Reclaiming Our Time

toxic environment of academia, particularly for black women. And you know, doctor Simmons in her TED talk, which was about her own experience as a black woman in a very racist higher ed system. And this is not the first time that I've had these conversations before, as it pertains to other esteemed doctors that I know from higher ed institutions that have been denied tenure. Right, we all watched publicly as it happened to Nicole Haddon Jones, the author of

the sixteen nineteen project. We watched as she was denied tenure at Duke University, which was her alma mater, and then we watched that play out where she sued them, received an undisclosed amount of money and then went over to take her brilliance and her project over to Howard University, historically black college and university. And so we know that these things happened, but it doesn't just happen in the field of academia. Toxic, racist, misogynist environments are alive and

well in every industry. And I will talk to doctor Simmons in this first part of two parts robust conversation about what it means to own your power, what it means to take up space. I was asked recently for the best advice that I have ever given and received at the Lesbians Who Teach summit in San Francisco earlier in October, and I said this about the best advice

that I've ever given. Take up fucking space. Oftentimes, in a lot of my career until probably the last you know, I would say, the last five to six years, I've been the only one in the room. And what do I mean by that? The only black person, the only child of immigrants, the only queer person, the only woman, not often the only woman, but the other three. Absolutely,

And that has been my path my entire life. As you all know who've listened to the show for a very long time, I grew up in a predominantly white suburb on eastern Long Island, and my public school education was in a ninety six percent white school and ninety

six percent white community. And you know, by virtue of my parents and my family at large, I have never been one to shrink in a room where I do not see myself reflected for better or worse for many For many, many decades, I've seen myself as a need, the need to be an ambassador in those spaces. We will talk about the undue burden that that presents as well, the undue burden and stress, an additional labor that you are not being paid to do that happens when you

are the only one in these spaces. And so what does it mean to reclaim rest? What does it mean to, as Auntie Maxine has said, Representative Maxine Waters, reclaim your time right. I'm currently reading If you guys follow me on Instagram, I did post a story recently Tricia Hersey, who is the Bishop of the NAP Ministry on Instagram.

I am reading her debut manifesto Rest is Resistance, and in there she talks about how capitalism and white supremacy has robbed us of our dream space has robbed Black people in particular, which she dives into, but all of us collectively that are wrapped into capitalism and this grind culture. That I am only as valuable as what I produce right,

not by virtue of who I am. And I think that it is really important for us to continue to unpack these conversations that help us reset our programming, because don't be mistaken, we have all been preprogrammed from a young child. I'll give you this from Tricia Hersey's book Rest Is Resistance, which is available now. I'll tell you this little tidbit she writes in the book about how from elementary school we begin to program children to be workers.

We force young kids, and she'll tell an anecdote in the book to betray their bodies. This is her language, betray their bodies and conform to the time constraints that a teacher allows them to be able to use the bathroom. A child could be squirming in their seat, unable to hold their bladder, and a teacher will say to them, well,

you can't use the restroom until twelve thirty. Well it's eleven forty five and my body is telling me I need to go now, and what do we do Well, we have kids have accidents quote unquote that demoralize them, that embarrass them all because they won't conform their bodies, won't conform to the productivity schedule that we begin to put them on as young as in kindergarten. Well, now look at your own routines. How we design our work calendars, or rather, how our work days are designed, that we

are forming too. I can't tell you how many zoom meetings I jump on where folks tell me, Hey, Danielle, can you give me, you know, just three minutes. I'm so sorry, but I've been in back to backs all day and I haven't been able to use the bathroom. What can you just give me, you know, four minutes to go heat up a cup of coffee? Or do you mind if I eat on this call because I

just haven't had any time. Because we have been programmed to believe that we are undeserving of that time, that we will seem lazy, we will seem like we are

not dedicated to the work. If what I listen to the needs of my body, that I am not a machine that I actually do need to physically recharge and relieve myself and eat and breathe fresh air and get some sunlight and the conversation, the first part of this two part conversation that I have with doctor Dina Simmons, begins to unpack all of the systems that are at play that tell us that we are unworthy, and particularly those that have played on repeat for black people and

black women throughout the course of time. So coming up next, dear friends, the first part of a two part conversation with my new friend, doctor Dina Simmons. Hey there, I want to tell you about another podcast I think you'll love. The Brown Girl's Guide to Politics, hosted by a Shanty Gohler, the president of Emerge BGG, is the one stop shop for women of color who want to hear and talk

about the world of politics. Join a Shanty this season as she talks to incredible women of color who are changing the face of politics and tackling some of the most important issues basing the United States, from reproductive justice, to rights, to climate change and more. Tune in every Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts, Folks, I am very excited to welcome to woka f Daily for the very first time, Doctor Dena Simmons, activist, educator, Ted Talker, and

the founder of Liberate Ed. She's also the upcoming the author of the upcoming book White Rules for Black People. Welcome to Woke f So I want to jump in and I want to talk about your upcoming book, and then we will talk about all the ways in which you have found yourself and other highly esteemed black academics, black women academics disrespected in your professional field and industry. But I want to dig into your upcoming book because I'm exhausted, as I know that you must be right.

I'm exhausted by the chosen ignorance of white people. I'm exhausted by the media chasing the desire and the likes of the Karens and the Chads in order to decide whether or not we're going to turn into a fascist country, right, whether or not they deemed that their gas bills are too high to give a damn about our democracy and just equity in general. So I want to get your your your thoughts based around your upcoming book. What prompted it?

So you know, I think many of us, So I think before talking about my book, I think I need to talk about the journey, right, So my journey to right now, having this conversation, to the book, to the places that I end up and have been and whatever

my future hold. Right. So I started born and raised in the Bronx, New York, my mother coming into this country as a you know, an immigrant from at cleaning white people's homes and saying to herself, one day, I want my children to go to school like these white folks, right, because we've already she can tell as an immigrant in this country that white folks got better stuff, right, And so she said, I want my kids to have that too.

And so when she had the opportunity, and when we learned of the opportunity of boarding school, we went to boarding school. Now, what no one did is prepare me for what it was like to leave the Bronx with everyone looking like me and for those who can't see me, I am a light skinned black woman. I have my hair up up and it's it's natural, curly, big state and approach, and I'm here going into this place and

it was so overwhelmingly white. And so as a fourteen year old, I'm like, yo, I'm not gonna make no friends here. That was the first response that I had to my boarding school and that I ain't gonna make no friends here is the response and the feeling I

usually get when I walk into white spaces. And so what I learned in the process of going to boarding school and then to college in Vermont and then to that you just keep d a white place after white blazing, right Ivy League, is I've better learn how to perform here, right, And so what black folks are or we are great performers, we will, yes, ma'am, and yester you because that's what

we learned, right. And so I learned the rules of whiteness, and so that's why I was like, I learned how to navigate white spaces up to the point that it made me sick, up to the point that I said, I couldn't do this no more because it's me or it's me doing this or death. And so it got to the point where I just could not follow the rules anymore. And you know, I wanted to no longer have these white rules oppress me, limit me, keep me from my excellence, keep me from my fullness, keep me

full from freedom. And so I, you know, left my Ivy League university because it was the most toxic place I've worked and but yet at the same time, as a child, the lessons that our schools teach us is that you should aspire to end up in a place like that. So in many ways, our rule system begins, it becomes the beginning or the the place where young people learned that they must aspire to whiteness. Yep. And so so now it's like my entire journey and my

book will be about with white journey whiteness. But let me tell you, I was very good, like I said in my TED talk, and I don't even know if it made it to the Ted Talks. So some of my TED talk was edited out. But one of the parts that I think I edited out was the sort of psychic homelessness that many black folks feel in white spaces because we are performing for white spaces, but at the same time, in that performance, sometimes that performance becomes

who we are. We leave themselves and sort of the grief that goes with that, sort of the trauma of erasure, of self erasure that goes with that, but also the fact that we learn to perform these places and do it so well that sometimes when we go home, our home doesn't even recognize us, So we don't even recognize our home, and we go home and we don't want

home because it's nicer over there. So no one talks about all of that loss and grief that goes with taking a young black child from the hood and to saying we're going to give you a better life. But no one talks about the loss and the grief. We just focus on this very narrow definition of success being how do you get as close to whiteness and how do you guys far from yourself? So, like I shared my book, and we'll see that title six right is essentially a homecoming. Right, how do I come back home

to myself? How do I come back home to my community? Because there has been that distance for so long. You have said so much that I want to I want to unpack for our audience who does not have the same experience. Right. I have often shared on this show my own experience of growing up in a ninety six percent white community, of going to a predominantly white institution,

of being UM a child of immigrants. My family came from Jamaica, UM, so big up the Caribbean UM, and you know, and and the idea you know which my mother would learn later when my sister and I would go for our master's degrees, um, that She's like, I just chose the best school. I moved to the best school district that we could afford. Right that you know

that that that we could afford to go to. And it didn't occur to me, right um, that there would be so many instances of assimilation and a razure that you would then unpack as adults and I and I didn't experience and I'll be honest, I didn't experience deep trauma. There are there are I have memories right that I have that I have unpacked over the over the years. But my experience allowed me to be able to navigate white spaces in a way that I have been able

to utilize, right um. And again that white people don't ever have to do James Baldwin said, they never have to look at us, right, but we always have to look at them. And so for for for the audience, talk a little bit, if it's not too much about providing an example about the way that this performance works, what this performance actually looks like. And then the toll you know in this and I love the phrase in

this psychic homelessness that happens. And I think that you know, in a lot of ways, a lot of performers, Broadway performers, actresses, you're taking on and the way that you take on these characters, at times you lose yourself in right. But unlike a Broadway show or a film, it's not done after several months. This is a lifetime performance. So can you talk a bit about how that shows up and what that looks like. So you set assimilation earlier, and

so sometimes that assimilation looks like code switching. And so for folks who don't know, it's like I'm from the Bronx. And so when I'm coming in this white space and I'm like, yo, what's up? Good? What's good? Folks? And someone corrects me and tells me that good is an adjective and that well is an adverb. And when someone asks me, as asks me how I'm doing, I should answer with an adverbs or should be well right, or when I'm corrected for saying acts as acts instead of ask.

So these little ways right that we get chipped and corrected. And so after a while you're like, oh, I gotta learn to speak like them. I gotta learn to talk like them. I gotta learn to smile like them. So you shift and change, and it's like called shape shifting that you sent do so that you ensure white comfort. That's really what you got to do when you go to white spaces and you ain't white, because you got

to ensure that white folks say comfortable. So and so you always got to be aware that when you show up in this space, is that you are the work that you're doing to one perform and then the other work that you're doing to pay attention and to read, to read white white response to you is essentially the work of performance, right, because you're reading the room, so you read the room and as a young show, so sometimes change. It's changing the way you're dressing. It's changed

in the way you walk. It's changing your hair, because we all know both. You know, when we wear our hair and the way it naturally grows out our head, it's considered unprofessional and right, I always say to folks who defines professionalism, why can't my natural state of being be professional? And those are ways in which we're raised, and that's the ways we learn to perform. So let

me straighten my hair, let me perform. So then I don't come across as as too black for these folks, are too militant for these folks, right, And so those are the ways in which that we perform. But black folks have always been performing right when our enslaved ancestors were in working in you know, the enslaver's house, best

believed they were smiling through their rage. Best believe, best believe that a bunch of black folks in institutions, whether it be corporate, academic, not for profit, are smiling through pain or smiling through comfort. Because again, what we learn, one of the rules we learn is to ensure that white folks maintain their comfort. And so I would say it's the shape shifting. It's the shifting and leaving some of yourself at home and taking out the yoe at

the end of the sentence, you know. And folks and teachers often say, but that's the correct way to speak. You should be thankful to the teachers that corrected the way you speak. And I often say, in that correction, there's also a triggering. There's also and when I say triggering, I mean like the fact that there's a message that the way I am is wrong. So there's a way to honor what I bring naturally to a space, what

I bring indigenously to a space. And I could be bilingual or multilingual, learn a new language instead of saying a race that because that that ain't right, and so I think too often an education that's what we do. We say a race, who you are and get it come correct if you want to be successful, because we have a very narrow definition of success, a very narrow definition of what professional is, and a very narrow definition

of what it means to thrive. And in many ways, the definition of success or thrive does not have a natural black woman's face on it, and we got to shift that neither doesn't have rest or relaxation, or joy or laughter. And as a result, what do we learn as black folks? And what did I learn was that I had to show my worth by how much I produced I do and how many of us are sick and dying because we are still working our tailed up.

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and streaming on YouTube and Twitch. There was a just and I saw that too in my book as well. This is this idea as well. There was just released in terms of the straightening of straightening of our hair. H the report that just came out that said, guess what causes cancer? Uterine cancer? At that hair? Relax right right?

How many mamma's relax their hair? Ye? And you know, I thought about it in when when that news broke because I I went natural in early two thousand, I had grown out, I had started growing out my my perm in the nineties. Uh when I and then you know, and then went into the process of having locks, which I've had now for for a very very long time. But you know, it's just this idea that white society will tell you how you need to look and then provide and then the product that we used to look

that way will kill us. It is I mean, it is just like you know, you there there's no there's no other way to look at that, right than for than for what it is um And you know the ideas like these, Your your message and so beautifully stated, is about what it seems to me, the relearning of our worth. And how do how you know and how do we relearn our worth as black people? Right now at a time when literally you have the governor of Florida,

Ron DeSantis, who literally wrote legislation about white comfort. You have a sitting member of Congress, regardless of how crazy we know that she is, Marjorie Taylor Green, talking about schools teaching anti whiteness. So how do you articulate or express how we understand and learn our worth and navigate through this imposter syndrome and through this contortion that we have been doing our entire lives when literal policies are being created to deny us that very avenue, that very pathway.

It's again white limitations, right, So like we and we've seen this. So I just finished I just watched Till the movie, and I was just I've been thinking about

tild story, Emmett tild story. And for those of you who don't know, Emma Till was a black a teenager who went to visit his family in the South from Chicago and did not make it past the entire time because he was killed for you know, speaking, you know, having some interaction with a white woman who did who displeased the white woman, and obviously she you know, Caroline, I believe kind of exaggerated the details. And because what happens and with black folks is that one we're adultified

as children would become adults. He was seen as a man even though he was a child, and he was killed. And and so what I was thinking about was this, you know, this idea of you said, we have to contort ourselves into these spaces. And now we have legislation that says you beuys, stay, you beust stay contorting yourself

because we like, we're not uncomfortable. And so Till goes down to the South and doesn't know the rule right because at that time it was a little bit more liberal in the North than it was in the South. And we have a whole we have a whole conversation because I think white supremacy is universal. I just think it looks different dependent on where you are, right and so so so I think that the tension that we have as black folks is how do we raise our children so that they can be free ants live to

see the next day. And that is a real tension that that white parents don't have to worry about, Like when a there's a point in the movie and I actually didn't even need to see the movie to know this where you know the kids, the black boys are out and the uncle and the aunt are up watching TV. You know they want to be sleeping, but you know they can't sleep because their kids that are not home.

Black families still worry about their children because you never know if you're going to read about them be yup on the newspaper and so that, and so now we have legislation that said, how dare we make white folks uncomfortable? And you know or anti whiteness? And to me, I think when you hear them their argument, they actually want

to go back. A lot of the folks who are arguing for this, like who are on the anti curtive race theory train are really thinking are arguing like, but what about our country's values of equality and justice for all? What happened? And I'm like, where were you where I was being a race where were you? Every day when black and Latin eggs, and Indigenous and queer children and trans children are saying, we feel uncomfortable, we don't feel

welcome to here. Where were you? So to me, the double standard and the arguments really don't make any sense because at the end of the day, it is strictly about who as a nation we deside we decide deserves protection, and we have decided that only white little kids deserve protection in this country. White little kids who conform to a binary gender. Come on, now, you put this in a little white kid in their trainings? Oh, throw them out, yep.

And so you know, we've decided very narrowly who as a country we decide to protect, and that is not going to be a future that is worth living for a lot of folks. And that's why we got to do the work anyway that we can. Like you know, the end of the month, I mean, and the end of November we have a holiday, you know, which I don't celebrate because I come from Antigua, but it is a It has indoctrinated this idea of thanksgiving. We know, it's a whole lie. You know, there was rapture, there

was raping, there was killing. It wasn't as like beautiful and harmonious as we tell the story. But that's an opportunity because folks are gonna be sitting at the table for the white accomplices out there. I'm like, that's the time to talk to your racist uncle. Talk to your racist uncle, tell them you know how, you know, because also we got to be voting, and I know voting is coming up, and thinking about Georgia, I'm thinking about how close certain states are and I'm like, really, anyway,

I've just been all over the place. But all that to say is that it's not I don't want to dooms believe, like believe that everything is doomed. I want to I believe that this can shift, and this is an opportunity for us and those of us who are about this like radical revolutionary life of collective liberation. I want to believe that that we can change something. And

that's what honestly wakes me up every day. That's the work that I do at Liberate Ed is really trying to create a world where all children can live, learn and thrive in the comfort of their own skin. And I first said those words of twenty fifteen and my ted talk because at the end of the day, all black people want is to live comfort in peace. Just let us live in peace and let us die in peace. Like you don't have to contribute to either of it, just let us be. And I think that's at the

end of the day. I do the work so that I can live in peace because every time I speak my truth truth. And I don't know about you, Danielle Is I got to worry about what death threats I'm gonna get, what email I'm gonna get. And all I'm trying to do is live in peace and ensure that every single child can live, learn, and thrive in the comfort of their skin. That's it for part one of

my two part conversation with doctor Dina Simmons. Make sure to check back tomorrow for the rest of the conversation about how to wake people up to their power and how to take up space as always, dear friends, Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.