Farai interviews Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry, award-winning journalist, author, and host of WNYC’s “The Takeaway”, on reimagining how we view U.S. history and politics, specifically regarding how Black women in media and academia shape our nation’s progress. Then, Farai speaks with Tiffany Dufu, founder of The Cru, a peer coaching platform that provides women with community and resources to achieve professional goals and advance their careers.
Farai Chideya:
Hi folks. We are so glad that you're listening to Our Body Politic. If you have time, please leave 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're here for you, with you and because of you. Thank you.
Farai Chideya:
This is Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry centers conversations on the Black community, women and Intersectional Justice as an academic author and award-winning journalist and commentator. Last year, she became the host and managing editor of WNYC's, The Takeaway, a national daily news show with live reports from the field plus analysis. She also serves as the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at her alma mater Wake Forest University and runs the organization she founded, the Anna Julia Cooper Center. I am so glad to be reunited, Melissa.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
Hi Farai. I'm so happy to hear your voice and talk with you.
Farai Chideya:
I am too. We have so much to talk about, but I'm really just so glad to see you thriving. And before we get to all your work things, how are you overall just as a human in these very strange days?
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
Wrong day to ask. Most days the answer is great. Today is that I have not had anything to eat and I have not slept. And so I'm feeling like life is terrible, but that's really just because I'm hungry and tired. So I learned that very much like a toddler, you got to fuel up and drink the water and sleep. But most days, actually, I'm doing extraordinarily well and almost surprised to find this little life of mine continuing to make itself. My children are wonderful and healthy and thriving. My parents are still with me. My husband's parents are still with us. The start of the pandemic, I'm not sure we thought that would be true. And yeah, as we say down south, I feel blessed and highly favored, Miss Farai.
Farai Chideya:
You are indeed and hungry. So we're going to try to get you to some food soon. But yeah, so let's talk about The Takeaway. It's been a little over a year since you were officially named host and managing editor. I guest hosted the show briefly years ago, and you've hosted on cable news and you've been an editor for several publications. So what brought you to The Takeaway?
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
Oh, that was an accident. I had very purposely left media in 2016 and when I left, I really left. I think maybe I was a guest on one or two things, but I really just never showed up in any kind of broadcast again. I was doing plenty of writing, but didn't want to ever show up in broadcast again. I got a call from Lee Hill, executive producer, and I was going to say there are folks in Audio World who know Lee very well, and he just said, "Hey, can you come sit in for two weeks?" And I thought, oh yeah, that I can do. I mean, that's a low key thing. And I did, and then now, whatever, a year and a half later, they haven't let me go.
It might be that it's actually a black hole over there. I might have been sucked in, but I had just agreed to come for a couple weeks to sit in and then ended up staying. And Farai, I've known you a long time. I have any kind of media career at all because of you. And I feel like you should have told me that radio was super hard, way hard, so much harder.
Farai Chideya:
You do it beautifully. Radio can be a black hole because it seems like, oh, well okay, if your show's an hour, you produce an hour's worth of stuff or if it's two hours, you produce two hours. No, that's not how it works. But I am so thrilled that you're doing The Takeaway and you really have made the show your own. You have a unique voice and spirit and I feel like you really bring your vision to this nationally syndicated show. So how do you decide what you're going to cover? What gets you excited?
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
Well, as you know, hosts are really just the little part of the iceberg that you can see, but the show is actually much bigger than that. It is all of the producers and all of the guests and everyone bringing their everything. And that is really, I think, what drew me back into media was I forgot how much I love the team aspect. And so that's how we decide is each day the mostly very young producers really realized how much I've aged in a short period of time, but everyone's now a decade and a half younger, two decades younger. But the young producers, the leadership team, it's an all in with pitches and deciding. And I think for me, what I'm always looking for is something that is connected to the news stories, but I always feel like if they could hear it anywhere, then why would they hear it from us?
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
So let's try to tell these stories in a way that is unique or surprising. I mean, sometimes it's just here's what happened today and let's talk to a smart person about it and there's real value in that. But a lot of times we're actually trying to tell a story. So we've been trying to cover the midterm elections. I love politics, everything is politics for me. And we've been trying to cover the midterm elections with a purposefully different lens and really trying to think through it in the context of what we've been doing as SHElections. So we've been looking at races where both or even all three of the general election candidates are women and trying to understand what can we understand about American politics from looking at midterms through that lens.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah, we definitely paid attention to the woman versus women races and your SHElection series and so much great coverage. So you recently spoke with Congresswoman Barbara Lee at the Harvard Kennedy School's 2022 Truth and Transformation Conference, including about whether America is ready for a racial reckoning. And you talked about the affirmative action case before the Supreme Court reparative approaches to structural injustice. So tell me what's on your mind in that realm for you as Melissa Harris-Perry and what was on the congresswoman's?
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
Yeah, so the congresswoman put forward with her colleague, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, an effort for a truth reconciliation. I think that the language of truth and healing and reconciliation committee here in the US and modeling it both on international models of this that we have around race and reconciliation and harm done by state actors or with the backing and complicity of the state and actually on some truth and transformation and healing committees and practices that are happening at the more local level. And so they're asking for this to occur at the national level and specifically what she and Senator Booker are looking at and asking all of us to look at is the question of racial transformation and healing. Congressman Lee is extraordinary. Of course, we all know that she was the lone clarion voice in the context of the run up to the war in Iraq.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
She has been a clarion voice on questions of reproductive justice, on representation for Black women on the important fragility of our democracy. But she does not let go that at the root of much of this are, as some would frame it, the original sins or the fundamental foundation of US economy and politics, which is white supremacy and that we can't reasonably protect a fragile democracy unless we even understand the basis on which it stands. And so it was really an opportunity to pick her mind a little bit, to think about how she thinks of a congressional responsibility. I think for me, those kinds of questions and concerns and issues around power happen in a very different space than for the congresswoman. I'm inherently primarily a teacher and so for me that work is happening in the classroom and it's always going to happen on a much smaller scale.
Farai Chideya:
Absolutely. Well let's now pivot to your academic work. You have been teaching a course called Girls' Stories: Race, Politics, Pedagogy. So what is this class and how did you come up with it?
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
That's funny. I think the students are a little bit like, what is this class? I've been teaching at the collegiate level for 25 years and I still occasionally teach Intro to American Politics. There are three branches of government. You got to do that. But as I can, I try to have course titles and names and experiences that will bring to my classroom students who might not otherwise show up there. And Girls' Stories is one of them. And basically what we do is the broad question is one, not unlike the question of this podcast, which is how does American history, how does American politics look if instead of reading it through the characters we typically read it through, we begin with girls and the stories of girls. Now, the easiest way I can explain what this looks and feels like for folks is think about the American Girl historical dolls and like, oh, Kit Kittredge and what does it mean to tell the story of the 1920s if you tell it through Kit Kittredge, right?
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
Those dolls are marketed. The goal there is also to buy Kit Kittredge's whatever, her stuff. But what if we tell the story of World War II, instead of telling it through as a war story, we tell it through the story of a Japanese girl interned at Heart Mountain. What if when we tell the story of the War on Terror, we tell it through the memoir of Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, who's a Muslim teenager living in New Jersey when her identity suddenly becomes politically relevant in an entirely different way.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
What if when we think about what it means for an adult to write their girlhood story, we read Janet Mock and we ask about a trans woman writing her childhood, which was not read by others as a girlhood, but was read by herself as a girlhood. And how do we even understand what girlhood is in that context? So that's what we do each time. And then we do a little bit of straight up electoral politics too. So if you're a Girl Scout living in Michigan and both of the people running for governor of your state are women candidates, what does that mean to you? We're just trying to tell and think about and turn American politics and American history on its head a little bit by telling the story of America through girls and of course almost exclusively through girls of color.
Farai Chideya:
You're at Wake Forest University, which is your undergrad alma mater and you have this endowed professorship named for Dr. Maya Angelou, who I got to interview once and it was incredibly intimidating. What does it feel like to hold a professorship named after her?
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
So she was my undergraduate advisor.
Farai Chideya:
What?
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
I know.
Farai Chideya:
Stop the presses.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
I worked for Dr. Angelou and she shaped my whole life. I was a sophomore in college. I'd gone to college early. I was 16 when I went to school and I hadn't even graduated high school. That's another thread. But I was in college on scholarship and my sophomore year I was grown. So I pledged Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. It was 1992. I was walking around in sufficiently dressed in the January and February weather. I got bronchitis. I took an amoxicillin thing for it, had a systemic allergic reaction and basically lost six weeks of school.
Farai Chideya:
That was Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry, host and managing editor of WNYC's, The Takeaway. Coming up next, we continue our conversation with Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry of The Takeaway and Wake Forest University, plus Tiffany Dufu on building sisterhood support circles with her company, The Cru. That's on Our Body Politic.
Farai Chideya:
Welcome back to Our Body Politic. We're talking media, politics, race and power with Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry, host and managing editor of WNYC's, The Takeaway. If you're just joining us, Dr. Harris-Perry was in the middle of a life changing moment from her college days.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
So my 18, 19-year-old self walked up flat footed to my professor, professor Maya Angelou, and said, "Professor Angelou, here's my drop form. I have to drop your class." Now to be clear, the right reaction to some little no nothing, 18-year-old who just went and is dropping your class because she basically pledged to a sorority should have been okay, here's my signature, see you later. But instead, what she said to me was, "Aren't you a scholarship student? How will you keep enough credits to remain in school?"
Farai Chideya:
Oh wow, beautiful.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
And of course, at that moment I started crying. I was like, "I don't know." So she says, "Okay, I'll sign your drop form, but here's what you'll do. You'll come this summer. I'll pay your tuition, but you'll work for me. And that's how you'll pay back your-
Farai Chideya:
Oh my gosh.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
She was special.
Farai Chideya:
That is so beautiful.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
So I did, I went and worked for her. And if you're catching this timeline here, this is then summer of '92 and then working for her into the fall of '92, which is of course the presidential election that is won by Arkansas native Bill Clinton. So in January 1993, my job is to open her fan mail and she gives the inaugural poem at President Clinton's inauguration.
Farai Chideya:
Oh my gosh.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
And it was my front row seat in how a Black woman from Arkansas, southern Black woman, who is a sexual assault survivor, who was underestimated over and over again in her life, changed the world with her intent, with her courage, with her words. I got to read every one of those letters that poured in, thousands and thousands of them, and it transformed my life.
Farai Chideya:
Oh my goodness.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
So holding her title on my professorship is, you can't tell me nothing because it is the pinnacle. It is all I was going for and I just try to be worthy of it.
Farai Chideya:
Oh man, you've made my day with that story. That is so beautiful, just absolutely beautiful. And someone else who has been important in your life in more of a spirit guide way is Anna Julia Cooper. You founded and run the Anna Julia Cooper Center. So what is her place in history and the legacy you have built and are continuing to build in her name?
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
It's so funny. I thought I knew the answer to that and then I read Brittney Cooper's brilliant book on Black women intellectuals and I was like, ooh, she done turned Anna Julia Cooper into a whole verb. So what I would say is I am in community with many different folks who are doing the work of keeping Anna Julia Cooper's legacy alive. And when I say alive, not just remembering her, but truly trying to animate her legacy in the world. So much of what Brittney Cooper does in her text is to bring Cooper's transgressiveness forward because it's easy to write her off as a respectability politics and therefore not to be worried about, but she brings forward how transgressive she was. There are folks in DC where Cooper spent so much of her life, who are continuing to do so much of her work around being an educator of young people who everyone else underestimated and she thought great things about.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
For me, the one piece, the sliver of Anna Julia Cooper that I tried to work through here, there's was really two. One is that she was a voice from the South. And that at the intersections of gender, race, and place, we come to understand very particular contributions of Black women and actually of all peoples. We understand those contributions at the intersections of gender, race, and place, so that place matters. And particularly for me as a southerner that southerness matters. But the other big thing is I'm constantly just fighting with the boys, as was Cooper. She kept getting fired from jobs that she was overqualified and better than everybody else in. And then she would do things like run off and get a PhD at the Sorbonne and write her dissertation in French. And so part of it is me, again, just trying to live up to remember, recall and model that we stand not only in the legacy of these extraordinary women, but that many of these women were shunted aside by the very black men within whose community and at whose welfare they were working.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
And that it was painful, it was challenging, it was often bankrupting and yet the work and the commitment kept them moving forward. And so those are the things I try to model from Cooper.
Farai Chideya:
So the book she's known for most widely is a Voice from the South by a Black woman of the South. So just give us a tiny little snippet of why we should read that book.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
Oh, so many reasons. One, if you hold a current US passport, you should pick up your passport and flip through it. At the back of the passport, there are document pages and they have quotes from famous Americans for a very long time. I think this is still true, I haven't renewed my passport lately, but she was the only woman quoted in the passport pages and she writes that freedom belongs to all simply because of their humanity. So part of what she does in that text is to bring us the critical understanding of freedom, not as a liberty to do what I wish, but rather freedom as a fundamental inalienable human right from which we cannot be separated and therefore the responsibility that is engaged in it. Many will know from the title of Paula Giddings text in which she quotes Voice from the South, the now famous line, when and where I enter in the quiet undisputed dignity of my womanhood, only then can the entire race enter with me.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
And so that is part of what Cooper's doing there is reminding that we can't be our brothers keepers at the exclusion of Black women because in fact, only when Black women enter does the entire race enter. And then I'll also say that Cooper, again, one of my favorite lines is not the boys less but the girls more. And I think for me, not only on a binary that she was working with at the turn of the 19th and 20th century folks, but that I'm rarely interested in silencing, firing, canceling, shutting up other folks. But I really am very interested in the cacophony of additional voices of asking who isn't being heard? Where don't we have platforms to speak, to listen, to see, to be in community with? And so I think that notion of not the boys less but the girls more is also a guided light.
Farai Chideya:
You're listening to Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya and we're talking with Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry, host and managing editor of WNYC's, The Takeaway about Black women's leadership.
Farai Chideya:
We actually reared an interview that you and I did a few years ago on your book Sister Citizen. And we talked about how Black women are not allowed to be angry in politics and the anger thing came up in the first Georgia gubernatorial debate between democratic nominee Stacy Abrams and Governor Brian Kemp. How do Black women candidates overcome the angry black woman stereotype or is that even possible?
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
So first of all, I heard the re-airing of the interview. I was driving and dang near drove into a ditch.
Farai Chideya:
Oh no. But it holds up.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
I said she got me out of here telling stories from a decade ago now. So I did enjoy that and I was really honored by it because I am very much an Our Body Politic listener. And it was fun to hear that. If I were to ever rewrite some portion of Sister Citizen, which was the book that you and I were talking about at that time and dealing with all of these tropes, I have the things I think that I missed and one of them was just really to say in the clearest sense that we cannot overcome, change, alter or fix the stereotypes that impact us. And it is exactly the madness of trying to do that, that should rightfully in fact make us angry. The notion of understanding the operation of those stereotypes is so that you can see them working in the room and you can see the ways that they're working on you.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
But the whole reason that stereotypes and lies quite simply operate, live and are reproduced is because they serve power. And so the construction of the angry Black woman serves a purpose and it's not a purpose primarily for Black women. And so we can't fix it. I think we have to actually be angry when we're angry, but also not lean into anger when what we're feeling is hurt or hungry or tired, that anger is a righteous and powerful tool and it's one that we should wield as needed and as connected with us authentically. And none of that will have anything to do with how others view us or see us. That, we are not in control of.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah, I will be honest, I've been grappling with the emotion of bitterness in the sense that there have been so many incidences where a family member is directly hurt by structural bias or a friend of mine comes to me with some horrible employment discrimination situation or their own topics of other structural issues of discrimination. And what I realized was that I could examine different members of my family, some who were embittered by things that were really tragic, like fighting in Vietnam or whatever, and others who were able to shed that despite what empirically happened to them. And so I feel like there's a lot of evidence. There was a Thomas Etzel column about how Black Americans are much more optimistic than white Americans despite the fact that we have a lot less money and a lot less structural protection. Do you think about stuff like that?
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
I mean, of course we are. I think about stuff like that all the time. It is at the core of how I try to teach and lead and think. I'm trained as a quantitative social scientist. I have a PhD from Duke in political science. So I was taught that a thing is not true even with a lowercase t unless I can empirically demonstrate it pretty much within one standard deviation. That's how I think about what constitutes evidence in the world.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
And so whether I'm looking at it through quantitative data or whether I'm looking at it through historical data, I always want to know the evidence. And then I went to seminary and I went to seminary not because I had a calling to preach, I do not, not even because I was seeking something in particular in my own faith journey. I went to seminary because it was extraordinarily important for me to cultivate a practice of intellectual humility around survival in the American project and to understand what pieces of the world, my grandma and great grandma and great-great grandma understood about the world that is not actually identifiable within what we think of as empirical evidence.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
So these are women for whom there was very little empirical evidence, one that there was a God or that if there was a God, that God cared at all about them. And yet, they believed both that there was a God, that God was alive and present in human history and that God knew who they were and liked them and cared about them. And that as a result of that godness, and this is in the broadest sense, sometimes God was found in the backyard in nature, sometimes God was found in church, sometimes God was found through the love of their children and their beloved partners, but they believed that they were human even when all evidence was to the contrary.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah, my grandmother definitely is someone who she could have become a very bitter person. She endured employment discrimination, poverty, many different things and constantly regenerated in a spirit of faith and also joy. And we try to talk about joy a lot on this show. What brings you joy and how do you tap into this? I think that faith is not joy and joy is not faith, but you can have a joyful faith. Do you feel like you can access that?
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
I have 27 chickens in my backyard.
Farai Chideya:
Really? Oh, that's amazing.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
And at various points they have also had little duck friends and there have been pigs back there. The pigs were a thing that happened during the pandemic. I'm not such a good pig mom. I way overfed my pigs. With my children and my animals, I tend to show love through food. Too many potatoes for the pigs.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
But yes, many of my happiest moments are spent fingers and dirt. I do a lot of worshiping, rejoicing. My Godhead is definitely a head of lettuce that I have grown myself. I feel really comfortable with those notions of creation and I am in those spaces and in my backyard tapped into regenerative life, tapped into my genius grandmother who could make a wedding dress without a pattern, who none of the white folks in the room even would know was there because she was a domestic worker. And so I find a lot of joy in both what I can make and in what was made for me. Also, I just got to say, I have a really quirky eight year old who is on autism spectrum and has a most extraordinary... She really is wild in her imagination. And so sometimes I just go on a magic carpet ride with this kid wherever we're going. Yeah, I have a best friend in a lot of joy.
Farai Chideya:
Well, I could talk to you all day, but I am going to let you go with just one last question. We talked a little bit in the context of Anna Julia Cooper about freedom. So what does freedom mean to you in this very strange era with your dynamic family and your chickens and your 12 jobs? What does freedom mean to you?
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
I don't know that it's a stable thing. So funny, I bet James would have an answer. James would be like, freedom means she just get to do what she wants around here.
Farai Chideya:
Your beloved husband.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
My beloved and long-suffering husband. I'm just laughing to myself as I think about my answer because I'm hearing James's pushback. But I will say increasingly and perhaps this is age, perhaps this is relative privilege and some level of economic security that increasingly freedom to me does feel like responsibility and it feels like responsibility to build community.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
I deeply understand respect and probably need a little bit more self-care, but I am far more motivated by squad care, by team care, by crew care, by what we're doing in and for each other. I do try to make sure I get enough water and sleep and food, but gosh, the thing that makes me feel most free is when I stop my workday long enough to check in on my friend who has COVID or would I stop my workday long enough to call my dad who is in stage four or I like the moments to myself. I do feel free, but I actually feel most free when I take, not just have, when I take space to care for all the people I really love the most. It feels like I'm finally getting my budget in line with my ethics, my priorities, my morals, and I care about myself. But man, that's the part where I feel most liberated.
Farai Chideya:
Oh, I love that and I share a lot of resonance with that. So Melissa Harris-Perry, I am just so thrilled to see you flourishing in academia, flourishing on air at The Takeaway, and thank you for spending so much time today
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry:
And for real Farai, thank you. I mean, you have been beyond gracious for 20 some years now. I don't even know that I would've ever thought about the thing that is radio except for news and notes and for your voice. And thank you for continuing to make things that bring us together and I cannot tell you how important it's to me almost every day these days, so thank you.
Farai Chideya:
That was Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry, host and managing editor of WNYC's, The Takeaway. She's also the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forest University and founder and president of the Anna Julia Cooper Center. Coming up next, Tiffany Dufu, Founder of The Cru on her journey to create a national support network for women. You're listening to Our Body Politic.
Farai Chideya:
Welcome back to Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. The COVID pandemic hit workers of color hard, including small business owners. The House Committee on Small Business found that there were 41% fewer Black business owners between February and April 2020, but now that's turned around. In 2022, the University of California Santa Cruz found that the number of Black owned businesses was 30% higher than pre-pandemic levels and a National Association of Women Business Owners survey from last year found 5% of women business owners started their company during the pandemic and about half of those were women of color. Tiffany Dufu is a longtime advocate for entrepreneurial women and the author of Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less. In 2018, Tiffany founded The Cru, a peer coaching platform for women that uses an algorithm to build accountability groups. Together, these women build a network so they can succeed both individually and as a group. Welcome, Tiffany.
Tiffany Dufu:
Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here and to have this conversation.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah, me too. I'm an accidental business woman. I just wanted to create content because of the kind of content I wanted to create, I needed to be a businesswoman, so I'm really am grateful for the work that you're doing with The Cru. How would you describe The Cru to someone who's not particularly interested in business or networking, just someone who you meet or someone in your family?
Tiffany Dufu:
Oh, that's a great question. I probably would start with the question for them, which is have you ever had a goal, something that you wanted to achieve, and there's this little thing called life that got in the way and you found yourself having challenges executing the goal or just making it happen? Typically, people say yes to that and they can even share what that goal might be. And I say, "Well, you know what? A lot of people have that challenge." When we identify what our goals are and we write them down, we track them somewhere, and when we meet on a consistent basis with one or more people to help hold us accountable, we're likely to achieve that goal, to move it forward. The Cru is a movement, it's a platform, it's a company that matches women in those accountability circles to help them realize their life intentions.
Farai Chideya:
So how did you recruit the initial group of people? Did you go through existing business networks or friends or post it online?
Tiffany Dufu:
So my life's work is advancing women and girls and one of the things that I'm obsessed with is actually talking to women, to listening to our stories and understanding why we make the choices that we do. I used to meet anyone who reached out to me on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9:00, 10:00, and 11:00 AM. I did it for many years and The Cru was born out of an observation that I made that even though we often have a lot of people around us, our family, our friend, our coworkers, we often perceive our leadership journey as a solo endeavor, not a team sport, meaning that if we have a problem, the first question we often ask ourselves is how am I going to solve this problem? At the end of my conversations with women, after they had shared with me their challenges and their hopes and their dreams, I would ask them, who are you sharing all of this with? Who's helping you to create a plan?
Tiffany Dufu:
But I would tell them about a group of women that I had in my life that I called my crew. Most women would say, that's a really great idea, I really need something like that, and they would go off. But one day I had someone who she was really honest with me. She said, "Tiffany, I understand theoretically this concept that we all need peer support, and I believe that if I had what you're describing, I could move my goals forward, but I don't think you appreciate the amount of work that goes into finding a crew." And then she walked me through her needing to get access to the cocktail party or the conference or the event.
Tiffany Dufu:
She said, "Tiffany, you're probably invited to speak at these things. And then I have to awkwardly introduce myself to strangers collect a bunch of business cards. You want me to take the time to reach out to all of these people, to schedule coffees or lunches or Zooms, and then I'm supposed to figure out who I'm compatible with, coordinate regular meetings. I'm exhausted just thinking about everything that would go in to that. I already have three kids. I have a dog. I have a mom with a diagnosis. I had to ask my manager to come and meet you at 10:00 AM on a Tuesday. Most women are working at 10:00 AM on a Tuesday, Tiffany. I understand what you're saying, but I just don't feel like that's accessible to me."
Tiffany Dufu:
And that was where I realized, oh, if my life's work really is advancing women and girls, then I should probably stop preaching to all of these people about how they need to find a crew and I should just find the crew for them. I didn't have a lot of money, didn't have very many resources. I used a Survey Monkey for the first application, and I sat on my couch and made a video basically saying, I have a crew. This is what they've done for me. If you need one, click here. And I pushed it out on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, I think I forgot to post it on Instagram that day and hundreds of women applied. That's how it got started.
Farai Chideya:
That's amazing. I have to say that I have a very deep crew and I have a very organic crew, but also, I'm 53 years old and this crew came together over 30 odd years of me working, and it sounds like it can be a real accelerator for people who aren't as old as I am or even as old as you are. You're considerably younger than me, but still, do you have people in their twenties and early thirties who are part of Crus?
Tiffany Dufu:
We are very focused on what we refer to as women in the middle, largely because that's who responded initially to that call to action. It was women who were typically older millennials, maybe younger Gen Xers, who were in the middle of their careers. They often had other people that they were caring for. They were feeling a lot of pressure and I think they, particularly like the woman who I spoke to that day, were just feeling like I need the next step, but maybe I don't know exactly what that is and I could use the support
Farai Chideya:
Actually, that fascinates me that it is the women in the middle because I do think that for me, I had aspirations not to be a manager, not to be a business person. I had aspirations to just have people pay me to do what I wanted to do. And it was in my early middle age that I started asking myself hard questions about whether I was willing to engage in risk. Let's talk about algorithmic matching. What does it mean for your work with The Cru?
Tiffany Dufu:
Yes. I'm so glad you asked this question because I'm what you call a non-technical founder and yet I built the scaffolding for our algorithm at The Cru I didn't have money to hire an engineer in the beginning, so in order to match these women in the first cohort, I needed to print their Survey Monkey applications and sit in a room with two of my other Cru members who volunteered to help me and figure out how we were going to bring people together. We decided that diversity was very important, and so we would start with the optionality of diversity that had the least number of options, which was, does she have dependence, yes or no? If she had dependence, we put them all in one pile. If she didn't have dependence, we put them all in another.
Tiffany Dufu:
And then we went from there, what is the family configuration? What is her race and ethnicity? It went all the way down to her industry of which there were more options than any other and our goal ultimately was to ensure that they felt like they were in a crew of peers, meaning you need to have people who really feel like they can get something from all of the other members and that they had something that they shared in common, but outside of that, they really should be as diverse as possible. It needs to be a group of people that you wouldn't have otherwise met. We recorded that matching process actually, and I did give the recording to an engineer and I said, "Listen how we're yelling at each other and what we're saying." And that was the foundation for the algorithm, which really prioritizes diversity and pureness, being in the same life cycle as it were.
Farai Chideya:
You're listening to Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. We're talking to author, entrepreneur, and founder of The Cru, Tiffany Dufu. From what I understand, you came up with the idea in 2017, you were able to iterate and get it going in 2018, and then we had these small things like a global pandemic happen. How did that, in particular, and all of the ramifications for women, especially women who are caregivers, affect how you worked with people or how people worked with each other?
Tiffany Dufu:
It was a humbling learning experience for me as a founder to reconcile what the fact that I had gotten the initial model when I launched The Cru wrong. I insisted that a crew needed to have a physical experience, that they needed to meet in person. I thought that was an important part of building connection. In the beginning, we matched women based on geography, and we then only had crews and markets where there were critical mass of applications in cities like San Francisco and LA and New York. When the pandemic hit, all of a sudden our crews were unable to meet in person, and I feared that this would be the end of the business, but obviously the crews had already created their meaningful connection. So the first real test was, okay, our existing crews, can they convert to a virtual model? And the answer was yes.
Tiffany Dufu:
In fact, the pandemic allowed me to do something that I had never been able to do before, which was to be in a crew gathering, in lots of them. So I spent most of March and April 2020 in gatherings pretty much every day, and I made a number of observations that led to a lot of growth for The Cru. One was that in a virtual model, you remove the friction for the woman in the middle to show up. No one was waiting in traffic, no one had to find childcare. I saw women in gatherings nursing babies. I saw more than one woman in a gathering corn rowing or taking out the braids of her daughter's hair, and I thought, "Tiffany, by insisting that these women meet in person, given that there are these women in the middle with so many demands, you actually created more work."
Tiffany Dufu:
The second thing that happened was that by virtue of my model, if you were in Baton Rouge, Louisiana or if you were in Cincinnati, Ohio, The Cru was not accessible. Well, all of a sudden with our virtual model, it didn't matter what your zip code was. That opened up the market for us, which meant a lot of growth in the wake of the pandemic as women were more isolated in their homes, wanted more connection, and loved this idea of someone else curating a small group for them.
Farai Chideya:
So when you look at the overall experience of women in the workforce, there's been a lot of what some people call quiet quitting, which is feeling completely tapped out and overused by your bosses and then just ramping down and either seeing whether you reach a new equilibrium where you don't feel taken advantage of or you quit. It's pretty controversial. How do you think for people who feel a little overtaxed or a lot overtaxed by the systems they're in, how do you renegotiate your literal contract but your larger contract within a workplace? Do you have any thoughts on that?
Tiffany Dufu:
I do in part because right now we're at a place where everyone is expecting more out of their workplace and more from their employer than they ever have before. Part of it, I think, is just our communities, the institutions that we used to rely on, whether they were church, our neighborhoods are either in decline or certainly our participation in them is declining. The workplace has been the place where people look for aspects of their lives that they used to get from other places. Women in the middle in particular look for three things from their employer. One of those things is meaning. People truly feel that their jobs, their careers need to be synonymous with meaning and purpose. That concept obviously resonates with me, but I don't think that means everyone has to or needs to, but certainly that is the expectation.
Tiffany Dufu:
The second expectation is for advancement and not just advancement in terms of I want to be promoted at work. I want to increase my salary at work, but that I want to see evidenced evolution of the self. I want to feel that I am growing and learning as a human being. The third thing is integration. People are now expecting their employers to value and acknowledge and sometimes even provide resources to support them in the holistic nature of their lives. They're expecting for you to actually care and be vested in their politics, their community service, whether or not they're a knitter or a 5ker. They want to be able to bring all of themselves to the workplace.
Tiffany Dufu:
And so on this quest to live a meaningful life and seek advancement and to have integration, the more and more that we're not getting that from the workplace, the more we perceive that the workplace is not meeting our needs, thus the quiet quitting. And so I've been spending quite a bit of my time supporting folks in human resources and diversity equity inclusion and talent development to provide an alternative experience to fulfill some of those desires.
Farai Chideya:
And as we wrap up, I wanted to ask about diversity. I was really interested that The Cru recently acquired the Mentor Method by a young Black entrepreneur in the tech and entrepreneurship space, Janice Omadeke. It seems to me that one powerful way of inspiring functional diversity is to invest. There's been so much lip service to diversity in the workplace and diversity in entrepreneurship. What are the ways to actualize some of that?
Tiffany Dufu:
Well, Janice is a superstar. That was probably of all of the different things that I've done at The Cru, one of my proudest moments. I always start with the individual level. One thing that you can do is really amplify the voices of diverse leaders and diverse leadership. I saw you at the Forbes Summit, the Women Power Summit, and I said to my husband, "I'm going to do everything that I can to support Farai." Because you've been in the trenches for so long doing really incredible work that advances all of us. And if there's anything that I can do to lift you up, I want to be a part of that.
Tiffany Dufu:
I think every post that you share, every dollar that you donate to an NGO that has a woman leader, every company that you can invest in, it's really important that all of us have not just mentors and people in our lives that are giving us wisdom, but that we also have mentees. I have eight right now in my mentee rotation. I'm the cumulative investment of a lot of women who have poured themselves into me, Farai, poured themselves into me and given me opportunities. I'm here because they said yes to a meeting, to an introduction, because they said yes to giving me some kind of endorsement. And the world's going to get a return on that investment, and I think all of us have a responsibility to pay it forward.
Farai Chideya:
Well, Tiffany, it has been fantastic talking to you, and thank you for coming on Our Body Politic.
Tiffany Dufu:
Keep going. You're doing an amazing job.
Farai Chideya:
Likewise. That was Tiffany Dufu, author, entrepreneur, and founder of The Cru.
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 host and executive producer, Farai Chideya. Jonathan Blakely is our Executive Producer. Nina Spensley is also executive producer. Emily J. Daly is our senior producer. Bridget McAllister and Traci Caldwell are our booking producers. Steve Lack and Anoa Changa are our producers. Natyna Bean and Emily Ho are our associate producers. Kelsey Kudak is our fact checker.
Farai Chideya:
Production and editing services are by Clean Cuts at Three Seas. Today's episode was produced with the help of Lauren Schild and engineered by Mike Gohler and Archie Moore.
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.