This week, we are revisiting some of OBP’s most joyous interviews starting with Farai’s conversation with two publishers of color, Elizabeth Méndez Berry, vice president and executive editor at One World, an imprint at Penguin Random House, and Lisa Lucas, senior vice president and publisher at Pantheon and Schocken Books on celebrating the work of BIPOC authors and critics. Then public health professionals and sisters Nilufar Kayhani and Nazineen Kandahari share the inspiration and beauty behind starting the Afghan Clinic, an online space that serves the health needs of fellow Afghans. Farai then speaks with Rue Mapp, founder of Outdoor Afro, about finding joy in the great outdoors and encouraging others to do the same. And in the weekly roundtable Sippin’ the Political Tea, Farai talks with fellow women of color journalists, S. Mitra Kalita, founder and publisher of Epicenter NYC, and Jenni Monet, CEO of URL Media and author of newsletter Indigenously about what it means to identify as women of color and why identifying as one can evoke both personally powerful and political implications.
Farai Chideya:
Hi, folks. We are so glad that you're listening to Our Body Politic. If you have time, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcast. It helps other listeners find us and we read them for your feedback. We'd also love you to join in financially supporting the show if you're able. You can find out more at ourbodypolitic.com/donate. We are here for you with you, and because of you. Thank you.
Farai Chideya:
This is Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. This week on the show, we're talking about joy. When we started Our Body Politic, we wanted to make space for our full selves, our challenges, our celebrations. We're taking stock and sharing with you some of our favorite past conversations with creators, community builders, and change makers. First, as a lifelong lover of books and also someone who's written half a dozen of them myself, reading has brought me a lot of joy. I wanted to bring you two people publishing writers of color.
Farai Chideya:
Elizabeth Méndez Berry is vice president and executive editor at One World, part of Penguin Random House, and co-founder of Critical Minded, a grant making and learning initiative that supports cultural critics of color in the US. We've also got Lisa Lucas, senior vice president and publisher at Pantheon and Schocken Books. Welcome to Our Body Politic, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
Thank you so much. Glad to be here.
Farai Chideya:
And we've also got Lisa Lucas returning to the show. Hey, Lisa.
Lisa Lucas:
Hey, it's great to be back.
Farai Chideya:
Let me start with you, Elizabeth. Women of color are over consumers of books compared to many other demographics. One World, your house that you're at, and helping to champion and lead and edit some of the most powerful intellectuals in America is publishing people like Nikole Hannah-Jones who are pretty much directly under attack, not even indirectly in a general sense, but very directly being banned. What do you make of this era and how it's perceiving the work of your authors?
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
The way that I think about this stuff is that the public square is so contested, so important and when who holds that square and who dominates that square and who has the power to articulate their ideas, their vision, their analysis, when that shifts, there's a group of people who get very angry and very scared. And that combination is, of course, combustible and toxic.
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
The banning of books is not new, but the combination of banning of books at the most local level, at the library, at the school library and these spaces has now trickled up to legislation to where 1619 in particular has been banned multiple states. I think it means that we're strong. I think it means that they're scared.
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
I think it means that the notion of a new narrative about this country that destabilizes its longstanding belief in its own innocence is so devastating to people for whom the only way that this country can exist is innocent. I believe that what we're doing at One World is we believe that when the myth of American innocence ends, that's when a much more interesting country emerges, a country that is willing to dwell in its contradictions and willing to actually grow.
Farai Chideya:
We had a series of conversations about what it's like to critique black art and hold black artists accountable for their actions. It was regarding Dave Chappelle specifically, but I think it's not just about black art, it's about in general when someone is "your people," whatever your people are, how do you assess them in ways that are culturally contextual? Karen Attiah, who's a Washington Post columnist and a contributor here, said that she wanted better for us.
Farai Chideya:
She said, "Because we're in a white dominated, male dominated society, there's this instinct to want to promote and protect black expression at all costs." Lisa, how do you make sense of these conversations about respectability politics, inclusion and where we are today?
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
Yeah, no, I mean, I think one of the things is we're both babies of Vibe and The Source where I also worked back in the day. I grew up, my mom worked in black media. She worked in a place called UniWorld, which is a black ad agency. I think that when you have the look to grow up in spaces that are by us and for us, you ultimately have a better sense of the nuance that is required, right? You're able to have those conversations about, okay, so we're women coming up in hip hop journalism.
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
Actually, I don't know if I love the way that I'm being represented or that there's not a conversation about representation. You start to lose the nuance in these conversations. Where there is space to talk about the black vernacular, to talk about misogyny in hip hop, to talk about colorism, to talk about black capitalism and whether or not it's good or bad.
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
These are things that because you are at such an infancy of thinking about the breadth of BIPOC publishing, that you're not able to sort of... You don't have the main text that talks about X, Y, and Z problem in black America. Let alone the tertiary issues that are of the utmost importance to everybody living inside of our skin and bodies.
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
I think that that's the job too, to sort of not just champion a work by a person of color, but to also say that I'm laying the groundwork, both structurally in terms of bringing on editors and marketers and all of the people who do the work, but also to integrate not just black stories, but a wide variety of black stories, a wide variety of female stories.
Farai Chideya:
Elizabeth, you wrote an article for Vibe 15 years ago, Love Hurts, that sort of touches on some of these questions. Maybe give a small example of how you've made sense of this?
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
Yeah. I mean, Love Hurts is a great example. I think fundamentally when we pretend that things are okay when they're not okay with the people we love, we're preventing ourselves and each other from growing. The role of the critic... This is one of the things I think so much about because I've learned since we founded Critical Minded several years ago that a lot of people don't actually really know what criticism is.
Farai Chideya:
Can you just explain what Critical Minded is, which is incredible? I was introduced to some of the cultural critics of color that you brought together at Sundance a couple years ago. Explain what that is before continuing.
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
Absolutely. Critical Minded is an initiative that I co-founded. Basically what we were trying to do is figure out a way of supporting critics of color, because all of the different supports that had existed, that had enabled some people like me to develop over the years, like working for alternative weeklies or like Lisa working for Vibe Magazine, and actually kind of...
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
All of these spaces where we were able to see excellence and understand excellence as not something that was exclusively the domain of white institutions. That was no longer available. The question was, what does that mean not just for critics, but for art and culture and democracy more broadly? I think that's a little bit what I believe criticism is so valuable for.
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
I think at the end of the day, when you have a frank and honest conversation about whatever it is, including culture, that means that you care about someone or something enough to believe that they deserve to hear the truth.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. Thinking of influential books, I think of Greg Tate's Flyboy in the Buttermilk, and I really cried for him. I just realized that among other things for me, Elizabeth, he represented the positive male gaze that just accepted me for who I was at every stage of my life and didn't want me to be more than I am or want me to be less than I am. I just felt very seen by him in a way that really breaks me up to this moment. Can you tell folks who he was a little bit more?
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
I was reflecting on this. I was thinking about reading him and the importance and power of reading him as a critic who made it such an important role at The Village Voice, which when I think about cultural criticism, it was such an important incubator and laboratory for so many people. He was really the epitome of that. And then you have the person. I called myself at tater tot.
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
There was a group of us who called ourselves tater tots because he gave us a way of understanding what criticism could be in the world and how we could be as critics uniquely, specifically, and vivaciously ourselves, right? I'm a little bit resentful.
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
When I think about the fact that his last books were coming out on a university press, I love the university press, I appreciate the university press for doing it, and I'm also enraged that he was not one of the beneficiaries of this wave that we have now of younger people who are extraordinarily talented and deserve the visibility and support that they get. I wish he had gotten it too. The world was built by the Tate's, right? The cultural world I inhabit. It's interesting.
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
I think back to Stanley Crouch, who's writing for The Village Voice at the same time, and he's saying hip hop is terrible and jazz is changing ways that is offensive. Brilliant man. I disagree with 95% of all the things that he ever said, but I found his mind to be quite rigorous. Now, unfortunately, we were willing because it criticized us. Because it criticized some of the parts of blackness that were complicated for white America, he found a home at major publishers.
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
But the Tate's that celebrated hip hop, that said to us, "This is a new world order, and this is a new culture. And that it is deep and intelligent and rigorous and changing lives and the world. And it is not lesser in any way. And it's beautiful." It's just difficult to see that they were a lost generation in terms of wider publication and celebration.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. Last question, very short, name a book coming out on your imprints in 2022. One book that you want us to read. Elizabeth first, and then Lisa.
Elizabeth Méndez Berry:
Oh my goodness! I'm going to say Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine. It's historical fiction, but it's vibrant. One World does historical fiction, which means that it feels present and prescient. It's about indigenous identified Latinx people in Colorado in the 19th century, and it's just a phenomenal yarn.
Farai Chideya:
I can't wait. Lisa?
Lisa Lucas:
I'm really excited about Margo Jefferson's Constructing a Nervous System, which is a memoir and it has all of her traditional sort of unexpected critical lens on the art that made her the complications of an ornery mind.
Farai Chideya:
Elizabeth and Lisa, thank you both so much for joining us.
Lisa Lucas:
Thank you. Pleasure always.
Farai Chideya:
That was Lisa Lucas, senior vice president and publisher at Pantheon in Schocken Books, and Elizabeth Méndez Berry, VP and executive editor at One World. Coming up next, two sisters who created an online space for Afghans to find health information and community.
Nilufar Kayhani:
We just want to nurture a safe environment for people to explore and express themselves and live their best and healthiest lives.
Farai Chideya:
And black people are centering health and joy by reconnecting with the outdoors.
Nazineen Kandahari:
I noticed that as I pursued more outdoor activities and in groups of people, I didn't find people who looked like me. I was often the only one.
Farai Chideya:
You're listening to Our Body Politic. Welcome back to Our Body Politic. This week, we are focusing on joy with some of our favorite interviews about taking care of each other and ourselves. Sometimes the things that bring us joy are focused on our own enjoyment, taking time to do arts and crafts. Now, for me, I love doing collages. It's low stress and it's fun. Other aspects of joy are the joy of service. Early in the pandemic, I brought fresh fruits and vegetables from farm stands in Upstate New York to my neighbors in Brooklyn.
Farai Chideya:
It was a time when the supply of vegetables was disrupted in the pandemic, and that was a service that brought me joy. One of my neighbors is a vegan, so the lack of vegetables really hit him hard. He's a black man in his fifties and a personal trainer. The reason that he's both a vegan and a trainer is because he lost his brother too young to a stroke. His life's work is a service to the health of his community and he takes great joy from it.
Farai Chideya:
I call him the mayor of our block. Helping others be healthier is definitely a form of service dearly needed in our times. My next guest are sisters Nilufar Kayhani and Nazineen Kandahari. As students, they teamed up and founded the Afghan Clinic. It's an online space for Afghans to get health, education materials, attend webinars, and get help navigating their health in the US. Nilufar, welcome.
Nilufar Kayhani:
Thank you for having us.
Farai Chideya:
And Nazineen, welcome.
Nazineen Kandahari:
It's a pleasure to be here, Farai.
Farai Chideya:
Before I go to Nilufar, can you tell me just briefly about your family's journey to the US?
Nazineen Kandahari:
Sure. Both of my parents are from Afghanistan, the city of Herat, and they actually both separately sought refuge in Iran, which is just next door, and got married there, which is where I was born, as well as my two older brothers. But like many Afghans, they weren't treated well there. They weren't allowed to go to school. They weren't allowed to work or own property. I wasn't even given a birth certificate because I was Afghan.
Nazineen Kandahari:
We came to the United States when I was about four years old and applied for asylum here. And that journey took a little bit of a while, but here we are.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah, and here we are with Nilufar, who is your talented sister. Both of you working in health. Were you born here in the US?
Nilufar Kayhani:
I was. I was born shortly after they immigrated here in 2001. I was the first citizen of the family. I remember like when we were all applying for citizenship, they would always comment that I was the lucky one for not having to wait 15 years to kind of get some recognition of my American identity.
Farai Chideya:
How did you get interested, Nilufar, in health? Was it because of your older sister or just in general?
Nilufar Kayhani:
My older sister had a lot to do with it. Besides that, since I was young, I kind of knew I had interest in the health fields and it was largely informed by the experiences I had as my parents' health advocate. I have distinct memories of when my dad was diagnosed with diabetes and having to go home and research what that means so I could explain it to him and researching the different medications so we could come up with the questions we want to ask his physician.
Nilufar Kayhani:
It was experiences like that as a kid that I had these epiphanies, where I was like, other people don't have to do this and don't have to rely on their children to make these healthcare decisions. It is the job of the healthcare practitioners to educate us and have us involved in every step.
Nazineen Kandahari:
We were talking about the concept of informed consent for someone to truly know the risks, the benefits, the alternatives, why they're saying yes to something or no to something. If my dad automatically by default said no to the diabetes medications, it's someone's job to see why. Why is he saying no? Is he saying no because he truly knows the risk, benefits, and alternatives and what comes with that?
Nazineen Kandahari:
Which is why we focus a lot of Afghan Clinic work on health education. It's for people to feel empowered to make the decisions that are best for them.
Farai Chideya:
Nazineen, tell us about the concept of sofreh, which you mentioned on the website.
Nazineen Kandahari:
Growing up, my mom would take me to these gatherings that were created by women for women. It was a very sacred space and they were called sofrez, sofreh and nazer is what you say. These gatherings were really quite a sacred space, especially I think in a culture that is otherwise misogynistic in many ways and can be oppressive to women especially. Women gather. They eat ceremonial foods. They pray. At every sofreh, other women pray. And when their prayer comes true, then they have to host the next one.
Nazineen Kandahari:
There's an aspect of sustainability already built into it. This was also all inspired because my mom was praying for me to get into my dream medical school. When I did, she had to host a sofreh. All of this came from that. I was thinking there's so many health benefits to spirituality and to promoting that, which happens at sofreh gatherings. There's so many health benefits to promoting social networking and social support.
Nazineen Kandahari:
How great would it be if we had sofrehs where the newly arrived refugees and those who have been here for a while can converse and make friends and teach each other the ropes of living in the United States? And like maybe at every session, I would be there with another Dari speaking health professional and we could teach about a health topic in a forum that already has so many beautiful strengths to it. And that's what I meant about uplifting the strengths of these marginalized patient populations.
Nazineen Kandahari:
Why do we have to focus on their deficits, of them being not educated or whatever other deficits the healthcare institution tries to focus on as the reason for their worst health outcomes? I got funding through a few different fellowships to go ahead and create this beautiful public health intervention that I had dreamt up with my mom and sister, and then COVID happened. We weren't able to host any sofrehs yet, but it is our goal and plan to.
Nazineen Kandahari:
And also just to explain, in Dari, salamati means health, so the name was Sofreh Salamati.
Farai Chideya:
Nilufar, I think a lot of what your sister was talking about is there's stuff that's very specific to Afghan culture, but it's also about... I was talking to a friend of mine who's another storyteller in a different form about how the loss of the original culture is like an existential storyline for people all over the world. We have always moved, migrated, changed languages sometimes over tens of thousands of years, sometimes over one generation.
Farai Chideya:
It seems to me that part of what you're doing is taking health and reconnecting the older and the newer narratives. What does that feel like?
Nilufar Kayhani:
I think in all of us a big kind of value is cultural humility and allowing people to educate us about who they are. We can't make any assumptions of what their background is or what they want their lives in America to be like. One big kind of factor in Afghan Clinic is also there is no definition of what is right or what is wrong here and what good health or bad health is.
Nilufar Kayhani:
We just want to nurture a safe environment for people to explore and express themselves and live their best and healthiest lives. Nazineen, do you want to add anything?
Farai Chideya:
Yeah.
Nazineen Kandahari:
I, myself, identify, like I said, as an Afghan refugee woman, as an Afghan American. There is no universal way of being Afghan. And that's why I think the concept of cultural humility is so beautiful. I learned that acutely because I grew up at this intersection of having to define myself between two clear cultures, the American and the Afghan. I knew pretty early on that there's diverse ways of being and believing in things. I think healthcare practitioners carry themselves with cultural humility in order to care for Afghan patients properly.
Farai Chideya:
How do you take care of yourself? I'm going to ask both of you that, but Nazineen, how do you take care of yourself so that you can do this work for other people?
Nazineen Kandahari:
First, I will say this project has truly been a labor of love. It's the first time I brought my Afghan and American worlds together. I'd say this work truly has been nurturing my heart, and it feels really good to put to use the privileges and the skills that I've worked really hard to attain as a medical student, as a public health professional and to use that to address the challenges, the very challenges that I experienced as an Afghan refugee.
Farai Chideya:
Nilufar, what sustains you and fills your well so you can do this work? And what do you think you've gotten from it?
Nilufar Kayhani:
The one thing really keeping me going in all of this is that I am gaining the skills and the knowledge to really be able to do the work that I want to do in the future. I've always been reminding myself like I'm here to learn and better myself, so I can be a better public health practitioner and researcher one day.
Farai Chideya:
Nazineen and Nilufar, thank you both so much for joining us.
Nazineen Kandahari:
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to be here.
Nilufar Kayhani:
Thank you for having us.
Farai Chideya:
That was Nilufar Kayhani and Nazineen Kandahari, founders of the Afghan Clinic. You can support their work by going to AfghanClinic.com. We're bringing back some of our favorite conversations about giving and receiving joy. My next guest finds joy by spending time in the great outdoors and encouraging others to do the same. Rue Mapp is the founder and CEO of Outdoor Afro, a nonprofit based in Oakland and DC that gets people of color across the nation out in nature.
Farai Chideya:
She launched it as a blog over 10 years ago, and now members of Outdoor Afro have climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, as well as taken many, many local hikes. Here's a bit of a conversation that Mapp had with Oprah Winfrey during Winfrey's 2020 Vision Tour. They gathered with others in a stand of redwoods that were growing back years after the area had been clear cut. Mapp speaks first,
Rue Mapp:
Think about what's been clear cut in your life and where you need regeneration.
Oprah Winfrey:
I take my stillness and my peace from the trees. And whenever anything is off or off balance in my life, I literally just go out under the oaks, which I call the apostles, and I find peace and sanity there. This is my church.
Farai Chideya:
And this is our conversation with Rue Mapp. Welcome, Rue.
Rue Mapp:
So glad to be here, Farai. Thank you so much for having me.
Farai Chideya:
A lot of people have used the pandemic as a chance to enjoy the outdoors, even if they didn't really do it before. I was really excited to see, for example, a lot of teenagers, like middle school and high school age kids walking in groups through the woods, because it was the place where they could interact relatively safely. What do you think the whole pandemic has done for the outdoors and our connection and for Outdoor Afro and its outreach?
Rue Mapp:
Yeah. I mean, that's a really great framing. As you were talking about the teenagers, I just thought about what was going on in my neighborhood, and it was the same thing. It was like kids on bicycles, on roller skates, adults on roller skates. It was almost like it was 1982 again. It helped me to understand just how far we had gotten away from our everyday connection to the outdoors.
Rue Mapp:
We were literally trying to sell nature for a while, but the pandemic was actually this beautiful moment that intersected perfectly with all the work that we'd been doing over the years, where we actually felt ready to welcome people and guide people to their nature. Public areas were available in ways that restaurants weren't, places of worship weren't, shopping wasn't.
Rue Mapp:
I looked out one morning during all this shutting down and saw my pit bull scratching on her back. I saw a blue scrub jay in the yard and I realized that nature never closes.
Farai Chideya:
I have to say that I have really benefited from Outdoor Afro. I grew up in a culture of loving nature. My grandmother helped to desegregate the Girl Scouts in Maryland. I went to Girl Scouts and to summer stay away Girl Scout Camp and also did family camping.
Rue Mapp:
Love it.
Farai Chideya:
I was already a fan, but I didn't always have a community, especially living in New York City, which I did for most of my adult life. When did you found Outdoor Afro? Why did you found Outdoor Afro, and what is it now for you?
Rue Mapp:
Well, just like you, I was a Girl Scout and I had a nature loving family, mom and dad from the South, Texas, Louisiana. They came during the Great Migration that brought many of our folks to cities like Oakland and Los Angeles and New York and beyond. They brought with them this love of nature and connection to nature, and they were so committed to it that they had a house set up about a hundred miles north of Oakland beyond the Napa Valley adjacent to Clear Lake, which was a destination for working class folks to go up and fish and hunt.
Rue Mapp:
We had this ranch that my dad crafted. We had people come over from all over our community, from church, from the hood. I mean, relatives that span the whole spectrum of black community were invited. My dad had this wonderful saying, and it was, "If you came and you had a good time," he would say, "You have a standing invitation." I grew up with the steadiness of hospitality and this abundance of nature and outdoor recreation.
Rue Mapp:
But I noticed that as I pursued more outdoor activities in groups of people, I didn't find people who looked like me. I was often the only one in those groups, especially when I went out beyond the city. It was really this moment where a mentor asked me the question I think everybody should ask or answer at some point in their lives. By this time, I'm divorced with three children. It's looking kind uncertain for me. She's like, "Hey, if time and money were not an issue, what would you be doing?"
Rue Mapp:
I literally opened my mouth and my life fell out. I said, "Oh, I'd probably start a website to reconnect black people to the outdoors." And literally two weeks later, I whimsically started a blog from my kitchen table called Outdoor Afro.
Farai Chideya:
What year plus or minus? Remind me.
Rue Mapp:
2009. It was in that first wave of social media that we were able to build audience who then asked me, "Hey, this is great that you're sharing a new narrative and that you're helping to shift the visual representation of who gets outdoors. But we want to find ways to get outside with other people who look like us." And that's when the Outdoor Afro leadership team was born. I'm proud to say that that team started off as about 12 people.
Rue Mapp:
And then in this last year, we have a class of over a hundred men and women who represent 33 cities across the United States and their participation network is over 50,000 people. They are out getting it. People are hiking, biking, camping, nature journaling. I mean, getting their nature swagger back.
Farai Chideya:
I have to give props to Katina, who is one of the New York leaders. I've been on some great hikes with her.
Rue Mapp:
She is amazing.
Farai Chideya:
I've gone to meet up, to sign up for the listings of what's what. I'm sure it's different in different cities, but I just feel differently in my body. I feel alive, powerful, less worried about my deficits than I am about my assets. I enjoy hiking, kayaking. For me, being outdoors is so much about just feeling present at a time where there's no like cell phone pings. There's no this. There's no that. Do you still feel that sense of freedom after all these years of doing this as part of your work?
Rue Mapp:
When it comes to me, I recognize that I need nature's medicine too. It's important for me to not only practice what I preach, but to really locate myself in the experience that I'm asking people to take part in who join Outdoor Afro. It's so much about hospitality and welcoming, and it's important that I also share back what these experiences mean for me with my staff and also with our community. I do quite a bit of posting about my own journey.
Rue Mapp:
You can find that on Rue Mapp on Instagram, where I go into a little bit more detail about the things that I'm facing that just helps me to support our leaders and also have empathy for the ways that people say yes to nature and yes to Outdoor Afro.
Farai Chideya:
That's Mapp with two Ps. Rue, R-U-E, Mapp with two Ps. Thank you so much, Rue.
Rue Mapp:
Thank you so much for having me, Farai.
Farai Chideya:
That was Rue Mapp, CEO of Outdoor Afro. Find your local group at outdoorafro.com. Coming up next, journalists Jenni Monet and S. Mitra Kalita on what it means to them to be a woman of color. I'm Farai Chideya. Back with you shortly.
Farai Chideya:
Welcome back to Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya, and this week, we are taking time for joy. Now, me, I find joy by connecting with other women of color in journalism. We help capture shape and in many ways lead the conversations about our nation's democracy. Despite some of the problems in our industry, we often have a lot of fun doing our work.
Farai Chideya:
To continue on our joy train, here's one of our favorite episodes of sipping the political tea with S. Mitra Kalita, co-founder and publisher of Epicenter NYC and CEO of URL Media, plus Jenni Monet, media critic and editor in chief of the weekly newsletter Indigenously. When I founded Our Body Politic, I started describing women of color as a super demographic. We are of many races, backgrounds, religions, national origins. Do we have a lot in common or not so much?
Farai Chideya:
Are we starting to find ourselves as a collective voice, or are we really living very different lives? Here's a clip from Vox of black feminist and activist Loretta Ross talking about the history of how the term women of color was used when an Alliance was first forming between different women's groups at the 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston.
Loretta Ross:
It was in those negotiations in Houston the term women of color was created. Okay? They didn't see it as a biological designation. You're born Asian. You're born black. You're born African American, whatever. It is a solidarity definition, a commitment to work in collaboration with other oppressed women of color who have been minoritized.
Farai Chideya:
Now, Mitra, you've written about this topic. That was 45 years ago. What comes to mind when you hear it defined here as a political alliance?
S. Mitra Kalita:
I mean, I love the idea of identity being a destination versus a construct that you're kind of born into. I think that the idea that you owe other women of color something by describing yourself as a woman of color though, is really powerful. I'm going to say I agree with the construct. What I worry is that we haven't made a whole lot of progress in the decades since that was almost offered to us as a way of being.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, for me, it's like I definitely define myself very much as a black woman, but my blackness was also informed by having an African father from a specific tribe and region of Africa, the Shona people of Southern Africa, and a black American mother with quite a lot of information. We know about the history of my family on that side. That's also complex. But Jenni, obviously indigenous women in the US have a very different history than other women.
Farai Chideya:
You are the OGs. You were here before there was a United States. Does that affect how the women of color identity or umbrella does or doesn't stick?
Jenni Monet:
I don't know, because for so long, I don't think people even understood who we were. I remember growing up and people thinking, "Well, you're just like me, you're white. You're here, but you're not white, and you're not black, and you're not Hispanic. What are you?" They don't ask, or if you live near tribal communities, they just think that you are some stereotype of Native American. I remember just growing up very, very firmly couched in my own identity as a Laguna Pueblo woman, where we are distinctly of our own cultures.
Jenni Monet:
I think that that has been what's carried me in so many situations. The community that breeds, it's incredibly matriarchal, which means that the womanhood behind how we function even in our own communities is really strong. I'm grateful for all of my aunties and grandmothers and all the other women. I just think that it's just been my medicine, what has carried me.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. I mean, Mitra, one of the things I think about a lot is the ways in which class, for example, is as much of a sorting hat as race. I think most people who are working income or low income, they're not worried about stuff like this. I mean, is this even relevant?
S. Mitra Kalita:
It's very relevant, because when we use a term like women of color, it can erase what you're talking about, right? I do think that the class distinctions matter both in terms of how we're capturing communities. O f course, the data and demographics is so important to capture, but you also don't want to kind of blanket create narratives without diving into field reporting and really capturing the nuance of it.
S. Mitra Kalita:
I think the other piece that feels important from a class distinction is being aware of what we're bringing to our identities and the blind spots that inevitably arise. I see this with a lot of Indian American women who have clung to the narrative of being women of color, but haven't necessarily understood what it means to center black voices.
S. Mitra Kalita:
This year, what I'm really heartened by, and this is not just because Jenni's joining us today, but increasingly I'm hearing the centering of black and indigenous voices in a way that I've never heard before in my life. If you have Asian women or Indian American women who are clinging to this construct of being women of color, but they're not centering those to your point who really paved their path, then they're benefiting from a certain identity, but they're really not practicing what that identity...
S. Mitra Kalita:
To sort of end where we began, right, which this is something that requires you to give back, right? That requires you to think about something greater than yourself.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah, and that can be very complicated. I use the term unpaid civic labor to refer to all the work that women of color disproportionately do to just keep democracy going and to be essential workers and so on and so on. This brings me to some of the work you've been doing, Jenni, to bring more focus to the impact of native women on life in the US and life around the world. In your newsletter Indigenously, you talk a bit about Alberta Shank and Ada Blackjack. I'd love to hear a bit more about who they are.
Jenni Monet:
Oh, well, they're incredible pockets of information and inspiration, both information and inspiration, but I've deliberately inserted them into the narrative of how some of our most remote indigenous communities are often portrayed from folks who parachute in and exploit what are considered some of the most rich areas and environments. Alaska, they're rich in subsistence economies, fishing and hunting.
Jenni Monet:
Ada Blackjack is a woman who out survived four white expeditioners in their quest to colonize Wrangel Island, which is in the middle of the Bering Sea. It's just above the Bering Straight. She goes up there with these white guys. She gets stranded, outlives all of them. I love the fact that she just kind of knew the original instructions of how to survive in an environment like that for two years.
Jenni Monet:
I don't think people know that when they come up here and they report on missing and murdered indigenous women, or they come up here and they look at child welfare and children getting taken away, that these women come from a legacy of strength and intelligence and tenacity that I think if we projected that a little bit more, they might think twice before they come in here and just want to get their headlines for awards and prizes that make it into newspapers.
Farai Chideya:
Your work really covers both the promise and the peril of life facing indigenous women and how indigenous women are leading and trailblazing with so much nuance and complexity. I have to say, and I've said it on the show before, I learned nothing about indigenous people not only in K through 12, but even in college. Your newsletter is one of the ways that I'm informing myself because it's up to me to learn. I think a lot of times people are like, "Well, if they want me to know something, I guess they'd tell me."
Farai Chideya:
And it's like, yes, there are people telling. In any case, I want to keep going with talk about representation in the media and turn to you, Mitra. In addition to the Epicenter, you also have URL Media, which you co-founded with a black female journalist. How do your different backgrounds within this broad umbrella and possibly very flawed umbrella of women of color affect what you're doing and how you're doing it?
S. Mitra Kalita:
I think having seen a lot of headlines of founders, of companies being at odds with each other. More than a year into founding an organization with another woman of color, I just emerged with such gratitude that we really see eye to eye on the big things. One big thing is what does it mean to be black centered when you're not black, right? That's a conversation we had early. I mean, before we literally incorporated. There was two ways of having that conversation.
S. Mitra Kalita:
One was for me to kind of say what I thought I was doing, but the other was to say, "Sarah..." My co-founder is Sara Lomax-Reese, who's the president of URL Media, but also runs WURD, a black radio station in Philadelphia. I said, "Sarah, what does this mean both from a business perspective, from how we run things?" I hope it's okay to tell you this. We're upfront about it. We're co-founders, but she owns 51% of the company. That was important to both of us.
S. Mitra Kalita:
Really when we talk about power, wealth and money is a really big part of that conversation. We often with a lot of journalism, I don't want to say we conflate mission with power, but we kind of put the money aside. When you're launching a company with someone, the money conversation has to come first.
Farai Chideya:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's absolutely fascinating. The 51% is not a small deal. It is really a vote of confidence in a certain financial and equity structure that is putting the ball in the hand of your co-founder in this one specific way of majority that ownership. That's pretty amazing. Jenni, I want to check in on the broader media universe. There have been some advances for women of color in news leadership roles.
Farai Chideya:
Harper's Bazaar hired its first black editor in chief Samira Nasr, and ABC News appointed their first black woman as president of the network. Do you see that as in any way game changing or too soon to say?
Jenni Monet:
Oh, it's always game changing when you bring women in leadership positions. And then when it starts be less white, I mean, it's exciting. I don't think that we have any gauge to that really here in this country anyway. I think that it'll be... These are interesting times. I do always carry concern as a Native woman about how long it's going to take for them to understand that decolonizing doesn't start with slavery. Actually we need to look at the very bones of this country.
Jenni Monet:
I think that just our current climate in general is having a really slow and hard time doing that. I don't know how long it's going to take for people to really truly understand that indigenous and visibility is still kind of creating part of the same problems that people are trying to correct. I worry about that from a media perspective. 2020 for me really laid bare how much abuse I have endured as a woman journalist of color in my industry, where I've just kind of taken it and taken it and we move on, right?
Jenni Monet:
Our endurance I think is incredible when we look at 20 years in this industry, right? I'm really happy with myself these days of just kind of being really grounded in what I know needs to happen now. It's exciting and there's not a lot of fear involved, to be quite honest, because I feel like we're now in this new space where there is just a lot more freedom. The internet allows for people like me to have a newsletter, for instance, and to push back around these more bigger brands that might just be missing the mark, even if they are trying to make progress.
Jenni Monet:
I think that's what's so inspiring to have someone like Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland so visible in our spaces every day is because she is the most credible reminder that we're still here as Native people and that every part of our society, every law, every kind of policies that are created, I mean, they have an indigenous story behind them. They have some kind of foundation, and I just don't see that being discussed. I look forward to the indigenous reality being inserted into spaces a lot more.
Farai Chideya:
Mitra, you actually work in helping to strategize around leadership and executive placement. Seeing it from a pretty privileged, well-earned privileged, but privileged part of the pipeline where you get to really landscape from the top, what do you see happening?
S. Mitra Kalita:
I see a lot of desire to get this right. I also see a lot of desire to just hurry up and get a woman of color in there so we could say that we did it. I want to be honest about that, because a lot of conversations I have in... As you mentioned, we run a wildly successful recruiting arm of URL Media. We'll start out with conversations with the hiring manager. What do you want, right? What are the skills of this job?
S. Mitra Kalita:
The number of times people will just because we center diversity will just feel comfortable saying, "We're a very white team. If you could find me a woman of color, that would solve a lot of problems."
Farai Chideya:
That's what we like to do is solve other people's problems.
S. Mitra Kalita:
That's right. I'm not even like going hyperbolic with that quote. That is a real thing people have said not just once, but a few times, right? I'm sure you could picture it. What that has forced us to do as a business for this, but also as a thought leader to that manager, which comes as you rightfully say from a perch of privilege is to say, "Wait, wait, why are you thinking that a woman of color is going to solve a problem that is clearly not solvable with one position," right?
S. Mitra Kalita:
Then we get into the culture of the place, the hiring processes, and so on and so forth. It does give us a window to have that conversation. I think the names that you mentioned are fabulous women. I mean, one thing that's happening this year is that you could ask the question what pipeline problem, right? For so long, it was, "We can't find someone, or there's a pipeline problem," was always the excuse. Somehow women of color are emerging every which way to fill these jobs this year is what we've seen.
S. Mitra Kalita:
However, unless we're going to solve I would argue a toxic work culture that allows somebody to say unchallenged, unless they're working with us, "I would love a woman of color to solve my problem," then we're actually creating more problems for said leadership, right? I think that there is some ways to go.
Farai Chideya:
And that's a perfect place to leave it. Thanks for joining me, Mitra and Jenni.
S. Mitra Kalita:
Thank you, Farai.
Jenni Monet:
Thank you, Farai.
Farai Chideya:
That was S. Mitra Kalita, founder and publisher of Epicenter NYC and CEO of URL Media, and Jenni Monet, author of the fabulous weekend newsletter Indigenously.
Farai Chideya:
Thanks for listening to Our Body Politic. We're on the air each week -- and everywhere you listen to podcasts.
Farai Chideya:
Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms. I'm the executive producer and host, Farai Chideya. Our Co-executive producer is Jonathan Blakely. Bianca Martin is our senior producer. Bridget McAllister is our booker and producer. Emily J. Daly is our producer. Our associate producer is Natyna Bean.
Farai Chideya:
For the re-broadcast segments in this episode, Juleyka Lantigua-Williams was executive producer. Paulina Velasco was senior producer. Cedric Wilson was lead producer. Original music by Kojin Tashiro. Additional production by Priscilla Alabi (à- la- BEE), Michelle Baker, Mark Betancourt, Sarah McClure, and Kojin Tashiro. Additional production and editing services are by Clean Cuts at Three Seas.
Farai Chideya:
This program is produced with support from the Ford Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Democracy Fund, The Harnisch Foundation, Compton Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the BMe Community, Katie McGrath & JJ Abrams Family Foundation, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.