Ep. 5: Systems Entrepreneurship and Mutualism with Aniyia Williams
* Subscribe using your preferred podcasting service by clicking the “subscribe” link in the above audio player*
-
In this episode, your co-host Nikishka Iyengar talks to tech entrepreneur and ecosystem builder, Aniyia Williams about a framework they call ‘systems entrepreneurship’. Systems entrepreneurship directly addresses systemic inequities while building ecosystems and movements (rather than just companies or industries).
Highlights:
• The journey to becoming a systems entrepreneur and what it entails
• The tech industry’s broken-ness as it relates to venture capital, and alternative financing tools
• Building ecosystems of support for tech entrepreneurs of color
• The importance of conflict resolution skills as a tool for a more liberated economy
• Mutualism and re-building the social safety net
-
Aniyia Williams is a systempreneur, creator, inventor, tech changemaker, and investor. She is a principal on the Responsible Technology team at Omidyar Network, and works to help the tech world live up to its promise of changing lives for the better.
Prior to joining Omidyar Network, Aniyia founded Black & Brown Founders, a nonprofit which helps Black and Latinx entrepreneurs launch tech businesses. She continues to serve as the organization’s board chair. Aniyia is also co-founder of Zebras Unite, an entrepreneur-led movement focused on creating a more ethical and sustainable startup ecosystem through capital, culture, and community; convener of the Black Innovation Alliance, an ecosystem of organizations that support, fund, and sustain Black innovators; and co-founder of the Firefly Alliance, a community that equips women with collaborative leadership skills to move beyond racism and sexism. Previously, Aniyia founded the fashion tech company, Tinsel, which invented the world’s first audio necklace, designed in response to a lack of electronics developed for women.
Before becoming an entrepreneur, Aniyia held roles in marketing, business development, and nonprofit fundraising. She also has a background in the arts, with a decade of training as an opera singer.
Aniyia holds a B.A. in music, with minors in business and Italian from Penn State University. She was a Bunton-Waller Fellow and graduated with honors in Italian and musicology, as well as the Josephine Rhea Award for Excellence in Italian studies. In 2019, Aniyia was honored by Penn State with the esteemed Alumni Achievement Award, presented to prominent alumni 35 and younger.t goes here
-
• Primer on Revenue-based Financing
• Primer on character-based lending
• ‘Black papers’ on alternative capital
• Mutualism by Sara Horowitz
• Malii Watts Witten, inclusion consultant and workplace conflict resolution facilitator
-
Aniyia Williams 0:00
We're kind of going through this negotiation right now as a society of well, how much do we need each other? And like, what should I be obligated to do for another person? How much is enough for any one person to have? What are the things I should be able to own and control versus like someone else? Who's regulating who all of these are questions that we need to answer as a group.
Road to Repair Theme Song 0:24
You ready? We gettin' down to business. Investing in existence. Shifting from a system steeped in extraction, that steady sappin' our peoples and planet to cash in, slashing. Widening gaps in our access to land, wealth, peace, satisfaction. Imagine basing relations on more than transactions. It's time for new pathways, and we need to shape them through our inner landscapes, our relations, our approach, our dedication. We're on the road to repair as a commitment to transformation.
Show Intro 0:57
Welcome to the Road to Repair, a podcast exploring our journey out of a "business as usual" economy toward collective healing and liberation. We're your co-hosts Andrew X, Jessica Norwood, and I'm Nikishka Iyengar, and we're very excited for this conversation.
Nikishka Iyengar 1:18
In this episode, I talk to Aniyia Williams, principal of Responsible Technology at Omidyar Network. Omidyar Network is a social change venture that reimagines critical systems, and the ideas that govern them, to build more inclusive and equitable societies. Aniyia is also co founder of Zebras Unite, Black and Brown Founders and the Black Innovation Alliance, all of which you'll hear more about in this interview. There's a few reasons I wanted to talk to Aniyia this season. For one, as we're all finding ourselves thrust into the metaverse with or without our consent.... and we're seeing sort of large tech companies routinely flout labor rights, and seeing the impacts of disinformation on large tech platforms contribute to a total breakdown of democracy worldwide. I wanted to understand what the road repair within the tech industry could look like. Aniyia's work across the different organizations she's helped co-found wrestles with the questions of right-sizing capital and power within tech ecosystems, to move us away from the winner-takes-all hyper-capitalist model that Silicon Valley is so well known for. Another reason I wanted to talk to Aniyia is because of the way in which she seamlessly and eloquently goes back and forth between examining details of her personal life and interpersonal relationships, and then you know, connecting them to larger institutional or systemic problems. She talks transparently, for example, and publicly, about everything from navigating personal finances with her husband, conflict in personal and professional relationships, and parenting a brilliant Black girl. If you're one of the 15,000 people that follows her on Twitter, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And if you're not, I highly encourage you to follow @operaqueenie. Her Twitter handle, by the way, is a nod to her beginnings as an opera singer. And her journey from opera singer to tech ecosystem builder is just full of creative inspiration.
Aniyia Williams 3:36
I think that two of the things that really characterize me as a person and what I would say my journey is, is like one, I'm a creator, and I do it compulsively even. Like I can't help it. Sometimes I look up and I'm like, Oh, my God, I'm like making a new thing. And so I think that all of that has kind of come into me as a performer, me as in having lots of hobbies, doing all of these different things, especially in the arts when I was younger, and kind of coming up through that. I also grew up in a family business. My family in Philadelphia, we owned a cosmetology school, a hair school and salons. And so I also grew up in the hair industry and things like that. So it was just culture of creation. And just like being resourceful and just doing things. Like, just doing. But I've especially always loved singing. And so that was something that really, I clung to when I was younger, really throughout my entire childhood and then going into high school. When I grew up in Philly, I went to the performing arts high school there. And so when I went to college, I thought I was going to be a business major my first year and then I was like, this sucks. It's just like all economics and all this other stuff and like I need the arts in my life. And so I switched my major back to music. I was trying to figure out how those two things get married together, because I'm like, I gotta figure this out.
So, after I graduated, I started working in the DC metropolitan area in major gifts fundraising at arts organizations, that was how I managed to, like marry those things. And it was cool. And that like, was definitely a thing that could have been the trajectory of my life. And it would have been perfectly fine. But I met a guy, who's my husband now. And he's a software engineer. After a few years of us being together, living together, starting to kind of make a life together in the DC area, he got recruited to work at a startup in San Francisco. We're like, you know, we're young, crazy kids, what do we have to lose? Let's move 3000 miles away from everyone and everything we know, to San Francisco and see what this tech world is about. I felt like that was my opportunity to also kind of see what might be in that for me. That same year I had gone to South by Southwest for the first time, in the interactive part of it. And I was just like, this is cool, and I kind of wanted to see what was poppin, you know? And so when I moved out here, I could definitely find a fundraising arts job here, like, let me like, see if I can get my foot in the door with this tech situation. And so within the first few months of me moving here, I did get my foot in the door working at a startup called Voxer, which makes this audio messaging app. It basically is like a walkie talkie on your smartphone. Even after me having been there a few months, it went viral, it started blowing up and like it ended up being one of those startup stories where it was growing super fast. There was always more things that needed to be done than there were people to do them. And one of the things I love about startup life is that you see a problem, you jump in there, you start solving it and you're doing a good job at it, then that becomes your job. You're now the head of whatever that thing is that you do that the company really needs. Right? You know, I made my way through that organization. I started there as like a part time office manager. By the time I was ready to go, I was running the marketing team there. I kind of was just ready for a new challenge ready to do something different. And I had this idea in my head for a necklace that would transform into headphones, but I wasn't like, Oh, I'm gonna like go do that right now. And basically, at first I was like, I need to find some some people that can help me make this happen. If this is the thing that's gonna happen. And I went to the CEO and kind of went to talk to him about who he might know that he could connect me to. And that kind of led to me having a larger conversation with him about me wanting to like, see if this could be a thing. And he committed to being my first angel investor and giving me the seed money to get it started. And it was like, Cool, I'm going to like, quit working for you here. I'm going to start this company with your money and like you're gonna own part of it. And we're gonna make electronic jewelry for women, and it's gonna be dope. You know, it was really amazing, though, because it was it was a trust deal, right? Like, he definitely was like, if there's anybody who's gonna, like, make this thing, it's gonna be you. So I'll make a bet on you. And that was really where I feel like the kind of conversation around like the whole system entrepreneur thing really comes in.
Nikishka Iyengar 8:11
Okay, first, let me just acknowledge that making your boss your first angel investor is a pretty boss move. When I first started following any his work, I noticed she used the term 'systempreneur' to describe herself. It was around the same time that I had started to use 'systems entrepreneurship' as a way to think about my own work, which I felt was trying to depart from mainstream social entrepreneurship, which you know, as we've talked about before, has mostly failed to grapple with root causes of systemic inequities.
In previous work, I've highlighted the following as traits of a systems entrepreneur: systems entrepreneurs are directly working to solve a systemic problem through their product or service. For systems entrepreneurs, it is not simply a question of being a quote unquote, responsible company. You know, in contrary to traditional entrepreneurship advice, where you're told to just sort of focus on only one thing and do that well, systems entrepreneurs are focused on understanding and tackling multiple problems at once, because they understand that complex problems like the racial wealth gap and climate change are outcomes of political, economic, social and cultural systems, all interlinking together, right? And without taking a 'whole systems' approach. You can't really create the systems change that you're wanting to see.
They are also ecosystem builders. So, you know, systems entrepreneurs aren't just building companies, right? They're building movements, and they're building whole ecosystems and that often means they're acting sometimes as both community organizer and entrepreneur. They understand that the means are just as important as the end. And they practice emergence and adapt to complexity really well. They work to scale concepts and not just scale their companies and instead of sort of dislike, move fast and break things norm that we've seen in Silicon Valley, they instead move at the speed of trust and, you know, work to repair or build things. And then finally, they're invested in democratizing ownership and power within their companies, right? And Aniyia fits this description and these traits really, really well. Here she is talking about her journey to becoming a systems entrepreneur.
Aniyia Williams 10:45
So I feel like from the moment that I decided to go on the journey of being a startup founder, I kind of continued to sort of see these issues at the next level up that I wanted to attack. And I felt like all the problems that I had, in terms of, you know, getting the funding and kind of support and resources that were needed to build my company, and even being seen with the kind of legitimacy and credibility when it was just, you know, you have to, like, prove everything. Even proving it and then still the goalpost continues to move like that whole dynamic, that I think a lot of women and people of color in the tech industry experience, it just kind of had me at this place where I'm just, I know that I'm like an impressive person, it shouldn't be this hard, there's no way it should be this hard. And also people shouldn't have to be able to like, do an infinite number of all of the things in order to get a fair shake at actually trying to solve a problem that they might be equipped to solve. Everyone doesn't have to be or shouldn't have to be, you know, the Swiss Army knife of human beings to try to fix something, right. The big thing was one really understanding and realizing that capital was just such a major issue, not just for me, but for other Black and Latinx entrepreneurs that I was starting to build relationships with. It led to me starting Black and Brown Founders, because we kind of did it from this lens of like, investors ain't writing checks, first of all. Second of all, like so many of us are entrepreneurs by necessity. I would love for parity and all of that stuff to exist tomorrow, but it's not. And we're still going to be out here building these businesses anyway. It felt like there was really a need to see information and community that was around like, if you never saw $1 of venture capital money or investment money, how would you get from idea to launching your thing and making the first dollars. And that's kind of where Black and Brown Founders has sat in terms of the whole ecosystem. And that's what we still really focus on is like, really, how do we help founders cross that chasm from idea to launching their thing with modest resources. Within the same few months that I launched Black and Brown Founders, I paired up with Astrid and Mara and Jen and co-founded Zebras Unite, where we were just like....also, the venture models? Not working for 90% 99% of businesses. This is just not designed with those businesses in mind. And we need more capital options. And we wanted to start that conversation. And we wanted to go the path of trying to innovate in financing vehicles and making sure that there wasn't this huge gap between venture capital and bootstrapping your company.
I'm super excited about where we are, at this like moment in history, for that reason, like for the opportunity. There's a lot to be said about the phrase like 'crisis-tunity'. The thing that sucks is that we're also like living in a time where it feels like we're teetering on the edge of, are we going to make it? Are we not going to make it? We're still not in the after yet, clearly. And so we're like, how's this gonna shake out. But in the meantime, as we're figuring the things out, and trying to solve some of the problems, like I'm excited about what that conversation looks like, in the circles that I'm a part of. And as it relates to what we're doing in kind of the tech and startup ecosystem, like I said, we're starting to see some traction where I feel like Zebras used to definitely be like, we were like, the crazy people in the town square on the soapbox with the megaphone: "We need more capital options! Venture is not the way!" or whatever, and people were like, whatever, you're just like bitter and jealous or crackpots. And now it's just like, oh yeah, they've been talking about this stuff. So it feels like our moment is here, and people are interested, people want to understand what there is. Of what exists, what needs to be improved? And of what doesn't exist, like what what's needed that doesn't exist yet. Right. And so, you know, I think that there has been a few kind of funding vehicles that have kind of become popular. I would say, you know, like when we talk about revenue based investing, for instance, is one popular alternative that's coming up, instead of the traditional sort of VC equity kind of structures. We are seeing lots of different ways of structuring loans also. Whether it be you know, the funds that are deploying these loans, having loss guarantees, so they can offer terms on those loans that give the founders more psychological safety. Whether it be like having them be character-based loans, instead of, you know, leaning on people's credit and things like that. Because when you look at venture capital, they're not running your credit check, and, you know, gonna put a lien on your house if you don't make the returns. And I'm just like, the people who already don't have access to this are also taking on outsized amounts of risk, just to get the thing started, off of things that are just completely arbitrary criteria, if you ask me. So how we're looking at whether they be character based loans, forgivable loans, low interest loans, like all of these other kinds of ways of structuring them is really interesting. And then I just think that there's a lot more we can do with leaning into grants and fellowships, as well, with helping people get started. There's just such an incredible sea of talent out there, especially in a community of people of color, who were solving those problems. Because obviously, if you don't know that community and you haven't been born or raised into it, or you know, really part of that culture, you're not going to come up with the best solution for them, you're just not. You don't have enough information. And that's why I really feel like we need to talk to and listen to, and center, marginalized people, because we have the best lens for all of this. There's just some things that I think are the solutions to the problems we're looking for where it's just like, you just have to be born and raised in this shit to understand it. I can sit here and try to like, do a workshop with you on Zoom for four hours to try to give you as much of it as possible. You're still gonna have like a very clinical understanding of it that doesn't take into account all of the little soft pieces of how people relate to each other. Because I think at the end of the day, it just involves a lot of white people needing to de-center themselves. And I know that that is not a muscle that they have had to exercise before. But I believe in you white people, you can do it. You can do it. And we'll all be okay. Everyone will be better off for it.
Nikishka Iyengar 17:39
Okay, Aniyia has said a whole lot there. Let me just pause and say if you're new to some of the financing terms and concepts she mentioned, we have some helpful links on the episode page on our website. I've been following Zebras Unite since a little after their inception. And I've been really, really energized by the tangible ways in which they're building real, more cooperative alternatives to the venture capital model for tech companies. Cooperatives are a way to ensure that every worker, or in this case, every stakeholder in the company, share in the decision-making, in the profits and in the power of the company. This is super important for every industry, but especially for tech companies where for example, workers might be creating the most value but are barely receiving even livable wages to do so right. Think about the drivers and Uber or other ride sharing companies or delivery drivers for Instacart, DoorDash and other food delivery companies. In the past year or so Zebras Unite has taken the next step towards creating a multi-stakeholder cooperative so not only are they incubating and resourcing other democratic business models, they're also distributing power more equitably within how they themselves operate. And in doing so, I think they're creating a blueprint for other organizations. So that's really exciting. Zebras Unite was co founded by four brilliant women. And Enya is the only Black woman co founder. So I had to ask her what her experience and journey has been like from the inside building Zebras Unite.
Aniyia Williams 19:15
We're pretty open and talking about, you know, having gone through challenges as four co founders together, in particular, you know, feeling like those things really kind of came to a head early last year. We kind of even came to a point of like, really, I'm sure all of us were questioning like, are we actually going to be able to continue moving forward working together.... there was some real head butting there. I think about what it took for us to come through that stage. One I feel like we basically kind of went to a quasi co-founders therapy type of thing, but we actually had an incredible person, aactually, her name's Malii Watts Witten and she's awesome, who sort of guided us through. She was our Virgil, through this co-founder purgatory; are we going to make it are we not going to make it. And we made it and honestly our relationship with between the four of us is even stronger now than I would say it was in the beginning of when we first got together. Because when we first got together, everything was just easy. We were just like, always so aligned on everything that tensions were very few and far between. And then I think it was, you know, once we kind of really had to figure out the shape and direction that things were going and where we started to find not even like divergence in terms of what we believed, but just in terms of like, it was about the how, it wasn't about the what. And there were some cultural things that were coming into that and that were kind of fueling some of those clashes. And it wasn't until we really were able to just let our guards down and start communicating more about the stories we were telling each ourselves about each other and how we were engaging with each other that it really de-escalated and diffused what a lot of that was. I think we had started to build up these ideas in our heads about what the other person's intentions were and why they were doing something or not doing something. And once we kind of got over the the fear of actually articulating that, and even expressing how some of these things were bringing up past challenges we had had with people who were not even in the room, it just started to become clearer. And we just kind of started to understand how to be with each other, and how to be good to each other as co founders. And also, we just came up with better tools to kind of de-escalate conflict. Because I think like one of the big things that came out of that as a realization for me was that conflict is inevitable, right? I think we spend so much time and especially when we talk about bridging this gap between, you know, white people and people of color. It's just like, we spend so much time in professional environments trying to avoid conflict. And I think that that's part of the problem. I'm not saying we need to just like well, let's pick a fight, because we should do that. But it's just knowing that it's going to happen and the desire to tamp it down so quickly, it really stunts the progress and the growth of a team. And you know, when we talk about trust and building trust, I was saying this the other day, to some folks on Twitter, it's not actually in the agreeing on things that you build trust, like you, you don't really actually know, if you trust somebody, or if you can build a long term sustainable relationship with them until you start to have ideas that diverge and that don't overlap, right? It's when you realize that they think and feel something very different than you do and yet you still want to be in relationship with this person. That is where trust is built. It was just such an important part of it. And then a lot of folks don't have good tools to resolve conflict. And like we need to change that as a society, it's kind of important.
Nikishka Iyengar 23:03
Yes, I firmly believe conflict resolution is one of the most important skills we can be building for this journey towards a more reparative economy. At the time of this interview, Aniyia and her husband Marco had just had a live conversation on Twitter spaces, where they talk honestly about how they navigate conflict within their marriage, and what lessons they've learned from that that have helped them navigate conflict on other levels as well.
Aniyia Williams 23:29
We had been saying for a while the two of us that we wanted to host a conversation and just like talk about our marriage, because people seem to be curious. It was impromptu. And we were just like, You know what, we got time we're in the mood, let's just do it tonight. So that was a couple nights ago. And we were just like, alright, and we were talking for a couple hours about that stuff. But that came up. Like obviously, people wanted to hear a lot about conflict and how we manage that in our marriage. Because we've also been open in saying that, like we had a really dark time in our marriage that also we weren't sure if we were going to come through and I think you know, all these things are related. I feel like to your point about like the personal, the interpersonal how you can like, be there just like these concentric circles, you know, where if my relationship with my husband is kind of one of the relationships I hold the closest and the most closely tethered to me, like how I have managed to understand him as a very different person than I am and how I meet him where he is and vice versa and how we manage conflict. And then that permeates into the kinds of skills and tools that I have to be able to resolve conflict with my co-founders who are basically like your other spouses. Beyond that, you know, with colleagues, co-workers, your team and beyond that with I don't know random strangers that you might meet on the street. Yeah, like we just need to be giving people these tools and there's just so much I could I could literally just spend the whole hour talking about that.
Nikishka Iyengar 25:01
In this segment Aniyia talks to us about the concept of mutualism, an acknowledgement that we as a species are interdependent. And yet the majority of institutions we have in society don't operate that way. In her new book, which I haven't read yet, but plan to soon. labor lawyer Sara Horowitz with discusses how the role of government should be to foster mutualism and rebuild the social safety net.
Aniyia Williams 25:25
Mutualism is a big word that has been key for me and for my Zebra co-founders too in the past few years. When we actually kind of started to codify our values as an organization, mutualism is the number one value with Zebras Unite in particular. And I was actually really excited because I took vacation last week, and I read Sarah Horowitz's mutualism book last week, which I was like, yassss, thank you for succinctly crystallizing my life's work. To share a couple things that I felt like really came up from your I took away from that was, you know, I feel like I had been talking a lot about this dichotomy. But I think that she she gave me just like better language to express this to people. We have on one side, when you think about on the left with, you know, progressives, liberal people, left-sided people, that we do tend to lean pretty heavily on government for solutions, and maybe too much so, right, where I think for the same reasons of what I was just saying earlier, like, you want people who are from the communities to be solving the problems for those communities. I just think that government in general doesn't have enough insight into the nuance, and the minutiae of how those solutions can be best crafted. And then I think on the other side, you've got like, neoliberal, free-market, Fast Money, capitalist markets, but they're really like, it has to grow, grow, grow, more more more, you know, 10x, or however many returns and like, if this thing is unprofitable, fuck, it doesn't matter. Who cares if we need clean air and clean water to breathe? Like it doesn't make money. So not a priority, right? We have this huge hollowed out space in the middle there, that we're kind of trying to like, navigate or rebuild like. And I think it was just really helpful to understand and contextualize like, how there has been something in the middle. There was a time where it was even thriving, but through people doing what people do, I guess, and us not really paying that much attention to it, in some ways, just been hollowed out, right? Like the safety net is just not there. The whole muscle for collaboration and collective action, and understanding that you are not an island, you can't make it out here on your own as much as people might want to believe that we do need each other. And so I think like we're kind of going through this negotiation right now, as a society of well, how much do we need each other? And like, what should I be obligated to do for another person? How much is enough for any one person to have? What are the things I should be able to own and control versus like someone else? Who's regulating who? All of these are questions that we need to answer as a group? And I just know that we don't have a good track record in doing that. But again, I believe in what's possible, because I just think that all the signs are there that this is something that people want.
Nikishka Iyengar 27:24
There's one question we love to ask the folks that we interview on the Road to Repair podcast, There's that famous quote by Octavia Butler, that goes: all that you touch you change, all that you change changes you, the only lasting truth is change, God is change. And so in this next segment, Aniyia tells us how this work of building these various tech ecosystems has changed her. And then she also talks a little bit about how motherhood has changed her and what her journey and evolution as a mother that works in this tech industry has looked like.
Aniyia Williams 29:15
I have learned how to listen better. I think that's probably like the number one thing and win across the board, because my ability to listen, it just naturally has leveled up every other thing that I know how to do because I'm able to really understand what people need. And then beyond that, it's like really trying in earnest to meet people where they are and give them what they need. I find myself saying this to people a lot now where I'm just like, I know it's not, but it's very simple. This is just like a loop and I think it really ties in a lot to just how humans like how our brains and the ways that our brains work naturally. Just like being able to listen and observe and understand what's happening, being able to confirm that that is right, responding to meet it, it's 90% of the thing. Especially when we're talking about, like interpersonal relationships, and also when we look at these kinds of organizational things, and even at the systemic level, it's just like, a matter of like, is the system, you know, designed in a way to be responsive to.... once something, once it learns that it's not working, like once we learn that it's not working, once we learn how it how it is working, right, because I think like, even when we talk about capitalism, for instance, some people like to say it's not working. And some people like to say it's working exactly like it's supposed to. And I'm like, doesn't really matter which one, If it's not producing the results that you want, what are we doing to change it? So I feel like, you know, listening, I think is the big thing that I would I would come back to, and then I don't know, like, I just feel like, I've learned a lot during this pandemic, about people. And some things that are just really hard to swallow, really hard pills to swallow about, you know, the limits of humans. But I think it has helped me approach the work that I do with a lot more a lot more reality in terms of whether these things are likely to be successful or not. I like to really think about moral questions. Understanding that even that is something that's very malleable, like it changes all the time. I have this fascination and this interest, like perpetual interest of finding out how people see the world. What is in their head, how does their mental model work? How does that tie into their own moral compass and values? And how does that show up in how they respond to the things that they have found a way to hear and listen to, it's just this ongoing, clearly informal study that's happening in my head all the time. And like, I try to communicate what I'm learning as much as I can, because I feel like it's important for everyone to kind of see and know and also like, for me to air out my mental model, so that maybe someone else it's gonna help, I think it is a little bit. So listening, learning, watching and like, just trying to read people is just, I love it.
I will say this, like about, you know, about motherhood is, it's a real treat in a lot of ways. But it's also incredibly hard because you don't like you get no vacation days, there's no vacation days, for ever, like the rest of your life, if you're lucky. And you're not hopefully, you never have to bury your own child, you never get a day off. My husband. and I both view our daughter as us trying to put everything that we feel like we have learned about the world and what we think are the best parts of us into her like, I think that she is going to be my greatest masterpiece, you know, creations and whatnots. And I don't mean to say that in like a weird, detached way. She's her own person, for sure. The ways in which she is influenced by us, we try to be really intentional about the lessons that we're teaching her and just in the world where technology surrounds us in the way that it does. And her generation is very online and going to grow up and live so much more of their lives online than we had to. Our job as parents has changed in a way where for my parents, it might have been more of like, How do I tell her what she needs to know about the world. She's gonna find all that stuff on the internet. Stuff I want her to see and stuff I don't want her to see, right. And in fact, like, I've already been trying to like condition myself to get comfortable with the idea that like, she might even still be in the single digits years old when she sees porn for the first time, because that is the world we live in. Right? Obviously, that's not what I want. But those things are in a way out of my control. And so it just helped me understand my relationship and what my role is in a different way. And I just feel like the best thing that my husband and I can be doing is to just be really good at contextualizing the world around her. There's only so much that I can do to shelter her. And there's only so much that I feel like I should do to shelter her because she's a Black girl in America, like come on. You need to know these things if you want to survive, but like helping her understand why and like what to do in response to that, how she can continue to find safety and in the ways that she really needs to for herself with all of these very chaotic forces. I think that's my job.
Nikishka Iyengar 34:45
As a mother of a Black child, I deeply feel what a nice saying. I think our job as parents is to get really good about contextualizing the world for our kids and giving them the tools they need to navigate the harshness and injustice they will likely encounter based on their identity. But what also came up for me Aniyia was framing that contextualization piece is how that is often our role and job as stewards of this work of repair, right? All of us have different roles to play in this work. And I've really been reflecting on the evolution or maybe crystallizing of my own role over the past few years. Sometimes you'll hear people refer to this work as being a doula or midwife of the next economy. And that definition or framing deeply resonates with me, especially having birthed a child under the care of both a midwifery practice and a doula. My midwife and doula, for example, were doing a lot of contextualizing of, you know, what was happening in my body, what was happening in my child's body, what I was feeling somatically and emotionally at different stages of pregnancy and birthing, and then giving me the tools that I needed to have an empowered birth in a way that I think went way beyond just like a clinical experience, right. And so I think about holding that same role in this work of repair. To put it mildly, we're going through a period of intense uncertainty and a lot of different intersecting crises and a lot of trauma. And I don't want to downplay that in any way. But the good news is that more people are realizing that the status quo needs to completely transform. They're craving a different way an alternative at, you know, a deeply cellular level, even if they're not fully articulating it in the same way some of us might. And so I think about how might we contextualize what's unfolding around us in a way that really builds collective power and self-determination. So on that note, please, please let us know if we're doing a good job of contextualizing things on this podcast. Are we saying too much? Are we not saying enough? Tell us how you're feeling and if there's something specific you're looking to get out of our episodes. And if you're enjoying what we've put out so far, please leave us a review on Apple podcasts. It really really helps us to hear affirmations and constructive feedback from you all. You can also send us a note on hello@theroadtorepair.com. We would absolutely love to hear from you.
Show Outro 37:31
Thank you for joining us on the Road to Repair. Our greatest hope is that this show will have a transformative impact for those of you tuning in. The Road to Repair podcast is produced by Andrew X, Nikishka Iyengar and Jessica Norwood, with amazing post-production support from FRQNCY media. Music for the show was produced by Andrew X in close collaboration with artists and sound designer Zachary Seth-Greer and the luscious vocals and original poetics of Naima Penman. Shout out to sofahood for all of the amazing artwork. You can check out more of all of their great work on their website, which you can find links to at theroadtorepair.com We always love the social media shout outs and you can help this message ripple out to those who might really benefit from it by rating this show and leaving a review on Apple podcasts. And if you feel called to you can make a donation to support the show at www.theroadtorepair.com. Thanks again for tuning in and stay tuned for our next episode.
Road to Repair Theme Song 38:29
We stand with the land. We are far more than a commodity. We join with the water, our bodies are not property. We're reclaiming our shared sovereignty and shaping an economy based on reciprocity, cooperative, accountable ground in justice and ecology. The Empire is toppling who want to be about this prophecy. We've been summoned to the summit, trust, we here for something. What is now possible? Who are we becoming?
