Episode 2: Radical Honesty – The Truth They Called Dangerous | Auntea-ology: The Antidote Dialogues

Have you ever told the truth and been called dangerous?

In Episode 2 of Auntea-ology: The Antidote Dialogues, hosts Sobia Ali-Faisal and Mueni Mutinda spill the tea on what happens when you stop performing peace and start speaking truth. Come quiet. Leave louder.

In this episode:

• Sobia shares a story that will hit home for anyone who's ever been silenced for speaking truth: fired from her role as Director of EDI and Human Rights after the Faculty Association complained about her anti-Zionist and anti-casteist social media posts - posts made on her own time, on her own accounts.
• We explore how power protects itself when it can't win on logic, by making it about who is speaking, not what is being said.
• We name the civilization-level lies that systems are built on, and why refusing to name them means refusing to solve the problem.
• We ask the question that changes everything: If you benefit from a system built on a lie, and you never say the lie out loud, are you actually an honest person?

Reflection Questions for You:

• What's the one thing you're not saying out loud, and who would it cost if you did?
• When did you last lie to keep the peace? And what did that lie cost you?
• If honesty is the antidote, what's stopping you from taking it?

What You'll Walk Away With:

Permission to name the lies you've been carrying. A framework for understanding why silence protects systems—not people. And the reminder that the more of us who speak, the harder it is to silence us all.

Join the conversation deeper: www.seedroom.ca

🍵 Monthly Auntea-ology gatherings (live, confidential)
📘 Online course with frameworks and readings
🧭 Coaching & consulting for teams and leaders ready to move from performance to practice
📧 Free discovery calls: info@seedroom.ca

Come quiet. Leave louder.

Music credits:

Intro Music from #Uppbeat:
https://uppbeat.io/t/jeff-kaale/win
License code: YHCOEFOGGBJ5NJQC

Break Music from #Uppbeat
https://uppbeat.io/t/dan-barracuda/casuarinas
License code: USTCXFWEUZVQAUKT

Outro Music from #Uppbeat
https://uppbeat.io/t/cloudchord/dharma-feat-soul-food-horns
License code: JLAYJCLEG7O9ZRPB

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Have you ever told the truth and been called dangerous? Welcome back to Ontiology, the Antidote Dialogues. I'm Moiny Mutinda. And I'm Sylvia Ali Faisal. Last time we asked if you were the drama. This time we're asking what happens when you stop performing peace and start speaking truth. Sylvia, how are you doing today?

SPEAKER_01 0:33

I'm doing well. I'm excited about today's conversation. Um, a little nervous, but definitely looking forward to this. I this is something I've been thinking about for a really long time. How are you?

SPEAKER_00 0:47

Yeah, I'm doing well. Thanks. I'm doing very well. It's raining, so definitely uh enjoying the tea and this conversation. I'm looking forward to this conversation and the topic, as you say. It is a sensitive one. So I'm bringing in that tea closer. Okay, so tea's ready. Let's talk about the last time you told the truth and they called you dangerous.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Okay, so I have a story about that. This past year, uh, I watched something a little unsettling happen. So Zoran Mandani ran for mayor of New York City. For those who don't know, he's a 34-year-old Muslim man, democratic socialist, and he came out of nowhere and won the mayorship of New York City. He's also unapologetically anti-Zionist. And because of that, the smear campaigns against him were relentless. Anti-Muslim racism, fear-mongering, hate, they called him a threat. They said Jews would not be safe with him in power. They acted like a Muslim in power was a dangerous thing. Luckily, he won anyway, and by all accounts, is doing an amazing job right now. Very popular. But watching all that panic reminded me of something that I'd recently experienced. When I was working at UPEI recently as staff, the faculty association filed an informal complaint about my personal social media posts. So these are posts that I made outside of work hours on my own time, using my personal social media accounts, which did not name my employer. Specifically, they were upset about my anti-Zionist and anti-castist posts that I reshared from others, from scholars specifically. Now I'm South Asian, I'm against caste-based discrimination, which is rampant in our communities. So this is something I often post about. And also I'm Muslim. Zionism has been at the forefront of perpetuating and propagating anti-Muslim racism. So this is also something I post a lot about. Both Zionism and Castism impact me personally. The faculty association said that I was biased. You know, like how we're accused of being biased against white people when we call that racism. They even asked that I be removed from equity work with them. That's how offended they were with my honesty about the brutality and oppression of Zionism and castism. After about a month, the university fired me. No clear reason, no warning, no due protest, just a less than one minute conversation with my boss, who said they were letting me go for some vague reason that didn't make any sense to me. Then later that same day, they sent an email statement out to the campus community about wordplace culture concerns. And they suggested that the campus was safer without me. So here I am, a Muslim woman who does equity work, who speaks about Palestine and anti-Muslim race at them, and caste at them, and who refuses to be neutral about genocide. And that makes me a threat to them. And so unfortunately, here's the lesson that I've learned from that: that hate and fear don't want truth. What they need is a story to keep that hate and the fear going. The story of the dangerous Muslim has been circulating for centuries. It makes people panic about Zoran Mamdani leaving New York, and it made UPEI remove me without dignity, without reason, without a single conversation as to why or an opportunity for me to defend my truth. So here's the thing: radical honesty will cost you. There's really no way around that. The systems of oppression that we are working to dismantle are built upon lies. Layers and layers of lies. Lies about black, brown, and indigenous people, lies about disabled and queer people, lies about immigrants, lies about poor people, lies about women, lies about the other, basically. But the alternative to radical honesty is silence. And silence protects these systems, not people. And the more people who are honest, the harder it becomes to silence us all.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

What I'm hearing is that radical honesty isn't about being authentic in some feel-good way. It's about the fact that silence protects systems, not people. And the alternative to honesty isn't safety, it's it's complicity. And one of the things that strikes me about your story is that the university didn't even try to make the case against you, your substance. They just couldn't argue with what you actually said. So they made it about you, about who you are. And it strikes me that that's how power protects itself when it can't win on logic.

SPEAKER_01 6:18

Exactly. I mean, power is based on lives, right? Truth telling challenges its existence. So it makes so the truth telling is is very threatening to power. They need to maintain a certain status quo, and anyone who threatens that through truth telling is going to be considered a threat. Because again, it's it's like lives upon lives upon lives. One example that I think of that always helps me understand this better, and it maybe might might help uh listeners understand as well, is the interview that I heard a few years ago. So Mark Lamont Hill interviewed a forensic psychiatrist named Dr. Aruna Kilanani. She's of South Asian descent, works in the US, and she there was some sort of controversy around something she had said at the time, and it had to do with race and racism. So in the interview, Hill asks her, basically, based on your expertise, are white people psychopathic? Again, she's a psychiatrist, and this is her area of expertise. And she says, yes, you know, she thinks so. And and not because every white person has a clinical disorder. Like that's not what she was suggesting, but because of the scale of lying that has been normalized in colonization, right? There's just so much, so many lies that the new systems uh have been built on, this idea of white supremacy, ideas of like the supremacy of the colonizers, it's all been based on lies. And so Hill asked her for an example, like, what did she mean? And she said, Well, you know, like you steal a country, you loot the country, you genocide the people there, the indigenous people there, and then you say you discovered it. Like that's not discovery, but you say you discovered it, and then you write that in history books, and that's taught in schools and it's taught in institutions, and all of a sudden it's a quote-unquote fact of history, right? It becomes so normalized. These lies become so normalized. And so her point was that as long as white people are unwilling to recognize those lies, as long as they walk around with this sort of psychopathic understanding of the world where that becomes discovery and genocide becomes settlement, you can't address racism because you can't you can't solve a problem that you refuse to name honestly. And so this, these are the types of lies that these systems are based on. And until we are willing uh, you know, to to recognize these lies, we're not going to be able to address any of these systems of oppression.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

It it reminds me of the doctrine of discovery. I don't know. Have you have you looked at that document? Have you read it? Yeah. And uh the first time I read it, and I mean, I think every time I I have read it since that time, uh, it's always struck me how kind of the push or the direction was to subdue, quote unquote, like you're discovering these lands, these lands don't have people, which then they are yours to take. And if there are any humans, indigenous people that are there, which were considered uh not human, less than human, they uh are going to serve you in perpetuity. And so the the construct, the colonial construct is that there's this lie, this decision that is made that then is continued on and built upon and built upon, which then we see in our modern day these institutions that continue to harm, that continue to smear the identities of people, and particularly uh black and brown, indigenous, two SLGBTQ people with disabilities. You know, it's people that have been put on the margins of society by those lies that are then vilified and harmed continuously because they are being looked at through another lens. Uh and that that is a system. That's a that's a sickness.

SPEAKER_01 10:31

It reminds me of Adrienne Marie Brown's um her her when she talks about uh radical imagination. And she says, you know, people say to her, Well, aren't you too like idealistic? And she said, Well, right now the world we live in was like the fantasy and of the colonizers, right? Like this, the world we live in is the fantasy of the capitalists. Like they, this is how they imagined this is their imagination. They imagined it and then they did what they did to make it real. So we live in their imagination. Why can't we imagine better? Why can't we work towards our imagination and and and what we want? So we live in their life, then the world that they've imagined, in which like black, brown, and indigenous people are dangerous and need to be controlled and need to be subdued. You know, these are all lies that they've created, and yet we these have become our reality. So why can't we then create a world that is one in which we're liberated?

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Yeah, so refuse the reality of this one, which was imagined and created against against our will, and dare to create something else. You mentioned that there's there's a choice, there's always a choice. There's there's an option to truth tell, but the practice and the choice, taking that choice to truth tell is sometimes not so easy because of the cost that it means. And maybe some just don't want to bear that cost. Maybe the dream sounds good, but there's a there seems to be a disconnect that I I want, I want the temporary promises of the the context, the systems that I'm a part of now. I know those are not enough, but I I and I want another dream, but I'm not willing to make the sacrifice to let what I know go for an unknown. Truth telling is scary.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

It is like if and if you look at history, right? I mean, a lot of truth tellers were punished, some by death. This isn't like that, that's not unusual, right? I I get that truth telling is scary. And I think we do need to acknowledge that that can that is the reality of of the world. And that's because the systems don't want us to tell the truth. You know, we look at, I mean, I mean, if you look at people like Martin Luther King Jr., uh Malcolm Eck, and other folks in the Black Radical tradition who have been killed by the state for their truth telling. So yeah, it it it's it's scary. And and granted, for the most most of us, we're not facing that kind of a threat for truth telling. It might be potentially losing your job, losing friends, losing relationship. And so I understand, but what is the cost of silence? That silence, if you're gonna be silent, what is what is that cost though? Like we were the the point that we are in history right now, we are seeing the cost. We are seeing the cost. Like we're seeing to our neighbors to the south, the fascism that's been rising, that's there. That is the cost of not telling the truth. You know, the the costs are so high of not telling the truth to us. Like we think that, yes, individually, this will harm us if we tell the truth, but that's why it's so important for so many of us to do it together. There's power in numbers, right? I mean, over the last couple of years, I have seen so many more people tell the truth about what's happening to Palestinians. And now it's become so normalized, you know, to be open and honest about that. And that has been, and that has led to truth telling in so many other spaces too. It's not, it hasn't been limited to just what's happening to Palestinians. People are starting to see the truth of how all these systems of oppression are interconnected, and people's eyes have been opened and people are much more willing to speak out now. And I and I think this is a moment where we are gonna start, we are starting to see some major changes and moving forward, there's gonna be major changes because so many people are now willing to speak the truth. And I think that if those who are listening are are you know still scared, I mean, I again I get it, but you have to ask yourself the question like what is the cost of that? What is the cost of your silence? You know, and and are you actually an honest person, right? I mean, I go back to Dr. Aruna Kilanani's commentary, and I think her challenge to us is that if you benefit from a system that's built on a lie and you never say the lie out loud, are you actually an honest person? And I think that goes back to her point, her answer to Mark Lamont Hill's question on, you know, are white people psychopathic. Well, if you're not actually calling out the live and if you're benefiting from the live, then what what does that say about you as an individual? Right. And I think people need to sit with that and understand what does that mean for them? You know, are you are you just a well-adjusted participant in a in a very old illusion, you know, and what does that say about you? And how do you feel about that?

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of one of the things that I have learned over the years in the nonprofit sector and have instituted into just the way I approach maybe it's something new or a decision I have to make, or a group that I've just joined, that I don't know the people, and so on. And so I'm being asked to do something, to bring something. I like to consider how I'm coming into that space. So, in other words, my positionality when it comes to all the things that have contributed to make me me, my culture, my history, my politics, my identities, intersecting identities, my education, my worldviews, my religious views, my relations, my family. So all of those things contribute to position me in a certain uh way in this group or in this space that I am taking up. And if I'm unconscious of how I'm showing up, more often than not, I will cause harm, uh, which can be prevented if I did that work on uh on becoming conscious of wait, I've I've got these privileges and these benefits. Uh, how am I ensuring that I am doing right by them and that I'm I'm using them in a way that is is responsible and contributing to community well-being because we're not islands. We are relational. And, you know, I the the I think you and I have talked, one of the antidotes to, you know, truth telling and this idea of being vilified for telling the truth, especially to systems, speaking out against systemic oppression, equals the ostracization of you, which can mean like economically there's a disadvantage, and especially if you are from historically minoritized community groups. So, how do we maintain that uh I need to be self-aware to see that I have a responsibility? We talk about relational accountability, and that I have a role to play in how things unfold in the future. I am not responsible for what happened in the past. That's true. I mean, all kinds of things have happened before we got here. But the thing is, we've been here now for a time, and things have happened that we have been complicit to. And so what happens next? We we can't be like ostriches that that just bury their head under the sand and pretend, well, I I can't see it. I don't know, therefore it's not happening.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

And understanding your own fears as well. Like, what are you scared of? What are your insecurities? What are your concerns about your safety? And how did this play into like whether or not you're willing to speak truth or not? Is that part of the equation? Are you really unsafe or uncomfortable? And I think that's a really important question for a lot of folks to look at.

SPEAKER_00 18:31

You know, from a human perspective, we seem preoccupied with truth-telling and being honest. We that's a value. We want to have the truth told to us just as much as we want to be truth tellers. But in reality or in practice, it's like we we are not reaching that because of multiple things. You mentioned fear, you mentioned, you know, the cost of not speaking out. One of the costs of silence is that it's different for different bodies. So it's not the same across the board. And actually, your story shows that some of us are already read as dangerous before we open our mouths. So for somebody who can just decide, I'm gonna be silent, I'm gonna opt out, that that is even a position of privilege to be able to say, I don't have to engage in this conversation and still benefit for their silence while others, while the ones who speak out or the ones that are silenced still continue to face uh forms of violence. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

I mean, I think about my own experience at UPEI, and I know that even if I had not been let go, eventually, I know I would have been told, like I'm sure I would have been told to not post uh about the things that I was posting about. Again, in my on my personal social media, I know I would have been told to not post about things that are relevant to me. Like when I post about Zionism or casteism, I'm speaking about things that impact me. I'm speaking about systems of oppression, especially with Zionism. Like I'm speaking about a system of oppression that impacts me, that oppresses me. And for my employer to tell me to be silent on that, to not speak about the oppression of me and my people, to not speak about something that has cost so many Muslim lives. Like it's just, it feels so violent. And if if that had been the case and I had stayed and I had been told to be silent, and I decided, okay, I have to be silent to keep my job, that would have taken such a massive psychological toll on me. I don't think I would have been able to stay. I would have eventually had to have left, anyways, probably, because the idea that I would have I wouldn't be able to post or or shal about that in my personal life, just such a violation of my humanity. It's so dehumanizing. And that silence, when those some of us who are forced to be silent are are basically being forced to dehumanize ourselves. We're we're basically being told we don't see you as human and you need to see yourself as deep like non-human as well. And that's the only way you're gonna keep your job. That's the only way you're gonna keep this reputation or whatever the case may be. So yeah, that's for some of us, that silence is destructive.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

Yeah, and it sounds like actually, silence is not the safer option. There is no safer option.

SPEAKER_01 21:19

Not for many of us, no. For those, for those of privilege, it it can be the safer option for them because there's no risk, right? They're not there, they're fine, they're safe. But for those of us who are marginalized, that silence can mean destruction, literally, right? Whether it's our mental health, physical health, our safety, whatever it might be, but it's it's very, it's very dangerous for us.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

I wonder what happens in the mind of the person with a lot of privilege who can quote unquote afford to stay silent and benefit from that silence. And what happens to their humanity in terms of they know, they know. I mean, as an adult, there are things that We know intuitively because we've spent this many years on this planet. And so we understand how interactions, specifically human interactions, work. And where we sense disagreement, dishonesty, or willed dishonesty, where we're we're participating in telling something that is untrue. What does that do to the humanity of the one who decides? Yeah, I'm just going to stay silent and put my head down and just coast away. I don't want to ruffle any feathers. That's a really good question.

SPEAKER_01 22:38

That's a really good question because I have to, I have to think that something happens, right? And I and that kind of takes me back to what Dr. uh Kelanani said is that people are walking around with this delusion. There's just certain almost like psychopathy to it. Like it's it's not normal. This is not healthy behavior, right? Mentally, psychologically healthy behavior to to live in this lie and to and to believe these types of lies and walk around. So I I have to I have to think it had an impact on their own humanity. Like, how are you thinking about other people? And what kinds of relationships are you building if you are willing to throw certain people under the bus or a paycheck or whatever the case in our age?

SPEAKER_00 23:22

Yeah, 100%. And you can never ask, demand truth. For you, it doesn't exist because you don't even model that.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Exactly. And yet they often do demand truth, right? They talk about they value honesty or supposedly value honesty, yet at this most basic human level, they can't honor it.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

Yeah. Uh, you know, Truth and Reconciliation Commission uh in Canada and the work that they've done and the acknowledgement of the atrocities, the harm, the violence, the the pillaging of the lands and the peoples and their futures that has happened for Indigenous people on Turtle Island. And this idea of the truth and reconciliation as a foundation for convening necessary conversations that have to happen to acknowledge what's happened in the past so that we can build based on truth and begin to build that trust and relationships that are founded on trust. How do you do that if someone doesn't even acknowledge that this thing has happened?

SPEAKER_01 24:27

I mean, there's a reason truth comes before reconciliation, right? Truth and reconciliation. First, you have to tell the truth. And indigenous folks have told us this already. Like they've said, first you gotta tell the truth. If you're not willing to tell the truth, then there's no moving on to reconciliation. And so many people are so quick to just reconciliation. What are we doing for reconciliation? No, what are you doing to acknowledge the truth? What are you doing to live with the truth? What are you doing to really understand what that means, what the truth means? I mean, the truth is that Canada committed a genocide against Indigenous people. And many Indigenous folks would argue that it it continues until today, especially with the with the way in which Indigenous children are still taken from their families. So what are we, what's Canada doing? I mean, recently an independent international body found Canada guilty of genocide against Indigenous people. And I've seen many people in Canada just deny it. Say, oh, this is hyperbolic, this is hyperbole. Now, until we recognize these truths, we're not going to be able to have any reconciliation. Truth is hard to to face, but it's necessary. Otherwise, nothing meaningful can come after without that.

SPEAKER_00 25:38

And you you asked a series of like those really great questions just just uh uh a few seconds ago. And I, for me, I'm sitting with, okay, well, how is truth showing up in me? How am I embodying that truth? How am I sitting with that truth and letting that work through me? Where do I need to come clean about some things that are for the well-being of not just me, but but the community, the collective. And you you're right, until we do that, we can't reconcile. There's there's there's a the there's kind of like a stalemate. You can't move forward because heads are budding and uh people uh have their stakes in the ground. Although I feel in in this case, we've heard the voices and interests and calls of indigenous people to the table. They're at the table, and that invitation has always been there. It's just not been honored to come and sit and acknowledge. And so uh for me, from what you've said, how the question for me that I have is how am I sitting with the truth of my positionality in all of these conversations? Because all of these things are interconnected, whether it's here or there or somewhere else, we live in one world. And how am I seeing these interconnections and seeing whether I'm further contributing to reinforce to the harm or working with those who have also seen that no, we need to break this bond here. There's no such thing as being safe because we don't speak up when we need to. We have a voice for a reason.

SPEAKER_01 27:40

So here are some questions to fit with this week. What's the one thing you're not saying out loud? And what would it cost you if you did? When did you last lie to keep the pee? And what did that lie cost you? If honesty is the antidote, what's stopping you from taking it?

SPEAKER_00 28:12

So we started by asking, have you ever told the truth and been called dangerous? And here's what I'm sitting with after hearing Sylvia's story. The answer is maybe not yet, or maybe yes, but either way, the truth isn't the danger. The silence is. What they're afraid of isn't your voice. It's what happens when we all start using it. And the times we're in right now call for us all to speak the truth.

SPEAKER_01 28:46

Next time, tears that stop the conversation. Not the tender kind, the kind that become the weapon. We're talking about the crier in the room, who gets to fall apart, who ends up cleaning the mess, and why the tears aren't the work. If this episode stirred something, if you're sitting with that question about what you're not seeing, we've filled spaces for that. Our Ontology Monthly Gathering, the online courses, and coaching and consulting for teams and leaders who are ready to move beyond diagnosis into real transformation. We also have wonderful resources on our website, so please go check those out. If you're wanting to work on yourself, do self-awareness work, thinking about truth, radical honesty, you will find resources on our website for that. So please go check that out. Links in the show notes.

SPEAKER_00 29:43

And if something we shared today landed with you, reach out. We're at info at seedroom.ca. Free discovery calls, no pitch, just a conversation about whether we can help. Thanks for pulling up a chair. Come quiet, leave louder.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

Stay messy, stay curious, and stay loving.