Red Lips & Eyerolls Katara McCarty

In this episode I sit down and chat with Michelle Cassandra Johnson. Michelle is a social justice warrior, author, dismantling racism trainer, empath, yoga teacher and practitioner, and an intuitive healer. With over 20 years of experience leading dismantling racism work and working with clients as a licensed clinical social worker, Michelle has a deep understanding of how trauma impacts the mind, body, spirit, and heart. Her awareness of the world through her own experience as a Black woman allows her to know, first-hand, how privilege and power operate. 

This week's guest is Kalilah Wright!

Kalilah Wright, born in Jamaica W.I., migrated to the United States at the tender age of 4 and was raised in Brooklyn, NY. She is the Founder and CEO of expressive brand Mess in a Bottle. As an accomplished designer and trained architect, she used her Masters degree from Morgan State University and Bachelors of Arts from Penn State University to establish the brand in January 2016 in Baltimore, Maryland. Mess in a Bottle allows you to put messages on t-shirts and are packaged in reusable bottles.
The Mess in a Bottle brand was established to evoke change, question Kalilah’s audience and allow individuals wearing their messages to be vocal without saying anything at all.
Each item is designed and printed at her Baltimore in-house studio space. 
Kalilah has participated in multiple pitch competitions and won the Wells Fargo Business Pitch competition in 2016 and the 2018 iFundWomen pitch competition in conjunction with the Baltimore Ravens. Mess in a Bottle has collaborated with numerous brands and created limited edition capsule collections with Warner Brothers Studios for their movie The Kitchen, YouTube, Roc Nation artist Rapsody and most recently Target for their Black History Month collection. Celebrities such as Viola Davis, Serena Williams, Luvvie Ajayi, Lena Waithe, Yvonne Orji and more are all proud supporters of Mess in a Bottle.

In this episode I chat with Corinne Rice-Grey Cloud about her life and her passion to educate people on Indigenous culture and the importance of dismantling systems of oppression.

Corinne Rice-Grey Cloud is Mohawk and Lakota, and lives on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in Mission SD. She is a journalist with Powwows.com, the Executive Director of the Buffalo Project, and was previously the Program Coordinator for the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition under their Federal Sex Trafficking grant. She currently provides education nationwide on culture and Land Back movements and has spoken at Google, Facebook, Walmart and Universities across the nation. She is a voice in the community working to raise awareness on Human Trafficking in Indian Country, and has spoken on Human Trafficking panels regarding MMIW. She’s 34 years old and she and her fiancé Greg Grey Cloud live on a small ranch with their two kids Hunter and Emma.

In this episode I chat with Dr. Christena Cleveland, we dive into a beautiful conversation about Black liberation and the sacred feminine. We talk about her 400-mile walking pilgrimage across central France in search of ancient Black Madonna statues, and how she examines the relationship among race, gender, and cultural perceptions of the Divine.

Christena Cleveland Ph.D. is a social psychologist, public theologian, author, and activist. She is the founder and director of the  Center for Justice + Renewal, a non-profit dedicated to helping justice advocates sharpen their understanding of the social realities that maintain injustice while also stimulating the soul’s enormous capacity to resist and transform those realities. 
A weaver of Black liberation and the sacred feminine, Dr. Cleveland integrates psychology, theology, storytelling, and art to stimulate our spiritual imaginations. She recently completed her third full-length book, God is a Black Woman (HarperOne), which details her 400-mile walking pilgrimage across central France in search of ancient Black Madonna statues, and examines the relationship among race, gender, and cultural perceptions of the Divine. 
Dr. Cleveland holds a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of California Santa Barbara as well as an honorary doctorate from the Virginia Theological Seminary. An award-winning researcher and author, Christena is a Ford Foundation Fellow who has held faculty positions at several institutions of higher education — most recently at Duke University’s Divinity School, where she led a research team investigating self-compassion as a buffer to racial stress. Though Dr. Cleveland loves scholarly inquiry, she is also a student of embodied wisdom. She recently completed the Art & Social Change intensive body wisdom training for millennial leaders, and is currently deepening her mind-body-spirit integration in a year-long life practice program for BIPOC. 
A bona fide tea snob, lover of Black art, and Ólafur Arnalds superfan — Christena makes her home in the wild high desert of northern New Mexico.

Enjoy the episode!

This week's guest Rachel Gilliam chats with us about her amazing work and her online reset that is led by Black women for all women. 

Rachel Symone Gilliam runs an online platform centered around owning her grief and encouraging others to live their best life on purpose. As a young widow and bone marrow transplant survivor, she is no stranger to heartache, loss, or hard seasons and invites you along in her own journey to self to help you open the door to your personal healing. 

She lives life in Dallas, TX and is all about self-care, wellness, and rosè. As the host of the Rosè with Rae podcast, founder of Unapologetic Womxnhood, and creator of Daily Rae, a daily encouragement text -- she has made it her mission to live her best life on purpose and to invite you to do the same.

https://unapologeticreset.com/ (use code KATARA10 to get $10 off ticket)
https://www.instagram.com/rachelsymonegilliam/ 

This week's guest McKensie Mack chats with us about how they are impacting the world toward radical transformation. 

McKensie Mack is a trilingual anti-oppression consultant, facilitator, educator, researcher, and the Founder of McKensie Mack Group (MMG) and the Creator #BoundaryWork. McKensie holds more than 10 years of experience helping organizations, community groups, governing agencies, and healthcare organizations expand dialogues of power, identity, and equity across race, gender, class, disability, and LGBTQ+ identity with clients based in the U.S, the UK, India, France, Germany, Spain, Peru, and more.
Their consulting group, MMG, has partnered with communities nationally and globally to develop equitable and anti-oppressive communications strategies and cultures that identify and dismantle social inequity while giving people the tools to better their lives and communities. McKensie's work has been featured in the NY Times, Refinery29, Chicago Tribune, BlockClub Chicago, El Pais, and The Guardian. Their entire body of work is defined by a singular core belief: We are all born worthy.

Follow McKensie Mack on Instagram @mckensiemack