Vida, K, and Nina talk about the new year as a time of spiritual, cultural, and political awakening - as well as a capitalist construct intended to encourage consumption under the facade of growth and rebirth - our personal goals for ourselves and the work we hope to do in community this year, and the function of social media as a means of sowing discord, dividing us, co-opting and disrupting movements and organizing, and creating synthetic community relationships and false political personas that are counterrevolutionary.

Vida, K and Nina talk about the importance of having open, honest conversations about the meaning and weight of money, our relationships with money, how money shapes our lives and survival, and how white supremacy and capitalism create anti-Black values of money as "success" that condition us to a need to consume and assimilate to be seen as human.

Nina, Vida and K talk about our experiences with therapy, finding a Black therapist and why it's important, our struggles with depression, anxiety, self doubt, and feeling like we deserve less, as well as what we have been able to achieve through healing and learning we deserve and can have more. We also talk about racism in the service industry, ableism, and building support systems and networks. TW: suicide mention.

Vida, K and Nina talk about the importance of care work, collectivism and community and how surviving a global pandemic should be pulling us closer together and having us develop new ways of supporting one another rather than finger pointing and placing blame. We also talk about what a "real" Black experience is, celebrity worship, and the violence of the suburbs.

This week, Nina, K and Vida talk about finding and holding on to joy, especially during a global pandemic but also as general practice within our individual journeys. We talk about loving each other and being accountable to each other in community, dating and healing from past hurts as a necessary part of the dating process, and creating and upholding our boundaries while being mindful of how we show up for and engage each other in love.

Vida, K and Nina talk about the presidential election circus and the media's divisive, reductive narratives around Blackness and Black voters that are anti-Black as hell, Black children, parenting and family outside of the nuclear family and the ways that Black people have always taken care of, invested in and shown up for each other in community together.

Expanding on the previous conversation about anti-Blackness, Vida, K, and Nina talk about anti-Black childism and the impact of colonialism, slavery and white supremacy on shaping Black people’s relationship with parenting and childhood. We also get into the media’s role in shaping ideas of Blackness rooted in white supremacy and reducing Blackness to caricatures.

This week Vida, K and Nina talk about the anti-Blackness, violence, and exploitation that Black sex workers (especially poor Black sex workers) experience, the history of anti-Blackness in modern medicine including modern gynecology, the anti-Blackness and carcerality of social services, the racism and eugenics in the history of birth control and basically how anti-Blackness makes the world go round.

Nina, K and Vida have an honest heart to heart about Black capitalism, racial capitalism and the relationship that we as Black folks have with capitalism as both exploited workers/labor and (often but not always forced) participants in exploiting one another for our own advancement.

K, Nina and Vida (who had to be absent from this week's recording) invited Lili (formerly of Vanguard Army Podcast) to join us for a conversation about the presidential debate - if you could call it that - the violence of whiteness, the circus that is electoral politics and the devaluation of Black women and our labor both interpersonally and professionally.