Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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: Hello, Taina. Thank you for being here. Hi. In full transparency, because I love to be transparent, we've already done this once, and tech decided to tech, and it didn't work. And so we lost our last conversation that was really great. And the thing that happens when that happens is you are living in the shadow of the past conversation because we both loved it so much. And there's this feeling of like, can we replicate it? We're not even going to try. We're just going to let this be its own new conversation and see what happens. The good news is I do know how we started our last conversation because it's the way I start every podcast, which is talk to me about your relationship with feminism.
Taina Brown: So happy to be doing this again. My relationship with feminism started, I would say, when I was really young, even though at the time I wouldn't call it that necessarily. I've always been a very strong-willed, independent person. And as a child, I think even more so. I've had this thing about my personality where I can get petty sometimes. Growing up in a family where there was an obvious difference between how the boys were treated and how the girls were treated kind of brought out that pettiness in me. I was like, well, why can't I do the same things? And why can't I behave or wear the same things or say the same things or have the same rules apply to me that apply to my brother or to any of the other males in my family?
I feel like that was the beginning of feminism for me. Then when I went back to college, because I was a return-to-college student after taking a 10-year hiatus, I was in my early 30s at that point. I went back for sociology and anthropology because I had decided that's what I wanted to do. I took a course called Intersectional Studies or Intersectional Approaches to Media Studies. I didn't even know what the word intersectional meant at the time, but I had heard great things about the professor and had always been interested in media studies. So I thought it was a great opportunity to just check it out. It completely, completely rocked my world. I finally had a language for talking about my own experience and how I felt about some things in the world. So after that one course, I decided to change my major to Women's and Gender Studies. And that has kind of been my relationship with feminism since then. It's strongly academic, with a lot of reading and engagement with other feminist thinkers.
Becky Mollenkamp: Regular listeners of the show will probably know that there's been historically a fairly distinct division between white women and women of color on the show, where white women almost always have a great answer and immediate re-answer to "What is your relationship with feminism?" They have a connection to that word. And historically on the show, most women of color, especially Black women, seem to have less so or more of a complicated relationship for all the reasons that we've talked about on the show. But I'm just wondering, like, you being sort of an exception in that as a Black woman who's like, "No, I really own this word and love that." Talk to me about that. What do you think that's about?
Taina Brown: Yeah, so I'm glad you brought that up because there does seem to be a disengagement with the idea of feminism as most people understand it and know it, from women in the Black community. And that is really due to the fact that historically, feminism has left Black women out of its conversation, out of the dialogue.
When we think about the different waves of feminism, right, going back to the first wave, which was like the suffragette movement, the second wave, which was like the bra burning movement. You can see how even with the first wave movement, right, they were fighting for the right for women to vote, but for white women to vote, right?
Becky Mollenkamp: Some of the people that we most associate with that movement were actively fighting against Black women getting the right to vote. So not even not bringing them into the fold, but saying, actively saying, "No, we're not talking about you."
Taina Brown: Yeah, and then you get to the second wave, right, which is like the bra burning, which kind of overlaps a little bit with the civil rights movement. This is where you really start to see Black women start to officially talk about the concept of womanism, because what they were experiencing was like, in the feminist movement, there was no space for being Black.
And in the civil rights movement and the Black Panther movement, there was no space for being a woman. So they had to create their own unique space for Black women. That's where we get things like the Combahee River Collective and their indictment on feminism and womanism, etc. What's interesting about how feminism has historically left Black women out and has been mostly pushed by white women also is, this is a part I remember from our last conversation, we talked about how even those first-wave feminists, those suffragettes, they picked up those ideas from the Indigenous populations that they saw because there was a lot of equity and matrilineal privilege and power in a lot of the Indigenous nations.
I remember reading this article in my introduction to feminism class, and I forgot who the author was. I always forget the author's name, but the article was titled "Who is Your Mother? The Red Roots of Feminism." It basically contextualized that entire first wave. Today, the way that we engage with feminism and even womanism, we still see a lot of disparity when it comes to how feminists, specifically white feminists, talk about feminism. For instance, an easy example that comes to mind is the wage gap. Usually, when feminists talk about the wage gap, they say, ‘Yeah, women make 84 cents to every man's dollar.’ Well, a big context of that is white women make 84 cents. Women of other ethnicities and racial backgrounds make less than 84 cents to a white man's dollar. Even in the language we use today, there tends to be some kind of disparity. That is why a lot of Black women have a hesitancy or are just completely not okay with identifying as feminists but are more comfortable identifying as a womanist, which is something that the author Alice Walker coined. For me, I am extremely comfortable with both terms, but my introduction to these ideas of liberation and equity came from a strictly feminist lens because that was my introduction to these specific types of ideas, and the professor I had was a Black woman. So when I was first introduced to these concepts as a 30-something-year-old college student, I didn't see a difference in the ideas. I definitely experienced a difference in my day-to-day experiences, but my entry point was feminism, so that's where I sit on the debate—not that womanism is invalid. I feel like womanism has its place and is absolutely necessary and needed, but that has been my experience.
Becky Mollenkamp: It just has me thinking about these waves of feminism because we haven't really explicitly talked about these on an episode. I think it's interesting to do so because you mentioned that first wave talking about suffragettes and how very explicitly exclusive that was for white women. Then moving into that second wave, which is interesting because that's the longest time period between waves of feminism—from the first wave to the second wave, which is in the '60s and '70s, the Gloria Steinem's, the Bella Abzugs, that time of Ms. Magazine coming along and also bringing in sort of the Audre Lordes and bell hooks, even though she's a little bit towards the end of that, but coming in and starting to say, ‘Hey, we're a part of this movement too.’ I think what you notice in that second wave is like this real exclusion of lesbians, queer folks. And that sort of being some of the response, especially among, my understanding anyway—you can tell me if you have the same understanding—is among the Black women saying, ‘Hey, we can't be leaving out our queer sisters in this movement,’ right? Again, where it's like the folks with the most privilege, no shock, are the ones who are the least aware of the ways all of our identities play with each other and how if we're talking about women, we need to be talking about all women. And those who have the most privileged identities are sort of like, ‘Well, I'm talking about me as a woman,’ and not being able to understand. And it's always, always Black women who are like, ‘Hey, let's talk about all women,’ right? So that was sort of that second wave. Then the third wave is really when I was introduced to feminism because it was in the '90s. It's when I was a teenager, reading Sassy magazine and feeling like, you know, like starting to go back and reading Ms. also. It was sort of this younger vibe being brought into feminism. But still, again, race became much more clearly a part of feminism at that point. But I still think we were just starting to integrate gender and sexuality. It was more around sexuality and less around gender, right? It was like, ‘Okay, yeah, we do need to bring in the lesbian sisters into this movement.’ And I feel like what's happening now where we're sort of currently living in fourth-wave feminism, which is sort of, I think people might argue about when that started, but sort of the Me Too movement kind of a time where it was like this whole new resurgence in this idea of, ‘Hey, we haven't made as much progress as people have tried to make us believe we had. There's still so much to do here.’ I feel like right now we're living through this next period of that same issue of privilege and exclusion where there's this battle in the feminist movement—and I would say they're not feminists, but they say they are—that sort of TERF, you know, these trans-exclusionary feminists, where it's now we're really grappling with gender inside of feminism. What does that mean? And who's under this umbrella? Are our non-binary siblings included? Are the trans siblings included? Who's in this umbrella? I feel like you and I both share this idea around intersectionality, hat tip to Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined that term and really made it mainstream in the third wave of feminism. But I feel like now that to me is a real distinction. And for me, it's not feminist if it's not intersectional. I really feel like fundamentally it isn't feminist if it isn't intersectional. But I also understand these historical roots where that term has not necessarily been intersectional at all points along the way. White women have been sort of saying, ‘No, this is our movement, right? And only those that we deem worthy are now underneath the umbrella,’ which is what the J.K. Rowlings of the world continue to do. So anyway, I think that's sort of that background. I feel like you and I are both coming at it from that same place of if it is intersectional, it isn't feminist. And that, I think, is ultimately because of the education you got. I mean, that class that brought you into this, it really woke you up or made you feel like you wanted to identify this way was an intersectional class.
Taina Brown: It’s interesting because a phrase that is common when people in academic spaces are talking about the different waves of feminism, especially the second wave, where women were like, ‘Well, we want to go into the workplace too. And we want to do all these things that we want to be just like men.’ But then you have Black women or other historically marginalized women who are like, ‘We've been working for decades. We want to rest, right? That's our fight. We don't want to work. We don't want to be like men’ because we've been forced to be this other for so long. We just want to be able to choose for ourselves and to rest and not have to work if we don't want to. There's a way that language has really shaped how we talk about feminism and the ideas of feminism. It's always interesting because when I start to hear people talking about a specific topic as like this new radical thing, it's like, okay, that's been in academic spaces for decades, and it's just now making its way out of academia, which I think is a detriment to how insulated academia is. That's why media studies have always been this little niche that I've been interested in because it's like, when do those conversations become part of the mainstream? We think about celebrities who are quote-unquote feminists, and they may or may not be right, but that's their own journey. But it's like these ideas that people have been grappling with in private, whether it's in academic spaces or just in very small cohorts. I mean, I mentioned the Combahee River Collective from the second wave, and they were a group of lesbians. They weren't just Black women. They were a group of Black lesbians who broke away and did their own thing because they were facing heteronormative issues in the civil rights movement and the Black Panther movement and then racial issues in the feminist movement. So they were like, "How do we create our own space of belonging, where we can take the best of the Black culture that we love and the feminist principles that we love and merge those together?"
That's where womanism really came about. And I think with intersectionality, I think what's really interesting and necessary about that is that it really allows us to explore the different ways that we all engage with systems of power and privilege. There tends to be this idea sometimes that if you suffer oppression at any point, then you're just 100% oppressed. I think what things like intersectionality help us to see is that we all have different points of power and privilege that we occupy—some more than others, 100%. But I just remember graduating from college and feeling like that was an immense privilege that I had, being able to go to a small private liberal arts school, traditionally just for women, with an extremely high tuition rate. Thank you, student loans. But like, I was just like, it's a privilege to be here in this space and to think about it in that context. Like, obviously, there were things that were happening on campus. I was like, this is not right. Like this is systemic oppression embedded into this academic institution, but it was also such a privilege to be able to sit in those classrooms and learn from those professors and be in a space that was dedicated to my educational instruction. So that liminal space that a lot of us occupy on a day-to-day, depending on the context, that's intersectionality, right? That's how we engage with intersectionality. That is how we can make sense of these contradictions that we feel happening to us every day. It's like, well, I'm oppressed, but I'm not oppressed. I am a feminist or a womanist, but I love Taylor Swift or Beyoncé's music. It's like, how do you make sense of those contradictions? How do you make sense of these opposing forces that you have to contend with every day? Intersectionality helps us to do that.
Becky Mollenkamp: You just hit on where I was, where my head was going too, which is intersectionality to me, at its core, is about removing binaries. Like that's, it's about no more this or that. It's like this and that. It is ‘how do we understand the way all of these things overlap, play together, and create the big and?’ That's why I love it. I want to stop exploring the either/or, but let's look at the "and." Why can't it be "and"? But it's nuanced. Intersectionality is about nuance. And I think that is the struggle because we, as Americans, for the very reasons that intersectionality exists, is like trying to fight the oppression that exists to live. Liberation, to me, exists in nuance. It is, how do I begin to get to that place of saying it can be both and not either/or? How can I recognize that? How do I see all of the ways things play together? That's so challenging for people because we are so like the waters that we swim in from birth are these hierarchical, binary sorts of waters that teach us everything has to be either/or, and everything's pitted against each other because when you are ranking humans in hierarchy, that's what happens.
That's the struggle, as a person who is, you know, as a white woman who is very much in that group of people that have historically been problematic. To me, so much of it boils down to that. It boils down to the lack of ability to see nuance and to see the both/and. Because basically, once I begin to say, "You have another oppression that I don't have," if I can't see a nuanced view of the world, if I can't understand the both/and, it becomes either/or. So then your oppression is worse than mine. Right? Yours is more important than mine, or mine is more important than yours. And that becomes so threatening if you are still in that headspace. That's threatening. It's threatening to say, "So now what you're saying is that my oppression doesn't matter because it can't be both. It's either/or," right? And I think that is so much the heart of the problem, which is what I see still with the J.K. Rowlings of the world, where we're at right now with people who are trying to be so exclusionary with trans folks. It is that same thing again. It is, well, it can't be both/and. We can't all live under this umbrella. We can't both be women. So it's either/or. And if I say that you're valid, then that now suddenly takes away my experience. And so anyway, the whole thing is the intersectionality to me is it's that invitation into the ‘and’ and to the nuance. But we have that there's work that has to happen to get there, to be able to set aside, liberate yourself from the either/or-ness of our conditioning. And that is challenging, especially I think the more privilege you have, the more that you have had varying marginalized identities, the more you can, I think you just naturally see the ‘and’ And I think it's harder for folks who have had more privilege to understand the ‘and.’
Taina Brown: Yeah, well, there's more to lose. The more privilege you have, the easier it is to get threatened because you feel like you have more to lose. And that's a function of capitalism, right? Capitalism is about competition. It's about a competitive market. And when you have that as the foundation for how your society operates, it's going to create binaries because what it's saying is that there can only be one winner. And if there can only be one winner, then everyone else is the loser. And even if you might agree with that one person on some things, but on other things you don't, only one of you can be right. Only one of you can win the argument. Only one of you can get on top. And so I feel like intersectionality creates a more collaborative environment because there's that space in the "and," right? There's an opportunity for people to have conversations and for people to engage with each other while understanding that there is no, what a lot of people like to call Oppression Olympics. There's no Oppression Olympics. We all have shit that we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. The context of that matters, right? If we were to embark on a road trip together and we go into the deep South, right, Becky, you as a white woman, you are going to have more racial privilege than I am going to have in that context. But if we go somewhere else, right, depending on any of our other identity markers, I might have more identity privilege. If we go to a Spanish-speaking country, right, I might have more privilege in that space than you might have if you don't speak Spanish, right? I mean, I barely speak Spanish, but my grandmother would be... she would roll over in her grave to hear me say that. And so it's about understanding that at any given moment, things can change. But if we're working together to figure that shit out, it's a lot better than us trying to compete with each other for one of us to get on top.
Becky Mollenkamp: Well, and that idea that there's this top, the winner, there's one winner, which, you know, right now it's what Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, whoever's at the top, right? And I think so much of historically what's happened is rather than feminists trying to say, ‘we don't want,’ I think, let's be clear, the academic feminists, right? But also there's privilege inside of that. So I'm talking mainstream folks who have not had the privilege of being inside of, who spend their lives in academia talking about nothing but these issues. I'm jealous of those people. But for I think mainstream feminists over time, it has been rather than, ‘How do we change the game?’ Meaning, how do we get rid of patriarchy and create a matriarchy? It has been, ‘How do we just replace who's at the top?’ And I think that's often what we see. That's a whole girl bossy movement. Instead of ‘How do I get rid of the Jeff Bezos of the world and say that whole system sucks and it's unfair and it's unjust and we don't want it.’ It's just been like, ‘Well, if we could at least replace it with a woman, it would be better.’ Maybe, but not really. It's still the same system, right? And I think that's so much of what we still see out there, of this like, you know, everybody's got to be a millionaire or whatever, without any questioning of like, ‘But is that even a system we want?’ And I will have people ask me all the time on social media about, ‘Well, why is a matriarchy any better?’ Like, it's because they think in their mind, a matriarchy just is patriarchy, but with women at the top. But the truth is, matriarchy takes that whole hierarchical system and smashes it, and it becomes a linear system. That's what matriarchies historically look like. They look more linear. They look more collective. They look more collaborative, like you mentioned. It's more about how do we take care of everyone instead of it being "How does one of us get to the top?" How do we just get more women at the top? And so I think that's so important. And these are the kinds of conversations you and I love having, which is why we've actually started a podcast called Messy Liberation because, well, one, liberation, trying to liberate ourselves from these systems and creating something new and messy because we know it's messy along the way. That's part of, I think, the nuance and the ‘and’ that also gets lost is that it doesn't have to be perfect. And I think so much of what we see right now in the fourth-wave feminism sort of space is in the progressive spaces is like this expectation of doing everything perfectly. And you can't get it wrong. If you get it wrong, then you're bad, and you're gone. And the truth is we all are going to fuck up along the way. There is no doing. Yeah, there's no doing this perfectly. And so how do you feel about that part? Like, what's been your journey to getting to a place of feeling comfort in the messiness of your own liberation movement?
Taina Brown: So I am a recovering perfectionist, and so it was not an easy journey to be comfortable with the mess. I like clean answers, I like structure, I like order, I like control. That's what it really boils down to. I like to know what I'm getting myself into. If it is ambiguous in any way, I'm just like, not touching it because I need to know what the expected outcome is going to be and what the process is going to look like to get me there. So getting to the point where I was comfortable with the messy part of it, it took a really, really long time. I think this idea of perfectionism is also rooted in a lot of capitalism and toxic thinking that things are completely ordered. One thing I like to remind myself of is that the universe is chaos. The universe is chaos. There's a system to it. There's an order to it. There's a mathematical order to it as far as we know, right? I will leave that to the scientists who study that. But in general, it's quite chaotic. Life began through chaos. We are literally made up of the same thing that is out in the universe, right? We are made of the same thing. So if everything out there in space is chaotic, what makes me think that I'm going to have control or not expect chaos? Like, that's hubris. That's pure ego to think that I can constantly be in control. I can constantly predict the outcome. That's just my ego. Once I allowed myself to let go of that need for constant control, I was able to see the messy part as a creative project. The whole idea of being in that "and" space instead of the either/or, the whole idea of the messy part is that there's no model for what we're trying to build. So we really have to get our hands dirty to create something. And that means that there's going to be failures, there's going to be mistakes, there are going to be times where we're just like, ‘That didn't quite work the way I expected it to.’ Maybe there are some tweaks or something that we can implement next time. So seeing it as a creative project allowed me to be more comfortable with the mistakes, with the perceived failure, right? With this idea that it is sometimes going to be ambiguous, but the goal, the outcome is clearly defined because it's trying to come up with a new way to live life that doesn't fucking exhaust you from all the mental and emotional energy that you have to put out there when you're contending with systems and structures and people who are intent on your harm.
Becky Mollenkamp: Yes, that makes me think of... well, there's a couple of ways I could go because I want to talk about imposter syndrome. I feel like the perfectionism and the nuance and all these things play into that. But before we go there, I think I want to bring in this thing that you shared on Instagram that really struck me, which was "How much is love and hope driving my resistance?" It was about what's happening in Palestine, which, again, last time we talked, unfortunately, nothing's changed. Our hope is that by the time this airs, maybe things will have changed and there's no longer a genocide happening. But this is where we're at right now as we're recording this, and you're talking about ‘how much is love and hope driving your resistance?’ And it makes me think about this world that you want to build, right? There is no model for it. We don't know what we're trying to create. We know what exists doesn't work. It's not working for most of us. We want something different, but what does it look like? I find that often inside of that, and I'm older than you, and so maybe this is a Gen X thing because we were, you know, we're the slacker generation. We're very nihilist, I think. And so there's this part of me that is like, I know what I don't want. And so often I find myself railing against that. And what I have found is often the millennial and especially Gen Z folks in my life, these feminists that show up and I am so grateful for them, they're the ones who are asking me, "Then what is it you do want?" Because I recognize I can get very fixated on what I don't want and get really mad about that. Like, this sucks, I hate this, right? And it's like, "Okay, but then what do you want?" And that goes back to that, "How much is love and hope driving my resistance?" And I think too often, there's more hate and nihilism driving my resistance. And I want to make that shift. So what does that look like for you? Because you're asking that question too. You're an elder millennial, so you might have a little of my nihilism, but hopefully some of that hope. So how do you balance that?
Taina Brown: Yeah, it's hard to balance it. And I think I want to say, first of all, there's a place for hate and rage and grief. A lot of times we label things as good or bad, and that's a binary way of thinking, right, that we can get caught up in that may or may not be the best way for us to clarify our emotions. There's a place for rage. There's a place for anger. There's a place for hate. Like, I hate oppression. I'm not going to say I dislike oppression, right? Because that doesn't fully encapsulate the effort and the energy that I want to expend to hopefully see an end to some type of oppression in my lifetime, right? So there's a place for all of that. I think when it comes to hope and love, that's a little bit trickier because... And I kind of see this tying into also this competitiveness that is born out of capitalism, right? When you feel like you're constantly competing for things, it's hard to build meaningful connections with people that you see as the other. And so because of that, tapping into emotions or motivators like hope and love can sometimes feel harder to reach. It can feel a little bit more difficult to tap into that. And so if you're just naturally a competitive person, or if you are finding your way out of thinking in capitalistic ways and patriarchal ways, that might be something that you struggle with. For me, I think what helps is so many things. It has to be an intentional effort, right? Those things just don't automatically happen because so much of our feeds are filled with hateful things that we're engaging with every day. We are socialized to hate our bodies. We are socialized to hate certain politicians regardless of where you, what camp you're in, right? We are socialized to hate other countries or dislike other countries. Like there's all these ways that we're socialized to dislike and hate quote unquote the other that it forces us to, in a way, dehumanize ourselves. And in order to tap into hope and love as motivators for resistance, you have to tap back into your own humanity in order to see the other person as human as well, in order to see humanity as a whole as something that you can hope for, as something to be hopeful of. And so it takes a very conscious, very intentional effort. What I will say is that it doesn't always feel as hard as it did in the beginning. And I think small acts, little micro actions that you can take to move toward hope and love as part of the motivators for your resistance, those things stack up. This is something that I like to talk about or help guide my clients on. It's like, okay, there's this big overwhelming thing. How do we take micro actions to lean away from the overwhelm and lean into possibility? Because if you try to tackle the entire thing at one time, you're just going to stay in overwhelm. It's not going to be helpful.
Becky Mollenkamp: Yeah, one of the things that I think can feel helpful to me is tapping into my own humanity in those moments of feeling like I'm not measuring up or I'm doing it all wrong or I'm failing to be perfect, whatever, is thinking about the little me, right? So picturing little Becky when she was five, four, six, especially now that I have a child, that really helps in that process. But I think it can be really helpful to think back to that little you. There's something about children that are just so innocent and special and beautiful. And when we can see that part of us who's still there, it can help bring some humanity to yourself. And to challenge yourself even more is to then extend that to other people where you're feeling that resistance, that animosity, that hate is like, can I find that child inside of them and say, "Can I find some empathy in that space?" I have challenged myself to do this with Donald Trump, which is very challenging.
Taina Brown: It is.
Becky Mollenkamp: I cannot say I can always do it, but there have been times when I've been able to think of that little tiny Donald Trump when he was five and six, and knowing what I know about his parents and the rejection, I can't even imagine the pain that that little child felt. It doesn't excuse who someone is now, so it's not about that, but it is that piece that you said of like, when we start to ‘other’ everyone, we start to just hate everyone, we start to create caricatures of people that we can just project this anger on. That's not a place for the kind of liberation that you and I are wanting to see in the world, right? That doesn't work. And listen, I'm as guilty of anyone as doing it. Believe me, I was dancing happy dances when Donald Trump was convicted because it was like, you know, I wasn't thinking of him as a human at that point. And I get that. And we can't excuse the horrible things that people do. But there is something in finding our humanity inside of how can I find that part of me that still says I can see the human in you, even as flawed as you have been and are? Like, and find that human. And I think that that's not a gift for the other person, it's a gift for you, like you were saying. And I think that this is important because it talks about your coaching. And I want to make sure that we get to your coaching because that's why you're here too, right? You're like, we bond over the fact that we're both feminist coaches. And I think we both bring a lot of the stuff we're talking about into our work. And so you work primarily, if I'm not mistaken, with folks who are of the global majority. I'm really trying to switch and using that language more and helping people with things like imposter syndrome and burnout, like business owners who are working a lot. And there's unique challenges that I think go back to the thing you mentioned with that second wave of feminism and this whole like, ‘I don't want to work more. I want to rest. I've been working.’ You are, you are because you were relying on my labor free and then underpaid. I'm tired. And I feel like those historical roots, it's only a generation or two generations ago. So we're not talking antiquated stuff here, right? And that very much lives through epigenetics and also social conditioning with the kinds of clients you're working with. I feel like it's a, there's a whole different relationship to burnout. So let's start with burnout and then we'll talk about imposter syndrome. But with burnout, what does that look like when you're working with folks of the global majority versus maybe white clients?
Taina Brown: Yeah, so with burnout, there's just such a clear difference because there are these little things called microaggressions that people who are non-white deal with day in and day out. I remember when I lived in LA, I worked for a travel company, and during my first week of orientation, my supervisor took me around and introduced me to all the sales agents. There was this white woman who the sales agents were split up into regions, right? And so she worked with the Africa region. She sold Africa. That's what they call it in the travel industry. You sell Africa, you sell North America, you sell Europe, which that in and of itself, that language is problematic, but I won't get into that now. So she was a white woman, originally from Southern California, like she was LA born and bred. My supervisor introduced me as Taina Brown, one of the new operations specialists. And she was like, "Wait, how do I pronounce your name again?" So I repeated it to her. And she's like, "You know what? I'm never going to remember that. I'll just call you whatever." And it was just like, "But you work with people who want to go to Africa, different countries in Africa, to the continent of Africa that has names of cities, locations, names of businesses, names of people, like tour guides over there that we work with who have names that you're not used to that are different from Betsy and John and Megan or whatever.
Becky Mollenkamp: Becky and Chad, just say it.
Taina Brown: The Chad's and the Kevin's and all those people. But you are just completely unwilling to learn your colleague's name that you're going to be working with five days in the office for eight hours a day. And so those little things, like they take so much emotional and mental energy that it's, you're not just exhausted from the work, right? Regardless of what the work is, regardless if it's physical labor, if it's quote-unquote white-collar work, right? Like you're exhausted from the extra emotional labor and mental labor that you have to put in to deal with that nonsense and to keep yourself in check, right? So those are two different things, right? Like let's really parse this out and get into the nuance of it. It's not just, "Man, so many meetings today. I had eight meetings today or five meetings today." It's like, "No, I had five meetings today and John kept asking me to be the note-taker and, you know, so-and-so mansplained something to me and I made a suggestion and somebody else kind of stole it. And now all of a sudden it was a brilliant idea." And so it's like when you list all those things out, that shit adds up. And so then at the end of the day or at the end of the week, like you don't have energy for creative world-building. You don't have energy for empathy for the other person sometimes because you have to deal with all of that. And so when I work with my clients on burnout, like it's less about, "Well, let's figure out your calendar or let's figure out your day-to-day or whatever." Like there is some of that, you know, that we do, but the majority of the time is spent on figuring out, "Okay, how do we navigate these systems that you have to participate in, in a way that isn't going to burn you out?" Because a lot of times when people talk about burnout, they're talking about people who don't know how to use their time wisely. That's the framing of burnout, right? It's that let's be more productive with our time. Do time blocking exercises or do this with your calendar or do that with your calendar. But the issue for the folks that I work with is like, it's not the calendaring, it's not the time management, it's all this other bullshit that they have to deal with that is emotionally and mentally toxic.
Becky Mollenkamp: Yeah, I don't want to center whiteness here. I want to bring it back. I just want to acknowledge. How do I want to say this? I don't want to center whiteness. I am trying to find this commonality of my understanding, which is, I think for women, the piece where I understand it with women in general is like, often there's the extra caretaking and emotional labor happening inside the home that goes uncompensated, that's on top of the work time. Some of those same microaggressions from men are happening. And then you're adding another layer or perhaps more depending on, you know, perhaps you also have an identity in the LGBTQ family. And then you also have, you know, whatever identity you have of the global majority, those are additional layers of aggressions happening on top of that. So I think white women might be able to understand as far as like, I have all of these other things that are going beyond just showing up to my nine to five and getting my work done or running my business and getting my work done. I'm also managing a husband who's not contributing enough and I have to remember the kids' birthdays and all of things, right? And then I also have this male client who keeps assuming I'm the secretary or whatever. And then you're adding on top of that, even more layers. So for a white woman, we can understand there's already these additional layers that a white man doesn't have. Then if you're adding on, you know, if you have an identity of the global majority, there's a whole new set of layers of things that happen. Microaggressions, assumptions, all the shit that you have to deal with. And then also, perhaps if you have a queer identity, that's even more. And so we're now talking like all of this stuff that just compounds and compounds and compounds that goes well beyond. Because I think even for white women, it's not always like, sure, there's the time management. How do I get to be more productive? That's not what burnout is. And white women also experience burnout for all the reasons we just said. But what you're saying is for the clients that you're working with, there's even more that's compounding on top of those things that we just as a white woman, I can't understand. I won't experience that adds even more. Plus, I think the piece that we talked about earlier, which is this historic stuff that lives in this, like it literally lives in your DNA, right?
Taina Brown: And then you're getting paid less.
Becky Mollenkamp: Which is a huge part of that, right? So you're doing more for less with all the other bullshit coming along, not to mention historic and cultural experiences around work and rest. And whether you're deserving of rest, allowed to have rest, what rest means. And I think every culture has their ideas around rest. I mean, I certainly know as a white woman living in America, rest is viewed often as laziness, right? You're not being productive and productivity is like godliness. And so we have to grapple with that. But there's even more I am sure that your clients are grappling with culturally around rest.
Taina Brown: And I think all women, right, or all non-men folks can probably identify with this idea that if you are not the man in any situation, then you are automatically the caretaker, right? So whether you identify as a woman or someone who is gender-expansive or non-binary, that role might be projected onto you in any given context at any point in time. And so there's this threshold of bullshit that you can only take so much, right? And so this concept of rest, if you grow up in that kind of environment where the role of caretaker is just automatically assigned to you, first of all, without your consent, right? So let's talk about consent culture here as well. And then you grow up like that and you just kind of forget how to not be the caretaker, right? And so now all of a sudden, you're not just fighting the external systems that have projected that onto you, you're also fighting what feels like your own nature. You're also fighting what feels like just what comes naturally to you to be a caretaker, right? And so even though that may or may not be the role that you want to be in, and you might not naturally be your caretaker, you're just so used to doing it all the time that you don't know how to do anything else. And so there's a lot of unlearning that my clients have to do sometimes to get to the point where they can finally be like, okay, I've unlearned all of this. Now, what do I fill that extra space in with? It's kind of like what you were talking about earlier. It's like, okay, I'm raging against this, but then what happens after that? What happens next?
Becky Mollenkamp: Which is why Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry—we'll link to that in the show notes—is so beautiful. Like, that book for me, and I don't hold all these other identities that she does and that she's speaking about and to, but it was beautiful in this, like, it felt like a sermon on why rest is liberatory because it is this act of resistance. It's not just frivolous or fun or something nice to have or whatever. Rest is a right. And it is one that we have been denied—that consent piece of like we have not been given that as women, and then even way much more so for folks of the global majority who have had their rest absolutely stripped of them, right? Fully without consent and have been forced into labor. It truly is an act of liberation to say, "No, my rest is important and I'm going to take it." And I think so often people who are feminists or womanists or whatever, however you want to categorize yourself, but who are very much like, "I want to be a part of dismantling these systems," still are not resting. There is still this guilt around it. And I think the more that you can lean into, "This is one of the ways I actually am dismantling these systems," that's really important. I'm assuming it's a part of the work you're doing with people.
Taina Brown: One of the things that I do with my clients who struggle with rest is we go through a rest audit. I think it's important to clarify that a lot of times we think of rest as sleep or not doing anything. I think that's one of the reasons why we think of rest as being lazy. Obviously, it's a lot more complicated than that. But rest isn't always passive. Rest can also be active. I came across an author, of course, I forgot her name, I'm so horrible with names, but she wrote a book called Sacred Rest. Even though I don't necessarily ascribe to a lot of her religious beliefs, I really love the way that she broke down these different components of rest. She broke down rest into seven different types of rest. And then I added in an eighth, which is sleep, because that is rest. That's rest for your physical body.
Some of those components include emotional rest, mental rest, creative rest, right? And creative rest is a really big one. Creative rest can actually be completely active, right? When I'm out working and tending to my garden, that feels restful to me, even though I am physically active, because it is an activity that sustains me. It's not something that strips me of my dignity. It's not something that exhausts me. Physically, I might be tired afterward, but creatively, mentally, and emotionally, I'm in a place of well-being. Understanding the complexity of rest, I kind of think of it as a back door into avoiding burnout. If we can't directly tackle the big issue of burnout—maybe it could be you're in a toxic work environment, and that's not something that you can necessarily just up and leave tomorrow for whatever reason, right? Because maybe you're a caretaker or it's just hard to find a job in today's job market—this back door into better understanding rest and focusing on activities that sustain you will help to mitigate some of that burnout until you can leave that situation.
Becky Mollenkamp: When I started seeing rest as a short word for restorative, it helped me in thinking, "What are the things that restore who I am, right? Me at my core. What brings me back to me? It makes me feel like I'm restoring Becky." And that helped me with thinking about rest beyond just sleep. So I love that. And I like that you mentioned that, well, first of all, rest is liberatory and also that it's part of this bigger systemic stuff that we exist inside of, and we can't always change the systemic parts, but we can address how we exist within it. And I want that to bring me to imposter syndrome, which is the last thing I want to talk about, because that's very much the same sort of thing in my mind, right? Women have been made to believe that we have a syndrome. This has been made into a sickness, as it were. Like there is something wrong with us when we feel doubt about our abilities or we worry that others are going to judge that we don't know what we're doing in a professional setting. It happened in the '70s with a couple of psychologists, and it was very much— they were studying women and what this unique phenomenon was of this feeling like an imposter without just saying like, ‘Hmm, it's the 1970s. Women are entering the workforce at numbers that have never happened before. This is all new to them, right? It's the late '70s. Gee, I wonder what might make them feel like they don't belong here or like others are judging them as being inferior inside of these spaces.’ Like, duh. I just think something that is clearly such a systemic issue was instead made into this thing that uniquely was about women and their internal inadequacy. There was something wrong with them. And it boggles my mind that we are here now 40, 50 years later still talking about this thing called imposter syndrome. And now more men, I notice, are starting to use the term, but it is still largely used about and by women to describe these feelings of doubt inside of the workplace. These feelings were born out of, and continue to be related to, very real differences in what the professional experience is like for women and most especially for women of color versus white men. And yet here we are pathologizing it. So you are dealing with imposter syndrome. It takes me to the quote before I unleash you on this topic. You have a quote on your website that I absolutely love from Bunny Michael that says, "What if imposter syndrome is a precursor to realizing you are here to disrupt and revolutionize the status quo? What if being an imposter to an oppressive system means you are here to tear it down?" And I love that because it feels like what we've been talking about, which is finally saying, ‘Fuck that, I'm not an imposter. I'm just a woman or a woman of color existing inside of a system not built for me. So fuck you and fuck that. I don't own that title.’ To me, it feels like the same as saying like, "Rest is revolutionary." Disowning this whole imposter syndrome bullshit feels revolutionary. It feels like part of liberating ourselves from the systems. Go!
Taina Brown: Yeah, you know, I was just thinking, I was like, because the original article, like you said, was like late '70s, two psychologists, and they called it imposter phenomenon. It just made me think, or it made me question, like, at what point did it go from phenomenon to syndrome? Who was the one who pathologized it, first of all, because again, language matters, like how we talk about things matters. So imposter phenomenon and imposter syndrome feel different. Those two things feel a little bit different. And so I'm like, was it a man that pathologized it? I just, I would be interested to know that, but yeah. So where do I even begin? Where to begin with imposter syndrome? I think, you know, I found myself... I'll speak from my own experience first. I grew up feeling like an imposter all the time. And I think a lot of women of color, people of color, experience that. Like, you feel like an imposter from a very young age because the systems that we're operating in, especially here in the US, were set up with white men in mind, right? I mean, think about the Constitution. That was created for white men. And the Constitution of the United States has not been updated, really. It has not been changed to reflect the diversity of this country, right? There have been amendments put into it, but amendments are like suggestions, right? They're treated as suggestions. And so if you are not a white man, heterosexual man in this country, the sense of being an imposter, the sense of not belonging, right? Which are two different things, right? Sometimes we feel like we don't belong and we call it imposter syndrome because that is what we're told it is, right? But what it really boils down to is where do you feel like you belong, right? As an introvert, first of all, with my family, as an introverted person in my family, I didn't feel like I belonged because most of my family, they're very extroverted, very extroverted. Like you get more than two or three people with my family together in a room, and people are talking over each other. Like they're talking at full volume like this. It's just, it's wild. Like it's the most uncomfortable situation for me. Or one of the most uncomfortable situations for me.
With straight people, I felt like I didn't belong even as a child and as a younger person. And I didn't know it back then, but when I eventually came to terms with my sexuality, I was like, it's because I'm not straight. That's why I don't feel like I belong sometimes. As a fat person, I don't feel like I belong in a room full of thin people, right? And that can translate into feeling like you don't belong at the beach, you know, in summertime locales, right? And so this sense of just not belonging is something that Black women, people of color, we just carry with us everywhere we go. And so when my clients come to me because they're quote-unquote struggling with imposter syndrome, we turn it around. We're like, fuck what's going on over there. Let's create a world for you to belong in. Like how do we create your world? How do we reinvent your specific world? Not the world at large, but your world. So you feel like you belong no matter where you go, no matter what other circles you might find yourself in, right? Because a sense of belonging comes from full acceptance of who you are. It comes from full acceptance of your background, your culture, the good and the bad, right? I think sometimes when we talk about "just accept yourself," right, you have to accept all the parts of you. Like our mind goes to the good things. But when you also accept the fact that there are things about you that you may not like, right? Like I can be a judgy bitch. I know that 100%. And for a long time, I was uncomfortable with it. And eventually, I was like, you know what? I can't... this is not something about me that I'm ever going to 100% change. So I just need to accept that this is who I am. And being able to accept that, then I was like, okay, now that I've accepted it, now I can have agency over when I'm a judgy bitch, right? Because if I'm constantly unaccepting of the fact that I am a judgy bitch, if I'm denying that part of myself, then what I'm doing is I'm denying the agency, the right for me to choose when and how to be a judgy bitch because I'm like, that part doesn't exist, right? Even though it does. And so when it comes to imposter syndrome in communities of people who have been historically marginalized or are part of the global majority, it's really tackling that is really about creating, reinventing the world, right? Getting back onto that creative project of world-building, of being in that mess of like, how do we build our own systems? How do we build our own communities? How do we build our own capacity for things like mutual aid, our own businesses? How do we reinvent those things so that way we feel like we belong, but also people who come after us feel like they belong as well? And that then becomes a model for anyone who's just fucking tired of the state of the world as it currently is.
Becky Mollenkamp: You're talking about acceptance because that makes me think about body acceptance. And obviously, you're talking about a personality trait. But I think all of these things are related because I think for me, for a long time, I had a struggle with acceptance because inside of that felt like some sort of like I had to love it. I had to like it, like to accept it, even though I recognize acceptance can just be like it just is what it is, which I think is where you're talking. But just for people who might also be in a place of like, "Well, I'm not ready to accept that I'm a judgy bitch or like love that I'm a judgy bitch. I'm not ready to accept or love that I have fat rolls," whatever the thing might be for you. I started with neutrality with my body and it feels similar to some of the other things too, which again, it's just language, but whatever language resonates. I was like, "Can I just get to a place of just not... like it just is, right? I don't have to say I like it. I don't have to dislike it. It's just, this is what it is. I have these fat rolls. I am judgy. It just is. Can I at least get to neutrality?" Because for me, that felt like a first stepping point before to me what felt like acceptance was liking, even though I think honestly, we're saying the same thing. Neutrality or acceptance is just like, "Can you be with... this is what it is. I don't have to like it, but I don't hate it. I just say this is the thing." And I think that's really helpful. So thank you for that.
You mentioned also just varying identities and the spaces that you're in and learning to embrace, to love your—well, accept or be neutral about, then maybe accept and then maybe eventually get to that place of love if you can. All these different parts of you. One of the things we didn't talk about here, so we'll talk about it in a bonus conversation. I don't know what the conversation will look like, but we didn't talk about the LGBTQ piece of your identity and how maybe that affects your coaching or how that shows up with your feminism. So we'll have some sort of conversation about that piece in the bonus conversation. So make sure you go subscribe to the newsletter if you haven't. The link's in the show notes. I'm going to end this like I always do. We did mention at least one or two books during the show. But is there a resource that any of our conversation has brought up for you that you'd like to share?
Taina Brown: Yeah, so I highly recommend, well, first of all, anything by adrienne maree brown. Any of her written work is just—I mean, it's gold. And so for... if you own a business and you are in the space where you are facilitating impact, I highly recommend Emergent Strategy. It's a toolkit. It's a book that I keep in my toolkit. I use it as an instructional manual for how to live my life, for how to work with my clients. The principles and elements that she lays out in that book is something I go back to again and again. If you are just looking for ways to just tap into this idea of just creating belonging within yourself, acceptance or neutrality, right? Of just living a more values-aligned life, I recommend her book Pleasure Activism. It's more of an anthology because different parts are written by different people, but it's a really in-depth look at how pleasure shows up in our lives and how not just rest, but pleasuring yourself, right? In the way that you're thinking, yes, but also in other ways, like engaging in activities that actually bring you pleasure is also part of resistance, right? And that can be part of your rest, your rest ritual. And so Pleasure Activism is wonderful.
Becky Mollenkamp: Pleasure Activism introduced me to The Uses of the Erotic by Audre Lorde, which took me to Sister Outsider, which took me down the Audre Lorde rabbit hole, which is a great rabbit hole to fall down. So I'm always grateful for Pleasure Activism for that and for more because it was beautiful. And then an organization doing good work in the world that you'd want to highlight?
Taina Brown: Yeah, so this is less of an organization. I feel like I should have been better prepared for this one. But the only thing that, like my... not the only thing, but like I can't get my mind off Palestine. And so there is a journalist out there, Bisan, who is constantly just like updating the world and sharing resources and how to support the Palestinian people right now. And so any of the resources or organizations that she puts out, that is where I'm sending people.
Becky Mollenkamp: And again, our deepest prayers are that by the time this runs in the fall, we're in a different place in that part of the world. And yet I have a feeling—well, at least the nihilist in me thinks we may not be, which is unfortunate. So I will link to that in the show notes if that is still current for folks to go and take a look at. And I'm sure it will be. So thank you so much, Taina. We're going to go do our bonus content. And I really appreciate you redoing this interview. And again, guess what? It went great. I loved it.
Taina Brown: Awesome. Thank you for having me. It was fun.