It’s literally titled How to deal with remote work microaggressions but goes on and on about “allyship”. It basically just lists all the microaggressions they can think of for various communities and drops BIPOC as many times as possible. Who are y’all talking to? Lola Bakare (She/Her) shared similar feelings after receiving an email entitled “Want to Be an Ally to Black Women? from Lean In. Lola shared that “another great way to be an ally is to acknowledge your Black subscribers exist.” Both examples credit the writing to the brand and not a specific writer or group of writers. If your target audience is cis White people, you should say that.

Often people are not able to get past question one. I also make sure to let them know that I have no interest in being hospitalized. A therapist dedicated to providing adequate care and ensuring those in search of care are able to receive the care they need would be able to provide honest answers. Not all therapists are good therapists. It’s better to know that before building a harmful relationship with a bad one.

With psychology and mental health being such White dominated fields, it’s easy to imagine why these behaviors were not annotated as stimming but rather purposeful disruptions. This disconnect is harmful and has led to so much more harm. Black people be stimming. This needs to be acknowledged so we can receive correct diagnosis and get the care that we need.

The more that we dig into doing the things that make us happy, loving ourselves and finding people that connect to the love that we have decided that we are worth. The better. So this is a call for Black women to know that you are loved, beautiful and valuable. And that there is a benefit to presenting to you that you are not and that benefit is not yours.

Relationships, amiright? Just the word makes a lot of people run for the hills. What we run from is the thought of defining them. We’re running from the intimate conversations needed to maintain and acknowledge our relationships — and to manage our fears and insecurities in relationships.

No contact is a strategy in order to cut ties with a narcissist, sociopath or other emotional manipulator. No contact works because it stops giving energy to the unsafe relationships. Narcissists need “punching bags” because they refuse to self-regulate, acknowledge their own emotions or stop abusive behaviors. There’s a lot of terminology associated with this topic and Dr. Ramani Durvasula (She/Her) provides a lot of in depth explanations on it all.

I have been Queer my entire life.

I never got the chance to “come out” because I’ve always been me. I shared a lot about my thoughts on “coming out” and my journey on Chris Angel (they/them) Murphy’s podcast Allyship Is A Verb. Last year, I used the word Queer for the first time publicly to describe myself because I was assumed an ally. For me Queerness is the ability to move freely outside of the boxes they’d like to put us in. It’s permission to love and be loved exactly as you are. I have been Queer my entire life!

This thinking stems from the frequent use of the Body Mass Index (BMI). The same system used by the military. Heather Irobunda, MD, FACOG (She/Her) and Sabrina Strings, Ph.D. (She/Her) speak frequently on how this system is outdated, rooted in White supremacy and not an indicator of health or wellness.

They created a video describing the history of the system and how it still causes harm til this day. This video not only promotes self-advocacy in all spaces but also solidifies the fact that….. Fatphobia is Anti-Blackness.

There are a lot of people who believe even if you are trans you must choose and take part in the binary in order to identify as trans. They believe people who refuse to choose should not be allowed to identify as trans until they do. There are also people who believe you should not be able to identify as trans unless you partake in Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy (GAHT) and Gender Affirming Surgery.

The next time someone says PTSD and your brain automatically pulls up a cis White man who is also a combat veteran , challenge it to think of anyone else. Challenge it to think of a trans person who has been disowned by their family for transitioning or a Black person who just had to watch another Black person be murdered. Think about who is defining trauma and why they are defining it this way.

To clump people together from different groups just because they are being harmed by systems based in White supremacy because we assume that everyone who isn't White receives the same type of harm from these systems is extremely harmful and unsafe.

It's giving the Wizard of Oz, when they pull back the curtain. My thoughts and perspectives were minimized and criticized and not in a constructive way. It's so important, you have to figure out what you don't want, work backwards and build questions based off of that, otherwise y'all end up in situations like mine.

You're walking in with all these firm boundaries that really aren't based in humanity or connection, and then you're saying that you know how things are going. The reality is there's a wealth of research, there's a wealth of scholarship, and I'm sure, we've both seen, in person, when folks call themselves neutral very often, they're the exact opposite of it.

And the fake it till you make it, I see that more a skill set for most people, but with Black people, it's not only a skill set, it's it's the way we have to navigate ourselves in this world. It's the way we have to carry ourselves, it's the way we have to be-

Being in HR and being Black, is interesting. It's one of those fields where there's an expected vibe. And I'm not that person, because my goal is to create an environment where you get to be whoever the heck you want to be all the time. I don't want you to turn things off about you.

We are not all educators and should not all be expected to be. I love talking about boundaries because they make it so easy to see how harmful people truly are after setting them. Thank you so much Jessica for reminding us of the boundaries we are allowed to set! In this episode we discuss: -Why Blackness in the workplace is different -Knowing that it's not you, it’s them -How documentation is key to being safe