Meet Rachel: Examining Layers of Racial Identity

In this episode, Shawna Gann introduces co-host Rachel Sadler, and together they explore the complexities of racial identity, particularly focusing on the experiences of biracial individuals. They discuss the fluidity of identity, the impact of family dynamics on self-identification, and the societal constructs surrounding race and gender. The conversation also gets into the privileges associated with racial ambiguity, the challenges faced in workplace settings, and the increasing recognition of multiracial identities in America. Ultimately, they emphasize the importance of community and the need for critical discussions about identity and privilege.   

Rachel Sadler is an empowerment coach and founder of Rae of Light Coaching, specializing in helping women unlock their potential and navigate personal and professional challenges. With a strong background in DEI facilitation, anti-racism education, and cultural competency training, Rachel is dedicated to advancing social justice and equity.   

Other stuff to check out:

• The Infuriating Journey From Pet To Threat: How Bias Undermines Black Women At Work
• The Persistence Of Pet To Threat
• The US will become ‘minority white’ in 2045, Census projects
• The Myth of a Majority-Minority America
• GOP Rep. Burchett calls Kamala Harris a "DEI hire"
• What Might It Mean When Critics Call Someone A DEI Hire?
• Vice President Kamala Harris Is Anything But a DEI Hire

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Transcript

Jason  00:00

Welcome to Our True Colors, hosted by Shawna Gann. Join her as she explores the challenges of being a racial riddle, an ethnic enigma and a cultural conundrum. Let's dive in.

Shawna  00:21

Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode. I am very excited, because, as you know, this season, we've mixed things up a little bit, and I have two co hosts this week. I want to introduce you to Rachel. She is an amazing human. We had a conversation right off the bat, and I was like, Oh yes, oh yes. Because, as you also know, I enjoy having folks on the show who not only have some shared experiences, but bring a different perspective. And her story is such a powerful one, and the work that she's doing to continue just being the amazing human that she is is so inspiring. And I'm super glad for you to meet her. So hey, Rachel.

Rachel  01:05

Hey, thank you so much for that great introduction. Really heartwarming. Thank you. Yeah,

Shawna  01:11

thank you. I'm so glad that you're spending time with us and sharing your insights and so on. So why don't you tell folks a little bit about yourself? Sure.

Rachel  01:20

So again, my name is Rachel. I am a Black biracial person, so my mother is Black and indigenous, and my father's family immigrated here from Hungary, but I present as racially ambiguous, and so that is made for a very interesting journey through racialized spaces, right? We know that race is a social construct, and the ways that we have constructed meaning around race are very intentional for a certain populations, for the advancement of some groups and the marginalization of others. I was raised mixed. My parents are very clear to say you are biracial. You are not one or the other. You may not claim one or the other you was very rooted in this idea of my biracialness, even down to like the dolls that I had. I never had any like Black baby dolls, and I never had any really white reading baby dolls. They were always these ones that probably were coded as like Latinx dolls. But my parents like all these look like they're mixed dolls. I remember my mother telling me a story. I have this cabbage patch. Do you remember Cabbage Patch? Oh, yes,

Shawna  02:27

I had two. One was Michael and one was Sarah.

Rachel  02:30

Oh my Benjamin, and he still lives with me. He is in my my go bags of like things go left in my house. He's in there, and my mother waited in line down at the Kmart for like hours so that she could get me this one that looked like me. Rachel stopped

Shawna  02:48

because, girl, you tell people all kinds of how old we are. AJ wants to talk about we got Cabbage Patch. Both was excited about and talk about Kmart people. Some people are listening to the show like, what's Kmart? Yeah, hey, Kmart is now where spirit Halloween lives,

Rachel  03:04

literally, or Planet Fitness, they made a planet in our Kmart, um, yeah, the blue light special. Oh, that was

Shawna  03:13

a thing. My word, okay, go on, go on, aging myself, elder millennial, me too. I'm over here, like

Rachel  03:21

living so she waited for hours to get that doll, and it's really close to my heart. And in one respect, I appreciated that, but in the other, as I started to like read and learn more about, you know, Black culture and all of these things and how, again, race has been constructed and coded in a very particular way, in particular around biracial folks, right? And so now I identify as a biracial Black person, because I understand that I read as ambiguous. And, you know, sometimes I think that allows people to understand that I recognize the privilege I have in that sometimes, right? I know sometimes if I show up and say I am a Black woman, some people get triggered by that for a lot of reasons that I think are understandable. And so now there is a lot of conversation in my family in particular, around how I identify and who gets to own that, who gets to define it, and what does it mean if I define it in a certain way, which is keeping my therapist in business, and

Shawna  04:26

I'm like, right? I'm with you there,

Rachel  04:30

and also informing the ways in which I engage with this work as a dei professional, as someone who works with particularly folks from marginalized backgrounds, all of that is included in the ways that I show up in and participate in the world.

Shawna  04:48

Yeah, wow, yeah. So many thoughts. There's a lot of things that I relate to. Some folks might know not everything, because I don't identify as being biracial. I identify. As being a Black woman, but I very much recognize my racial ambiguity. You know, I say that I have a rich ethnic background or heritage, because that's true, and because Blackness looks different in many ways, Blackness and who you are and what your identity is, or how you identify, can be completely different when you ask from one person to another person, and it's really interesting. I'm in this work of dei workplace culture specifically, you know, I know a lot of people who are Jedi professionals, and they're doing a lot of social justice work surrounding racial issues and inequalities and so on. And my work is specifically in the workplace as a business psychologist. But it's, it's very interesting, this journey of identity, even from the time I started the show, you know how I've ebbed and flowed and shaped and turned. And one thing that I believe to be true, which has come up, not only in my research, in my studies that I've conducted, but also in myself, is the fluidity of identity, that just because you might see yourself one way on one day doesn't mean that's your forever identity. Because why? Well, as you said, race in itself is a construct. It's literally something that we made construct, meaning constructed, we built it right, and that we That's not me, but I participate in it. I participate in it, whether I want to or not, because that has been such a such an underlying part of our country, like, why we're so obsessed with it and have to put ourselves in boxes or, like you said, you know, I'm really can't wait to dive into what you said about having conversations in your family about who gets to claim what and how. That's not a conversation I've ever had in my family. You know, kids growing up when I when I was in school, used to ask me if I was mixed, not as nicely as that. What are you? Oh, there it is. That's the first What are you? And among other things. But I would come home and ask my mom that, like, you know, the kids keep asking me, if I mix, like, am I mix my mom be like, you're Black. And that was it. That was like, the end of the story, period. So it's an interesting time right now, as people are continuing to explore race and what that means, and when you hold multiple racial identities, and this idea of not only fluidity within oneself, but how other people racialize you and try to put you in these categories, and I liken it a lot to gender. You know, I don't claim to understand the experiences of folks who are queer, but people who identify differently with their gender than society expects them to. I feel like there's a parallel there, right? Because gender is also a social construct. Gender roles the way we decide people need to conduct themselves, dress, look, whatever, based on the gender assigned to them, and that can change. It's fluid, and how we choose to express ourselves might be different from one person who identifies as a woman to another person who identifies as a woman. Why can't the same be true for how we identify racially? So I just think it's so interesting how caught up we get into our little boxes, like it's like a security blanket. We can't let go, and even if we want to, it's a struggle, and it's scary to let go. So, yeah, I'm fascinated, Rachel, please tell us. I got to know more about the who claims what and the family discussions.

Rachel  08:33

Yeah, I mean, it's such a tricky dynamic, because I'm very close to my family. I could ride my bike to my parents house. That's how close we are, and that proximity is not by accident, right? And so we're very close, a close knit family. I have a younger brother, and it's my parents, but we are, I am very different from them, and that they are all, you know, they all lean right leaning politically, and I am very left leaning politically. We have a lot of different ideas about religion. My mother's father was a Baptist minister, and so we were raised Southern Baptist Christian Pentecostal. If you know anything about that, you know, speaking in tongues and falling out in prayer, you know, all of that. And so that really constructs meaning for them in a lot of ways. So there's this very distinct binary with the way they think about everything. So when you're talking about gender. For example, it is man or woman, male or female, and that's it. And we got into a discussion the other day, because I am a woman of a certain age. I already told y'all a little bit earlier that, you know, I'm an elder millennial. I don't have a partner. I don't want one. Presently, I am consciously uncoupled. I am one of them cat ladies that the people are mad at you dogs, and you know, they, they don't cause me the problems that having a partner has in the past. And you know that's a conversation for another day. But family member asked me, you know, since you have not been, you know, with a with a person for a while, well, you think. That would like, turn you gay. And I'm like, well, turn interesting. Can't turn to the gay. That is something that,

Shawna  10:07

did you say, turn to the gay.

10:11

You don't just wait. You can't. And I literally said to her, I was like, you know, I have prayed to Jesus, Hakeem Christ on on a nightly basis to make me queer, because I but that is not how this works. And I explained that this is how folks are born. You don't just wake up and make that decision. And, you know, then there was this whole conversation about, I don't agree with lifestyle. And I'm like, That is like saying you don't agree that some people prefer Popeyes over KFC. It is not a choice. It is the way people live. And I am not going to reduce people's like, who people are, to a choice I am making because, for lack of a better term, he's men or raggedy, right? Like, I am not going to say that like I am now going to change my entire identity as a heterosexual person and diminish the experiences of, you know, queer folks and what they go through because of how they are born, and so, but they think that, they think you can just like, wake up and be like, You know what? Today, I am this thing. Are there people that may have done that? Perhaps I don't know. I don't, I can't speak to their experience. I can speak to my own. And so, um, these are the types of conversations that we have. So one day we were talking about the work that I do, which is always a struggle, because they don't believe in dei work. They believe, you know, that dei stands for didn't earn it, right? They believe that this, like affirmative action, harms, you know, white folks, when actually affirmative action benefited white women over any other demographic group, right? Research does not, it doesn't in inform their decision making, but as a professional and as somebody who does academic studies and research and all these things, it informs mine. And so we were having a conversation about the work, and I said something like, as Black people, we and my mother, who, again, as a Black woman, she said, you don't get to say you're Black, you're not Black. And I was like, tell me more about that. Well, you're, you're, you know, you're, you're biracial. Keenly aware of that when we're talking about the construction of race, it's interesting how we say that, like the one drop rule, these people are coded as Black because we can code them in a way that allows us to demean and demoralize and take extrapolate something from right? So if we go back to the enslavement era, for example, mixed people, or what referred to as like mulattoes Back then, were seen as property, and they were seen as a more palatable type of property to be in a space where they could be seen by other white folks because of their proximity to whiteness, but they were still enslaved people. They were just, there's a hierarchy that was instituted and created right to justify putting these people in a space where they were visible, to justify the fetishization of our bodies, to justify turning us into concubines and all of these different things. But in that space like No, these are still Black folks. These are still our property. But now, when we see that folks who are biracial or racially ambiguous can benefit systems of oppression and benefit large, you know, majority groups, now we want to change the way that we talk about these types of people. There's still a fetishization. We still have that, but we see that now like, well, now we want to benefit from you in different ways. Now we don't want to code you as Black, we want to code you as something else. And what did that does to like the psyche of people who are fixed in this very middle ground racially can be problematic, but also is now, again, someone else gets to define your identity. And the fact that we now take this conversation back to centering a white male perspective, as opposed to my woman of color experience, and not being able to have that conversation, not being able to say, your feelings don't Trump my experience. And these, this is a group of people that say, you know, like, forget your feelings, snowflake. Like your feelings don't matter, but my identity is now rooted in your feelings. So who now is the snowflake in this situation? And why are we prioritizing one person's experience and feelings over the others?

Shawna  14:20

Yeah, how interesting. You tell me what you think about this, but, hmm, what happens if I do identify lean more into my multi ethnic heritage rather than just saying I'm a Black woman? That's scary, because then I feel like, am I denying my family? You know? And I thought to myself, if I start to identify a little bit differently, does that make me less Black? Does that make me traitorous? Because there's been so much contention even within racial communities, we don't even have time today to start talking about colorism, and you talked a little bit about privileges. And you know, I. I'm writing right now, and one of the things that I'm writing about is the paradox of privilege. I know I've talked about this in previous episodes, but I nickname it the guest pass. I call it a guest pass because, you know, I say, like, just imagine you live in a community that has like, a pool, and that pool is accessible to the people who are residents in that community, but you might have guests that want to come, and you want them to come to the pool, and you have to get them a guest pass to enter at any time, though, that guest pass can be revoked. That guest has no rights other than the permission they've been granted for that temporary time in that space. And I think much about when you have some proximity to whiteness, whatever it is, no matter how you identify, because we can identify one way, but we know that people will racialize us in however way they they do. So when you have some proximity, or, as you mentioned earlier, this palatability, or a little bit more palatable, people don't feel as threatened or whatever. The thing is, you might be issued a guest pass to certain spaces, but as soon as you become a threat or things don't sit right, that guest pass can be revoked so you can get close, but you're never really there. And this might ruffle a few feathers. While I referenced proximity to whiteness, I believe that's true for other communities. Not every community, no matter what color, race, creed, whatever you know your identities are, is accepting of the other. It's an it's an otherness or an us and them tribalism that takes place. So guest pass can come in many forms, shapes, sizes, colors, etc. So yeah, I think about that, on one hand, I totally embrace the identity that I grew up with, knowing myself as a Black person. On the other hand, I also recognize the privileges that I hold while there's still limitations in place. Because for me, the reality is we are experiencing in these times a progression that is so hopeful when you see people beginning to make race in itself less salient in their lives, it's not the thing that defines a person anymore. We cannot deny that there are people who are holding on to that with all dear life, and who long for the days where there wasn't a threat of other people coming into their spaces, they ready to roll those guest passes 100%

17:32

and I mean, I've experienced that. I've experienced that guest pass. And then so there, I think there comes this assumption that's like, All right, we'll give this as we said, I said before, this racially palatable person, it's like the token diversity hire. So we hired a diverse appearing person. That's not like too much, but enough to say that we did the thing. And this person will go along to get along. And then nine times out of 10, I don't sometimes and I recognize that I have that privilege, and now it's time for me to shake things up a little bit. And that's when, not only do they revoke the guest pass, but then, you know what we saw actually happen with pools, when Black folks start to use them as they cemented them over so that nobody could use the pool. And there's that complete backlash I have experienced, like both of those as well, because again, there's this assumption that you are in this space because we allow you to be here, and we will revoke that privilege and that access whenever we feel like it, when we feel like you're getting too big, you know, for your bridges sort of thing, like, if you're you're doing too much, saying too much, or calling out too many things. We don't want that disruption, you know. And so I have had to grapple with understanding the privileges I have in, you know, my presentation, the privileges I have from being in a middle class family, from any access to networks and in certain levels of education and all these things. I have to be able to use that to disrupt systems for folks that don't have access to those things and say the things that people don't want to hear, and that gets me into trouble. I was

Shawna  19:05

just going to ask you, if you've ever heard of pet to threat from you. Yes. Oh, we talked about it,

19:13

and I went and looked like I have seen. I could count multiple times where this has happened, and you can see that moment. I can feel I'm very energetically in tune. I can feel a disruption in the force when I show from 100% I can immediately feel it. I'm like, Yep, it's going left from here on out, because I said this thing and it did not sit with this person in the way that they wanted it to. So

Shawna  19:38

I know you and I talked about it. But for the listeners, let me just explain quickly, pet to threat. And of course, y'all can look it up and I will include some stuff in the show notes as I as I usually do. But you know, Rachel, you talked about being a novelty or being fetishized in some way, so a lot of racially ambiguous people experience a thing. Where, because you don't neatly, visibly fit into categories that folks are used to, you're kind of interesting to them, and you become a little exotic and novel, and people are like, wow, you're interesting, and you might have a supervisor or or somebody that wants to be your mentor, or they show you all the themes, and they're so proud to have you with them. And you know, oh, I'm helping so and so, or whatever, whatever. And then you start to excel and kind of show what you got right. Or, or you challenge things. You might ask a question that's a hard question, or provide some feedback that's not readily received. And when you start doing well, and you rock the boat a little bit, you go from being a pet to a threat, and all that support disappears, and it can even go so badly as to a person might begin experiencing sabotage, you know? So there's obviously, like everything a gradient or a continuum, that these things follow along.

21:06

Yeah, and I do a lot of work with workplace trauma, and my own workplace trauma comes from that backlash, and it is almost instantaneous to where you are, this shining star, you're doing the things, and then there's this switch that goes off, and now everything you're doing is raggedy. All of a sudden, you're not following through on these milestones and markers that last week, everybody was celebrating. The way that people talk to you is different, and it's almost like they take something personally from their again, their binary perspective of you, it's either for or against, us or them. And what I really want to encourage folks to do is to to get rid of that binary thinking our brains. Do it because our brains are have to be kind of lazy. Your brains do a lot during the day, you know, like it keep you breathing. I like to tell us in workshops, like, you don't feel your pants now you feel your pants because I said you should feel your pain, but you don't feel your pants because your brain is like, I have to keep this immune system going. This person needs to breathe. There's blood cell things that need to be happening. They need to focus on, you know, things that are more than 20 seconds, because thanks to Tiktok and so forth. So our brains want to put things in categories of like, yes, no, good, bad, and that's how we get this polarization of, you know, Black, white, male, female, this and that. And we really need to allow ourselves the ability to think critically about things and some self reflection, like some emotional intelligence. I feel like with your social security card, you should also get free therapy in this country to be able to help us really deal with what is going to come next from the ways that our culture has been constructed here, and might help the folks in the next generation, because it could really help us see that a binary does not exist, and it is a very reductionist way of thinking That limits everyone. It limits the ways that we can see and define ourselves. I choose to define myself, how I choose to define myself. And other people want to put you in categories and categories, you know, like, like, Beyonce, when she went country, right? Like, who says that you gotta be one thing? Why can't we like and do multiple things? Why are we reducing ourselves to this or that when we can be all if we choose to be?

Shawna  23:27

Yeah, 100% I absolutely agree with you, and I love it. You.

Shawna  23:40

I don't know if this is a bit of a shift in our conversation, but I'd love to ask your opinion on it, and building on a study that I did a few years ago where I wanted to understand the experiences of Black, multiracial women, there's already a lot of research about all the ceilings, the glass ceiling, the bamboo ceiling, the concrete ceiling, right? But there aren't experiences about people who are mixed race, specifically in workplace settings. So I wanted to do that, and that's what I did. And this most recent project expands on that you could be mixed in so many different ways, just like you can be Black in so many ways, like you can be Asian in so many ways, like what ways, like whatever, whatever. There is Professor Richard Alba, and he is pushing back on reports based on the US Census reporting. Between, you know, every 10 years there's the census data collection and between 2010 and 2020 which was our most recent one, there was a 276% increase in people who identify as multiracial. Now, data is data, and how it's analyzed and so on, sliced and diced, there's some changes you know, that have taken place since census began, where a census. Acre would just look at you and decide what category would go in and whether or not you were a full person or not. Forward to where we are now, where not only can we self identify, but people can self identify and include as many identities as they want to, which makes the data the people are like, how we go categories, how people get all this stuff together. But the bottom line is, more and more and more people are identifying as mixed race. It has gone from 9 million people in 2010 to 33, million people in 2020 the Brookings Institute then took this data and was like, Hey, we are going to be a majority minority nation, meaning there will be more people who are people of color than there are white. And Richard Alba is basically like, hold the phone. Don't be talking about stuff like that, because y'all gonna upset white people who are worried about it. And you know, I always say we're not going to talk about really current events, but I'll tell you, there is one that we I do want to talk about, and that's the fact that Vice President Kamala Harris's the presidential nominee for the Democratic Party, the opposing party, many of them referring to her as a dei hire, and her resume speaks for itself. Well, Richard Alva came to mind to me when I saw one of the politicians say something along the lines of her skipping the line. Like, right? Like, what happened to white people? What happened to white women? All this stuff. And I'm thinking to myself, um, Hillary Clinton was there, and y'all said no. So now you're upset because we skipped white women, but you weren't exactly excited for her. We gave you one. It's this, the idea that there's a line anyway. What line like? Why are we what do we talk about? Skipping a line? What line there is another scholar, Eduardo Bonilla Silva, who did research some years ago but continues to write. I just got the sixth edition of his book, which I now have

26:54

two books by the third edition.

Shawna  26:58

It's the racism without racist y'all. And he talks about the the social hierarchy, right? So Alba says we should not tell folks or characterize the shift in the way the racial demographic is going to say that we will be a majority minority nation, because people who are mixed race with whiteness, shouldn't just default to the old one drop rule, because it was problematic. Yes, I agree that the one drop rule was problematic, but like many things, culturally, there can also become an embrace with some of the things. Think about the word queer, that was an insult, and then the queer community embrace it, and it's their description. You know, one drop rule. There's pride in the way people identify a lot of the times. So if that's the way people if people want to embrace their Blackness, just as Kamala Harris does, despite acknowledging Yes, my mother was South Asian, you know, yes, my father's from Jamaica, but I'm a Black woman, period. We should not be telling people how they should and shouldn't identify which aspects of their race that they hold to they should and should not hold to, going back to what you talked about with your family. So I have a little bit of problem with Mr. Alba's take on this, because he basically says people with white heritage should not be considered people of color, even if their racial makeup includes identities that are, quote, of color, because that makes the he thinks that it inflates the number of people who identify as non white. And

Rachel  28:41

again, I don't know dr Alba, but I have a number of thoughts about that, and forgive me if these don't connect. But firstly, it prioritizes the feelings of a majority group over the identity of marginalized folks, and tells people don't identify this way because it's considered a white folk, and we know that when that happens, it often results in some sort of violence against marginalized folks. That's why we have folks talking about the great replacement theory, that we're going to be replaced. And it's very scary. It also makes me think about the idea of becoming white. So we see that, for example, folks who immigrated here from like Ireland and Poland were not seen favorably by white folks who were who had already been here, but then became white, once we start to see that all these millions of enslaved people that we brought over are now impacting our numbers and things that to do with politics. Now we need more people to be white to increase our numbers. So we sometimes seeing that with some Asian populations. And so if what you say tracks with that. Then there is a, I don't want to say opportunity. There is the potential for multiracial, biracial people to then become white, because, as we talked about the top of the show, race is socially constructed. So that means that that distinction can change and evolve, and it often does. And so if we're going with this replacement theory, and then we're saying, okay, the minority or marginalized folks are are outnumbering us. Who can we get to become white, to change our numbers? Yes, all

Shawna  30:30

those things that you mentioned, he actually talks about so. He says classifying mixed individuals in multiple categories will help Americans see that the apparently steep decline and the white population is partly And ironically, a consequence of whites mixing in families with minority partners. Common sense, we know that that's what's happening. That is, as whites and minorities have children together, their children, as we've seen, tend to be classified as non whites and publicly disseminated demographic data, one drop rule got it. The more whites mix, the more children there will be who are categorized outside the White group. Yes, got it. That's correct. Here's the part. There is something perverse about a demographic data system that converts some whites. That's an apostle like a possessive. Some whites' willingness to cross major ethno racial boundaries and choosing a partner into data that alarm other whites about minorities becoming a population majority. Surely, we can do better than this. There's something perverse about a demographic data system that converts some whites willingness to cross major ethno racial boundaries and choosing a partner into data that alarm other whites about minorities becoming a population majority. Okay? Willingness. Girl, we were sitting, I will tell we were in public. My husband was conducted to business, and I was just along for the ride. So I had my book, because I am a nerd and I always have a book. So he was like, talking there at the desk, and I'm reading this. And I, I slammed this book down and looked up, and he and the other man were just like, yes. And I was like, continue on with your business. There are two words that stood out to me that incensed me. One, perverse, okay, I said it's perverse to see loving someone as a quote, willingness to cross racial lines the way that was worded, and I pray that that was just a bad choice of words, and his editor didn't catch it, because maybe, oh, my God, to say it like that automatically, to me, inserted some sense of superiority. I'm willing to cross a

Rachel  32:42

racial line because language is powerful, and there's an intentionality in the words that we use, which is why, when somebody calls somebody a dei hire, say what you really want to say, say with your full chest what you really want to we know what you want to say, but because you we have categorized now hierarchies of racism. So there is a pyramid that starts at the bottom with, like, little jokes about race that are like, he, he, ha, ha, that are like, I'm not a racist. I'm going to tell this, you know, off color joke up to, like, burning crosses in people's yards, right? So I'm not doing that, not burning the crosses, and I'm not down here in my good bed sheets. So I'm not a racist, but you know, Eduardo Bona Silva says this is how we get to colorblind racism, right? So language like that is intentional, because it asserts that this group is willing. And again, who are we prioritizing? Are we prioritizing the discomfort or alleged discomfort of these folks, or the actual material experiences of people who go through things that put things into place, to then say you can't do those things anymore. This is why we see someone like Donald Trump, who is popular because he says the things just close enough that people have been wanting to say for a long time, unfortunately, just enough that it's like we know, like, that's wild, but it's just close enough to saying, to not saying, the hard things that people really want to say. One, there's this pastor that he may, I can't remember his name, and I'll, I'll give you the information later, but he said, like, he is the avatar of their grievance. Like, what are we so aggrieved by what is it that you were so aggrieved by

Shawna  34:23

perceived loss of power and status? This, this line that that one politician said, How come they're basically why do they get to cut the line? Why do they get to skip at the line, a

Rachel  34:39

line that you never stood

Shawna  34:39

in, a line that doesn't exist. You made this line, Bro, why are you putting me in some line that you say, and people are skipping that does not exist. It only possibly, but they want it to exist, right?

Rachel  34:53

But like, let's look and I don't know Kamala Harris's resume, I just know that it's longer than mine, and she is probably. Be far more accomplished and intellectually potentially superior to me, because she has had a long history of like, going to school, being an academic, being in all these elected positions like nobody just handed her anything, right? Like you didn't just get handed any of these things. You had to work to get there. I

Shawna  35:36

Rachel, I cannot believe how this time has flown. I am more than excited for this season, these conversations we've got to have, y'all, it's gonna be so fantastic. So anything else you want to leave us with just for this episode? Yeah,

Rachel  35:53

thanks for that. If we can supersede these structures of individualism and come together as a collective, as humans, right? That shared experience, I really believe in that. You know, again, I recognize where I do have privilege, and I want to use that to dismantle these systems and structures and for the greater good. Ultimately, sure,

Shawna  36:16

yeah, is there a place that you want folks to be able to reach out to you on socials or anything like that. Or,

Rachel  36:23

yeah, you can go down to the LinkedIn and hit me up there. I also have ray of light coaching, but it's spelled R, A, E of light because my name is Rachel, and that's the nickname my family gave me. Ray of light coaching.org and it's the same on Instagram and so forth. And you know, sometimes people just really want to hear what you have to say, and don't really want to go follow you down a rabbit hole. That's fine too. Just come on back next time, because I'm going to have something interesting and hopefully insightful to say.

36:53

I

Shawna  36:54

have no doubt. I've certain you will. Rachel, thank you. Thank you so much for being one of my partners in this I love that you and Kat are here to be co host this season. I just think it's gonna be fantastic. There might be times that it's just the three of us, or two of us, or we'll see how it goes, but it's gonna be a great ride. So thank you for joining us all. Take care. Thanks. Rachel

37:18

Bye, me,

Shawna  37:25

and just like that, we have kicked off season five. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode. I'm glad you've gotten to know Rachel. She and Kat are joining me for the rest of the season, so do stay tuned, and if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe, follow, share this with other folks so that they can be part of the conversation as well. And speaking of being part of conversation, don't forget, what's new this year is you can go to the show notes, click that link and directly send us a message. Tell us what you want to hear, the topics you'd like to discuss, and whether you'd like to be a guest or recommend somebody else to be a guest. I'm super excited to be able to bring you into the conversation in this way. In the meantime, be safe out there. Y'all be kind to one another. Share a smile, and when you get the opportunity, please find a way to make someone feel welcome, love. Y'all talk to you soon.

Jason  38:19

You've been listening to our true colors you.