentor to you, i realized that I had never assumed that you would be looking for a mentor in someone like me, and by like me I mean a white woman.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, i think you make a very important point And, to be honest, our relationship as it stands right now is the last thing that I expected. I wasn't looking for a mentor when we began working together And in truth, when you initially reached out to me about the possibility of co-authoring, like one of our earlier pieces, at the beginning of our relationship I was, you know, i was immediately suspicious. While I had known you as an instructor for a couple of my graduate courses at that point and honestly even appreciated how you approach some of the classroom discussions around power and privilege and equity, i still didn't really know you. I didn't know you in the way that black women like to know white women before they take on projects with them.
Speaker 2:As a graduate student who has worked in higher education for many years, i've met many white women who really talk the right talk right during one-on-one conversations with me around equity. But when those conversations are in staff meetings or with leadership or in mostly white spaces, i'm really often left out on the ledge alone. So through multiple trial and errors, i have learned that white women couldn't really be trusted to support me or uplift me in the way that I needed them to. And if it was between me and their comfort, their comfort would win out every time.
Speaker 3:Thank you. That makes total sense and is a little hard to hear but is totally valid And I thank you for letting me know. And I'll have more to say. So when we think about our relationship, it was technically, i think I'd probably say pretty hierarchical in the beginning.
Speaker 3:If I was your instructor, you were a student in my course, I was your advisor and you were again a student in our EdD program. And as time went on, and in those relationships, i had the chance to witness your brilliant contributions in class and to read some of your excellent, excellent writing. So I had two ideas in mind when I reached out to you initially, about expanding our relationship into a collaborative one. First, as I mentioned, you are a brilliant scholar and thinker and the world needs to hear what you have to say. And second, it seemed like our respective knowledge and experiences could come together in a way that might reach some really important audiences. So that's what was going on for me when I asked if you might want to work together. But, as you just said, you didn't trust that. I didn't have ulterior motives and you came into this collaboration assuming that I would eventually either A take sole credit for the work that we'd done together B silence your voice in the process. Or. C both of those things simultaneously, yeah exactly.
Speaker 2:You know, from my perspective, that initial reach out about a possible collaboration made me really wary. White saviorism in academia is rampant And my past experiences had shown me that white women did not seek out relationships with black women without ulterior motives. You know, ultimately I went into that initial project meeting with you with a clear set of conditions about what was an absolute must for me and for this relationship to work. The first, and maybe the most important for me, was that you would be doing the work of dismantling the socialization of white supremacist ideology on your own. I was not interested in unpacking that with you in any way. It's one thing to discuss how this socialization shows up, you know, theoretically in our writings together, but I'm not willing to take on the taxation that comes with unpacking how this socialization can and will show up in our relationship. That's just, that's not my work to do.
Speaker 2:And then my second condition was that I would be able to show up authentically in my writing. Again, the trust wasn't there, so I didn't have any real expectations that I might be able to show up authentically in conversations between us. You know, as a black woman I was used to code switching But, with that being said, i wasn't willing to limit my writing about race positionality and the insidiousness of white supremacy in education. So suffice to say I had a lot on my mind and a lot to consider as we began our relationship, but I think ultimately my decision to move forward on the project with you was built on these considerations, which really acted as hard boundaries for me and my own sense of agency to engage in the work.
Speaker 3:Thanks for being so explicit about what was at play for you when we began to expand our relationship.
Speaker 3:I appreciate the distinction you made between having a theoretical understanding of concepts and then actually being willing to incorporate that understanding into our lives and what our work looks like as educators. My view of, and my experiences with traditional mentoring models, as we talked about earlier, assumes that a more experienced or professionally advanced mentor sees some potential in a student or colleague and decides to, or is sometimes assigned to, offer assistance and insights about how to successfully navigate higher ed. And this model assumes that the mentor knows what's best for the mentee and that the only path to success is the one that the mentor has taken. And then I can't help but make some connections to colonialism and white saviorism here, because both of these concepts champion the assumption that people of color can only achieve success with the guidance and assistance of white people. They ignore the knowledge, experiences and agency of people of color. So if we view mentoring in that sort of traditional way, we're really guilty of the same oversights, of ignoring what people of color bring to our relationship, to our collaboration.
Speaker 2:Right, absolutely, and I think what allowed me to feel like we could do some really powerful and important work together was the fact that you named your lens as a white woman, without me having to lay that foundation for you, and that's clear to me, at least at the time that you were actively doing the work to divest in white supremacist culture behind the scenes, right, so, without me, and that really saved me the trouble of having to provide you with feedback or corrective measures myself, and you know in my experiences being forced to provide this input to white women with whom I'm just in relationship right, maybe they work with me or maybe that, you know we're acquaintances It's really left them feeling resentful and it further inhibits my ability to fully show up in the space, and I think that a white woman might be doing some of the anti racist work on her own.
Speaker 2:Black women are still going to be skeptical of that. We have a healthy paranoia of white women and our hyper vigilant, which is exacerbated by racial battle fatigue, but it ensures that we're almost always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Speaker 3:So it sounds like you're saying that, even as we've continued our relationship and engaged in multiple collaborations, you've held on to some wariness about the ways my socialization as a white person will always be present in the dynamic. You have this vigilance, as you mentioned, so it's an explicit reminder of the vigilance that I need to practice in interracial relationships, attending to the role of my race as well as yours, and I think that, because I'm so honored to be doing this work with you and I feel like it's so important, i talk with a lot of my white woman friends about the work that you and I do together and the fact that we center race in most of our conversations, and many of these white women friends respond with wow, it sounds like it's a lot for you. Meaning it's a lot for me. I must be feeling shame, gosh, jane, like it's you. Just that must be really hard, which?
Speaker 2:is just wild to me that no one ever asked black women if being an interracial relationships in which we don't place race neither my nor yours at the forefront is a lot for us, right? so when I hear about an interracial relationship between a black and a white woman, my immediate thought is like sis, are you okay? You know? I mean, you're in this relationship and you're carrying so much and this white woman likely doesn't see you and she doesn't hear you, that you know. That's so much to unpack and it's always a lot for black women. That's really powerful, you know, in this case, i think the fact that you so openly and without defense kind of named your socialization as a white woman and explicitly work to recognize your own blonde spots, it really allowed me to think that we could begin to build trust in our relationship. And so often white women particularly, you know, in academia, are so worried about not being or so worried about being an expert and all the things that they often invalidate the lived experiences of black women.
Speaker 3:Right. There's also a tie here and makes me think about the way I was socialized as a feminist. When I was studying feminist theory, i thought I was learning about feminism, capital F. What I was really learning about was white feminism, and so much of that writing and activism lumped women, all women's experiences, together, without paying attention to any of our other intersecting identities, and the paradigm shift for me really lie again in that recognition of the ways that my life had been negatively affected by sexism. I also remember learning about the metaphor of the latter and the perception among women that there are limited spots for us the higher we climb, in whatever industry, so we often, as you just said, focus only on our individual ascent and in so doing hold other women down in this self centered focus on our own success. So white feminists might feel like we have to prove that women can do anything men can do, and in that we're not considering the dangerous realities of racial privilege that lie within that narrative.
Speaker 2:This reality also has a direct tie to the characteristics of white supremacist ideology. You know, identified by team a coon. And one of those tenants of white supremacist ideology is this idea of perfectionism and a competitive and compulsive need to know everything. And when this compulsion comes up against the lived experience to which a white woman can't relate, they often say something like Well then it's probably not true, or it likely didn't happen that way, or I'm a woman and that's never happened to me. I can't be authentic in a relationship like that in which I'm being gaslit in response to my very real lived experiences.
Speaker 2:Some authors have talked about this idea of like a vulnerable, backbreaking dance that black women often find themselves in as they negotiate their truth to better fit the expectations of whiteness. And I'm not doing that. I'm past that stage in my life. So when you actively recognize that you were not the expert or explicitly named your blind spots, that to me feels like this dismantling of a structure that has kept me from being my authentic self. We were starting our relationship from a place of honesty and with recognition that I bring a lens and you bring yours and we are in this space together. You know we're sharing this space.
Speaker 3:Right, right, i'm also thinking about the ways those white supremacist characteristics are embedded into the very process of what it looks like to climb the ladder or to advance professionally in academia. And of course, for me as a faculty member, this is particularly in relation to tenure and to the tenure and promotion process. So the white supremacist characteristic of the worship of the written word it essentially speaks for itself. When we think about academia And I think, on the institution, publications and top tier journals are often the most significant expectation of early career faculty, which is an explicit valuing of a particular kind of written word. I was just in an apartment meeting today where we saw this new set of guidelines that requires faculty going up for tenure and we would essentially make an argument for the merit of where their publications are appearing. And so that's a double down on. We don't necessarily trust that your writing is the right kind for you to receive tenure, so it's still happening, as we know.
Speaker 3:And then, obviously, the sense of urgency, which is also one of those white supremacy characteristics. It means that it's so much easier to avoid collaborative writing projects like you and I do together, because they inherently take more time than working alone. And there's another characteristic of quantity over quality. We see that a lot in white supremacist culture and it came into play for me when I was writing my tenure application. And not only was, i did I need to provide a description of the peer review process and make clear that it was, you know, academically rigorous. I also had to provide the word count, and these were peer reviewed book chapters around intersecting social identity that students might hold, and I was asked to provide the word count. So that was an explicit valuing of quantity over quality. So it almost feels like a risk to navigate higher education in any other way or to embrace a more collaborative approach rather than an exclusively individualist one.
Speaker 2:Right Absolutely, and, and the truth is you have to be willing to share power, and that can feel like a risk to white women who have been socialized within academia, you know. I want to be unequivocal about the necessity of redistributing power within these kinds of co mentoring relationships. It has to be a power with relationship and it cannot be a power over. If white women are not willing to share power, than they shouldn't engage in interracial relationships. Right, because they are doing more harm And that is, of course, feeding into this cycle of mistrust and power imbalance.
Speaker 2:To me, this is the difference between performativity and action. You can't say that you want to be an ally and that you want an inclusive culture, but not be willing to give up something to make that space for someone else. So does that mean that you will likely have to be uncomfortable at times and take risks in your campus community? Yeah, that's exactly what it means, right? Equity is not about comfort, it's about it's a radical dismantling of oppressive structures that work to take power away from black, brown and queer folks. So when we think about interracial co mentoring relationships, we have to go into those with this recognition that power has not been distributed in an equitable way and that you have to intentionally redistribute power in order to ensure the relationship is reciprocal.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, i want to spend a little bit more time on the comfort element. I think what we're talking about is the entitlement to racial comfort which white women are socialized to carry and Robin D'Angelo writes about. So, as you have, as you mentioned earlier, the centrality of race in relational dynamics or in a relationship is always at play for the black woman in an interracial relationship. But we as white women become uncomfortable when we're challenged to consider not just your race but ours as well, and I'd say so many of us don't have any desire to acknowledge that our whiteness influences those relational dynamics, because doing so often invokes shame and paralysis, both of which are super uncomfortable. So the intersection of the white supremacist culture of academia and sexism make it really hard to build the type of relationship that you and I have.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, definitely. Honestly, I think all of that comes into play, and it impedes on the ability to form genuine and authentic relationships between black and white women. In addition to that, though, I think this incessant and perpetual need to ignore the fact that all of this is even at play at all is also a part of that dynamic, right? So white women believe that if they don't name it explicitly, then it's not happening, right? They don't recognize that in not naming all of the harm that has been done in a racial relationships historically, they're actually invalidating the experiences of black women. It comes back to what makes white women feel most comfortable ignoring the harm in the spirit of moving forward. You cannot move forward towards shared power without addressing the abuse and trauma that's at the root of the relationship.
Speaker 3:Right And, as you're saying, that abuse and trauma between white and black women. It predates our relationship. Our relationship dynamic also includes this historical and generationally transmitted reality And we as white women, i think, have had expectations passed on generationally, but in super subversive ways, that come much more in the form of modeling for us. So, for example, it starts with plantation owners, wives, making sure enslaved black women knew their place. It moves to white women teachers disciplining black girls. It also includes white women supervisors evaluating black employees.
Speaker 3:We can think about white women politicians making policies that affect the lives of black women citizens. It's been happening and passed down from generation to generation, this expectation that that it's our job to leverage our whiteness and leverage our positionality in relation to white men and make sure that the black women know their place. I also know that every personal experience that you have had with white women in your life, not just in academia, shapes how you approach and view our relationship And as a white woman, i really it's really tempting to say it's not fair to assume that I'll be like them, that I'll be like every woman you've met. But what's coming out in that statement brings me back to the individualism that white supremacist culture socializes us to value and pursue. I want you to see me as an individual and to not lump me in with all other white women. It's that good bad binary that Robin D'Angelo writes about. So I really want you to see me as a good white person, despite all of the experiences you've had that contradict that very possibility.
Speaker 2:Yes, and honestly I often say that if your black friends are colleagues whom you consider to be your friends, are not talking to you about race and how it's impacting their experiences in this like shared professional context, they're not your friends, right, they're not really your friends. You know and this is, of course, coupled with this recognition that we as humans have many identities. Of course, that can be salient to us at any given time, but at historically white institutions, race is really salient for a lot of black and white folks, and especially salient for me, and so if I can't talk to you about my racialized experience, then you likely have not proven that you can be trusted with that information or you've not made me feel safe enough that I can explicitly name it for you, right?
Speaker 3:I'm really grateful for this conversation And I just want to underscore something else that you've said in this conversation that I'm coming back to here. You mentioned that one of your conditions for working with white women is that their words must align with their actions, in both private and public spaces. So I feel the need to say that if we, as white women, are interested in increasing representation of black women in faculty or administrative roles in higher education, we need to be consciously and constantly committed to educating ourselves on the ways white supremacy shows up in higher education. But we also need to realize that we can't do that until we truly understand the ways it also influences our and this is going to be pretty uncomfortable personal journeys and individual relationships. So we have to go in.
Speaker 3:It's a lot of internal work and it can happen in a variety of ways, and a few things come to mind, but it's not exhaustive. We could read the writing or consume the art and offerings of people of color that de-center whiteness and uplift what we've framed as counter narratives. We can also read and engage with work by other white people that interrogates white supremacy culture and our socialization into it. We can join affinity groups with other white people, in which we examine our race and its influence on our lives and relationships. But the key thing about each of these strategies is that none of them tax the black women with whom we are in relationship.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, i think we can be really frank here and say that, unless white folks start doing the necessary work to dismantle oppressive structures within academia, black and brown folks will continue to be systemically excluded. Right, that's, that's the truth, and a part of that work is creating and making space for those from historically excluded backgrounds and elevating their experiences to a larger scale. White women may not recognize how they operate as gatekeepers in academia, but they have an opportunity to leverage their whiteness in order to foster reciprocal relationships between black and white women, and that's honestly why a feminist co-mentoring approach can be so transformative. Right, it disassembles this misconstrued ideal of this like objective intellectual, and it really inserts the emotional experiences of those in academia, particularly those experiencing oppressive structures. So, for black and white women, it can be mutually beneficial and empowering to show up for one another. The key, though, is recognizing that both parties bring value to the space and can learn from each other.
Speaker 1:I can listen to you talk. All the two of you talk together.
Speaker 2:We like it too. This is our thing.
Speaker 1:So, over the course of a couple different calls, jane and Christina meandered their way through a really fascinating conversation, and I mostly try to just shut up and sit back and observe the magic. And that's what's happening here. They pick up a thread on topics that are important to each of them individually and to both of them together, so let's follow along and listen in.
Speaker 3:Sorry, carol, you might use this. Right, it's okay. Okay, i'm just figuring, it's all material, but it reminds me of that text conversation where you and Leah another one of our black woman friends you were naming instances where white women not even instances, but it's like, and if you lead with like you're married to a black man, or if you lead with some sort of superficial connection to blackness, i still don't trust you. So then in that conversation, leah said Jane, how do you feel about what we're saying here? And it took me a minute and all I could come up with I don't even know how to phrase it other than like the good, the bad binary, which I'm trying to get away from.
Speaker 3:But I'm so eager, i'm so eager And my, my Capricornness, my white supremaciness, my feminists, i'm very eager to establish that connection. But what we're trying to name here is that it's the long game man. Truly, if it is a genuine interest in establishing a relationship, then it is about showing up. It is not about eagerly trying to establish myself as an ally, basically Like it's being an ally instead of like saying you're an ally.
Speaker 2:Yep, right, showing up in those spaces as that additional voice in the room to share the power, to carry some of the weight, right?
Speaker 2:Because when you're in a leadership position as a black person, there are a lot of things that might contribute to how you're feeling in that leadership space.
Speaker 2:But one of the things that I know I deal with or struggle with is feeling like I have to speak from the black perspective because I'm maybe the only, even though I know that our experiences are not monolithic.
Speaker 2:When I'm in that room, i feel like I have to be a representative of, like, folks from historically excluded backgrounds, and that's taxing. And so if I'm in that space and I know that there's another white person who's using their power to actually do that work, if I don't have to do that and then be labeled problematic or challenging, right, any of these other stereotypes we get to black women then I'm like, okay, i see, right, i'm much more willing, at the very least, to have a conversation with you about what we can do in community, with each other, to get shit actually accomplished. That's how you build the reciprocity. Because I'm like okay, i see that you are willing to have these really challenging conversations not with me one-on-one in these private spaces, but actually in spaces where change can happen, and so that makes me more willing to work with you in that way, right.
Speaker 2:And I think that's the reciprocity there.
Speaker 1:I'm loving this conversation and it makes me want to ask you a question that I think we'll get to some of the things we wanted to talk about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm thinking about this conversation you're having about representation and who speaks for whom and how that works, and I'm wondering if you can speak to the dismantling of the white supremacist culture at historically white institutions from this lens of who's doing the work and what that work could look like if we were truly focusing on dismantling, rather than perpetuating, these structures that are so disenfranchising.
Speaker 3:Right. So it's interesting because the characteristic of white supremacy culture that came to mind when you were naming that is the focus on individualism, and part of what Christina and I talked about earlier is that to do work in community naturally takes longer. It is a different investment of time, of energy, of process. I can't make a decision on my own if Christina and I are part of a team who are responsible for something. So there's a dialogue and a negotiation that goes into making programming decisions, making policy decisions, making any sort of curricular decisions. There's a process, as opposed to just sitting in my office by myself writing my syllabus or creating a program plan. It feels risky because things might take longer to let go of this white supremacist focus on individualism. It's just one thing that came to mind, but there's more cooking. What's up for you?
Speaker 2:I immediately think that the job of dismantling white supremacy is actually for white folks, or folks who hope privileged identities, and so I think the challenge is that white folks don't accept that and also are scared. So I think it's twofold. I think that sometimes folks are scared that they're going to be speaking to things that they don't fully understand, or they haven't, and likely that's because they haven't really done the homework. They haven't thought about how their privilege identities show up, they haven't thought about how their socialization shows up, they haven't thought deeply about what their privileges are, what social identities they do hold and how that takes up space systemically. So they don't have the context. And because you don't have all this context that wonderful black and brown scholars have been providing for many, many years through the literature, through the research, which we really should be taking into account, particularly in higher education reading it's contemporary, so that's stuff we should be taking in. But because they haven't done the homework, they haven't studied for the test, and so they're nervous for failing. So it's this really dangerous cycle of never doing the work, never doing the internal reflection, never doing the reading, never listening actively to what folks from historically excluded backgrounds have already told us about this. This information's out there And so when they do get into the room and there's maybe a DEI expert, they're like, well, they've done the work, they know the answer. Right, they've done the work, they have the context, they know the answer.
Speaker 2:So why would I step in and say anything? It's a way to distance oneself from accountability. Yes, and that's actually why I think sometimes they have an office of one, a DEI office of one, and they're like, well that I hired this person, that's the action that I took, and they should be kind of getting us together to elevate what you said, jane. It's a distancing from community and it's this focus on individualism and in higher education, right, and it's this holding on to that tenet of white supremacy that allows folks to continue to not be held accountable for the community and cultures that they're creating on campus. So that makes it a lot easier to say, well, we have a DEI person and they'll just figure it out which is code and what. I hear the dog whistle, for folks from historically excluded background should do that work because they get it, they have that lived experience, they should just figure it out. So there's no accountability. I don't think that folks hold themselves accountable for actually doing the work in a real way.
Speaker 1:I'm just going to say something out loud and ask you to respond however you want to it. I think I've had this feeling but I haven't had these words attached to this feeling that what you're describing is actually racist, right? So putting a black or brown person in the DEI office and then expecting them to do the work is a perpetuation of racism. It's not a stop.
Speaker 3:It's not giving them a staff. I mean, it's the most performative thing.
Speaker 1:So I'm wondering if we can pick up this idea of the interplay of individualism and racism, and so, jane, i'll let you speak to this, so that Christina doesn't have to sit here and do the work for us. Jane, can you talk to white listeners about the ways they can actively intervene? So now we're in this for the long game, right, we're not performing allies. What does that literally look like for a white person on campus? What is doing the work look like?
Speaker 3:I mean, i just I think I have to start with a deep breath, because part of my approach to this is rooted in my inherent eagerness. Right, it's hard to take a beat and take a breath, and it begins with humility. And so I think, when Christina and I have been asked to be really clear about what this looks like, we're always very intentional to say that we are only talking about our own relationship. But you're asking me to make some generalization. So I want to be clear about both of those things that are at play. We never want I never, i never want a white woman hearing any of this dialogue or wanting to put any of this into action, to run out and eagerly attempt to establish a friendship with a black colleague. So there's, i want to be really clear about that. So the invitation is not to go out, the invitation is to go in. So in terms of like I know you're asking Carol like this look like, what do I do? and our desire for that kind of formula and the like how to be an anti racist handbook is all rooted in white supremacy. We want, we have a worship of the written word and we want this sort of very formulaic approach and and that is that's dangerous.
Speaker 3:I mentioned earlier the importance of consuming content, of reading the brilliant work that, as Christina named, has been around for a long you know not as long as as much. You know what we might call foundational and I might say tired scholarship, and it's often in conversations that someone might show up and be like Oh my God, i can't believe someone phrased it this way and Christina would be like we've been facing it that way for a long time. So welcome to the conversation, and so so our going in can look like consuming so much amazing content and art that's created by people of color and, as I mentioned, consuming critical white content that helps us really interrogate our own whiteness, because part of what Christina and I try to be clear about is that both of our races are at play in the relationship. My whiteness shapes my reality and my experience of our relationship, and the bias that I bring to the way I frame is that I'm really everything, and so I have to at least know that, and also I try to be aware of when and how I name it, because I think part of what you said, christina, is what you witness is that I will, on occasion, go. Oh, yep, there's that, that's just my like.
Speaker 3:But I'm like I was in a meeting this week and someone's like, oh my gosh, dry shampoo. Like literally, we were all talking about dry shampoo. And so someone's like, oh my gosh, dry shampoo is just, you know, a gift from my God. And I was like, for white women's hair I, as far as I know, right there's. So I just was sort of like, wow, this is a really interesting way to spend a few minutes in a meeting and I'm, you know, part of it, but I always am working to make sure that my race is at the center of the meaning that I'm making.
Speaker 3:I also was thinking, christina, as you were talking about listening to the voices of black and brown folks that we are in space with, and what my notes say here is the more you listen, the more you listen, whether that be to someone's audible contribution or someone's written contribution. If we start to actually listen to what is being said, then we're adding to our toolkit of ways to phrase opportunities to dismantle white supremacy, which are happening in every single meeting where we have someone with a historically excluded racial identity or a historical excluded identity. So the more we are engaged, the more we know how to do it. So I don't. It doesn't feel like a chicken and an egg thing to me, but it does become cyclical, i think.
Speaker 2:I think too, jane, and you said this, and it just was like yes, i remember when you said it I think I said that to you I was like damn, yeah, absolutely. what you had said was I think white folks, and white women in particular, just have to accept that there's a limit, and I just was like, yes, there is truly a ceiling when it comes to interracial relationships, reciprocity between black and white women And in a socialization, particularly that white feminism provides, in that we have to break all glass ceilings. we have to get to this point where we are like experts and there's nothing we can't do, which is a part of feminist thinking. right, there actually is like there's a limit to what you can understand in an interracial relationship. There's a limit to really how close you can get right, because when you're having two different realities all the time simultaneously, there are just things that you just won't understand, whether it be culturally or whether it just be like the lived experience, and that's just something that you have to accept.
Speaker 2:And I just thought that was really powerful when you said that of like there's always gonna be a limit in our relationship with each other, because there's always gonna be a difference in our lived reality And the acceptance of that right, the acceptance that you won't ever be an expert in this relationship, of this relationship, is a dismantling of white supremacist thinking.
Speaker 3:Oh, my God, thank you so much for kind of taking us there. I have been thinking and wanting to talk about understanding our limits as an alternative to shame. I'm thinking about recognizing, as you've said, the limits on the extent to which you will ever trust me, the extent to which I will ever fully understand your experience in the world, and the limits on which I can tax you in asking you to share that reality with me. There are limits to the extent to which I should expect to be entitled to access to black engagement and black culture.
Speaker 3:Writing about black lives In our earlier conversation, when you're talking about the conditions of coming into relationship and then you name them as boundaries, i think of the equivalent. Consideration for the white woman is the limit, and perhaps, maybe I go so far as to say I am very keen and observant of what I see to be the boundaries that you set and that any black woman I'm in relationship with sets, and that for me is a recognition of my limitation and the natural limitation of our relationship, which does not bring me shame. It is just part of how I understand our relationship to be.
Speaker 2:I totally agree as that that's the counterpart to the boundaries conversation, right. But I think the broader conversation for black women that we have to negotiate within ourselves is what our actual boundaries are in order to be in relationship with this white woman. And that's hard And I think a lot of that actually revolves around our own black identity development and where we find ourselves on that spectrum right Of, like, our consciousness of our blackness and what that means for us as we move throughout the world. Right, and the implications of that, the broader implications. But I do think a little bit about how long it took me to recognize like, oh, this is actually a boundary and it's okay for me to set this boundary. That is okay In a world that actually tells black women that they don't have autonomy over their thoughts and feelings and bodies.
Speaker 2:That agency that came with me really thinking intentionally about what my considerations are in order to engage with this person is just really powerful. It's really freeing. And I talk about it explicitly as a negotiation because we have to weigh the risk in setting those boundaries right. And so I know that in just average or typical relationship with white women sometimes the juice isn't worth the squeeze, right? Sometimes me naming a boundary just isn't worth all of the resentment that might come from that white woman or all of the pushback of like well, you've got to give me more information, you've got to tell me why you've set this boundary right, you've got to explain it to me. Sometimes the relationship is valuable enough that I'll do that, and most of the time it's not, and so I just have to determine what that looks like for myself and feel confident in that, with an understanding that there could be additional risks depending on where and with whom I'm setting the boundary.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of black women. It takes a long time for us to set boundaries with other people, and again, that's just because of our socialization as women, as black women, in a community, in a society that doesn't value what we say, right, our opinions, in that way, and so we have to care enough about our own mental health to really start thinking intentionally about what a boundary looks like, But the counterpart is the respecting from that white woman of what that boundary is right.
Speaker 2:You don't actually need to know why I've set this boundary What you do have to do if you want to be in relationship with me is to say, okay, I hear you and because I value you enough, I'm going to respect that boundary.
Speaker 2:I don't need to tell you why what you've said has kind of tipped over that boundary. If I say you know that really made me uncomfortable or whatever, that's a gift. I think That's a gift that I've given you to really do some internal work around your socialization, and why that might have shown up in our relationship in that way. I am really intentional about thinking about boundaries and whether I name them explicitly or not, i know what they are and I know when I'm going to disengage And that's just been really helpful for me in my mental health really how I take care of myself as a Black woman in community with other people. There's just standing firm in that.
Speaker 3:Thank you for being so brilliant. I don't need to know. Just you are is what I mean to say. You started the risk it might feel to set a boundary as you mentioned, you know, in a society that has led Black women to understand that they don't have autonomy over their minds and bodies, and I think about the role of white women in perpetuating that reality, and that in these moments where we are receiving a gift, which is exactly how we need to frame it, we have a choice to either perpetuate that situation and deny that Black woman her reality and then boundary with us, or we can do exactly what you said, which is recognized as a total gift, and this as a white woman letting you set a boundary with me so that we can stay in relationship Like I don't know, to be honest, like it almost doesn't compute Right And it just. It takes a lot, of, a lot of sort of figuring out where we are and our understanding of our whiteness as being a part of the relationship in order to be able to start to reconcile that.
Speaker 2:Right, i think I mean it's total socialization on from both parties.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes socialization for black women is oh, i can set this boundary and that's totally acceptable and that's and that's good, and I should do that for my mental health and for my physical being. And for white women, i think that there's a catering to emotionally at times, to the emotions of white women And sometimes, when we set those boundaries, that to trigger to like, oh, this feels like a personal attack on me And I am offended that you could even consider that I had ill intent in any way. Right, i think at the at the end of the day, it actually doesn't matter what your intent is right. When I'm setting my boundary, my boundary is my boundary, no matter what your intent is, and so what matters really in that moment is an impact and how I am impacted by what's happened, and so it's a total reframe of socialization in that way.
Speaker 3:I also want to name that, in the event that I receive a gift of critical feedback and an invitation to think about my socialization, it's important that, if I do feel like an apology is warranted, that I offer that apology. I give perhaps just a very brief explanation, if at all, if at all, and then I mean I'll say when I, when I do this in practice, which I do I say you don't even need to respond. I just want you to know that I, i, i recognize I don't know how it landed and I don't, we don't need to get into it, but I'm sorry And I will. I will seek to not make the same mistake in the future, which is, i mean, the minimum of what I can offer. And I'm not seeking absolution, i'm not saying we're okay, right. I'm okay right because I don't want to tax you in that way.
Speaker 1:Jane, can I add to that? I'm struck by the way you entered into that, that bit about the apology that I think you said. if I feel an apology is warranted, and the one caution I want to add is you might not feel the apology is warranted If a person and I learned this from my teenagers every day if a person feels harmed, the apology is warranted, regardless of what you think, and so I just I kind of want to offer a slight variation on that theme. I think you're 1000% correct that when an apology is warranted, you offer it, but the other person is in charge of what that apology is warranted. And one of the reasons that's coming to mind listening to you is the parallel between a black woman setting a boundary as an active agency and a white woman seeing a limit as an active humility.
Speaker 1:Those two things make me think, really hopefully, about the future of higher education. because, to go back to the shame component, we feel shame when we don't know things, because higher ed tells us to feel ashamed of what we don't know. Correct If we trade the shame that might come from lack of knowledge, if we trade that shame for humility and walk around feeling humble by all the limits we're seeing and knowing that. that's also acknowledging all the agency that other people are taking. Like the whole fucking world looks different. Yeah, we operate that way.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I mean think about. I think about I mean culturally, in my experience in the black community, you look at elders as these people that hold all that knowledge and it's so, it's so valued in the community, right, and people that have had these lived experiences and come from walks of life that are not your own. they are like the upper echelon of the community, the pillars, right, and they help guide the things that you do and the way that you think about experiences, and so I think that's really reciprocal in that way, right, i think, if we can really dismantle this idea of individualism within white supremacy and be in community with other folks and think about what it means to be in community, right.
Speaker 2:And so when you are feeling like shame, of like I didn't know this, you've got this other person who is like well, that's okay, like I'm stepping in, like tap me in, right, i've got this and we can rely on each other here to create and transform something into something really powerful. And so, really, it's this holding on, this clinging of I need to know everything, i need to be the expert in everything. That is physically just, it just is exhausting. It's just physically exhausting. So think about what it actually means to be in community. It means you're actually taking weight off of your shoulders, you're giving yourself grace to recognize that you don't have to know everything, and then you're sharing that with someone else and you're sharing and it's just like, okay, i know I can rely on this other person to do this work with me, right.
Speaker 3:One of the things that we talk on in this feminist co mentoring relationship is that we are both teachers and we're both learners, and the relationship, so humility, is baked in.
Speaker 1:But you know what, jane? humility is not baked into teaching in higher ed.
Speaker 3:I know. No, I'm saying it's baked into our relationship. Yeah that's really baked into this approach. But no, i mean no, it is, it is. It's not even on the ingredient list.
Speaker 2:Yes, yep, right.
Speaker 1:I have to bring this to a close.
Speaker 2:That's a really good conversation, i mean, but it's not done, i guess, right, no, i think that's.
Speaker 3:maybe that's it Like it's, it's actually never done. So you know, it reminds me of Glenn Singleton's courageous conversations protocol for how we engage in conversations about race, and one of the four agreements is expect and accept non closure. So there is no closure to this conversation To be. It lives on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this really wonderful conversation has made for a pretty long episode, and so I won't extend it with any additional commentary, except to say there is more commentary coming, so tune into future episodes. I also want to make a quick note of a variety of resources you can find in the show notes. I've linked to a number of useful readings and including Tima Okun's foundational piece, which is now revised, on white supremacy culture and the URL for the accompanying website she's published, which itself is a treasure trove of resources. I've also linked again as I did an episode 22 in my conversation with Alisa Robinson on the ways that feminism is optimism to Peggy McIntosh's original piece about the knapsack of privilege. I link as well to the podcast seen on radio, and I know you already paused and added it to your list, but in case you didn't, you can easily find it here. Most importantly in the show notes is a reading list that Christina and Jane generously curated and shared with us. I'm including it in full, including links to books you can purchase and also links to any pieces that are publicly available. And then, last, i want to make a request, and that is that we help Christina and Jane in their mission to make this material widely accessible to a broad audience, and so I'm going to ask that, if you know a woman who would benefit from listening to Jane and Christina talk, or would benefit from thinking about these issues, that you share this podcast, forward it, send folks links, direct people to listen to it, in particular, to this episode. I'll include Jane and Christina's contact information at the University of St Thomas in the show notes so that if you wish to connect with them, you can do so directly. I really appreciate you helping spread this message, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Uplift Summer Session. I am picturing you listening while swinging in a hammock in the shade with your favorite book nearby, and speaking of books, can I buy you one? Here's the deal I'll make you I'll enter you in a monthly drawing for a $20 gift certificate at bookshoporg If you will head over to your podcast platform and leave me a review. Once a month, i'll choose a winner at random And if your name is chosen, i'll thank you on air and send you your gift certificate. This way, you get some great summer reading and I get to help you build your library. After all, i'm the granddaughter of a librarian, so sharing books with people is one of my great joys. So head on over to your podcast platform, or even Apple Podcast, where it might be easier, scroll to the bottom of the page for the Uplift and leave your review, and I want to send you a book.