Fatimah Gilliam, Esquire. is the Founder and CEO of The Azara Group. As a skilled strategist, business leader, negotiator, and trusted advisor, she has spent her career advancing her clients’ goals. She leverages her expertise to provide real-world guidance. Her mission is to empower her clients to be strong business leaders, drive results, have successful careers, and be strategic in influencing others. She is an author, lawyer, consultant, public speaker, and entrepreneur whose career combines expertise in the law, diversity, human capital, leadership, stakeholder engagement, and negotiations – helping organizations gain influence and strategic leverage, build coalitions and consensus, drive business and organizational goals, and advance workforce optimization.  Ms. Gilliam is the author of the groundbreaking book, Race Rules: What Your Black Friend Won’t Tell You, which is an innovative, practical manual of the unwritten “rules” relating to race, helping people navigate polarizing issues.  Race Rules provides much-needed how-to advice to drive equity and behavioral change.  Introducing a straightforward, universal 3-step framework to unlearn racism, drive equity, and challenge misconceptions, it provides tips and tools on cross-racial interactions in people’s personal and professional lives. 

What You Will Hear:

• Being on CNN to discuss her uncle Jesse Balmore’s murder by the government and it impact
• What Fatimah learned about herself during her incredibly diverse and successful career
• The key component in the art of negotiation
• Difference between a good leader and a great leader.
• DEI
• Race Rules: What Your Black Friends Won’t Tell You

Quotes:

“Don’t ask don’t get…… if you want it, you’ve got to ask for it because no one's going to ask for it for you.”

“Don’t negotiate against yourself.”

“One thing that I think is really important for people to recognize or think about when it comes to race is that it's not neutral….there is no neutral zone. You're either standing in opposition to racism, or you are standing in support of it.”

Mentioned

Race Rules

FatimahGilliam.com

I AM Music Group

Portia Burch is a Black queer activist and Omaha native with a specific focus on anti-racism work and abolition. Portia was activated by the murder of Michael Brown Jr. and the subsequent protests and riots in Ferguson, MO. As consciousness shifts towards reckoning with racism and white supremacy in the world, Portia is working to create spaces that are just and equitable as a way to build communities that are focused on healing and growing. She does this by curating and nurturing spaces to unlearn and decolonize behaviors that have upheld racism and white supremacy culture. Her priority is and will always be the uplifting of Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of the global majority. She is intentional in her work so that people working to be active anti-racists and social justice accomplices understand that by making the groups they advocate for their priority, the decolonization becomes a natural act and creates effective change.

What You Will Hear:

• The motivation for and importance of podcast episode “Let’s Heal Together: Make the Most Marginalized Voices the Ones Most Heard”
• The unaddressed white supremacy in the LGBTQ+ community
• Why black women, cisgendered, lesbian, hetero, and trans are still the most disrespected and silenced women
• How Portia deals with moments of hopelessness
• Surviving suicide attempts.  Lifeaversaries

Quotes:

“I need for queer white people to remember that they are white first…….You can be white and gay, white and bi, white and poly, white and pan, any of those things, but you're white first, which means that if we're standing  in a line and we're talking about anti-black rhetoric, you can appear to be straight and you don't have to deal with any of that. You might internalize it, but are you directly harmed by it? No, because nobody knows that you're queer.  For me, if I wanted to, I could tuck my queer away, but I'm black all day long.”

“Twitter is the place where critical and cognitive thinking goes to die.”

“White women need to know that they still benefit from the patriarchy because the men that are in office, even though they're making laws that are detrimental to all white women, it's gonna hit them last.  It’s gonna go through us first.”

“A sense of urgency is a characteristic of white supremacy.”

“Rest is an act of resistance, rest is an act of liberation and rest is a requirement not a reward.  The sense of urgency isn't helping anybody because we're rushing to do things  and  what we're actually fighting for isn't working.”\

“If you're not checking in with you, if you're not touching in with you,  part of you starts to die.”

“it's important to be loved. It's important to allow people to love you. It's important to share that love with somebody else. Whatever that love looks like, platonic, romantic, whatever the case may be, it's just important to have people.”

Mentioned

@portia.noir

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Linktree

https://portiaburch.com/

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

I AM Music Group

Portia Burch is an activist and educator, with a focus on deconstructing current societal norms and systems in power to create a more equitable and just world. She believes in creating change from the inside out which involves identifying the root cause, where change needs to begin, and encouraging growth beyond. Portia works with both nonprofit and for profit organizations as well as private sectors.

What You Will Hear:

• Portia’s father’s influence
• Portia’s why and her legacy
• White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
• Whiteness, white supremacy, white fragility and aggression
• Children learning about race
• Community and collective mind set

Quotes:

“We're just human beings and we're doing our best, and if somebody shows you that they're trying, hold them close and hold that space for them.” 

“I do what I do for black women.”

“Whiteness, inherently, is a place of defensiveness. it is never at fault. It's white people never do anything wrong.  White people expect black people, indigenous people and other people, the global majority, to just give them a free pass, to accept the same apology over and over again.

The tears.  the caring, the acting out because you didn't get your way, those are all  characteristics of whiteness because white people can get away with it.  You’re melanated people cannot.” 

“You cannot be an ally in a war that you created.”

“there's no reason why  a black child at five years old can have a conversation about race and a white child can't.” 

Mentioned

https://portiaburch.com/

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

I AM Music Group