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You are a business owner who wants to prioritize people and planet over profits (without sacrificing success). That can feel lonely—but you are not alone! Join host Becky Mollenkamp for in-depth conversations with experts and other founders about how to build a more equitable world through entrepreneurship. It’s time to change the business landscape for good!
Becky Mollenkamp: Caroline, thanks for being on the podcast.
Caroline J. Sumlin: Thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here.
Becky Mollenkamp: We are gonna talk about worthiness a lot that I think that is a big issue for a lot of folks, especially I think women and how that affects them as business owners as well. So we're gonna get into a lot of that. Before we do, the first thing I ask everyone is about your relationship with feminism.
Caroline J. Sumlin: I'm not sure what my relationship with feminism is. I think I've always, I think the things that when we think about feminism, we think about being a feminist, and the ideals that come with that or the beliefs that come with that, I'm fortunate in that the way I was raised, those ideals were the norm. You know, I was not one of those people that was raised in an environment where they were conditioned, you're going to be the wife and you're going to be the mom and you're going to stay at home and you're going to, this is your role. I was raised by a very fiercely independent Black woman, single mom. With my father in my life as well, they just were, you know, divorced. And both of them and everyone around me, whether it be man, woman, or whatever in between, just being very goal-oriented and anyone can do anything that they want to do and as long as you get the education and just work at it or whatever. I'm learning so much more about people that were raised in different settings. And I'm just kind of like, oh, like mind blown that there was still so much of, I guess the opposite of feminism going on in households where people were being raised that are my age. I think I was raised in such a way where I thought it was like of yesteryear, like, okay, that was an issue of the past. But now like everyone believes that all women can do all the things. And, there shouldn't be an issue with that. And so in my adulthood, I'm learning, oh, no, there is still, and not only just learning that through other people's experiences, but also learning that through my own experiences, my own first times in the workplace and dealing with men who hoarded their power over me and treated me, especially as a Black woman as well, treated me as very much, you know, their, their subordinate. I hadn't really dealt with that on that level until I graduated from Howard University, HBCU. Everyone's in a power suit. Everyone's the top of everything. There was no issue of that at the HBCU, especially at Howard University. Women ran the place, are you kidding? T experience that in the professional level for the first time was also kind of like my wake up call of like, oh, okay, women's issues still very much exist. This is not a problem of yesteryear. The way that I was raised, the environment I come from is actually much more of an exception to the rule. But I think I'm still developing my relationship with feminism and also learning so much too about, race and feminism and how, there's a lot of damage that's done with white feminism. And so I'm learning that right alongside everyone else, really and truly.
Becky Mollenkamp: I don't know about your earlier background professionally. So before we talk about when, you know, you decided to maybe try coaching and, and how that's evolved since then, what is your professional background out of college?
Caroline J. Sumlin: I graduated with a degree in journalism, and I had every intention to be like Katie Couric herself. And I, you know, I had interned in like three top, you know, news stations in DC, and I was like, okay, this is what I'm gonna do. And then I didn't. I did not do that for a lot of reasons. My dream of being a journalist, a broadcast journalist started to develop around the age of 15. By 17, I was a teen reporter for my NBC station back home in Minneapolis. So just to put some perspective, we had a broadcast station in my high school. I did that for two years. I was one of top anchors, top reporters in that, top speaker in my, I was all of the things. Got to Howard University miles ahead of where most of my classmates were. It was very much expected, I was gonna continue to follow that path, that's exactly what I wanted to do, and something kind of told me, no, don't do that. And so I actually, post-graduation, I worked at Apple for two years, for two more years. I worked there for a total of four because I worked there when I was in college and I continued full time. And then I went into teaching for five years. I taught special education for DC public schools and a county outside of DC in Northern Virginia. And I, yeah, I did that for about five years until I had my second child.
Becky Mollenkamp: We share in common the failed, I don't know how to say failed, changed dream around journalism. I have two journalism degrees and worked in magazines and newspapers, but I thought I was going to be a foreign correspondent covering wars from the war zone. That didn't happen. Spoiler alert. So I know that feeling of getting out and realizing like, maybe this isn't what I thought it would be or what I want it to be. Certainly journalism is not what you see like it portrayed in pop culture, I think. But I'm curious then, because when you talked about men treating you as subordinates and things like that in your professional experience, was that, I don't wanna call out particularly just Apple or just a school system, but I'm wondering like, if you can give me some just loose examples of the kinds of things you experienced and how that may have affected your desire to work in Corporate America or in the public school system.
Caroline J. Sumlin: It actually began in my internships, even when I was in college. So I will say that while I didn't experience it on campus, because on campus, everyone was just so equal and there was just no issue ever of, you know, treating somebody as a subordinate. I'm not just talking about classes, just to kind of give you a quick picture, Howard University is one of those places where you are heavily involved in things. I was in student council for several years. I was a part of an organization that did a lot of things with the campus chapel, and I was on the executive board for that, serving as a secretary. I still am a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated. I was a member of the concert band. I even played tennis for a year until I was injured and that is a D1 tennis program. So I was all over the map, like doing tons of things and working with tons of different people. That's the culture at Howard is very much expected to be involved in all the things and to, and everyone is out there to win and be awesome at what they do. So to go from that and then to going into an internship where immediately I am treated like literal trash on the ground. One of the examples that will never, I don't think I'll ever forget this, is I was interning at a station. My senior year, my mother had an aneurysm. And so I had to go home for several weeks. So I missed a lot of hours. And the treatment that I received upon returning and how it was somehow my fault that my mother had the aneurysm and that I was incompetent in my work and in my performance because I think I remember post-aneurysm, there were a couple of times I showed up maybe 10 or 15 minutes late and I was really like harped on for that, that just because she had been in the hospital didn't mean there was any – I always just talked to all kinds of ways. And then literally within two weeks of returning back to the university and back to internship duties from that, one of my good friends on campus and as a fellow Bison was shot and killed. I found out about that when I was on the internship. At the time I was with a couple of women reporters and they drove me back so that I could you know figure out what happened. Two days later, I'm back at the internship and I get called into an office and I get berated for not having called and reported the story so that they could get the story first. I'm over here thinking like, last time I checked, y'all don't pay me, I'm confused at what we're, I was, I stuck to my duties, which were very specific to what you told me to do. Never once was I ever told like I was even allowed to do it. I didn't even think about it like that. I almost think about it like in the, in with Gilmore Girls. Rory Gilmore had an internship with her boyfriend's father and her father was like, you don't, you don't speak out, you should have gone above and beyond and you should have did it at a, everyone was talking to the meeting and you weren't. So you're not cut out for journalism. Period. And that crushed her. She's like, I've always done what's asked of me. And he was like, well, you should do more. You should do more. That was very much the same thing. I was like, I'm doing what's asked of me. I'm dealing with a traumatic, so traumatic to the point where this man who died that was with me the night before, and he was murdered within hours of leaving from dropping me off at my apartment. So this was very traumatic for me to deal with. And the first thing I deal with when I come to the internship is, how dare you, you're an incompetent journalist who'll never make it in his career because you didn't report the story and we have to learn it from the other news station instead of learning it from you. And then I should say it also, without going into stories, it did happen at my other places of employment in more than one occasion.
Becky Mollenkamp: Obviously it sounds like some of that came from men since you talked about it men treating like subordinates, but even more so on these things are obviously intertwined. I hear so much about capitalism inside of those things, which yeah, probably is part of what made you decide maybe Corporate America isn't for you. You started down a path of coaching potentially, because you have, I don't know when the children came in, if you had your kids and then started doing the coaching or you were trying coaching and then had the kids, but you were thinking about coaching and it was interesting because you said you decided that space wasn't for you and obviously I'm a coach. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about coaching, most of them not positive, so I totally am with you on that. And you just decided it really wasn't the right avenue for you because of so much of white supremacy culture that you saw inside of the coaching industry. And I don't wanna go too far into this because I know we're gonna talk about other stuff, but I actually think it's a bit related to what we're gonna talk about around self-worth and those things, because there are so many coaches that are working with people on those issues. And those issues should not be, they are, explored without also understanding and talking about conditioning, cultural conditioning, societal conditioning, white supremacist, capitalist, all of that kind of conditioning. So tell me a little bit about your experience with coaching and what you mean when you were saying that industry, what you saw with white supremacy culture just really made you feel like it wasn't for you..
Caroline J. Sumlin: To answer the clarifying question, I did not try coaching until after my kids came along. I was still teaching until I had my second. I did have a side business and that side business was actually making planners. I've always been a planner geek and I made planners. Back then, I was really Christian in the stereotypical sense of the term. I am still a Christian, just not in the stereotypical sense, I was considered a Christian creator. All of my content was all about scripture. I created a physical planner. I I was doing that on the side. I was blogging. I tried the blogging piece. And then I kind of morphed into the planner business and then I morphed into the coaching. After I had my kids is when I morphed into the coaching.
Becky Mollenkamp: That experience of moving into coaching and what you saw that we talked about that you were sort of like there was a lot of white supremacy culture showing up. And I'm curious what that looked like and how that kind of turned you off.
Caroline J. Sumlin: You get tricked. You get tricked by these other, what we see online, that capitalistic money grab. Look at what you can do within 30 days. You can be earning $5,000 a month. AAll you got to do is start taking consultation calls, have an amazing service that people cannot deny. That perfect skill that you have that comes easy to you that everyone else is like, oh my gosh, I can't do this and package it up. And wow, within months, you're going to have this six-figure business. While for me it was never like, oh, I want the six-figure business. What I wanted was financial stability and like many women who get sold into the, and you can do it while you're home with your babies. You don't have to choose one or the other because that becomes that primary conflict that lives right here when women have kids. Which one do I choose? Do I go back to work, but feel like I'm leaving a piece of me at home and I'm never with my kids and I'm not seeing any of those first moments because I think when you are freshly postpartum, and when I say freshly, I mean within zero to three years, because we act like postpartum is zero to six months. It's not, it's zero to three years. And so if you have a child that's two and a newborn, you're postpartum from both children at the same time. We have all of the crappy maternity leave stuff in our society because of capitalism. It's going to cost too much to do daycare. All this stuff starts swarming and you're like, this will be perfect because I can do what I love. I think it's normal to want to exercise your skills and your passions and your talents and your intellect as an adult. And I had to really reckon with that as a mom too, because I would feel guilty for wanting that. Like I want to be the one that takes care of them, but I'm so unfulfilled and so unsatisfied because I'm not tapping into my adult brain. So you're sold this idea and you're thinking, great, because my heart is in the right place. Then you get sold by the heart centered entrepreneurs and all of the marketing jingle jangle. And you get told you need to invest in yourself. If you’re really serious about it, you'll invest. You'll drop money you don't have because of money manifestation and mindset and all these things. Those types of selling things never felt right to me. It felt so icky, essentially allowing myself to be convinced to make a dumb financial decision, to invest in a coach if I was really serious about making this happen because that was really their way to just get my money. You get convinced that you're gonna earn it back. The investment's gonna be tenfold and da-da-da-da-da-da. To this day, kick myself. I really thought I was gonna make this money back and invest in this coach and do this and do this and do this. Then I have to turn around and convince women, my target client was mothers because I thought at the time, and while it's something I'm still good at, the only thing I thought I was skilled at was making routines for women. I was just really good at putting your kids on a routine. And a lot of women struggle with that. So I'm packaging this up, and I'm talking to a lot of mothers who just like me ain't got that money to drop on a coach for this $5,000 package and I'm over here being convinced by these business gurus that the higher the ticket, the more the quality and the more someone will invest because they're getting their money's worth. They'll know that your service is top-tier. I'm wrestling with imposter syndrome. It's like, who the hell am I to decide that I'm an expert in this shit when I don't even have a psychology degree. So I'm wrestling with that. I'm wrestling with all the imposter syndrome. I'm wrestling with mothers who were DMing me telling me I would love your program, but I can't afford this. I can't do it. I can't make these investments. And I'm like, shoot, I can't either. I don't know why I'm asking you to. None of it sat right with me. Everything just felt like it was this money hungry grab and gimmick to spend the money. And of course all these other business gurus are making six figures and whatever, because they're telling you they know how to make six figures. What?
Becky Mollenkamp: It's like the biggest MLM. It's that multi-level marketing scheme that we see with Amway or I shouldn't call out individual companies, but that we see with some of the essential oil companies and whatnot and it feels dirty when you’re participating in that system. nd I've been a part of it. I'm doing coaching very differently now, and I know it's possible. And yet I also know how really problematic the coaching industry can be. And so you decided after spending money you didn't have, trying to make money for people who didn't have it that this wasn't for you. And I know you've fallen back on what you really wanted to do, which was write. And now you're writing and you've written a book called We’ll All Be Free. And I think it's interesting because it's a perfect segue. You just mentioned that whole experience really brought up a lot of imposter syndrome for you. And a lot of what your book is about is about self-worth. And imposter syndrome is usually tied up in feelings of self-worth. I read that you said, I believe that your worth is inherent. Joy is a birthright and there is no such thing as a standard. And yet, I know you also didn't feel that way for all of your life. And your origin story, if you will, is one of having been adopted. And going through the foster system before that, which I know can be deeply traumatic for people. Adoption, I've learned so much from people over the years now about, I think we often think of that as such a gift, and it is, and also, there's a lot of trauma associated with that as well. But we also hear how accomplished you were. You know, you went to Howard. And you were doing all of these things inside of that school. That has the marks of somebody who's maybe not necessarily like having let their trauma defeat them or whatever. When did you realize the trauma of those things from your earliest years and how they were affecting you:?
Caroline J. Sumlin: I think I've always been acutely aware, even though my, I put a finite stamp on my awareness when I turned 16 or shortly thereafter, because I do remember that moment, and I write about this in my book, that moment that I saw my original birth certificate, which is a very just surreal kind of out of body experience because you're looking at this piece of paper from the day that you are born and next to mother and father are two names that you don't know. There are no words for that moment where you're looking at this. And a lot of adoptees don't have the name that they were born with. I have a variation of the name I was born with. And while I'm actually very glad that I don't have the name I was born with, because I don't like that name either. And my mom was correct. My biological name was Carol Anne and my name is Caroline. My mom did not want to name me Caroline either. She would have much rather named me Jada. I was like, come on, that's a better name. But, you know, to her defense, both her and my father were like, no, she's three and she's already, you know, but three, you have name recognition. So they thought that Caroline would have been a better name to choose so that I wasn't completely like, oh, who is this new person you're talking to? ButI was aware of these people's names. I didn't know their names. I knew my biological mother's name. I knew my biological father's name. I knew my birth name. But to see it on the legal document was like I really didn't go home with the woman that delivered me. It's the craziest thing to realize. I don't know the person whose uterus I was in. And then also see the birth certificate that you're given when you're adopted and to see your mom's name on there and to be like, again, new name, new mom. It feels like the witness protection program. Like given an entirely new identity and you take the old identity and you just kick it, like over the head. But the thing is it's always in there somewhere. I see the depths of this trauma and just how much it has been the thread of most of my struggles throughout my life. But I do think before that moment, I was always acutely aware. I would say things to myself when I was, you know, seven, eight, nine, ten, like, my mom might give me back. She hates me. She doesn't like me anymore. Every parent gets frustrated with their child. But I think as an adoptee, I would really internalize those things. I knew she kind of chose to get me. That's how internalize that as a child. So I'm like, if she chose to get me, she could chose to take me back. I think that filter was kind of how I lived my life. Like everything in my life, whether it was friendships, whether it was the things I pursued, whether it was my relationship with my mom or other family, always through this lens of I wasn't supposed to be here. So every failure or every mistake or every person that didn't wanna be my friend, I would perceive and internalize all of those things through this lens of I was a mistake. I really am not supposed to be here. And now I need to prove that I should be here and I'm not. So why am I here? And it definitely led to most of my memory as a child when I think of how I felt. You don't really remember the memories of childhood, you remember how you felt. It felt very dark for me. Even through the happy things that were happening my feeling of my childhood was a very dark one. And I think even before I had the words to articulate that a lot of that was due to the adoption, I think I just knew.
Becky Mollenkamp: As somebody whose biological father left her, I relate certainly not to the same degree. It's a different experience. But and then my who I now call dad is somebody who adopted me later when he married my mom. And I think it may be different when it's a father than a mother. But either way, within a biological parent not being there, I know that feeling of abandonment, and of the fear of anyone can abandon me now. So that definitely leads to a lot of those worthiness feelings. You also mentioned in addition to that personal trauma, there is the bigger systemic trauma. So somebody who maybe doesn't have any of the big T traumas from childhood, I don't know if any of us escape without at least some little T traumas. But for people who may not be able to relate to that sort of big T trauma in their own childhood, there is that additional piece, the societal trauma. The traumas that you experience as a Black woman in white supremacist patriarchy, that women in general experience in patriarchy to a different degree. And also just the collective trauma that harms all of us living inside of these really horrible traumatic systems. That is like an additional layer on top of that personal trauma that leads you in this place of feeling unworthy. How did you get from there to, you know, being ready to write a book about feeling more worthy?
Caroline J. Sumlin: As humans, the things that we go through, the big T traumas, little T traumas, the societal trauma, etc. I think it's something we're always going to have to kind of actively battle, even though battle is such like a, it's like a word, it is something I think you always kind of have to remind yourself and re-remind yourself or rewire your brain or recondition this, that and the other to say, no, no. I can fight against that. That's a lie. That's this creeping back up. I can speak from experience like someone who recovers from disordered eating. You'll still have some of those body dysmorphia things to creep back up or you still have that, oh shoot, should I be having and you have to remember we learned about this. We learned the truth. We can do it again. I don't ever want anyone to think you ever get to this place where you just arrive and you're like, oh, got it. I know I'm worthy. I'll never struggle again. I think, however, to get to the place where you have the tools and you do finally feel a shift in yourself of, I don't hate myself anymore. I actually really do like myself. I really do love myself. First of all, it's a long journey. It's a long journey. And I spent a lot of years masking a lot of my worthiness issues. I'm very good at that. So you might see like, oh my God, you went to Howard, you did this, you were all involved. It did not mean I thought I was worthy. In fact, a lot of my high functioning stems from my unworthiness. It stems from me feeling like I must do more to be worthy. You’re kind of trying to feed that temporary dopamine hit, but I think when I really started to dig for myself and decide I have to deal with this, I don't want to pretend like I'm okay, was when I found myself in a rather not great relationship that concluded in my senior year of college. It was a relationship that I accepted because I believed that was the best that I could ever do. And I allowed that person to speak to me as no one else is gonna ever wanna deal with you. Like no one's going to want to deal with how too much you are. No one's going to want to deal with your trauma. And it had to get to a point, it's a point where you hit the rock bottom and feel the thud to be like, oh, that hurt. My head officially hit the concrete at the bottom of the hole. I could either stay here and allow the bricks to then come and crumble me and bury me alive, or I can tunnel my way out. It was honestly this moment. I got to figure this out. And I decided to go on a journey of discovering myself. And a lot of that coincided with me graduating from college and starting to work at Apple and just slowly starting to figure out like, who am I? Who is Caroline outside of a man, outside of Howard University, outside of all of these things that I had used to define my worth, I attended adoptee support groups. I did whatever I could get my hands on to discover who am I, who do I love or what makes me light up, what do I love, what's cool about me, and made it about me. And over the course of that journey and just kind of adding things into that. Finding the people that loved me for me, friendship-wise, my now husband, adding these things into that and working really hard at figuring out, I'm a human, we're all human, we all deserve to be here, nobody is unworthy. If I would never think that about somebody else, how dare I think that about myself? But then when I decided to actually do the research and what led to the book, which I didn't think that was gonna be what the book was about, to be honest with you. I always knew I was gonna write a book about worth because that has been like the thread of my life. But I always thought I was gonna write it more about adoption, worth and adoption, that was it. But doing the research about systemic injustice and finding out that this normative culture that we live in is one that was constructed from the systemic white supremacy, oppression, racism, patriarchy, and realizing how that has played into developing the culture that we're in, down to the point where the whole reason why we think we should be skinny is because of what they told the white race back in the late 1800s with you need to be thin to save the white race kind of thing, was like the most eye-opening, well, I'll be damned. So I do think that there is so much power in education. There is power in knowledge. And the more you have, the more free you are. So it's when I coupled that journey of self with the education is when I really started to feel that freedom.
Becky Mollenkamp: I was looking around because I was trying to find “Fearing the Black Body” by Sabrina Strings that I wanted to point out.
Caroline J. Sumlin: I cite that book because I read that as part of my research and it's just so like…
Becky Mollenkamp: Eye-opening, right? Especially for somebody who has suffered from disordered eating, here too. I as a white woman, it's a different experience, but it's still, it's just so interesting. As a white woman, it's like, when you read this, you think, what does it say about me that I continue to participate in the system? Because I don't believe this shit, and yet here I am participating in it by judging my body based on these racist ideals. Anyway, I love all of what you shared. There's so much inside of that I can relate to, and I think so many people can. To me, what I hear, the biggest piece of it is, it's not your shit. As you began to peel back this onion of why don't I love myself, or how do I get to a place of loving myself I think one of the big ah-has that so many people, if they do this work, get to is so much of the reason that I didn't think I loved myself or that I didn't think I was worthy is not my shit. It is stuff that was given to me by culture, by trauma. And so being able to see that is really eye-opening and helping to make that change. And I love that you said it's not a battle that ends. Because it's not like you discover this and then you leave the water. You're still in it. You're still in the water.
Caroline J. Sumlin: And you still have to swim while you're in the water. We're not in water with a shallow end where you could just be like, oh, I'll just stand for a little bit. No, no, no. You are actively at least doggie paddling while you're in this water trying to stay afloat. I talk about in my book in my first chapter, I talk about the a lot, if not most, if not maybe all, of our big T and little T traumas, you can, if you write down the top three to five traumas that you think that you've been through and you really decide to take each one, one at a time and peel back the onion with those traumas, more than likely you can find some type of root in white supremacy culture or systemic white supremacy, one of the two, if not both. And I use the example of my adoption because adoption is not just something that was like, hi ho, the dairy-o, let's start adoption. No, that is deeply rooted in systemic oppression. And specifically in my very case, my biological parents were intellectually disabled. I was not a product of an unwillingness to parents, but most people who place their children for adoption or are forced, in my case, to place their children for adoption are because of the systemic things that we have put into place to maintain the supremacy and hierarchy of white patriarchy and white capitalism and white elitism and white, you know, parents being better than everybody else. That has been done strategically to ensure that people, especially people in Black and Brown communities, but people in poor communities have less opportunity to parent their children, are not given the resources that they need to be able to keep families together. I am a product of that, considering that not only were my biological parents intellectually disabled, but they also were practically unhoused. So hello, you have me. While child me and teenage me was thinking about a very individual level, I wasn't thinking about it in this broader systemic, why does adoption exist in the first place? And we're conditioned to believe, well, it's an individual thing, it's an individual choice, it's the parent's responsibility, blah, because of what? The individualism in our society, which is what? A characteristic of white supremacy culture. So in my adoption, maybe it might feel like it's a little bit easier to see it in adoption trauma because that's like maybe more obviously systemic. But I would, I bet you, if you just take a couple of your traumas and you look at them, you can peel it back to, okay, well, this generational abuse, why did that happen? Oh, because of patriarchy, because of these beliefs, because of Western Christianity.
Becky Mollenkamp: My biological father leaving is very much patriarchal in its roots, in that men are quote unquote allowed, right? To leave, there's not that expectation that they will parent and that is not because of anything biological, that is the conditioning that boys receive and all of us, including women, that we are the natural caretakers, that we are the ones who step in and do these roles. And it allows men this freedom to think that it's optional for them. And then guess what that does? It creates a whole lot of single moms who are gonna obviously have a harder time when they're the ones raising kids and doing it alone, trying to work and make enough money. It's hard to get an education. So that's gonna keep women subordinate to men. And obviously it's exacerbated when you have other marginalized identities. If you're a Black mother, it's even more so. We both mentioned disordered eating. You drew the obvious links to why that issue is rooted in all of this white supremacist culture. I love that exercise for people to think about their traumas. You know, as somebody who's a sexual assault survivor, there's another example where, again, it's about this conditioning that we all receive about bodily autonomy and who's allowed that and who's not, what's allowed to happen to our bodies and not. So it's a beautiful exercise for people to think about that. I have just found again and again, and I'm sure you feel the same way. The more that you can separate worth issues from yourself, pull it from outside of you and see how it is it's not you, it's what has been given to you or done to you, like you said, by design. I just feel like that is such a key piece and starting to change your relationship with those events and yourself. And it brings me to what I think you talk about, you said, I write and speak about liberation. And you said it's not that superficial sort of freedom that we associate with like politics and ‘Merica, but liberation. And what we're talking about here feels like liberation, but I wanna hear from you. Is that what you mean when you talk about liberation and freedom?
Caroline J. Sumlin: That's a large part of it, absolutely. I mean, it's not the end of it. I think it's the beginning of it. Because I do find that while of course advocacy and activism for the systemic oppressions, the marginalization, the abuse that is going on within our society is always forever important. And it's not something I think that we should like, okay, I'm not gonna touch that until I've healed myself first. But I do think we make the mistake of not ensuring that we are working toward the liberation from the conditioning that we have subjected to. And then we make the mistake of bringing that into activism. I think you see that with the vitriol that we see online and with activism,. But to say that liberation, it's all about yourself is also not it. My thing is we start and journey within, and then in that journey, we begin to add in how we can work towards the liberation for all because again, it's not just our trauma, it's not just the culture, it's those things that have kind of kept us in bondage and kept us conditioned and have not allowed us to see how the systemic oppression, the systemic marginalization is just that. I'll give you as an example, coming up, I was also very much raised like, unknowingly at the time, a level of anti-blackness within my own Black family, my own Black self, because I was raised to look at a certain community of Black people a certain way, people with certain income levels or people that made certain decisions and that you have to make sure to separate yourself from that and kind of prove that you are not that. To the point where I wasn't allowed to wear cornrows because of what that could have presented to the white that I was taught to uphold. You're taught to serve it. The whiteness is the master. It's that plantation thinking still, that we've conditioned that the white man is the master. What that looks like now a lot of times is that whiteness is the master and we still must serve that whiteness and deny our sense of self, our culture, the way that we speak. I was never allowed to speak in AAVE. I do now. That's part of my liberation is reclaiming and speaking in AAVE, and even sending things to educate my family that taught me that was unacceptable that it's a dialect, and not just as I was taught when I was younger, speaking uneducated, that's what I was taught. So all that to say that conditioning shows up in so many different ways. You have to do that within yourself. At least start that work within yourself to be able to be somebody that advocates and practices activism. Liberation does not succeed until every single human being is free and is no longer subjected to marginalization and oppression based on race, class, gender, sex, ableism, all the isms.
Becky Mollenkamp: I'm so glad you brought up the part that you talked about with your own experience of the ways that you were sort of perpetuating these systems, even as somebody who's oppressed by the systems, because I think, you know, as a white woman, I feel this very acutely, which is why I know we are the most problematic group, because we can look one way and see our oppression and we can look another way and we can see the ways that we are oppressors. There's something that feels better about looking at the side where you are the oppressed than having to face the part where you are the oppressor because no one wants to be the oppressor. It's easier to look over here and be like, I can see all the ways this is happening to me. But if we don't look in the other direction and see the ways that we are perpetuating these issues, nothing can change. Disordered eating, the ways that is perpetuated and was caused by these systems that you live in. I'm speaking here as a white woman. Like, oh, this is clearly patriarchy, but it's also white supremacy. We can't just look at one or the other. They're not separable. We have to look at them both. And so I can't just say I'm gonna dismantle the patriarchy part. But if I don't dismantle the white supremacy part, I haven't done anything meaningful whatsoever because the more that I continue to judge other women's bodies based on how they're the way they're shaped or what they look like or whatever, I'm still in the system. We have to do the hard work, which is not just the part where you discover the ways that you have been oppressed by these systems, but the ways that you are perpetuating them, which I think is very difficult for many of us to do, to have to confront our privilege, to have to confront the ways that we are not just being oppressed by the systems, but we are perpetuating it. It is not just men judging me for my body and me saying I'm a victim to that and that is why I have disordered eating. It is also all the ways that I have continued to judge other women for their bodies. We could go on and on and I don't want to go too long because I said we wouldn't. So you also said that you've made it your life's work to help each of us get our freedom back one faith-filled act of resistance at a time, but you mentioned how your Christianity has changed. I think we'll take that to the bonus content. I think we'll take it and make its own little piece. But I want to know, to wrap things up, the genre of worthiness books is very focused on you changing your narrative, changing your story and rewriting your relationship with yourself without any examination of all these things that we've talked about. As somebody who's written a book examining worthiness in this more holistic view. For those people who are either new on the journey of unpacking this or who have gone through this journey, but have done it in that very deeply individualistic look of worthiness. What would you want to leave them with on how they can start to reexamine that relationship with worthiness in this more holistic way?
Caroline J. Sumlin: The one thing I will say the individualistic books do get right is the fact that you do have to focus on your healing. The individualistic books will do it kind of like it'll start and end there and it's all about yourself. It's not that the holistic view ignores self. It just includes all of these people understand those other pieces, systemic, cultural, etc., in the relationship with self and the relationship with the society, the culture in which we occupy. And again, not that it's something that you can be like, okay, I'm going to do the work to heal. I will be healed and then I shall go forth. It's it's, it is something that you do continue to work through just like grief, just like all those things, but you have to include that. And you have to be okay with that. I do think those of us that tend to look at the holistic view and look at the oppression, we then will guilt ourselves because we do see the ways that we are privileged and we play the oppression Olympics. And then we think, well, I don't wanna be self-centered or I don't deserve or I shouldn't focus on my own healing or my own joy because all these people and all these issues are so much worse, there's so much worse going on. And that's one of the biggest mistakes that we make. You may not have had as much or as much as the wrong way to say it. It's different. And of course, I will say when it comes to the, you know, specifically like race and specifically like class, like yes, you know, there's acknowledge. I am more privileged. I have not had these struggles. But a lot of people either take that and get really defensive and say, oh, well, that must mean saying I don't have any struggles at all. Or you go to the other end of the pendulum and you're like, I cannot say I've had any struggles because I am this and I should never mention it. I should only just be like full steam ahead in fighting for everything else because I want to, again, still appear to be super good and I don't want to be misread. No, you, you still need to acknowledge your own stuff, your own trauma, your own hurt. You still have to do that work of healing. And that is okay. You have permission to do that. You have freedom to do that. I encourage you to do that. You're still a human, you still have needs, you still bend through these things, maybe at a different level or maybe in a different way, but it doesn't negate the fact that it has happened. And so please make sure that you are going on that journey with yourself and doing that work to do that healing. You can do it alongside your activism, you can do it alongside, but you need to do that healing first.
Becky Mollenkamp: Normally this is where I would ask is there a book you want to recommend, but let's recommend your book, “We'll All be Free” because even the title says exactly what you're saying. It's about all of us, not just some of us get to do this healing work, not just some of us are quote unquote allowed to or deserve it. We all need to do this work for all of us to be free. It's a beautiful name of a book. The link to it is in the show notes. And then finally, an organization that you support or that you would like to shine a light on that's doing good work in the world.
Caroline J. Sumlin: There's actually an organization that I had the honor of being interviewed by, um, and was crazy because it is, um, uh, one of the members who runs the organization is a member of a very prominent singing group that I grew up listening to, Earth, Wind & Fire. Philip Bailey called MusiCity or has a nonprofit organization called Music is Unity and they work with foster youth, specifically foster youth who are gonna be aging out of the system soon. So they did not have the opportunity to be adopted. I would love for everyone to give them a follow and support some of the work that they are doing.
Becky Mollenkamp: I'm gonna make a donation to say thank you for your time for doing this interview and I hope others will do that as well. I'll include the information in the show notes and Caroline, I will include the information about where to learn more about you and follow you on socials in the show notes as well. Thank you for your time.
Caroline J. Sumlin: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.