Interrupting Shame and Other Harmful Practices.

A recent study looking into cardiovascular risk and black women found that black women who experience high levels of shame and racism during their lifetimes demonstrated greater cortisol reactivity.

Shame, defined as a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behaviour, has been under the microscope for a while now when it comes to thinking about women's health and its effects on women's health.

Indeed, a study by the University of California investigated the relationship between shame and illness by looking into students' opinions of themselves and how that impacted their immune systems.

Those who felt shame showed an increase in what is called 'cytokine activity'?- an increase in inflammation, which researchers have said could have longer-term physiological consequences.

I've been interested in the work of Resmaa Menakem for a while now. Menakem is an American author and psychotherapist specialising in the effects of trauma on the human body and the relationship between trauma, white body supremacy, and racism in America.

He wrote a book called My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, and his work has really inspired me to think about the long-term impacts of ancestral wounds in our lives.

Reading Memakem’s work has helped me reframe how I intend to become a good ancestor through healing some of those wounds, and it has made me much more conscious about what patterns, familial stories and ancestral traumas I choose to interrupt, and which I choose to take forward in my life.?

So, every time I feel shame, I'm reminded of my own experience in this lifetime and of the experiences of those in my lineage who have gone before me. What is clear to me that a black woman's shame cannot be decoupled from shame throughout history.

?So what does shame through our history look like?

?Well, while a great deal is written about colonial shame or national shame, tied to the articulation of what it meant to be enslavers or colonialists, less time is spent talking about the experience of shame that lives on in the bodies of those people who were enslaved.

?This fascinates me (but doesn’t surprise me - it’s a kind of white guilt writ large) because the most painful part of reading any slave narrative that I ever encountered was the deep sense that these people, these black folk, these black enslaved women who have been written into fiction or captured in nonfiction, must have felt such deep shame.

These ancestors must have felt the shame of subordination, the shame of having agency taken away from them, the shame of recognising and being forced to recognise one's place in the hierarchy when one knows oneself to be equal to and therefore worthy of fair treatment.

This shame that lingers on has always felt to me the very shame I carry in my body. It is ancestral, and while it attaches itself to experiences that happen in my day-to-day, its power and force are wholly disruptive.

And so my daily struggle with racism and my struggle with institutions and institutional racism has been consistently made to feel as though I am less than, not equal to or as though I have to prove my worth repeatedly. This is shaming. Humiliating. Devastatingly embarrassing.

?And yet the interesting thing is that I have been able to manage my shame in so many spaces, and I have come to expect daily subordination in those spaces, too. I've come to expect it, and I have come to navigate it successfully, which is why I hold myself as up as an example to other women of colour of what is possible.

I know all too well the majority white institutional spaces in which attempts are made to subordinate me. I know how to navigate them in order to feel equal to, in order to feel worthy of that next promotion, that position of Head Teacher or of Executive Leader. It hasn’t been easy, but it has been possible.

However, what I am more frequently experiencing and actually the reason for this post, is that that daily subordination that I have become accustomed to in specific spaces at the hands of certain people, often majority white spaces, is cropping up elsewhere.

?Indeed, these attempts to ‘teach my place’ are happening in spaces or networks where it is altogether less expected, and this is even more breathtaking.

?As ridiculous as it might sound, this post is inspired entirely by an incident that happened today in which I attempted, possibly clumsily, to use social media and the various networks I'm trying to establish on social media to share information about a programme I'm running.

Ironically enough, the post was about?The Melanated Mastermind, a programme for women of colour trying to find agency in their work lives and opportunities for promotion and greater career success.

In my ‘clumsy’ (TBH - I don’t think it really was that clumsy) use of social media, I tagged somebody who didn't want to be tagged in my post. A social media blunder at worst, and an innocent misstep at best. But, what happened was that the person unwillingly tagged decided to school me in what I can only describe as a master class of what I have come to know as the tools of toxic patriarchy.

?I was offered a reminder of the hierarchy of black female spaces - a hierarchy I had clearly breached; assumptions were made about my intentions, including the assertion that I was trying to score ‘social capital in order to raise my profile’ from those I had tagged, I was shamed about not understanding the unwritten rules of social media, my programme was microaggresively diminished, and to top it all, this private message was offered up with the thinnest veneer of sisterhood and then a polite sign-off.?

This was an email that absolutely took my breath away, and to circle back to shame, this is because shame is found in our bodies.

Shame is located in the physical reminders that come in the form of palpitations, hot flushes and butterflies in the stomach. The physical reminders that we are not good enough, that we are unworthy, that come charging through our lineage in the most unexpected of ways.

Today's serving of subordination also reminded me that I will never know when or where it will come from. But what I must never do is let my guard down.

?There are so many spaces that I cannot take for granted. And what I recognised today and have been recognising over the past few months, as I engage deeper and deeper in diversity, equity and inclusion work, is that spaces I would like to take for granted, are being recreated in ways that I find unpalatable.

Spaces of sisterhood are being recreated, spaces where diversity, equity inclusion consultants and practitioners co-work are being recreated, spaces for people who should be co-collaborators, should be allies, should be supporters and champions are being recreated using the same old tools of hierarchy and subordination.

?Lines are being drawn across the landscape of DEI, women’s work, anti-racism, LGBTQ activism and many more, using the colonial approaches of designating and deciding on who gets which plot of the landscape.

?Time and time again I witness us using thinly veiled oppression, aggression, passive aggression and a violent politeness of language where everyone is left guessing, ‘Is this a dig at me?’

?As a woman with a black mother, who grew up with a white stepfather, I have always found the sisterhoods and spaces I have wanted to lean into, to be wrought with assumptions about my identity, to be wrought with hierarchy, to be wrought with judgments about my credentials and to be wrought with challenge.

?I sidestep, jump over, switch into new lanes, dodge missiles, avoid landmines about my work, and my identity and my business doing this work, on a daily basis, because I believe there is room for everybody.

?I actually believe that we need to use different tools to do this work, whether it's leadership development, whether it's work for and with women, whether it's work for and with LGBTQ communities, whether it's work for and with people of colour, we need to do this work differently and we cannot reuse the tools of toxic patriarchy to do that.

?Because I know that so many black women are born into this world with an inheritance of shame, it disappoints me further when we as black women continue to use shame as a mechanism for gaining control and exerting power.

?I'm here to do luminary work, which means honouring the humanity in everybody and shining a light on what we are all about and what we want to be about.

?I want to work with people and collaborate with those who wish to move beyond these old paradigms and this old power play. And while this is not a sales post, I urge you to think carefully about how you want to show up to do this work, how your process can mirror the best of what human beings have to offer each other and not the worst.

?The Melanated Mastermind?will provide a space in which we discover how to use our humanity to bring out the luminary in all of us.?

I hope that you will join me.