Why is Rashida hot in every still shot and I’m like THIS!??
Simone: We’ve been talking about allyship a lot, and a lot of people assume that, when I talk about allyship, it’s just about racism, or it’s about the LGBTQ+ community, or it’s about this one thing or another.
I even had people asking me, “Is this class only for white people?”
Rashida:: Because white people are the only people who are privileged, right? (/sarcasm)
Simone: Right! So let’s unpack that.
Rashida: Well, allyship is about finding solidarity with your fellow human, and it literally just doesn’t matter who they are or what group they belong to. Because as humans, we’re multifaceted. We’re not monolithic, and most of us have some sort of intersectionality.
What our brains like to do is to complicate simple things. And allyship is actually quite simple: treat people the way you want to be treated. That’s really it.
There’s not just one group of people who are experiencing oppression. There are places in your life where you are having an easier time than others, and so that is where you can show up.
Don’ try to start at your local NAACP or your local gay bar! It starts with your community. Where do you see the need? Are the children hungry? Are the unhoused being treated fairly?
Simone: You know, I’m not sorry to speak so much about racism and call out where white supremacy is doing harm. I’m not sorry to put a huge emphasis on that, because it’s important. However, I do think it’s unfortunate that allyship has gotten linked up with only that, because — yeah, obviously, systems of oppression exist. They affect us.
But it’s also like, if you’re walking down the street and you see someone fall down and hurt themselves, and you are like, “Are you okay? Can I help you up? Do you need me to get help?” That’s allyship.
Rashida: Yes!
Simone: And that has nothing to do with race. That person can be the same race as you, the same gender as you.
Rashida: Literally has nothing to do with anything other than you are on your feet and the person in front of you is not, and you’re going to help them get back on their feet.
Look. Nobody is going to leave this class with the cure to racism.
Simone: Aw, really? I was going to use that as a marketing point! LOL (/sarcasm)
Rashida: If wefind that cure, we are going to market the heck out of it. But right now, we don’t have it. We’re not going to find a cure to any sort of oppression that exists in the world.
What we will walk away with are tools that help us to be more self aware, so we know how to help our fellow human.
We’ve already established that people of color need help. LGBTQ+ community can use some assistance, especially from straight, cis people. But that isn’t the only place.
We’re talking about human-to-human interaction. And I think that makes it so much more simple and easy to digest. You don’t have to take on “the world”. You take on your world.
Simone: One of the things that you talk about in the free introductory class (which – have you downloaded it yet?), called Sustainable Allyship 101 is, you say, “I’m a black woman who is short, so I’m obviously not the paragon of unearned advantages in America. But also, I am cisgender, I am heterosexual, and I was raised Christian.”
We also talk about: do you speak English? Great. You speak the most dominant language in the world, and non-English speakers are at a huge disadvantage in the world because they don’t get to make their oppression be heard by people with the most power in the world.
Are you a US citizen? Are you a UK citizen? Are you a citizen in a country where the fact that you hold citizenship gives you a lot of advantages that aren’t afforded to other people who don’t? These are all places where we can share our resources.
Rashida: That’s it. That’s it. There’s no need to overcomplicate it, because when we feel like things are overwhelming, we tend to stay still.
Simone: Implicitly, that’s how I think a lot of people feel. If I’m a white person, I have to go and be the person who fixes racism for all of us. Or if I’m a man, I have to be the one who solves sexism. No! You are relieved of that responsibility!
Rashida: Yeah, let it go! You don’t have to hold on to that.
I think that recognizing your own world is so important because the world at large is overwhelming. Oh, Lord, is that going to happen in our country in a month or two? I was literally on the phone with a friend, and I was like, “You know what? I’m going back to my delusion. Everything’s fine. My world is right here, and I’m going to do what I can in my world.”
And those small things make a big difference. And it’s actually not small. It just seems small because it isn’t “the world”. But why in the world are we trying to take on “the world”? Why do we feel like we can do that?
Simone: I don’t know why. Yeah, I have to confess, I am affected by that. That bug bites me sometimes, where I’m like, “Oh, I feel like a horrible person because I haven’t solved genocide.”
Rashida: All by yourself, all in your brilliant mind, right?
Simone: I’m curious about your thoughts on this. What do you think about the encapsulation of allyship being: being the neighbor that you want to have?
Rashida: Absolutely. Be a good neighbor to your literal neighbor.
My neighbor raises chickens. She heard on the news that eggs were expensive, so whenever we want eggs, she is happy to give us eggs for free. When she’s out of town, we watch her house. When we’re out of town, she watches our house. That’s neighbor stuff. We’re making her life easier, and she’s making our life easier.
Simone: Where can I find a neighbor who has chickens?
And even if you don’t have chickens, what do you have a surplus of? Because you need your own to survive. Like your neighbor needs to have eggs for themselves, but when you have “extra” of something, you can share with others.
I have a surplus of material stuff. I live in an air conditioned and heated house and – you know – a fridge full of food at 24/7. And even on top of that, I have money in the bank! So where can I be of help with the extra that I have?
And it’s not just material, right? When your friend is feeling down, you might have a surplus of emotional resources, and you can be of support to them. That’s being a good neighbor.
And if you don’t have a surplus of stuff, then you take care of yourself.
Rashida: Absolutely. I know that I’ve heard people talk about allyship and say: “I don’t want an ally. I want someone who’s going to walk alongside me, knowing that we are not different.”
But the thing is, we are different, and so I think it’s really important to respect that, not only are we different in our group identifications, but we’re different as individuals.
Simone: I want to slow down here, because I don’t think people quite understand how important this is.
Let’s say a black person says, “I don’t want an ally who’s over there and thinking they’re helping me from over there. I want someone who’s going to fight the fight with me on the front line, next to me.” And that is entirely understandable.
But even if they’re linking arm-to-arm with you and walking next to you on the front line, their experience is different from your experience. And the consequences they face are going to be different from what you face.
Rashida: It’s important to respect those differences and to celebrate them, because that’s how we bring different strengths to the table. We are different, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work together. It doesn’t mean that we can’t have the same goal. We’re just approaching it differently.
Simone: Each of us can bring our own differences to the table: our own gifts, our own talents, whatever our own “surplus” happens to be. Who lacks resources that I have? Who could benefit from my surplus? That is how we make our own corner of the world better — my community, my home.
And nobody is fixing racism!
Rashida: Right. God bless you. But maybe if we do a lot of small things together, one day, that’s what will happen. But right now, this moment, let’s just bring our expectations down a little bit.
Simone: So this class, our upcoming class is for you if you’re white, if you’re brown, if you’re black, if you’re purple. It is for everyone who wants to learn how to treat other people the way you would want to be treated.
Rashida: By the way, this is how you feel empowered in your own life, and not powerless. Because I know a lot of people are feeling powerless and angry, and ask: “what do I do with this rage?” This is going to help you with that.
Simone: I think that’s why, if you’re a person of color, or a member of a marginalized community, you especially shouldn’t miss this class.
Even if you experience a lot of marginalization, this class will help you to locate your power where you are powerful, and to be able to use that for good. And I promise you, we will help you find those. And you’re going to just feel better.
Rashida: I really want everyone to get that free ebook, because it’s going to set you up. It’s a workbook, so you get to work some stuff out. And it’s literally the training that I do for folks here in Indianapolis. I have been doing it since before the pandemic. It’s tried and true, and really wonderful. And it’s going to set you up very nicely for Thursday.
Simone: It is really the perfect preparation you can do for the deeper level of conversation we’re going to have on Thursday.
And if you don’t have the means to participate in the paid class, the free book is going to give you so much good stuff to work with.
And the recording of the paid class is going to be available for sale, even after the live class so there’s no rush if you’re feeling stretched, yeah.
Okay everyone. Rashida and I’ll be back. Thank you for joining us.
If you want to listen to the full, unedited version of our conversation, you can watch the Instagram Live that this transcript was taken from.
Rashida and I both just saw Wicked. No one wrote the film review that I was desperate to read, until Rashida spoke it out loud. Right here.
WARNING: This conversation contains massive spoilers. If you don’t want them, don’t read!
Rashida: I was really excited to go see it, because I had been avoiding Wicked for some years. When it came out, there was so much hype around it. Even after having been to Broadway in New York so many times, I just have never seen it. And so when the previews were coming out, my daughter was like, “I really want to go.” So I said I’d go with her.
I just walked in knowing that Dorothy isn’t the victim that you know, that the Wicked Witch of the West isn’t a bad person. And that’s really all I knew.
When I saw the beginning, they immediately started singing about how “Nobody mourns for the wicked.” But I already knew that she wasn’t wicked. So that felt gross, right?
I also knew from the previews that Glinda and Elphaba are friends. And when I saw Glinda, first of all, reveling in the hate for this woman that she considered a friend at one time – I’m probably going to get emotional – even if it was fake, a version of delight and joy that everyone was having for this woman’s life being gone… This is scene number one.
Then I watch this woman who was othered from birth, has no support except for this bear who loved her and took care of her, has no love, no support from her father. Her mother died when her baby, when her little sister was born, her little sister isn’t sure what to do with her. And people are allowed to abuse her, and when they do, she gets blamed.
I want to talk about how I connected to that as a black woman. There’s no way I could count from childhood to now, my 46th year on this planet, how many times I’ve been blamed for how I should have done something differently so people didn’t treat me in a way that made me feel small, so they could feel big, so they could get me back into the place that I was supposed my entire life.
So watching her go through that, I was instantly inside of her shoe. I understood it. I had supportive parents, but that doesn’t mean other adults in my life were supportive. And my parents couldn’t always be there. So, there were many times that I was blamed for my abuse.
That is why having the “good person” title is not what allyship is about. A lot of times when you are doing the work, people don’t think of you as an “ally”. They think of you as a disrupter, a person who is making them feel uncomfortable. They don’t like you. So if you are coming in here wanting to be liked, that’s not the work.
Even though this has been happening since birth, it’s still tender. I’m still a human who doesn’t want to be othered. And I don’t want to be blamed for my abuse. But that’s just the way the world is working now.
Elphaba was super defensive every time somebody met her. “Um, yes, I’m green. I know I didn’t grow up eating grass. No, I’m not sick. Yes. Is the way I’ve been since birth.” That’s her thing.
And people often look at that, especially if it’s their first time hearing it, and ask, “why are you so defensive?” Not “Wow, what happened to you that this is something that you automatically just tell people? Something must have happened to you for this to be your default.”
I can’t understand how you can’t find empathy for why she has to be so defensive. She shouldn’t have to rattle things off to people, because she’s always been faced with what feels to her like ridiculous questions.
She finally gets this friend, almost begrudgingly, not from a natural evolution. But they become very close, very quickly. And even when they get to Emerald City, you see Elphaba say they’re “very good friends.” But then Glinda looks at her and says, “best friends”.
And to accept that is vulnerability. “Okay, what you’re telling me right now is that you have my back and I have yours.” So, when they get in there and realize that everything is corrupt, and in order to gain power, the wizard says you have to find a common enemy — which here is the animals who weren’t even hurting anybody…
Simone: They were the scapegoat.
Rashida: Literally! The literal scapegoat!
How many scapegoats do we have? How many common enemies were created just this election cycle? Trans people make up 1% of the population, and people are so afraid about something they don’t know. Thinking that their children are going to go to school one gender and come back another gender. They don’t know how ridiculous that is. But because it’s only 1% of the population, most people don’t even know a trans person…
Simone: … and they intentionally inflamed that completely ridiculous fear again and again on purpose.
Rashida: For 1% of the population! And it kills me because of the suicide rate among that population. People are taking their own lives. For lies.
For Elphaba, there are no other people who are green. She is the only green person, so she has no other people to fight with. The goat who was the professor had a house full of other animals to fight with. She doesn’t have anybody. And at this time, she thinks she has Glinda.
Simone: You said earlier that they became friends under unnatural circumstance. The unnatural circumstance was that Glinda was trying to manipulate her way into getting Professor Morrible’s approval.
Rashida: Exactly. And we saw Glinda be very typical – and I’m just going to say the words – white girl privilege throughout the movie. When she says something offensive and somebody reacts, and then she’s like, “What? What did I even say?”
Simone: What hit me at the gut was how lavishly she gets praised and adored for, like, throwing a crumb at someone else because she calculated that it would benefit herself somehow. “Oh my god, you’re so generous. That’s so sweet of you. I can’t believe you’d be so selfless.” Her actions are over-praised and misdiagnosed as “good” and celebrated again and again and again.
Rashida: And when I saw her use her unearned advantage as a popular person to help Elphaba at the party, I was like…
Simone: Tell me what you think. I think that was the only pure moment of allyship in the entire movie. The rest of it was Glinda actively putting down Elphaba, or conspiring with forces that were trying to destroy her.
Rashida: Exactly. And meanwhile, just being like “We’re best friends!” That manipulation, coupled with active, ongoing betrayal throughout the entire thing – except for that one moment.
Simone: And before going to Emerald City, the whole song Popular – “I’m gonna make you popular.” All of that, to me, was so painful, because it felt like all of white people’s attempt to make us “better” and “save” us by making us be more like them, even though… “you know that you will never be us, and you will never be as powerful as us. But whatever you have going on over here is bad. So let’s try to change you a little…”
Rashida: “It makes you more like me.”
Simone: “You will never be me — don’t get me wrong — but you’ll be a little bit better than this.”
On the surface, it looked like a popular girl helping the unpopular girl. But no, this wasn’t about friendship to me. This was about a very cruel power dynamic in which the dominant way of being is acting as a violent force to erase and marginalize the the non-dominant way…
Rashida: Right, and even when their goat professor was forcibly taken out of the room and he’s yelling, “They’re not telling you the truth!”, Glinda’s reaction just made me so angry. “Well, what are we supposed to do?”
Simone: That is the very definition of non-allyship. That is actually the default. The default is resignation and denial and complicity, because you are prioritizing not making waves. You are chasing the illusion of safety above all else, above justice, above fairness, above humanity.
The heartbreaking thing that the movie pointed out is that the majority will always choose the illusion of safety. They will not choose allyship, even when they have literally seen with their eyes that the dominant power structure is a lie. And there’s no “there” there. It is a fabricated con.
Rashida: Because they’re like, “Well, this may be fake, but it is what’s powerful. So maybe I can find myself a place in this, too.” Because remember, Oz being powerful was just an illusion. Elphaba was the one with the power.
Simone: Exactly! The majority says, “I will choose the illusion of power over actual power again and again, because it makes me feel safe.” Oh, that is the quintessence of what it means to fail to be an ally.
Rashida: Yeah, one hundred percent. So when they’re in the tower, and Elphaba asks Glinda if she’s coming – and you know that she’s not – Glinda gets her a cape. Literally all of the things in the Wizard of Oz that made her scary – the pointy hat, the black cape – Glinda put them on her.
And then, she was alone again. She had to be strong by herself again, and she had to know that this person cared about her, but didn’t care enough to put herself in any minor amount of danger.
Simone: You know what screamed white supremacy about that whole sequence is that Glinda kept just saying, “We can talk this out. Let’s just go and talk to them. It’s all a big misunderstanding. If you’re just nice enough…” It is such a blatant and cruel betrayal of what Elphaba was there for.
Rashida: Right? Because you’re not going to talk to me and try to help me. You’re trying to talk to me to get me to submit. You don’t want me to be me.
When I saw Glinda make that decision, and Elphaba realized that she was on her own again – and now, it’s not just dealing with bullies, it’s the largest force in the world that has now called her an enemy, and has told the entire world that that they have to find her because she is wicked – she had to do all of that by herself.
This is a dramatic thing to say, but it just made me remember all of the people who didn’t choose me. All of the times that I said that I was so afraid for my life. Not even my life, my husband’s life. Every time he gets in a car, I’m afraid. Every time he walks outside of our door.
I’m afraid every time my child leaves this house because my baby has a mouth. And she’s not a black man, but she is a mouthy black woman, and the world don’t like that.
I have fear every single day that we leave this house that we’re not gonna make it back. And when I tell that to the people who are in my life who loved this musical on Broadway, who read the books, who were loved this movie so much, but then they chose their whiteness over me… I saw all the times that it has happened in that moment.
And I know that people in the theater were emotional. They were emotional because, “Oh, this is so sad. Oh, she’s defying gravity and oh, good for her.”
Fuck that.
She doesn’t want to have to defy gravity. She just wants to live. She has to fight because she’s been forced to.
That’s some bullshit that she has to do that.
“Oh, we’re so proud of you for being so brave.”
I just want to walk around without people harassing me. That would be cool. I would love to not be called wicked by the most powerful force in the world. I would love to have my power and not be seen as evil or as wrong. I would love to just sit in my power and help people, because that’s my nature.
But because I have this power and I am really good at helping people, people don’t know how to take it. So now I’m this thing that’s flying around in the sky, because that is the only place that I’m safe. And who does she have right now?
Simone: Every step of the way, you see the complicity. If there are 1000 characters in the movie, it’s 999 of them who continue to actively create that reality for Elphaba again and again. “I have the opportunity to just treat her the way that I would want to be treated. But I am not going to take it, because I like the illusion of safety.”
It wasn’t like the ending just happened to her. It was a slow and constant process of everyone around her actively failing her, not knowing and not caring. This is what has been happening and is still happening to black people, trans people…
Rashida: Think of the people who presented themselves as ally: the teacher and Glinda. This is why people don’t like the word “ally”. Because they show up with all the friendliness on their face. But when it comes down to it, they’re just using you.
And now here I am having to defy gravity, because y’all wouldn’t have my back.
Simone: And once you get burned enough times, you’re just gonna be like, “Fuck all of that.”
Rashida: Right? That is why I feel like our work is changing the tone of the word ally.
You can’t call yourself an ally and choose comfort. You can’t call yourself an ally and choose the illusion of safety. You can call yourself a “good person” all day long, but you don’t get to call yourself an ally.
An ally is a person who’s going to jump on that broom with her.
An ally is a person who’s going to take the palm of their hand and push the wizard down and get him the hell out of there.
Someone who’s going to get on that microphone and say, “Hey everybody? Guess what? We actually realized that Oz has absolutely no power, and we need to get him out of here.”
That’s what an ally does. And we’re not going to accept any other version of that, because if you say you are that, and you decide to choose the illusion of comfort, we’re calling you out.
Simone: Rashida, to me, this is what Wicked was about. And I think people are way too happy about this movie. And I’m like, you should have left the theater with a giant crisis.
Rashida: I was nauseous. I came home and had to take a shower. I was so sick and angry at all of the people who have just been like, “Oh, this movie’s so great. Oh, it’s so wonderful”.
I even posted on Facebook, “Did they change the plot? Is this the same movie that was the musical that y’all been dying over for 20 years? Because I cannot believe that a good portion of you are the exact same people who voted for…
Simone: Well, I could believe it. I think those are the same people who think this movie is about friendship! And music! Cute songs and lighting and costumes! I think if you weren’t profoundly uncomfortable after watching the movie, then you completely missed the point.
Rashida: In situations like this, I work very hard to find the empathy, to find the place where they’re coming from. And I’m going to tell you, the feelings are still super fresh, so I’m struggling with that right now. I’m still just mad right now.
Simone: I was actually searching online to see who is saying this. And I didn’t find much. There are people going, “oh yeah, it’s talking about fascism” but no one I saw was having this conversation that Rashida and I were about to have on text.
There’s going to be someone out there who listens to you talk about it and will feel healed by it. So thank you for saying yes to this conversation. Thank you for sharing even while it’s fresh for you.
If you want to listen to the full, unedited version of our conversation, you can watch the Instagram live that this transcript was taken from.
