Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee Nicole Lee

“Become a witness to yourself.” - Camille Leak  
In Inclusive Life, we are continually looking at the ways in which we can reach across differences as a path to connection and liberation. We often explore the impediments to being with one another authentically such as defensiveness, perfectionism, guilt, and shame. Camille Leak brings this conversation even deeper. She brings us to what’s beneath these obstacles to connection: trauma.
Camille Leak is a DEI practitioner who believes that folks’ inability to be with other people’s differences is their fundamental lack of capacity to be with their own marginalization and trauma first. And what feels really new here is the way in which Camille deliberately and continually connects marginalization with trauma and trauma with marginalization.
Because we’ve been taught--some more than others-- to “bypass and ignore our own marginalization and trauma for the comfort of other people,” Camille asserts that we will bypass and ignore others’ trauma and marginalization. We cannot do for others what we cannot do for ourselves. 
Awareness comes first. It helps to know what trauma responses are. We may have heard about the trauma responses fight, flight, freeze or fawn (appease), but can we recognize those responses as they show up in our bodies and in our behavior patterns? For example, flight can show up as chronic busyness. Fawning can show up in a tendency to inauthentically compliment or agree to stay connected and liked. 
And this is where becoming a neutral witness to ourselves enters in. Can we witness ourselves in pain with curiosity and kindness rather than judgment and a desire to fix? According to Camille, this is often where DEI efforts shut down: we want to keep it comfortable. We especially do not want to deal with our own pain. Let’s just do a bias training and keep it movin’.
As Nicole points out, growing up requires increasing our capacity for discomfort. As kids, we experience bumps and bruises as we learn a new physical skill. We learn to wait our turn, to confront challenges without falling apart, and to win and lose gracefully. 
And so the work of liberation requires us to exercise these same discomfort muscles as the stakes get higher and higher. We have to get in our reps, practicing staying with ourselves in discomfort. As we do that, we become better equipped to be neutral observers of others. Camille offers that we can begin to discern whether we are dealing with another person, or actually dealing with someone’s trauma response.
In the face of differences, there is the reality that one’s marginalization has happened because of another’s privilege. Can we develop the capacity to be with someone’s marginalization that we are, on some level, perpetuating and benefiting from?  It’s deep and necessary work that requires and generates empathy.
And empathy is connection across difference.
This conversation will make you pause and will invite you to look through the lens of trauma when approaching yourself, others, and all equity and inclusion work. 
We encourage you to seek out the support and facilitation Camille is offering. It so beautifully complements the work of Inclusive Life. 
 
In this conversation, Nicole and Camille discuss:
How Camille’s work in market research led her to her current work in DEI and somatics The problem: our inability to sit with other people’s trauma What trauma actually is  Why organizations and their leaders want so desperately to avoid the discomfort The fallout that ensues when leaders won’t get in touch with their own trauma What trauma is not The cost of not dealing with trauma and how it relates to white supremacy culture Trauma response as a visceral mechanism to ensure safety and position There’s not necessarily more trauma, there’s more willingness and ability to verbalize traumatizing experiences and systems How can we acknowledge varying degrees and layers of tra

One of the barriers for well meaning white folks and BIPOC who want to see a better world is this belief in the inevitability of positive outcomes.
Dr. Crystal Menzies
 
When Dr. Menzies drops this pearl of insight into the latest Inclusive Life Podcast conversation with Nicole, Nicole names the “inevitability of positive outcomes” as “a uniquely U.S. American specific ‘cultural hiccup.’” The belief that it’ll all work out in the end suggests a reality that doesn’t comport with the history of revolutions. 
There’s no one “out there” who is going to save us.
Dr. Crystal Menzies is a Black educator who has been on a quest for liberatory co-collaborators. She didn’t find them within the education system. She didn’t find them in non-profits, even within those organizations with anti-racist mission statements and rhetoric. Her truth telling was met with vilification and ostracization, even from her allies. Ultimately her quest- motivated by a desire to share the story of Black resistance, genius, and joy with her students- led her to the history and living reality of Maroon communities.
Maroon communities are communities of self-emancipated Africans, folks who escaped from enslavement and started their own free rebel Black communities living in resistance to white supremacy and chattle slavery. These communities, varying in size, are a historical and living example of how, as Dr. Menzies shares, “folks get their freedom and maintain their freedom when surrounded by an oppressive system.” 
Her study of Maroon cultures were the impetus for her current work, EmancipatEd, where the vision is to soak in the Black history of resistance, joy, and innovation to reimagine what is possible for Black communities. The work of EmancipatEd is done in collaboration with people who are (actually factually) from Maroon communities from Accompong, Jamaica, San Basilio de Palenque, in Colombia and Helvecia Bahia, Brazil. 
Nicole and Dr. Menzies discuss that it is with these communities of resistance (and antagonism!) that we find a path forward in a time when the arc desperately needs more bending. Rather than a trust in the inevitability of justice, In Maroon communities, there is a fundamental “by any means necessary” determination. Maroon communities, both those that survived and didn’t, are rooted in self-defense, self-determination, and the building of alliances and community with like minded people. In Maroon communities, there is a unity of purpose upon which their survival depends. This unity doesn’t imply agreement on all things. In fact, embedded in this unity is the understanding that there will be trade-offs and radical sacrifice: it’s not going to be pretty. 
It’s so important to know this history and these amazing humans, and Dr. Menzies is devoted to bringing Maroon stories to her Black students. These stories awaken these children and teens to their own freedom stories already unfolding in themselves, their families, and their communities. It helps them thrive outside the white gaze.
When people believe the arc of justice is already bent, it keeps them complacent and believing that somewhere out there is someone who will get us across the finish line to justice and liberation. The stories from Maroon people tell a different story: that we must actively, tenaciously, by-all-means-necessary bend it ourselves.
We hope you enjoy this conversation!
If you’d like to know more about Maroon communities throughout the world, you can begin here, and also explore EmancipatEd Hidden History Cards.
 
About Dr. Menzies:
Crystal Menzies, PhD (she/her) is an educator of Black and Brown youth, a postdoctoral researcher studying cultural community wealth, and the founder of EmancipatED.
A former culturally responsive teacher in urban schools, Crystal aspired to teach her students about ways of being and thinking that did not center whiteness. However, she quickly realized that it

There is something about the Black Women Thriving research project that feels a lot like love. It began with a personal need and grew into a much larger question: What would it take for Black women to thrive - not just survive - in the workplace? From this question, a massive project took shape.
In this project, Founder of Every Level Leads, Ericka Hines and her team set out to understand Black cis and transgender women and Black gender expansive professionals and their experiences. Their goal was to understand them in all of their complexity. Ericka and Dr. Mako Fitts Ward wrote the report based on findings from 19 facilitated focus groups and a survey of over 1,400 Black cis and transgender and gender expansive professionals. 
Black Women Thriving was designed to find out - by listening to Black women - how organizations and businesses need to adapt so that Black women can thrive within them. It was created to understand exactly what thriving means to Black women.  
During this conversation with Nicole, Ericka shares a hope about the recently published Black Women Thriving Report: “I hope that Black women who read this feel the care and respect in which we held their stories.” 
For Black women and gender expansive folks to be seen (without being scrutinized), listened to, and centered in the workplace is exactly what Black Women Thriving is all about. Nicole and Ericka discuss the ways in which typical DEI efforts usually result in benefitting white women and do very little to create organizational excellence, let alone a workplace in which everyone can thrive, because those efforts are not rooted in intersectionality.
Because businesses and organizations are typically built to honor the needs and norms of white men, people within these organizations do not necessarily even have eyes to see the solutions-based leadership skills that Black women bring to the workplace. And without eyes to see, these skills go unrewarded. According to the BWT Report, only 33% of Black women surveyed believe that job performance is evaluated fairly and only 50% of Black women surveyed who applied for a promotion within their organization received the promotion.
And what will it take for Black women and gender expansive professionals to thrive in the workplace? It will take organizational change. Ericka is adamant: The recommendations in the report are for changes organizations must make. They are not changes for Black women to make to fit into a broken system. Ericka says, “We’re not going to ask Black women to do another thing,” namely contort themselves to fit into an organization that is not designed for them. 
The BWT Report is a blueprint, offering not only unique data, but straightforward recommendations for organizations to implement. And although these recommendations are not necessarily “plug and play” as Ericka mentions, they are specific, usable strategies.
In their conversation, Ericka and Nicole discuss the reality that if organizations make recommended changes-- common sense but overlooked practices like providing mentorships and sponsorships from other women and People of Color-- then the organization becomes better for everyone. The BWT recommendations “literally make it fair” for all folks in the workplace. These recommendations have the potential for organizations to reach beyond mediocrity.
Where does the report and its recommendations go from here? Now that it is complete, the Black Women Thriving Report is ready for us to give it both roots and wings. The roots will come from our commitment and time. The wings will come from our ingenuity, courage, and imagination.
Ericka Hines and her team at Every Level Leadership have done their work. Now it's time to do ours. Read more about how each of us in the Inclusive Life community can support Black Women Thriving.
About Ericka Hines:
Ericka Hines is the Founder of Black Women Thriving and creator of the Black Women Thriving research project,

This episode of the Inclusive Life Podcast is an intimate conversation between Nicole and two members of her Inclusive Life team, Christina Hernandez and Laura Halpin. We convened to talk about our personal responses to the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
We began with our own reactions, exploring our immediate sense of how each of our lives and our loved ones will be impacted. The Dobbs v. Jackson decision impacts all of us, and yet it is vital that we place this decision in a historical, social, and political context: the overturning of Roe v Wade is a massive step in a long history of reproductive oppression targeting Black, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized communities, who will be — and already are – most harmed by the protections that Roe v. Wade ensured.
Forced pregnancy is a human rights violation, defined by the United Nations as a crime against humanity. Without access to abortion, all people with a uterus lose their ability to control their own destiny. We are seeing the immediate and chilling effects as it interferes with people, including children, getting the protection, health care, and medications they need.
The political landscape has shifted dramatically in the past few weeks as Supreme Court decisions have eroded many of our basic rights. And we know that more rights are on the chopping block. In this conversation, Nicole refers to Clarence Thomas’s “stand back and stand by” concurring opinion in which he offers a road map for what the court will overturn next: the right to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut), same-sex consensual relations (Lawrence v. Texas), and same sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges).
We must remember – in our desire to respond in the chaos created by this decision – there is a web of reproductive health and reproductive justice organizations working to connect folks in need of reproductive care with protection and services. This is no time to reinvent the wheel which has the likely outcome of putting people in need of abortions at incredible risk.
Voting is essential, but we must not stop there. If we are not mobilized beyond voting, we are as good as giving up. As Nicole shared, “Our actions need to be aligned with our values.” Values without action are empty and meaningless.
At Inclusive Life, we know that we cannot act effectively or sustainably alone. We must be embedded in community, working against the forces that are designed to keep us isolated and fragmented. And so, in the next weeks, we will be creating a structure to build community around the strategies for the ground war ahead previously defined by Nicole. We are eager to tap into the expertise and leadership of Inclusive Life members.
We are in this fight for the long haul because we must win.
 
Pertinent Links:

• The War on Our Bodies: The Phase of Cold Clarity
• There’s No Equity Without Reproductive Justice from the Adaway Group
• Operation Save Abortion: It’s Not a March, It’s Your Training Day a day long training offered by Abortion Access Front on Sunday, July 17th.

In this Episode Nicole, Christina and Laura touch on:

• Where we were and what our initial reactions were when we first heard that Roe v Wade has been overturned
• Shame and the way it made conversations about abortion avoidable
• The implications of Dobbs for women’s healthcare
• Clarence Thomas’s “Stand Back and Stand By” message
• A court run amok: where are the checks and balances?
• Democrats: what’s the plan?
• Aligning actions with our values, no matter how the actions poll
• The next steps for each of us
• The implications of Dobbs on our parenting
• The next steps for Inclusive Life in light of Dobbs

“The white gaze is upon us at all times, and the ways in which Black bodies have been destroyed by whiteness are many. But this is just one of them.” - Sirius Bonner
 
One thing to get straight: divorcing yourself from diet culture isn’t just about being fat, loud, and proud. Sirius Bonner, who joins Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant for Part 2 of this two-part Inclusive Life podcast, drives home the importance of rooting our own relationship with our bodies in the broader political context. The context? Fat bodies are subjected to systemic oppression.
 
Sirius deepens the conversation Nicole, Hilary and Dana began in Part 1 around diet culture and racism. She shares “...There is a deeply connected root of anti-fatness and anti-Blackness from the time of slavery in the United States.” The conversation weaves from there into the complex ways anti-fatness shows up in the Black community—similar to the way colorism exists—as a means to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.
 
Internalized oppression in the shape of internalized anti-fatness is tragically logical: Sonya Renee Taylor, in her book The Body is Not an Apology, writes: 
 
“We must not minimize or negate the impact of being told to hate or fear our bodies and the bodies of others. Living in a society structured to profit from our self-hate creates a dynamic in which we are so terrified of being ourselves that we adopt terror-based ways of being in our bodies.”
 
These terror-based ways of being in our bodies cause so much daily suffering, resulting from, as Nicole says, “...living in a system that consistently tells you that from the moment of birth, you’re never going to be enough.”
 
What’s difficult to see are the ways that white body supremacy couples' health and size. 
High blood pressure?  A person with a thin body is provided medication and other medical advice. A person with a large body is told to lose weight and then come back for additional medical care. Both fat and thin people develop high blood pressure, so identifying fatness as causative doesn’t make sense. Yet doctors still center weight as the cause of disease and weight loss as the cure. Just like the war on drugs, the war on obesity is a war on people, both rooted in anti-Blackness.
 
Where can we begin to decouple fat and health? Fat and laziness? Fat and “you should try harder?” Fat and “it’s your fault?”
 
First, we can each begin by developing and deepening an appreciation for the diversity of bodies. Body diversity has always existed and will always exist. We can lay down our arms.
 
Second, we can shift our focus away from size and onto the social determinants of health, to understand the impact of fatphobia on fat folks’ health outcomes. 
 
Third, we can continually center the voices and lived experiences of Black queer women in this conversation. 
 
In this episode, Nicole, Sirius, Hilary, and Dana talk about:
What’s beyond Body Positivity The marginalization of fat, Black, queer women in the Health at Every Size and Body Positivity movements De-centering the pursuit of health Taking an intersectional approach to size bias Rejecting dieting without an analysis The root of anti-fatness is anti-Blackness How diet culture shows up in a Black culture Fatness and proximity to whiteness Decoupling size and health Shifting the conversation to the social determinants of health Learning to become one’s own advocate  
Bios:
 
Sirius Bonner is a passionate and noted presenter and facilitator. Sirius’ work focuses on the intersections between social justice issues such as racial oppression, reproductive justice, queer rights, anti-fat bias, educational equity, poverty, sexism, and liberation, recognizing that as we begin to untangle one issue, we can untangle them all. Sirius’ currently works at Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette as the Vice President of Equity and Inclusion.
 
You can find Sir

“We all eat for emotional reasons. That’s normal. Food is flavored with complex meanings. It connects us with our culture and our ancestry and heritage. We eat to celebrate. We eat to grieve. Food is an emotional thing for human beings. When we dumb it down to its nutritional components and see it only as a vehicle to give us nutrients, we are missing so much.” 
- Dana Sturtevant
 
If you haven’t yet considered weight stigma as a social justice issue, today is the day you begin. Diet culture is an insidious arm of white supremacy culture that has removed us from our bodies, from pleasure, and from our connection to our heritage. It has caused untold suffering to folks in fat bodies, impacting access to health care services, opportunities, and access to simply feeling good moving about in the world without shame and blame.
 
This conversation between Nicole and Dana Sturtevant and Hilary Kinavey, part one of a two-part episode, is one that lifts the lid on grief and loss. We have been fed so many lies. 
 
Diet culture shapeshifts when we start to catch onto its oppression. We may have given up on counting calories and tracking points, but we strive to “eat clean” and “make healthy lifestyle changes” or go paleo or do intermittent fasting…whatever the latest trend to make our own bodies more acceptable or to weaponize against folks in larger bodies. 
 
We learn early on that our bodies are problems to be solved, and that restricting food or eating just the right combination of nutrients will solve the problem. We are taught that there are right and wrong ways to live in a body.
 
Hilary shares, “People who occupy [fat bodies] are not able to function in the culture or pursue their joys, their lives, their bliss in the culture because fatness is considered something they have to resolve before they can get access to what they need.”
 
As Dana and Hilary share, the healthcare industry has centered “health care” around the Body Mass Index, the creation of a white statistician and founder of phrenology, a racist pseudoscience. The BMI was created not as a measurement of individual health, but as a tool to track populations for the insurance industry. The Body Mass Index has now been used for years in doctors' offices, in the field of dietetics, by the diet industry, and by professional trainers as a tool to measure health by means of body size. It’s bogus. It’s racist. 
 
One alternative to the conventional paradigm of food, body image, and weight-centered health care is Body Trust, a process by which we can all learn to live more peacefully and compassionately in our bodies.
 
As with all our social justice work, in the work of fat liberation, we must center the voices, work, and lived experiences of the most marginalized, namely fat Black queer femmes. 
 
We encourage you to disrupt diet culture and weight stigma in your own life by listening to the folks most harmed and developing an analysis so you can see the ways in which diet culture is expressing itself in your relationship with your body and other bodies. 
 
It is time to divest. As a community, let’s hold one another in generous accountability for doing this work.
 
In this episode, Nicole, Hilary, and Dana talk about:
• The origin story of Be Nourished
• “Healthy lifestyle” behavior is dieting behavior
• The empty promises of weight loss
• What happens when we compliment someone’s body after weight loss
• The racist roots of the BMI (see sources below for further reading)
• Our indoctrination into diet culture
• Diet culture’s focus on pathologizing foods of Black and Brown people
• White dominance in dietetics
• Weight stigma as a social justice issue
• Reclaiming “fat” as a neutral descriptor
• Beginning the journey of body trust
 
About Dana and Hilary:
 
Dana Sturtevant is the co-founder of Be Nourished, LLC and co-creator of Body Trust®. She