• Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee

  • By: Nicole Lee
  • Podcast

Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee

By: Nicole Lee
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  • Summary

  • Inclusive Life is for anyone who is interested in transforming their lives to be more inclusive, equitable and just. Join Nicole Lee, human rights attorney, activist, mom and founder of Inclusive Life for conversations with expert and badass guests. In these messy conversations, we will explore the ways in which we can live more inclusive lives in every aspect of who we are, with every role each of us plays. We will bring our most authentic selves to this work, link arms, and together move into aligned action.
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Episodes
  • S2 EP8: with Camille Leak: Exploring the Intersection of DEI and Trauma

    S2 EP8: with Camille Leak: Exploring the Intersection of DEI and Trauma
    Aug 23 2022
    “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 somaticsThe problem: our inability to sit with other people’s traumaWhat trauma actually is Why organizations and their leaders want so desperately to avoid the discomfortThe fallout that ensues when leaders won’t get in touch with their own traumaWhat trauma is notThe cost of not dealing with trauma and how it relates to white supremacy cultureTrauma response as a visceral mechanism to ensure safety and positionThere’s not necessarily more trauma, there’s more willingness and ability to verbalize traumatizing experiences and systemsHow can we acknowledge varying degrees and layers of trauma in ourselves and others without playing “oppression Olympics”?The importance of relationship and how to begin to cultivate relationships across differencesWhat it means for Camille to live her best Inclusive Life   About Camille Leak: Camille Leak (she/her) is a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Practitioner, truth teller, and story teller. She often says, “I’m not doing my job if I don’t do two things: 1) tell you how DEI impacts your bottom line, e.g., how it makes you money, drives growth, or increases relevancy and 2) make you really uncomfortable; being uncomfortable is the only way you know you are doing DEI right.” Via her practice, Real Talk & Brave Spaces, she provides group facilitation, workshops, and one-on-one coaching about a variety of DEI topics, cultivating spaces where individuals and groups can fearlessly confront the most uncomfortable elements of DEI. Additionally, Camille is the Community Manager of Holistic Life Navigation, a company and community that serves to ...
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    44 mins
  • S2 EP7: with Dr. Crystal Menzies: Finding Inspiration from Maroon Communities to Guide Us Forward

    S2 EP7: with Dr. Crystal Menzies: Finding Inspiration from Maroon Communities to Guide Us Forward
    Aug 9 2022
    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 would take more than being a “good teacher” to dismantle the systems of oppression that led to the systemic violence she and her students experienced. In an effort to tell a more expansive story of the Black experience across the Diaspora that didn’t perpetuate trauma narratives, Crystal traveled the globe to learn about the rich history of resistance and liberation movements that are often made invisible in our collective history books. Drawing on her Guyanese and African American roots, the legacy of Black educators, educational psychology, liberatory pedagogy, and African-Diasporan history, Crystal founded EmancipatED to uncover our hidden Black history. Through research-based educational products that center Black communities, Crystal hopes to create environments in which Black people, as a collective, can find joy, empowerment, and community through multi-generational learning. Her flagship product is an exploration kit that shares the stories of Maroon communities, which offers ...
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    46 mins
  • S2 EP6: A Roadmap for Black Women to Thrive in the Workplace with Ericka Hines

    S2 EP6: A Roadmap for Black Women to Thrive in the Workplace with Ericka Hines
    Jul 25 2022
    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, an innovative and groundbreaking exploration of the lived experience of Black women in the workplace. This work is rooted in the belief that Black women deserve workplaces that support their care and healing, and that invest in their professional development at every level. Ericka is also the Principal of Every Level Leadership. She is an advisor and strategist who works with organizations to align their commitment to inclusion and equity with their everyday actions and operations. She has worked with government agencies, nonprofits, and foundations across the country to help their staff and stakeholders learn how to create inclusive culture. To date, Ericka has trained over 3,500 individuals in skills that will help them to be more equitable leaders for their teams and organizations. Ericka has served as lead researcher and a contributing author to the national publication: Awake to Woke to Work: Building a Race Equity Culture published in 2018 by Equity in the Center. She holds a Juris Doctor...
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    40 mins

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