Eyes On Whiteness

UnSuk Zucker is a Korean American cis-gender woman,  an amazing advocate, educator, and parent, focused on equity and justice, not only around her but also with a relentless commitment to doing the work within herself.  This podcast is filled with raw, heart wrenching and glorious examples modeling vulnerability and transparency as she lives this work as a parent, educator, and professional leader for equity. 

In this episode, UnSuk talks about: 
- the challenges and joys of being a parent of a bi-racial son both in an effort to disrupt her own internalized white supremacy and externally in community and schools
- unapologetically raising their "rainbow sparkle unicorn boy" as his fullest authentic self with unconditional love
- her fears as an East Asian woman with her family in public
-  a story of her son’s white school leader who found humor making a costume of the Make America Great Again hat and a disregard for the harm that caused families of color, immigrants and many other marginalized communities 
- the age-old challenge of confronting individual acts of bigotry vs. the systemic process that has allowed the act of bigotry to happen.
- the need for white people to believe people of color and get out of the intellectual ways that whiteness demands the need for perfectly valid experiences to be through an intellectual lens of academia and books in order to have credibility.  

These are just a few of the elements of brilliance UnSuk shares today. 

We end with a powerful awareness of what leaders COULD do that is simple, but in the hold that whiteness has on our desire for perfection, not easy.

Support the show

This episode was created with deep love, and deep thanks to the frameworks and tools within Cultivating Intersectional Leadership, a course I co-created with Diedra Barber.

CIL isn’t just a training. It’s a transformative journey—one that supports individuals and organizations in making the systemic, strategic, and spiritual shifts needed to build something different.
 Something rooted in justice. Something aligned with who we say we want to be.

You're invited to learn more or inquire about participation at:
 🌐 www.cultivatingintersectionalleadership.com
Or visit our podcast site at:
🎧 www.eyesonwhiteness.com

If this episode stirred something in you, share it.
 If you’re holding big questions, write them down.
 And if you’re tired—rest. But don’t quit.

Diedra and Maureen spend some time using our tool "Transmuting White Supremacy and Patriarchy" to discuss how this election day is for each of us.

Note, it's recorded before we have ANY information and we're as curious as you to see how it lands on the day after the election when you all hear it!

Transmuting White Supremacy and Patriarchy, for us, means practicing
Introspection, Self- Awareness, Vulnerability, Transparency, Intersectional Inquiry, and Invoking Collectivism. 
Join us- what are you noticing in your own reflections?

*Note: the origin of "Whites gonna white...." is unclear as we discuss in the episode. If anyone has info to share on a place you've heard it, please reach out to us!

Support the show

This episode was created with deep love, and deep thanks to the frameworks and tools within Cultivating Intersectional Leadership, a course I co-created with Diedra Barber.

CIL isn’t just a training. It’s a transformative journey—one that supports individuals and organizations in making the systemic, strategic, and spiritual shifts needed to build something different.
 Something rooted in justice. Something aligned with who we say we want to be.

You're invited to learn more or inquire about participation at:
 🌐 www.cultivatingintersectionalleadership.com
Or visit our podcast site at:
🎧 www.eyesonwhiteness.com

If this episode stirred something in you, share it.
 If you’re holding big questions, write them down.
 And if you’re tired—rest. But don’t quit.

We welcome you all back to part 2 of a conversation with Dr. JuanCarlos Arauz, a brilliant educator, facilitator, leader for equity in a reunion, as the three of us realize we haven’t been in the same place in nearly 3 years. We discuss what it might be like to stand in our deepest energy source as one that has the potential to transcend the social construct of our given identities and how that helps us shed the power that hierarchy, boxed identities, compartmentalization can have on us. We focus on remembering that transparency is the enemy of white supremacy, and explore what it looks like to just present how we are without having it all organized, figured out or filtered....and how necessary it is for the creation of critical dialogues and relationships to see and hold each other in our wholeness.  And, we end with how whiteness appears in devouring crab! 

Support the show

This episode was created with deep love, and deep thanks to the frameworks and tools within Cultivating Intersectional Leadership, a course I co-created with Diedra Barber.

CIL isn’t just a training. It’s a transformative journey—one that supports individuals and organizations in making the systemic, strategic, and spiritual shifts needed to build something different.
 Something rooted in justice. Something aligned with who we say we want to be.

You're invited to learn more or inquire about participation at:
 🌐 www.cultivatingintersectionalleadership.com
Or visit our podcast site at:
🎧 www.eyesonwhiteness.com

If this episode stirred something in you, share it.
 If you’re holding big questions, write them down.
 And if you’re tired—rest. But don’t quit.

Diedra is back!  We have a reunion with our dear friend and colleague, JuanCarlos.  This is the first of a two-part conversation where we go deep into intersections of our racial and gender identities.
In part 1 we explore the depths and interconnections of white supremacy and patriarchy and how they play out in our socially constructed identities and the vulnerable ways we do our intra/interpersonal work and how that is similar and different as a result of our varying experiences in our identities. We dig into how often we can run away from ourselves and the challenges of finally taking on the internal work when we stop running away.

Some specific topics include
- how whiteness participated in (eventually) bringing national outrage for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery
-  an exploration of the ways that whiteness has us in a state of worry if we dare rest and define our value 
- a consideration of what we’re NOT taking with us into the new normal 

Support the show

This episode was created with deep love, and deep thanks to the frameworks and tools within Cultivating Intersectional Leadership, a course I co-created with Diedra Barber.

CIL isn’t just a training. It’s a transformative journey—one that supports individuals and organizations in making the systemic, strategic, and spiritual shifts needed to build something different.
 Something rooted in justice. Something aligned with who we say we want to be.

You're invited to learn more or inquire about participation at:
 🌐 www.cultivatingintersectionalleadership.com
Or visit our podcast site at:
🎧 www.eyesonwhiteness.com

If this episode stirred something in you, share it.
 If you’re holding big questions, write them down.
 And if you’re tired—rest. But don’t quit.

In this second part of a powerful discussion with Roger Bonair-Agard, we go deeper into the discussion of transmuting white supremacy and patriarchy within ourselves, each other and in our community.  This is a deeply personal conversation that includes a look into our ancestry and the harm that all of us have endured from the atrocities of White Supremacy.
We're continuing the exploration of the call to listen within as an act of transmuting white supremacy.  Roger shares some powerful stories of incarcerated youth leading critical work in Chicago, fighting how whiteness as perspective defines what is violent and worthy of incarceration.  We dig into more losses of those incarcerated during this pandemic, how whiteness keeps us focused on data over connection and relationship, how Restorative Justice certification is whiteness infiltrating a thing designed to infiltrate whiteness, and how this perpetuates the lack of validity of listening within. Roger tells powerful stories of connection with his lineage in Trinidad and Nigeria and Sankofa: being able to go back to find your truest self and move forward and there is healing to be done in all of us since White Supremacy hurts us all, including people who are considered white.

Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/eyesonwhiteness)

In a two-part conversation, this first episode digs into how whiteness shows up in rules and punitive enforcement of said rules. We grapple with the questions of 

• how you find your authentic self in the struggle against whiteness?
• how can you consider the journey as a pendulum forward and backward/not left and right and even maybe not a linear line at all?
• how whiteness can be a resistance to really listening and how ancestors and our bodies speak to us when we do deeply listen?
• how the belief in the power of choice and agency plays out  in our lives when we deeply listen within

*CW: Roger speaks about grappling with allegations of sexual assault 

Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/eyesonwhiteness)

Maureen talks with her sister-friend, Leidene King.  Leidene is a brilliant educator, facilitator, and healer who delves deep into the ways that she has experienced whiteness in healing and metaphysical spaces as a black woman and the struggle of the concepts of “we are one” and “nothing comes into your life uninvited” when we have such different experiences in the world based on the skin we’re in. 

She beautifully shares her journey of discovering “who am I?” as the daughter of an African American father and Chinese-American mother born in Hawaii, raised in the black community navigating a sense of “otherness” in the world.  Leidene details the journey of the transformational process of moving through terror that comes from a belief system disintegrating, the void left after that disintegration and then the infinite possibilities that become illuminated and how it helps better able to empathize when people engage in conversations about whiteness. She draws connections to thoughts, feelings, beliefs, physiology, and the power of interrupting how the ways whiteness doesn’t make space for all of them can cause health issues….and a million more brilliant lessons.

Also: Maureen gets another brilliant lesson the power of humility and accepting responsibility for impact, regardless of intent.

The brilliant Leidene King offers rigorous, intimate, 6-week coaching cohorts for serious anti-racists seeking to evolve in racial consciousness.  For offerings starting in mid-October (or to learn more about her work) message her on LINKED IN.

Support the show

This episode was created with deep love, and deep thanks to the frameworks and tools within Cultivating Intersectional Leadership, a course I co-created with Diedra Barber.

CIL isn’t just a training. It’s a transformative journey—one that supports individuals and organizations in making the systemic, strategic, and spiritual shifts needed to build something different.
 Something rooted in justice. Something aligned with who we say we want to be.

You're invited to learn more or inquire about participation at:
 🌐 www.cultivatingintersectionalleadership.com
Or visit our podcast site at:
🎧 www.eyesonwhiteness.com

If this episode stirred something in you, share it.
 If you’re holding big questions, write them down.
 And if you’re tired—rest. But don’t quit.

Diedra and Maureen talk with Sonya early on in the pandemic.  We come right out the gate talking about how ancestors are encouraging Sonya to shower more frequently and how white people not regularly washing their legs surfaces as a confession for Maureen.

Sonya joins us from New Zealand and talks about introversion in the time of quarantine, what New Zealand's sustainable and equity centered COVID plan looked like and Diedra yells at Sonya to stop talking this logical nonsense! We talk front line workers and how perspective has shifted, the amount of hours of labor it takes to avoid Amazon’s global control, how capitalism is the devil and COVID is the universe trying to have us stop worshipping the devil, how whiteness makes up "rights" and entitlement from thin air while they protest not being allowed in the playground, what happens when you tell the structures of whiteness “no”, the genocidal impact of “keeping America open” on black and brown people, the trauma of letting in the truth of white supremacy and why people choose to sit in the illusion of comfort and the gift of avoidance. We dig into white people’s trauma that must be healed, and ask how we acknowledge our complicity without it being an indictment on our humanity…and how holding hope and compassion for white people is a mind fuck for black people, how the reckoning white people fear is actually an internal reckoning and the counter-intuitive ease that comes with being allowed to be fallible. 

Diedra wraps with reflecting in how transmuting White Supremacy we get to a place of asking “How do we really see that when I’m looking at you, I’m looking at me?” and the freedom and space that come with starting within instead of always fighting externally. 

Special bonus story about how someone erased Sonya’s name from her quote and put Brené Brown’s name on it and how whiteness played out in that process and the lesson Sonya took away about release and trust. *Spoiler alert, it played out....Sonya was just featured on Brené's podcast!

Support the show

This episode was created with deep love, and deep thanks to the frameworks and tools within Cultivating Intersectional Leadership, a course I co-created with Diedra Barber.

CIL isn’t just a training. It’s a transformative journey—one that supports individuals and organizations in making the systemic, strategic, and spiritual shifts needed to build something different.
 Something rooted in justice. Something aligned with who we say we want to be.

You're invited to learn more or inquire about participation at:
 🌐 www.cultivatingintersectionalleadership.com
Or visit our podcast site at:
🎧 www.eyesonwhiteness.com

If this episode stirred something in you, share it.
 If you’re holding big questions, write them down.
 And if you’re tired—rest. But don’t quit.