Adulting - #8 Race, Diversity & Its Role In Feminism ft. Shona Vertue

Episode Date: May 27, 2018

The last episode in series 1, and I think it might be my favourite. @Shona_vertue is an incredible personal trainer, yoga teacher, author but above all an incredible human. We delve into the world of privilege, race, feminism and much more- and how making yourself aware of these issues is imperative as a part of truly growing up. I hope you enjoy x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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i think one of the most important things that's happened to me when I've grown up is really well as I'm growing up is realizing that I'm an entity within a massive huge communication center that is the world that is built off years and years of conditioning and governing that underpins basically everything that we do and I think unless you create an awareness towards this you couldn't really do yourself a disservice and everyone around you because really we're responsible for how the world's going to turn out how society is going to be and it's very easy as a white person as a white cisgendered privileged person to go through your life and never really realize the struggles that other people face um obviously as a woman you might understand sexism but when it comes to race it's such a big thing and we need to talk about it more

and that's what we're gonna do yeah i think that's one of the best things about growing up actually is the sort of slow but but conscious like real it's not a reawakening I guess it's like this kind of ability to suddenly question the conditioning that you've grown up within and realizing how each experience that you've ever had growing up um has caused you to become the person you are today but that's just your life and what's really awesome is then turning that sort of self-awareness onto the rest of society as well yeah if that makes sense i think what's really interesting as well is maybe the first i think we're one of the first generations where hopefully it's becoming more mainstream because we're starting like we were just talking about deconditioning ourselves yes we're finally

actually breaking out it seems it might seem that slavery is so distant in the past but i think it's actually only just now unraveling and we're starting to get certain areas and segments of society are starting to be like fuck this is still intrinsically linked to everything that we do absolutely particularly if you have come from that sort of with that sort of background um i think it's it's like anything i mean i don't it's funny that we think it's so far away at times because actually if you think about how much you might hold on to a particular memory in your childhood like maybe one day where um your mom said no to you about something and suddenly that caused this like knock-on effect and then suddenly you decide that um feathers are bad or whatever it might be right you have this conditioned belief

based on this one tiny experience that happened to you when you were younger now you plant slavery into your family at some stage that is of course going to have a knock-on effect through the generations it's just it doesn't go away unless we start to really address it in fact i think that's a really good point i think we should talk about so what people get with with racism i think a lot of the time people we've talked about try to incentivize this idea of reverse racism and i think what we should explain is the reason that racism and cultural appropriation all these things exist is because they're based off of something which has had a negative past yeah so you can't have reverse racism because white people have never been subject to marginalization or oppression or anything like that and that that's

why like you just can't be racist to a white person it just doesn't work because we are the oppressor exactly and marginalised ethnic minority groups and people of colour have a history of being oppressed, which is why you can be racist towards them, which is why cultural appropriation is a thing, which is why wearing your hair in cornrows or wearing a bindi

or anything like that is... Can you extend it a bit more? Because I want people to... Because cultural appropriation is a big thing that people don't get. Yeah, it's a really big thing um but it has to come from the oppressor but it has to come from the oppressor so it can only ever come from from them really um it's one of those so i'll use yoga as an example good so yoga um is a very ancient tradition and and

religion and lifestyle um that originated in india which we were just saying maybe some people don't even realize that it came from india they probably think comes from you know a villa in bali yeah like a board or something and um it comes from india and you know it has a whole philosophy attached to it the really sad part about yoga these days is that it was embraced by the west which is amazing because it is a really beautiful practice but now it's at the point where um the top kind of known and well represented yogis are all white and now indian yogis and indian yoga teachers rarely get represented in the media for yoga yeah and so that is a

cultural appropriation because you've got um white people who um and you know well I don't even know whether to go into indentured slavery but you know Indians definitely had their history of you know even it was called indentured servitude was just another form of slavery um and they had to go through their own liberation against white people but then white people have taken yoga something of theirs and then made so much money out of it made it a part of their own and now indian people aren't ever represented really in the yoga community and it's definitely seen as a white middle class thing yoga is which is what's so ironic yeah and it also you go into um so something a lot of people don't get is when like kim kardashian

wears cornrows and the reason that that's so problematic is black women and shona you've spoken about this before only like in the media really you only ever see like straight hair so women especially black women for years have worn wigs or weaves to try and make their hair look westernized and white to fit into a society that's completely whitewashed so when a white person is then like actually I'm gonna wear my hair in a way that's designed for curly hair like afro hair it's like what the hell no you've already got your hair like your hair already exists in every single paradigm and this is one way that we wear our hair when for years we felt like we couldn't wear our natural hair yeah and then you're suddenly appropriating something exactly it's really hard to explain but the hair one is one that i find really easy to understand right okay fine

it makes sense to me yeah totally i think it's the hair once hair in and of itself is like this whole yeah racial thing and that's why i made a video on my YouTube channel about how I wear my hair curly. And in the beginning of it, I talk about, it's sort of like my curl routine. But in the beginning of it, I talk about, and I had to really cut it back because I got a bit emotional and I was editing certain aspects out of it. But I'm passionate about curly hair, not just because I think that, you know, we should just embrace beauty and sort of like break down beauty standards. But actually, if you go deeper into how beauty standards were set, they are very much related to a Caucasian race. Yeah. And attributes that are related to that white race. So having straight hair that sits perfectly and blows in the wind or moves in the wind at all, which sometimes my hair really doesn't move in the wind when it's very curly. So it's these sorts of things that I try to kind of rebel against

because I think that curly hair should be beautiful. We shouldn't see it as something that is different to straight hair and therefore is less of. Well, it's interesting because I've always followed you when you've had your hair curly. And you said to me, I actually didn't used to wear it, like used to blow dry it straight oh my gosh like every weekend so every sunday night i'd spend two hours in this hair routine and i wash my hair once a week to try and preserve this blow dry and i was actually so if we go back

a little bit i was so the the issue is is that growing up i didn't there wasn't really other than my mother there wasn't a lot of representation of other women in in powerful positions and not saying my mom was in a powerful position but no other women that I really looked up to that either were of my color or of my background but just of any color right so the people that I saw the women that I aspired to be were always white and always had straight hair and always had light skin and Australia is particularly bad with representation so I really had none of any other race not even aborigine and which is another whole other kettle of fish so that meant that I was always trying to straighten my hair and I really wanted to have lighter skin because I wanted to aspire to look like and be like the women that I considered my heroes.

And these were the women that were in magazines and on TV. important and diversity is so important because otherwise i spend my whole childhood and other other girls and boys will spend their childhoods teenage years even early 20s rebelling against their who they are in an effort to become more what but it's like seeing is believing unless it's the same and a lot of people find it easy if you're white to understand it through sexism because we can see like oh i understand that actually if you're white to understand it through sexism. Exactly. Because we can see like, oh, I understand that actually, if you've only ever seen a man, it's like when you're a kid and all the kids' books say like, girls are princesses and boys are astronauts.

You never aspire to be an astronaut. So if you're struggling to understand like white privilege and you're a female, then that's a good way of understanding the reason that white men find it so hard is you have no grasp of any kind of marginalisation. you're like I don't understand this to be fair totally to be fair I did have that exact conversation um with a friend of mine who um he's a personal trainer he's really intelligent and he'd made the point of saying to me he was sort of questioning saying oh do you want to be known as a as a um as a personal trainer and represented in the media because you're of color and you're a woman or do you want to be

recognized because you're intelligent i was like actually i want to be recognized for all those things because they're a big part of me and i've spent so long i would say more than half my life denying my background denying myself feeling unattractive feeling less than um because of my race because of my curly hair because of whatever it might have been because i was a woman all those sorts of things so representation is really really important and it's something that as you say it's difficult to understand unless it's happened to you but we're going to try and people get funny about where was i read a really good article about positive positive discrimination and they were like well you can't hire oh it was it was one of the football or rugby i can't remember one of these managers being like you can't just hire a black football

player just because they're black or something like this and they were like but there's just not a bigger pool of these people like the thing is people of color because if you go back to entrenched slavery in years and years of of class systems and where the money is spread it's inevitably spread throughout the white families because again slavery wasn't that long ago so the reach for people of color to be able to get into those industries in the first place is lesser yeah and then if you're not putting them into representation representation then it's just lower and it's what people don't get is is it's the structural it's all the system it's the rungs of a ladder there's so many points to it that platforming i don't know how to explain it's the structural, it's all the system, it's the rungs of a ladder. There's so many points to it that platforming, I don't know how to explain it, it's really hard to explain.

No, well, the fact that you even get it, it's kind of, it's funny. So Anoni and I have spoken so much about race and it even just, so I think we should probably explain what marginalization is because I've met loads of people that are like, what does being marginalized mean? Yeah. So essentially it's any sort of group that's a minority that is sort of

what would you say but they're not necessarily why they're not even necessarily it's not that you're actually it's not numerically a minority it's that the way that your platform and the way you're put forward in society you would think if you watch tv that maybe 10 of the population in america was black right it's more from representation, it seems like, than minority. But it's not true. It's not true. No, you're right. So it's like, it's marginalised because you're literally put,

well, if you think what a margin is on a piece of paper, you're put to the side. Yeah. You're marginalised. Exactly. You're subjugated to be a lesser thing. Yes. That's what it is.

Exactly. So you're like an afterthought. Exactly. And so women obviously have been marginalised. Yeah. Black women or women of color. So, you know, and whether we're actually trying to figure out whether that was. What's the politically correct thing to say?

I definitely say I talk about my color and say that, you know, I am a woman of color. And I've had other black women say to me, what is it like to be a woman of color in the fitness industry or what is it like to be so you know we refer to each other in that way but i don't know i don't know whether it's i've heard other people say it's not themselves no no no i got that's a lot if i get a comment from a woman of color she'll say i'm a woman of color yeah that's the most used thing i'll get i'm curious i'm curious to know whether it is or not because actually I was watching Bill Maher the other day and he was referring to Trump saying something like someone of color and I think that and Bill was like uh hello that's not even politically correct but also who decides what's politically correct because it changes all the time and I'm really hot on things

I'm actually quite good like making sure that I always know what things are but you can get so caught up in it that you end up being completely silenced because you can't say anything. You're like, ugh. And that's I think where we've got to with the race thing

where people are so scared of being racist because there's such a big shame attributed to it which is what we were talking about so then people don't even want to go there because they're worried

about saying the wrong thing but really just opening up the conversation is what's so important which is why we've actually got Reni Adelodge's book sat here with us. We're using it as a point of reference. Why I No Longer Speak to White People About Race.

It's a really good read. I spoke about it on the last podcast. But it's so important that you realise that talking about race in itself isn't racist, but that structural racism is something that is entrenched within all of us. So people find this offensive, but basically if you're born into the kind of westernised society that you are born into, you are raised in a way that perpetuates you to be racist.

Not in your outward actions, but just in the way that you are. And we were just talking about how at school, you were saying your friends would say stuff like... Oh, so I've been called horrible things that i would never that i actually feel so much shame to even say out loud and and actually it took i can say it now without crying but sometimes it's only because i've started to readdress it in my life but i would have my friends would call me curry muncher curry coconut all these sort of things so just for the record if people are wanting to know why i have more melanin in my skin it's because in my body it's because my mom is

fijian indian um and samoan and we think it's samoa we don't know which other island it is actually to be fair um and my dad is australian white australian but that means we have a huge mix so actually we've done some like traces back and we've got sardinian we've got french so we're real mix but um on my mom's side we actually have it's her grandfather so my great-grandfather was an indentured slave that came over from india was sent over to colonize fiji um as an indentured slave or it's it's actually not indentured slave it's indentured servitude but i call it indentured slave or it's actually not indentured slave it's indentured servitude but I call it indentured slave because they're technically slaves anyway that's a whole other

thing why was I telling you this oh the reason I'm brown why was I telling you oh what I'd been called yeah that's right yeah so so I'd been called all these sort of different things relating to the fact that I had Indian in me relating to the fact that I was an Islander, so coconut. And growing up as a kid, you know, I never felt like my friends were doing it maliciously, but it still made me feel extremely uncomfortable because I felt like an outsider. So it still made me feel marginalized, but I would hide it because I was a teenager and I wanted to be accepted. So a big thing in Australia, Australians are excruciatingly racist. Just generally, there's no PC there. It's literally, you will call anyone out if they look slightly different to you and put them into a group.

And so I grew up having to really grow a thick skin and just deal with it and be like, ha ha, yeah, I guess I am a curry. In fact, did you guys have school jerseys? Yes. grow a thick skin and just deal with it and be like haha yeah I guess I am a curry yeah in fact did you guys have school jerseys yeah so like my friends were annoyed at me because I didn't put on the back that's my cat I didn't put on the back that I was a um they wanted me to write on the back of it curry muncher was that so when they said that to you were they saying it like um it was like meant to be endearing so yeah or was it in a bullying way it was sort of no it definitely wasn't bullying or really malicious it was more like um it was definitely like it was endearing but I think just intentionally how can it be ever endearing to marginalize someone I agree but they never questioned that

and I think what it is is something that Renny talks about in the book which is about um the fear of the other so it's almost like telling you that you should know that you're brown which you obviously wouldn't have figured out on your own so I'm going to tell you and remind you but what I find really interesting we're talking about as well is when when this is so bad right one thing you need to do as well if you're white if you're any person is not go I'm not racist but acknowledge the time be like never say I've never thought that. Because I was saying to Shona, I always used to get into a taxi on a uni and go,

where are you from? To the driver. Because they had a different skin colour to me. And they'd be like, Cardiff. And I'd be like, no, no, no, but where are you originally from? And now people might not get why this is racist, but it's a microaggression. It's rude because it's like,

obviously you're from where you live, which inevitably was going to be like some English-speaking country which is why they live there and speak english but because they had an accent or something like that you're like no but where are you from and it's so why do we have this desire to know like where someone's from people always like but why is that racist and it's racist because like i'm not english and no one's ever asked i'm not my mum's got irish family not, my mum's got Irish family my mum's all Irish and my dad's Hungarian and because my skin colour's the same everyone's like well it's fine so it's just this really weird

thing and I was saying to Shona like what do you say because you were saying like inevitably everyone always wants to ask you that question like basically why are you brown but no one thinks you can say that so I love messing with people because I always say to them, they say to me like,

oh, where are you from? And I'm like, Australia. And they're literally like imploding, wanting to say. And so then my next answer is, do you mean to say, why am I brown? And then they're sort of like, they feel very awkward about it, but it's like, yeah, I get it.

That's what you want to say. Because you're not asking where you're from because you know where you're from because your accent's Australian. It is literally that asking, why have you got a different skin color from me and why we so uncomfortable with that is because we're entrenched with this idea of the fair of the other exactly so that's the other thing is like I while I recognize that there is an importance of being politically correct it also makes it even more awkward for someone like me who feels

the awkwardness of another white person who's really like can't like there's this elephant in the room which is you are brown so it's like i know i'm brown you know i'm brown but you feel like you have to pretend like i'm not brown this is right so this comes down to color blindness which is so interesting this is a massive thing um so people will be like oh but i don't see this is a classic thing like i'm not racist i can't see color yes now the only person that can say that is a white person because everyone everything around us is whitewashed so everything you see on the tv is white most of the people you see are white so you don't see color because you feel like you fit all the time but if you're say especially say like in a a big corporation company that's, like,

I don't know, a very white, oh, I don't know, pretty much every industry is hugely whitewashed, isn't it? So if you're the only black person in that room, you're gonna fucking see that you're black. That you're black. Like, you can see that colour. Totally.

So the only people who can say, I can't see colour are the white people. So that's why colour blindness is racist in itself. Exactly. Because, in in of itself you have to acknowledge because it's a luxury exactly and it's and it's not you know we don't as people of color we don't have the luxury of being able to be like you know where i don't know that i'm black yeah because you face also as a white as a but actually i shouldn't be speaking

like as if i'm a black i don't want to say saying but I just feel like I just it's because I'm trying to explain like if you face I assume like as a woman if you face so much prejudice as a what so like I'll do it from a female perspective so like if you get cackled every single day and you're reminded of your femininity every five minutes there's no way in hell that I can forget that I'm a woman. And that translates into race. If you're feeling discriminated against because of your race on a day-to-day basis, you can't be like,

I can't see that I'm back because people are fucking telling you. Totally. Just like as a woman, you're constantly told that you have boobs. And you're like, yes, I'm well aware.

I'm well aware of my boobs. I knew that they existed. Yeah, totally. Exactly. So that's the thing. Yeah. It's one of these situations where I just, it would be great if we could talk about it more.

I had someone write to me. I recently shared this quote, um, and I'm going to read it. It's, it's from Reni Edelog's book, why I'm no longer talking to white people about race. And so, um, it, it comes actually just from the preface. It's not even really deep in the book. Can you hear her purring? Do you want me to send her out? so sweet

oh my gosh so right now my cat is on the bed with us purring so loudly she's purring so loud because she loves to talk about race and colour she's a rag doll she's purring directly into the microphone this is quite funny

so I had this one time this is so like who who is it it's actually um uh what's his name oh god i can't believe i've forgotten his name he's my favorite um louis ck who got in trouble for masturbating in front of women i didn't know that yeah louis ck is one of my favorite comedians but he um yeah so he's he's sort of he's in the bad books because he um he exercised his power definitely um for women who were trying to make something of themselves in comedy and would ask them if he could masturbate in front of them or or like hold his dick in front of them weird shit like that it's such a weird one it's not even like a the page it's like it's just such

a weird one it's like louis why yeah come on because of hegemonic masculinity i know yeah he's so freaking hilarious and intelligent it was just so disappointing anyway don't talk about him but basically he talks about how he's like i am definitely mildly racist and i like the way he talks about it and he says when he's walking down the street and he sees a black person you know well dressed and looking into with a great job he goes that's the noise he goes good and he's like i know it's racist he's like it's terrible and he's like oh that's interesting oh good on you that's what he's saying like okay yeah good on him like he did it and it's what what's really interesting about that it's it's a part of his

his joke is that he's taking the piss out of himself but he's also really highlighting yeah the fact that it is surprising when you see someone of color do well he's highlighting the truth and that's the problem with the world yeah is that there isn't enough representation of these people so actually white people are conditioned to also believe that black people or people of color can't be successful there's that perpetuated idea of oh they're just lazy or they don't work that much or that's because you only see like the black person in a certain role like they'll be the janitor or they're the 100 the crappy job yes is is the black person like that's what they're the 100% the crappy job yes is the black person like that's what they're doing

they're the lead role and the main person I mean it's happening more because people are talking about it and it's coming more into media a little bit but only in the last like year like really

only in the last year I was saying yeah like last night Grace and I watched this film um it was called Girls Trip and the whole cast was black and I turned to Grace

and I went this is really bad but I think it's weird because everyone is black and I was very aware if that film had been the other way around and every single person had been white I wouldn't have even realised because everything is whitewashed and what annoys me is I'm so

hyper aware of this but I know some of my friends will be like oh my god no I so would have noticed. No you wouldn't. Yeah no. Like you have to you have to not lie to yourself because we all lie to ourselves all the time and are like oh i'm not racist but then if a black man was walking behind me down the street i'd probably walk faster than if a white man would because i'm conditioned to believe exactly that a black man is more dangerous than a white man and that is so entrenched of no fact other than black people have been put into a position where within

society they can't work as much because they're not as high like they won't get as many jobs they can't earn as much money so they're they're not more likely to turn to crime that is an idea that's put out there but it's so well versed i know that the collective conscious mind believes that the black man is dangerous that is like the trope that has occurred well and this is where we get into this issue of um what's called respectability politics yeah and and where you have other black people perpetuating these conditions like even barack obama whom i love if george bush had said some of the things that he'd said yeah like pull your pants up you know stop eating so much jerk chicken or whatever he said to to other black people

internet his intentions were i want you to do well here's what you need to do but it's like i want you to do well according to what the white man says is respectable the other problem with barack obama is that what it did to america was people went oh we're not racist we've got a black president totally and then it and then the whole agenda to fight against racism, well, this is why Donald Trump is in power. I really feel like Barack Obama was a gateway drug to let the crack... I know he's worse than that.

He's like crystal meth that is Donald Trump. That is because people went, oh, look, we're not racist. Our president is back. Well done us. Totally. And it was a really good shield to let people believe that they'd really done something good it also really dichotomized america yeah and just highlighted how under but also and also he couldn't do as

much as anyone else because he had no one on his side so he was in power but he had no power completely because everyone was on the other side to him. So it was such a lie. It was such a farce. So this is another thing that I think, and I don't know whether we can talk about it, but you and I briefly touched on the fact that when you get to a certain privilege in your life, you then have the luxury of being able to,

and hopefully you do, turn around and say, oh, wait, what is it like to be black what is it like to care about the environment what is it like to be vegan and to start considering those things but when you're struggling to survive in society you have no money or you have no job or whatever it might be it's very difficult to consider it from another perspective definitely so i think it is definitely the responsibility of people who are in privileged positions to put more effort into understanding

this stuff which is why i love you forming more voices exactly the way that i my mom said this to me funny enough about mental health once she was like you all like your generation all have these things and she's like i didn't have time to know about my mental health she was like I was trying to work and like work like when she was little she would work in a shop all the time her family had like not really any like very much money at all she wouldn't necessarily have that much to eat and she had to wash her brother's clothes because her mum was at work really late right so my mum was like I never stopped to think am I okay she was like I never worried about I never knew I've had anxiety yes and have time to have and I know I'm

not saying that mental health isn't a thing when I'm saying we're very lucky what I westernized certain echelons that's the word I've been looking for love that word so certain areas of society are able to have more time to worry about but but consider that stuff to to start to be aware it is a point of privilege to be able to think about certain things i completely agree so so that's the difficult thing is is when you realize because sometimes i feel like when you're in an echo chamber which is what the worst thing about social media is because of algorithms and i listened to someone talking about this the other day i think was on russell brown's podcast but the guy was like facebook think they're doing a really good job because they're what they're doing is very efficient it's showing you the algorithm is showing you things you want to see but what it does is say

your opinion is that you voted to leave during Brexit then it's like oh you want to leave so you're going to see more people who want to leave so what it's doing you're only seeing that so it's bolstering your idea and going I am right everyone thinks the same as me so what I'm thinking is right totally but the reason this is unhealthy is not only in that instance, but in life, you need to be able to see other people's perspectives. But what Instagram and social media, which before was an amazing window.

Like if you listen to journalists years ago, when Twitter first happened, it was like just journalists on there. Like no one else was really on there. And they were like, I'd never seen these other people. It was like a window you can look through and to all these different people's perspectives.

And it was amazing to see a huge range of like differing opinions and views and that was what social media was fantastic for connecting people all around the globe with really different opinions what it does now is people all around the world with the exact same opinions and i think they're getting more and more efficient and better and better these algorithms every single day are getting more information from you from your phone calls from everything it's freaky so it will perfectly calculate this world where you're like oh my god everyone and everything's fine because everything's the same as me yeah and we were just saying like shona showed me this video where this woman was talking about like why feminism is bad and she was like this one was pro-life i've actually never met anyone who's pro-life i've never met anyone

who's oh no in australia there met anyone who's... Oh, no. In Australia, there's quite a few. Oh, really? Actually, every Saturday, they stand in front of the abortion clinic and they're, yeah, hardcore Christians that hold banners and show pictures of dead fetuses

and things like that. They've actually banned that in England now. Have they? The last one was the other day. The last... Protest or something. Picket, what they're called. Like, picket fence.

They're called something. And they stand outside the ad that was banned. I wonder it's banned in australia probably not too many australia's too slow for that stuff yeah um i was gonna read you this quote okay so this is just in the preface um it do you say preface or i say preface oh good okay great me too um i i found this so profound and goosebump inducing because i could really relate to it and i related to it growing up as a kid so here's the quote when white people pick up a magazine scroll through the internet read a newspaper or switch on the tv it's never rare or odd to see people who look like them in positions of power or exerting authority. In culture particularly, the positive affirmations of whiteness are so widespread that the average white person doesn't even notice them. Instead, these affirmations are placidly consumed.

To be white is to be human. To be white is to be universal. I only know this because I'm not. Bam! Dropped the mic. I just, I thought she just put it so perfectly because I didn't even think about it myself. Like like i hadn't acknowledged that myself until i'd read her say it and was like yes totally like i am highly aware of um all of the the positive perspective placed on being white or just people white people in powerful positions or positions of success and just it being something that's so placidly consumed by other white people even me as someone of color just accepting it i think that's the really weird thing when again i'm going to use sexism because

i don't want to talk from a point of view as if i understand racism because i don't right but i sometimes feel like i feel like i can't explain it but i shouldn't so if that makes sense because you shouldn't i know i shouldn't talk from that perspective but when it comes to it's like you know when you you have like internalized misogyny it's a good way of explaining it like when you and when you realize that this is what's so weird this is why structural racism is so important to understand and when renny says in the book like white people are racist whiteness isn't really necessarily about color that's what we're talking about it's almost a way of thinking it's the hierarchy that we perpetuate and actually racism

from like black people can be racist to black people, like colourism is a big thing isn't it, within like interracial racism is massive and you'll also find like we were saying how sometimes I'll say something that I think I'm being like progressive in the way that I approach it

to a person of colour and because they have entrenched racism within them they don't they think I'm being racist by wanting to talk about race and they'll perpetuate the the racist concept which is really so this is why it's so difficult because there's so many layers to it exactly um and it's just so uh it's it this is the other problem the echo chamber thing it's like i talk about this and we talk about these concepts now and you become so familiarized with them that you think it's normal and it's so not normal no it's so not normal it's and it's sad how not normal it is um and it does definitely make things difficult but I think rather than constantly so I'm on a bit of a mission at the moment actually to try and encourage more diversity at least within my industry so

more people of different races genders ages as well because you know as we were saying before it's you don't really see anyone on instagram over like 40 being represented other than davina mccall yeah do you know the thing for me is that i think that we need to just see more diversity represented in the media but the problem is is that it can't just come from the media because the media are always going to support what's in the zeitgeist exactly yeah they're going to support those that have following so it's actually both sides so as consumers of media we need to make demands to have that kind of diversity it's the demands that create like the what are people consuming exactly so follow people that aren't just white especially now with influencer marketing because we have really taken

so much control yes the consumer has more control than ever before because we can we can literally influence every single area of markets exactly just by who we're following completely and so if you're not following people of different races ages colors shapes sizes then then what's going to happen is in the media and through brands are only ever going to choose those this small sort of group yeah basically and it's it's but you might even think like i actually now you just said that i'm just thinking like how many people of color do i actually follow right probably a very very small amount and i was literally thinking to myself how do i find more people of color and this is the problem because

it's just like where do you find them they're not in the media so then you don't know platforms exactly and then people that we do know we were just talking about a few influencers or people that we know that are people of color women of color and they're following us tiny compared to what it would be if they were white and that's just fact it's just a fact their content has no difference and you know actually you don't want? Because there's so fricking lols. But right, so probably one of the reasons why I even have a job as a personal trainer is because I, when the whole booty thing happened,

is I followed that and wanted to get a bigger bum. And I never really take a picture of my bum anymore. It's not, unless like, I'm literally just standing there. But my whole Instagram for a while was doing that like booty pose. Yes. Which is when my Instagram

very, very first started to grow. To grow. But why are big bums in fashion? Well, big bums are in fashion because the Kardashians, and what are the Kardashians doing? They're appropriating black culture because black women naturally have a bigger bum.

But when black women had a big curvaceous bottom, it wasn't in fashion. No. It's only when white women started being like, I want a big bum that that became an a sexualized attractive norm before that it was the heroin chic look i'm actually going to talk about this on a podcast with a psychologist coming on to talk about amazing

the kardashians yeah because i just think it's fascinating but it is massive when you look at the body shape so one athleticism like genetically black women are more predisposed to be able to have more of an athletic figure just because of like the genes that they have. And yet, that was never seen

as sexualized. Like think about the way that Venus and Serena Williams have been, were for years demonized and really looked at as like atrociously unattractive in the media.

And now, like my body type even just me and i'm not that messy but i'm quite take minus 10 years people like what the hell and it's only when white women do something that it's like suddenly that's yeah that becomes i know completely appropriate it's almost like it's only when a white person talks about race that white people pay attention yeah if a black person talks about race that white people pay attention. Yeah. If a black person talks about race, the likelihood is...

It sounds like we're whinging. Yeah. So I was recently at Balance Festival, and I was on a panel with Zanna Van Dyke, Carly Rowena, Hazel Wallace, Ella Woodward, I was going to call her Deliciously Ella, and Alice Living, and they're all wonderful women so it's nothing against them but what's the common denominator between all those women they're all white and so i was the only person of color on that panel um and at the end

um zana the final question that zana had sort of asked, said to the panel was, you know, what would you, what would you say to someone starting out? And so I gave my like one little, I said, I want to say two things. We were running out of time and I started to shake. My palms were sweaty. Um, and the reason that I was feeling so nervous about giving this answer, I was about to bring up diversity, uh, was because I was like, shit, I, sorry to swear on your podcast okay great great okay great so i was sweating and feeling so uncomfortable because i was the the brown person making the statement about diversity and asking i was a spokesperson and i felt already on the back foot because i was like fuck it sounds like i'm black and brown and complaining that I don't have enough jobs so give me a job and that's honestly what I felt like but I wasn't I was trying to I guess

preach for everyone you know that has been marginalized at some point in their life and so anyway so what I asked was how many people in the audience p.s this audience was mostly white and there were like three people of a different race in in the audience p.s this audience was mostly white and there were like three people of a different race in in the different race to white sorry and when i say it's so funny how even my language is like white is default everything else is different yeah so bad it's so bad so anyway so i so i basically it's especially bad in london if you think about it because it's such an amazingly diverse multicultural city so um i said how many people in here have individual brands um and you're trying to build a brand not just like

you're an influencer and about actually 60 of the audience put their hands up so there are a lot of like growing brands there so maybe they had like they were starting like a lotus seed company or they were going to sell like crystals or whatever and or soap so whatever it might have been and so i was like you know what how many of you so they all raised their hand and i was like please when you start working with influencers consider representation and and representation of different races ages colors i'm sweating my mouth is shaking like you know when you're about to start crying and you're like but you're angry crying you're trying to this is what was happening to me and well because you know the white privilege people are going to be like well why are you bringing this up yeah why are you bringing this up so i

felt i felt conscious of the fact that i was making white people feel uncomfortable i was i know i was conscious of the fact that um I was brown I it was just all this stuff and it wasn't until after the fact that I suddenly had to sit back and reflect on all of these emotions that I'd experienced while explaining and I was like that's what's fucked up with society I think a lot of people will be very shocked to hear a woman of your step like you're so successful and you're in a in a business that is like like really influential and you're also someone who obviously, they think this is what people will find really weird to extrapolate is that you're obviously

like completely westernised and you like have a very like white world around you. And yet when you're sat on a panel, you feel, I think people feel shocked. People don't understand because no one talks about it. They don't know how much and how much racism, oh, I can't even, it's been it yes they don't know how much and how how much racism oh it's i can't even it's been excited i don't know but i remember the first time that a black friend said to me like i i know that i'm black all the time every room i enter and i was like

oh my god totally so this is something and people do and people don't react with any maliciousness i mean i haven't had any yet but i definitely hear the shock in people's voices when I say, exactly, when I talk about, you know, how I felt ashamed of curly hair, how I felt ashamed of brown skin, how I once said to my mom, why does our skin color look like? I said, why do you look like poo? Why do I look like poo? You know, things like that. Obviously I said it when I was little, not when I was like in my 20s but it's like these sorts of things um people are shocked to hear that I had that experience

so I think it's very important that it be spoken about but coming back to that moment I said brands need to work with different people because that representation is important and what was really interesting was later a lady came up to me she was so lovely but she said the problem is is that if so i i have a i think she had like a her an oil company actually not oil like like essential oils she was wanting to sell essential oils and she said that i have to use white people to sell my brand because that's white people only buy from white people and i was like this is the problem with society this is what's so stupid is do you think that everyone in the world is white because

I'm sorry but I'm fairly certain that the majority of London is not white it's not am I wrong no but I think I even think I think less people I think there's more people of color and different races than white people in London I'm fairly certain that's true which is what's so funny because it's like when they I've seen this before in adverts and stuff where they say like, but it's not, people aren't going to relate. And you're like, what are all these classes? Imagine how, also, you know when they, it's like when they don't make a foundation colour that's like really dark. Right. It's like, you're a capitalist venture. Do you not realise how many people you're missing out on? Like completely. Like you're literally

losing money because you're just not catering to part of society but why but why why why do we not have that and and it's so funny because when you start to question it and it is again more prevalent and people are talking about it more but it's just everywhere it's absolutely everyone this lady was so lovely and but she and she was and she even she realized as the words were coming out of her mouth what she was like what she was saying and i was like but this is the problem i was like we still need representation there's all these different races and different ages and she was like yeah she was like well i'm latina and i was like well there you go i was like don't you want to like feel represented don't you want it and she was like yeah yeah yeah and i felt her pain because I was like, I get it. I know why you feel this obligation to have just white, white women everywhere. Because it's, it's just, there

was something really interesting that was, let me just check who it was because it was on Women's Hour. Oh, Germaine Greer. Okay. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it was Germaine Greer and she was on Women's Hour. And she was talking about, isn't it funny that we're so scared of aging? So let's, let's bring up the concept of ageing. Because no one really talks about ageism very much. Just to tie it into all these... To kind of get a better picture of how marginalisation works. It's just race is the worst one. Because race is really born out of such severe oppression because of slavery.

Yes. Everything else is marginalisation. But it's never going to be... Racism is so prolific. Which is why as a feminist... We'll talk about this later. Yeah. You need to be racism is so prolific which is why as a feminist, we'll talk about this later you need to be anti-racist you need to be really fighting

against racism but she talks about how we're so scared of ageing that the women in the incontinence pad adverts are like 30 or the women with the anti-ageing creams are 20 and it's like that isn't who's buying that product so why are they putting really young women and she was like it's so funny when you watch those adverts because she said

something like imagine that poor like 21 woman going back to a boyfriend with an incontinence pad like obviously she's not wearing that like why are you showing that to app it's it's like a it's it's a universal cognitive dissonance of cognitive dissonance is one of my favorite sayings i learned it when i was writing about um clockwork orange at uni and it's basically when you know two truths at the same time so you fully believe in two things at the same time so you like it's like you eat meat and you're like it's fine to eat meat while simultaneously knowing that you don't think it's okay to kill out like to to farm yes you do those and i do this i do it all the time like i eat eggs and I know that I don't agree with how we get eggs. Yes.

Or like dairy. It's sort of like I love butter. Yeah. But you can oscillate between the two things and some days depending on who you're talking to or what you're thinking

you allow yourself. It's actually a brain it's a survival thing that we're able to do for certain it's like certain beliefs it's really it's a really interesting concept

but it's called cognitive dissonance and it's amazing and the world does it for pretty much everything you have to do it to survive because if you actually really looked at the world

like all the things I think you'd drive yourself insane like I don't think you'd actually be able to function day to day life because life is a contradiction because it's

everything is ridiculous like you wouldn't be able to just go and buy stuff if you really knew if you really were able to appreciate the fact that someone's literally been killed in Syria

you wouldn't be able to be complaining about the fact that they're they don't have your size in primark you know it's what drives it sends me into an existential crisis every day you can't you can't think about it but so going back to the point she basically said the representation is so funny because you're not selling it and and there was um what was it it was something else i saw i saw this on twitter actually it was a guy that was like it was like all hair types and it was this was about talking about hair and it was like they had straight hair and they had quite highly curly hair and she's like but it was falling down it was talking about how you fall down she's like i have an afro my curls are so tight that people don't

realize when you have a full full full fro it doesn't grow out no it literally will be tight to your head yeah she was like it could keep growing and if i pull it it will be like six meters long but literally my hair will never grow bigger than an inch or like bigger than half an inch because it's so tight yes because it's so tight and she's like that is not all hair tight so don't make sweeping generalizations and saying that you're doing an advert for all women or all hair types or all everything because you're not and we exist and why do i not exist like where are the people and the problem the reason why you don't exist or the why is because the person sat at the top of every single industry is a big fat white

man every time without fail so they never see because they don't know they never see it it was like the biggest one most annoying the thing that killed me was this L'Oreal campaign and there was a transgender mixed race, Rebecca, oh, Rachel, what was her name? So she was the face of the L'Oreal campaign and she wrote a Facebook post, I'll have to look it up because you'll be really interested in this. It was like last year.

She wrote a Facebook post about structural racism. It was like why all white people are racist. And I read it and it was before the book came out but I'd read Reni Edelodge's blog post. F.Ager's blog essay versus blog post yeah like years ago so when she wrote it i completely i'd completely revamped and rechanged the way that looked to race i read it like oh yeah that makes sense she was like all white people are racist because blah blah blah anyway she got dropped by l'oreal i remember this because they were like that was such a like a divisive piece of but it wasn't people are starting to talk about it, that understanding

she was talking about structural racism. This woman is a transgender mixed race. That is so forward of L'Oreal. Thank God. Well done. That's amazing. But they dropped her. But she spoke out about racism. And the campaign that they were doing was about all skin

types and diversity. And they sacked the transgender mixed race model which is why platforming is bad when it's done with the wrong intentions because those people weren't platforming this woman for the right reasons of we want a transgender mixed race person fronting our diversity campaign they were going we want money driven towards our campaign and look we're being really forward thinking haha amazing money money money oh sorry no i'm white and you've just insulted white people so we're gonna fire you that is what happened the guy at the top must have been white it was so stupid that was a diversity campaign wow and this is one platforming goes wrong i think because the only time when i don't

agree with it agree with it is there are instances when it's done now and this is very new i see instagrammers doing this where they'll be like oh my god look so and so's doing like because they're trying to be progressive then again in itself maybe it never actually has a bad thing because it's still virtually signaling yes yes exactly that fandu casino daily jackpots guaranteed to hit by 11 p.m with your chance at the number one feeling winning which beats even the 27th best feeling, saying I do. Who wants this last parachute? I do.

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signaling is it bad is it good i'm like oh well actually if a celebrity is promoting a charity and the fact that they support a charity doesn't that influence like a million other people too it's like so is it really that bad i know what you're saying i think it's it's like it's it's kind of like what you were saying about what your segue into feminism was it's like it started your gateway to feminism and so we think it's kind of like if it's on the right path. Yeah, exactly. But it's more like when it comes with the cooperation with L'Oreal, the reason

it was problematic there was because they didn't keep her. No, and then they fired her. That's why it was wrong. You're right. When it's like someone else putting something up. So if an influencer is talking about diversity and they happen to be white and they are virtue signaling who cares it's kind of like when people decide to exercise initially because they're like i just want a six-pack it's like

great but don't stay there for that reason that's true you then have to progress and realize actually exercise is beneficial for so many other reasons having a six-pack is a tiny aspect and it doesn't even really necessarily represent health so it's like it's kind of like that right and it's funny because i think a lot i got into feminism for a lot of the same reason i was saying that i got into feminism and that my kind of first first understanding because before i used to say when i was a humanist which means general laughing out because i was saying oh humanism is actually kind of like a way of thinking it's like basically there's no afterlife so you enjoy it so it's absolutely nothing to do with like equality or anything it's like a actual like ethos

nothing not relative i'm just while you're explaining this i'm going to google humanism yeah like read the definition it's quite hilarious it is really funny and lots of people say this as well because they're like femme feminine but i got into feminism because initially especially when i started instagram it was all about empowerment and i really thought that empowerment meant autonomy in my body which it does but I still agree with this I still think you should and actually a lot of it was about sex sexuality for me as well because I wanted to be like I I was brought up in the era of slut shaming massively right do you remember that it's not even really a thing now but like I mean I'm sure it is but compared to when we were younger it was like such thing and I think my thing was like such a thing. And I think my thing was like, actually, I want to be sexual

and I want to be a woman and I want to be all of those things. And that's where I got into feminism. Then I kind of realised that's not really the fight we need to fight. No, it's not where we need to put all our energy. Not for like 25 captions a day about why I'm doing a thong selfie, which is what a lot of it was. And it's true. And it was fine, but now I'm so empowered that I don't even which is what a lot of it was. And it's true, and it was fine,

but now I'm like, I'm so empowered that I don't even need to take a picture of my bum. Like, I am empowered and I'm bright all the time. Exactly, and that was the contradiction

that I always felt because it was like, isn't this like some sort of outward projection of like, I'm empowered, but secretly I also still want to I want to be

objectified objectified by a man or I want to be valued by And this is where the, because I have a really, I have a really, really clever friend who's fucking really nice when she's gone travelling it's why she's why I started book club because I wanted to talk to people

about stuff like this but she would be like I don't want makeup and I don't dress up and I don't care and I'd be like but I'm doing it and she was like no but I know you do care this is why you're going out wearing a tight dress and I was like no Beth me and my friends are going out wearing tight dresses because we it's our bodies we do what we want and she's like no because you're dressing up for

man it's for a gay she's like you wouldn't do it if no one was there she's like when you're in the house do you wear makeup and I was like no it's all a question of intention and that's the problem is that we never really know only we intrinsically know but on from a society perspective there's a million different reasons so I've had this battle a lot of the time because coming from Australia you know I didn't wear makeup and I never really believed in wearing it because my parents especially my dad was always against it my mom didn't wear it and then just it's totally impractical to have to go in and out of the with makeup on when I came to London I feel like I felt like everyone I still do feel like everyone still really wears

it a lot um it's a totally different culture and there are different reasons for wearing it and I started to feel obligated to wear it because if I wasn't I was I almost felt this pressure of like wow she didn't really take care of herself yes but she didn't put much effort in yes and it definitely didn't mean for me some people think it's unprofessional it's unprofessional to not wear makeup which is ridiculous because this is my face. Like, seriously, that's my actual face. Like, how is that unprofessional? You wouldn't say to a man,

you look unprofessional because that's your face. Well, so this was the thing that irritated me. And I did have a conversation about this a long time ago with my manager. And I was, it was almost like, it was a disagreement where I said, I do think makeup is an obligation from a beauty perspective I do think that people feel obligated to wear it and

it's deeply conditioned and she said no I think there are men because I said what frustrates me is that men don't feel obligated to wear makeup at all like they they don't there are men that choose to wear makeup but no they never wake up, oh, I've fucking got to put foundation on. I've got to put it on. And that's when I hate stuff like that. It's the same when I hate beauty standards or body standards where it's like, oh shit, I have to lose 20 kilos if I want to be accepted on the beach. Right?

That's when it gets ridiculous. If you feel like you want to look that way because that's how you feel sexy you still have to question the conditions around what you define as being sexy yeah do you know what i mean because i think this is what we're saying about growing up this is the weird thing so you get to the point of like you make a choice towards some kind of activism or feminism or you start to realize that you have a choice in certain things yeah so i think it comes down to you realize that actually things are a choice but that there isn't there also isn't that much of a choice because there's so much conditioning around absolutely everything that we do like i cannot explain how much of a mind filler is trying to

unpick it all so this is what i was doing i was like i'm empowering myself by taking my clothes off but why am i empowered because i'm told by the patriarchy that being like being sex oh it's really i can't even explain it like you're sexually liberated but you're being objectified completely and you can't and you're

it's really hard to explain and the reason that funnily enough feminism I was saying this to Shona like the more feminist I get or the more I start to learn about stuff the more I become

the archetypal feminist like I feel like I don't want to shave I don't want to wear makeup I don't want to like there's a rebellion there's something in it where I'm like

actually it makes sense I understand why those women why that trope is there but feminists don't want to wear makeup I don't want to like there's a rebellion there's something in it where I'm like actually it makes sense I understand why those women why that trope is there but feminists don't this whole argument of like this is what a feminist looks like

and all this stuff is redundant because the argument that we should be having isn't about what we look like because that in itself is a patriarchal idea it's like

the women are fighting about what they look like again you know that's and we are perpetuating these concepts and the problem is they're so entrenched in us that we actually do all the things that the patriarchy says we do because we're told we do them exactly for so long yes exactly it's really well i also have this thing where i genuinely think that we are put into this because women are the women are the creators yes like women are the creators. Yes. Like, women are the ones that hold all the power.

So they've somehow gone into this really weird mindfuck. Like, we're in a toxic relationship with the patriarchy. Totally. Because they're distracting us so that we can't

take over the world. And it's like what Renny says in the book about people having this fear of, like, black people taking over white people. Renny talks about it a lot. And I'm like,

that is so true. It's like they're scared. I don't know why it's scary or why it'd be weird but like when she talks to Nick Griffin do you remember that phone call? Oh my god she interviews him and he basically says that he's like he basically says he's scared that there'll be more black people than white people and they'll like

take over. God that's so Hitler-y. Yeah. Yeah. It's. Yeah. It is. That is just Hitler. And it's like the whole... He's basically reincarnated. It's the whole thing. It's this fear of the other taking over and this is like the same thing with men. It's almost like...

He did not say that. Yeah, it's... Oh my God, I did. It's awful. That's so awful and scary. But, you know, when we... It all comes down to fear. Yeah.

It is all just fear-based and because women were... And from a... We are in a place of power. We just aren't aware of it. Patriarchal society has been very clever at taking our power away from us through manipulation. And the problem is when you say stuff like this, it's the same thing with the racist people, the racist men think you're being like.

I know. Oh my God, the patriarch is men, but it's not. No, because women. Because women are patriarchal as well. Exactly. So it's, it's, it's a way women are patriarchal as well exactly so it's a way of thinking like yes the interesting thing about I'm not saying I definitely am not saying

men because I'm not directing it at all men I'm directing it at some of the women not all men but this is what is really funny about racism which I've learned from the book is so true racism isn't at all about people of colour it's about white people it's about white privilege it's about keeping white people elevated and sexism isn't about women it's about keeping men in power it's always the same thing

it's about the oppressor staying dominant and they do that by stepping on the thing that they're trying to dominate which is the classic trope of anything and and the problem with with racism is to overcome it you have to see it and acknowledge it yes and then introduce other people to seeing it and so by making it hush hush shameful that can't talk about it exactly so i think some of the tips for like not that i'm like this i'm not giving your listeners tips no i'd like you to no but I think it's like from just to give perspective or maybe what because I look I have to do it as well um I definitely fall into the trap of facilitating or enabling racism to a degree you know growing up you know as a kid

and enabling my friends to call me curry or to call me your curry muncher or whatever it might be is enabling that racism so it is we need to make the conversation louder so that we can actually resolve it like if you harbor all these feelings about the differences between you and me and don't talk to me about them and don't try to understand my perspective because you're too scared to ask about race or call out the fact that i'm brown you're white then we're gonna have this issue of like never getting to the crux of the problem whereas if we both accept yes we're different colors yes we come from different backgrounds and you acknowledge the fact that yes i was or my my people whatever my race were marginalized then we can talk about it yeah and i can give you my perspective but what we were talking about was so funny as well as i hate

that it's black and white so i was was literally saying that, imagine you get on your, you know when you go on a colour wheel on your laptop? So you pick like brown, so you get the darkest brown, and if you just slide it up to the creamiest brown, that is the colour scale of humans. Like we're not white and black. No.

And the problem is, it's within inanimate things as well. It's like heaven and hell, white being clean, brown being, it's the connotations things as well like heaven and hell white being clean brown being it's the connotations that we attribute to everything

there is racism entrenched in every aspect of the world any piece of literature you read if you read anything there's racism

and the more you start seeing it you cannot escape it it's really scary yeah how much it's it's there and we were talking about

there was a woman who was it that wrote that Instagram post? The editor of Vogue? Elaine, oh, I love her. Elaine Whitworth? No, not Elaine Whitworth. Let me wait. Let's get her name. Elaine Welterer.

So I'm sure you shared this, Shona. You don't think you did, but I'm sure that you did. I didn't know that I did, but... Unless I saw that you liked it or something. And anyway, I started following her, and she wrote about the fact that people were commenting on the fact that Meghan Markle is biracial rather than saying that she is black

or, like, just generalising. And she was saying it's really positive that people are starting to realise that, like, biraciality is a thing rather than being, like, someone who's mixed race is black. Because the weird thing is, we default. If someone is mixed race, we call them black yeah you call them the color that they like the color the color rather than the whiteness right because if

I like it which is really strange so say you were like like me for example like you're Indian yeah totally no they don't they wouldn't be like you're white no they won't be like you're white no because it's like well you're definitely not which is so weird which is why people white people can't say they're colorblind because you're fucking not yeah you're just not yeah you know when you look at me you see that i have melanin yeah that's it but we were saying the problem the thing that's really really sad and it might be true the reason they pointed out that megan markle is biracial is to point out that she's in fact not all black she's got whiteness and that is so sad but when you start

reading the world like this from this view as sad as it is you start to pick up on things and i think it makes you able to the other thing right so one other thing you've got to not be scared of so i'm kind of going i'm trying to like get around this point is so i'm annoying when it comes to pc things in that i don't care about telling someone you can't say something. So something that a lot of our friends who sit at school is retarded when we're younger. Yeah. So if I meet someone and I'm talking to them and they say that's retarded, I will, without even thinking about it, go, I'm really sorry, you can't say that word. Oh, I thought you said you don't tell people.

No, no, no. I don't have any qualms. In telling people, don't say that. You can't say that. Yep. You shouldn't say that. If someone says that's gay, I'm like, Ims i will go you can't say that yep you shouldn't say that someone says that's gay i'm like i'm really sorry you can't say that and i'll try and think of like i'm like say that's stupid or that's ignorant or whatever but don't say that word yes and what people are scared of is when you know that they feel like it's always good to try and do that

and i know that it might sound scary but if you think someone's saying something that isn't right but i actually i don't think i'm not sure if you can say that maybe say something because that's always going to have a positive impact exactly but i feel like people don't do that enough because we're too scared yes but i will say something like if someone says something that isn't is that quite british is it quite british to be scared to say yeah i think you just can't i think because i think there's so many different levels of understanding and i think that a lot of it is people like but i'm not it's not malice so i'm not going to correct them because I know they're not being rude or I know they're not

saying that to be mean but it doesn't really matter what the intent is because they're using something which is a negative you know. So can I say like I have a really weird relationship with politically correct, being politically correct because I'm Australian. I do think it's because I'm Australian and in Australia there's

no like PCs I mean what does that even mean? So no one knows there's do think it's because I'm Australian. And in Australia, there's no, like, PC is, I mean, what does that even mean? So no one knows. It's really about breaking down the PC walls. And so the thing that I feel uncomfortable about with being politically correct is that, A, who defines this? But B, is that it creates this very uncomfortable situation. Censored. Yeah, it's censored

in it and it may so i've been in situations where um someone has been not politically correct in an audience of people that are politically correct and they have said something about me or me being brown or someone of color and made a racial slur against them right and what i have to say is that it made me i had to run away and cry it made me feel very uncomfortable because i was like oh all the politically correct people are feeling uncomfortable and feeling sorry for me that's what it made me feel like and you don't want to be and i don't want to be felt sorry for it's cool i'm a to be felt sorry for. It's cool. I'm a big kid. I can handle it. He's just being fucking racist. Do you know what I mean?

So it's like, this is where it's like very difficult. I see what you're saying. So you're saying that like, it's not about the words he's using. It's about the fact that he actually is being a racist. Yes, it's not exactly. It's down to the intent. It's down to the intention. So, but then I agree, you know, politically, being politically correct is about respect.

And it's about respecting how someone feels about it. So I agree that like you can't say, you know, oh God, I was so wasted and so retarded. Like that's messed up because you're associating something negative. Exactly. With something else, right? And same with gay. It's like if someone's gay, it has nothing to do with something being bad.

Stupid, yeah. Or stupid or whatever it might be so it does come down to the way the word is being appropriated but the thing i have i guess from a point of privilege or what i'm trying to do because i realized that i literally am in the one of the most privileged positions that i live in the uk from a middle class background i'm white cisgender like i literally couldn't get more lucky just on those basis, let alone the fact that the industry I'm in and there's so many things. So I'm like,

if there's one thing I can do, it's allocate the language and the way that I'm doing to make sure that I'm not offending anyone. That's true. So that's how I see it because my mum's like, you're too much

because I'll talk off. She's not being rude and also sometimes I'm a bit annoying so I get, but also from where I'm sat because I've started to do this on Instagram, I've cultivated an audience

of very, very politically correct people. So I once said something like, I was talking about being woke and then I found out that woke could be

cultural appropriation and so I looked it up and they talked about on the Guilty Feminist how woke was used to be used by like African American communities in America talking about like being woke to the police so technically we've

taken that word but apparently it's yeah apparently it's a different meaning though so yeah so it is but it is it's still translation i was like that's really interesting and then later on that same day i put something and i messaged a friend on instagram and she replied something and i put lol triggered and put it on my story. And then someone replied to me and went, you can't say triggered because that might affect someone who like it's annoying because we have actual trigger warnings. You're undermining the use of the word trigger. Yes, I used it once. I said OCD. Yeah.

And then someone wrote to me and said, I can't believe you're, what did she say? It really stuck with me because at first obviously my ego my back went up and then I was like no no actually that's so true because I've actually I've met I've actually worked with clients who were obsessive had obsessive compulsive disorder lots of people misuse that term

and they totally what do you call it people always say they use it for cleanliness trivialising oh right yes they do use it for cleanliness and it's not related and it's not related to that obsessive compulsive disorder it's just obsessive it's obsessive so it can it can manifest in so many different ways um right down to like needing to take your sock on and off yes 20 million times which has nothing to do with being clean exactly so yeah it's one of those things that where we trivialize certain things so what was

really funny was i have i then went and put their story up and i'm really sorry i didn't know this i just screened what the person said to me i was like this is interesting you guys might want to know that like triggering we probably let's not use this anymore yes and everyone's like oh that's pretty cool and then it's like oh that's cool that you said and i was like because it's just i just didn't know that and then so then people did that a lot and then this guy replied to me and he was like for fuck's sake why are these people like getting and I was like why are you annoyed like I I really I'm not offended by that am I a lot of you're not offended by someone telling no and I don't even think it's annoying because I think there's so many because usually it's words as well there are so many words in

the English language that you could use I just don't know why it's annoying and it's so funny that people are like i can't believe that i can't because for me out of everything you can do i just don't think it's a big deal and i find it really weird that it's like it's a point of privilege to be able to use like whatever you want to use anyway and if someone's insulted by something like why but then that's a very isolated thing though because then when it's political correctness in terms of actual conceptualising stuff or actually being able to talk around a topic at all, I found that I feel, even on Instagram,

like so censored. Right. Oh no, completely. And this is... Like you can't say anything. You cannot say anything because at some point someone is going to feel... Someone's going to disagree.

Completely. And so this is the problem some point someone is going to feel. Someone's going to disagree. Completely. And so this is the problem that we're sort of coming into. But I think that we're not going to know what offends someone until we are willing to say it and then get perspective.

So for example, if I am to say, this is something that I personally as a personal trainer have a lot of issues with, is when I talk about body shape or size. So I might say say something like even utilizing the word obesity now i can get in trouble for because it might offend someone because it's deemed as a derogatory word now

from a health perspective it's just factual it's just to me it's factual because i'm saying these are health markers that quantify what calls someone what makes someone obese now society has made that a negative thing i'm just talking about is a medical thing is a negative thing from a medical perspective right not from a beauty standard necessarily and so this is what i'm saying they need to not be conflated they need to not exactly positivity that like yes which i don't i literally said that and i went you're right you can't say it's problematic because basically anything that is championing something that is subjected or marginalized you cannot pick faults in it because you're like i want that to be

a thing like i want to help the marginalized groups which are fat people also the fact that you can't say someone is fat when it's true is very weird. We need to stop making saying like you are fat or you have fat shouldn't be any different from saying like your hair is blonde. It's just a fact. We really need to strip that weird. Yeah. Because you need to be able to talk.

It's basically the F word. It's like it's uncomfortable to say fat, basically. And that definitely needs to be broken down i think the issue is is that when you're a trainer and you're coming at it from a medical perspective or just a health perspective and you want to say something along the lines of and i'm just speaking from experience i want to say something like here's how you can lose weight or you can lose body fat or you can improve your body composition yeah which is what i have to say now i'm not ever talking about it from a beauty standard perspective because all shapes and

sizes are beautiful and the truth is is that all shapes they're not all shapes but you can be not all shapes hashtag not all shapes you can be healthy at a different shape to what beauty standards have defined yes right but there are definitely health markers yes if you fall below a certain weight or above a certain weight you're going to be impacting your health much in the same way you would be if you were smoking or exactly excessive drugs or anything else exactly so this so this is the issue i can't remember why we're talking about it i have to tell you i'm going to be really honest with you i'm sitting here um and i have like this little bit of anxiety about the response you're going to get to this podcast because i know that discussion on race really gets people's backs up you know i think

because it holds a mirror up so i i think this is what it's because i've spoken to people like family members about structural racism and i it the the immediate response initially is anger it's actual like i am not right it's an indignant defiance that they do not believe because people aren't intrinsically if i've learned anything people aren't bad people society in general aren't not everyone out there is a bad person but it's going it's basically going for the whole of your life however long you've been alive 20 30 years you've literally basically put a penny into this pot that is funding white power and and racism which no one wants to believe because that's painful and I can't I'm trying to remember how I reacted when I first read Renny's blog,

because when I read the book, I'd already kind of come round. Yes. But I think when I read the blog, I can't remember now. But I'm sure that when I read it, I would have been like, what the fuck? I'm not racist.

Yes. And it's that first, it's like swallowing a really big pill. Totally. Because what it is, is you've got to hold that mirror and go, oh my God, I am, I am not,

basically you are not just your actions, you're the absence of action as well. So that's the problem. Beautifully put. That's what it is. It's not what you're doing, it's what you're not doing and what you're not saying. Yeah.

So you could go through your life and be like, I'm not racist, I've never done a racist thing in my life, I've never been rude to a black person, I've never been rude to an Indian person, I've never done this. But you've probably also

never once been in a position where you've been like, I'm going to an Indian person, I've never done this but you've probably also never once been in a position where you've been like I'm going to platform this person because they haven't spoken or I'm going to, actually I shouldn't be in this place, why are there not more black people in my workplace why aren't there any black teachers why is there no one black doing this

why is there no one, or like and I'm also doing default black as well and I'm basically talking about like, no but you said Indian, you said Indian you didn't you gave us but you know that's awful because it's not just black and white either there's this massive scope in the middle exactly i was doing like default yeah default black but we know what you know what you mean but but renee talks about it as well where she got into the reason she sort of started to inquire about um questioning racism in general where she started to inquire about um black history in britain and um she did it with her and a friend um and her when her friend dropped

out she said something didn't sit with her and her friend was white and her friend said you know it just didn't you know i just didn't relate to it and that upset her because it was like but this bad stuff has happened it would be like do we not owe it to those people to understand it and that's something that even i i think that should come across i think even black brown puerto rican asian like we should all just whatever color race we are we should try to understand the history of our people, even if we're white or we're brown, because actually we owe it to those people who went through that stuff. But also, but especially white people. The weirdest thing is, we're stripping race away from it for a second, like, just decolour us, or whatever. No one, pretty much no one in the world is one, from one place which is why race is the weirdest thing

because like as I was saying like you're just not so like you said our people the fact that that woman girl wasn't interested in the history the black history was that because she knew that she was the oppressor or not she was but that white people were the bad

side of it is that why there's that indignation and lack of wanting to know i think there is that i do i i think there's definitely i find it hard you know when i when i watched um the power of one like wait i think i was like 19 i have trouble watching racial movies where they go into racism and i sit there crying and i just get angry because i'm like god i just end up really dehydrated about like colonizing when you think about everywhere that we've colonized and like everyone that we raped pillaged and killed like British people are the worst right like literally every and we think we're such a great mission and like it's not true right and

so it's very confronting and what I'm saying is even when I when I went back and watched um a few documentaries on indentured slavery from India um and my you know it goes into my family just you know really close actually my great-grandfather and great-grandmother um they were indentured slaves that had come to Fiji which was colonized by the British, to work there. And they were basically slaves. And when I was watching this, I felt such shame that I had shunted my culture so much that I really tried to push it away. That I was like, no, I'm not Indian, I'm Fijian. Or I'm from some, you know, I'd just kind of be like, I'm brown. I really tried to push it away because I felt such shame about my Indian heritage.

That it's like I understand why white people might not want to go back and watch it because for example, let's just say one of my exes, white man, he doesn't want to look at it because he's like well I didn't do it and i don't feel that way right but it's like i know you didn't do it but you have to try to understand you're a product of it you're a product of it so you have to try and understand out of respect and not even just out of respect but it is going to help eradicate racism as much as possible if we can all see the different perspectives it's the problem is that conditioning is even as a concept conditioning is so hard to explain because it's like you don't

even it's basically what you've got to realize is that you are not an individual in as much as you think that you are yes so what you're thinking is as much of your environment as it is your it's the nature natural thing it's we're both and you are a product as much as you are an individual being and you might think that everything you're doing is like an individual choice and it's really not because it's so much going to be governed by not just your parents but your parents are governed by their parents and it goes back and back and back and it really probably doesn't change like i think now but i bet everyone thinks this and i say sweeping generalizations like this and probably i'm so ignorant but i always think that now I'm feeling like a massive shift but I think this happens

actually in every generation yeah I guess it does yeah it probably do you know what I mean but I think it's like we're in it you're like yeah it's happening it's happening all around me yeah yeah exactly and I I don't know whether we you know I think every generation probably does go through a shift and that's the that's the natural progression of our human society is that we do have moments of liberation and like moments of awakening which is awesome um it's just like looking at like how veganism has come around you know what I mean looking at how we've treated animals for so long and trying to understand that more so that's been a huge huge shift as well I just think that we need to stop being afraid to talk about race i agree i just think it needs to be something that we do talk about and and you know the i did a post which

you saw um and it was referencing that renny quote that i read to you guys already but i basically said um do you guys think that there is enough diversity in the fitness industry or represented in the media in wellness and in health and fitness? And what was disappointing was that there were any no's. So a lot of people were saying, no, there's definitely enough. Basically, they were saying, no, there doesn't need to be any more representation or diversity. And that is sad in and of itself. And when I, just for the record, I can see whether you've clicked no or yes.

So I don't know whether you know this. So I know the people. And what is even worse is just that there was not a single brown, colored, Asian, different race, anyone else that had been marginalized in that no crowd it was all white people and then i had even direct messages saying um i would i had i'd experienced

reverse racism growing up i grew up in a black community and experienced reverse racism and or whatever it might be and it's like oh but like we talked about you can't have it and do you know what the other problem is because do you remember this whole idea of like tokenism so you'd have like yes the token black person or the token woman on a on a panel show whatever and i genuinely think that people believe that like having one person is enough is diversity exactly and diversity will only really exist when i can watch that all black cast film and not react and not react and not feel like it's all black women. And I was like, I just, it just wasn't normal.

Exactly. It was new to me. That's 100%. And that is when diversity will be normalised, when you can have anyone on the screen, like ableism as well is another massive thing. Yes. Like if you had, like,

when do you see disabled people? You don't, and they exist. It's that other thing that disabled people talk about. There's been a few campaigns about it actually where they say um we're not invisible because i remember being told as a kid don't look don't look don't look because children are so honest and they will certainly do this is the point it comes back to it again it's like we have to honor the differences and be okay with them and be able to speak about them but then still acknowledge that there is a human in there do you know what I mean it's like yes we can

all have children and children are learning and we should that's the point when you should go and you should be like yes they've got like a disability and this is this and go and speak to them the first time when I was little I was lived in the late district and I'd never seen a black person and the first time I saw a black woman I said to my mum there's a chocolate lady over there because I'd never

and I just assumed that she must be made of chocolate and my mum was like fuck what do I say like what do I do and I think the woman was just really nice and I laughed and thought it was funny yeah well I my mom always tells me the story about how I came home and said you look like poo horrible but I wasn't didn't mean anything no just like why do you why is your skin color the color of poo I also used to think and if only it were true that my breast milk would be caramel flavored and that white breast milk would be caramel flavoured and that white people's would be strawberry flavoured

because their nipples were pink and that mums gave chocolate so funny isn't that funny yeah so sadly

I think that's not true but I think we need a few more randomised clinical trials yeah to find out because we don't know because babies

aren't going to tell us this tastes like chocolate to be fair my sister made me drink some of that breast milk okay cool did it taste like strawberry i didn't have a very small amount see that's the problem i didn't do it straight from the boob it was like sadly no i don't really know i think it just tasted a bit like milk yeah what like cow's milk i can't really remember i haven't had cow's milk so long i had something with it the other day by accident did you and i was like yeah it's weird

and now when i have dairy yogurt because i do somehow if matt has it and i think it tastes so overwhelmingly of animal yeah really sort of like when you have goat's milk something and you're like oh and i can like and i'm like i like the texture of skier and like i'm like i love the texture of skier but i'm so he's having soy yogurt that I'm like... I am drinking from the teat of a cow. Yeah, I know, it's so odd, isn't it? And it's weird because all of these, like, feminism, veganism, anti-racism, I wish there was, like, a

positive for racism. Yeah, there isn't, is there? No. Humanism, that's funny. It's not, yeah. Yeah, but yeah, so all of those things, if you get, if you think about it enough if you were like not cognitively dissonant you would be a vegan feminist anti-racist because even veganism is very weirdly tied into um feminism equality equality for every being

and everything like that oh and we haven't touched on this but brenny talks about i quoted it i think in the last book i was actually about feminism and racism and the. Oh, and we haven't touched on this, but when he talks about, I quoted it, I think, in the last book, I was actually about feminism and racism and the reason why feminism and racism is so intrinsically linked, it's what I was saying, it's like, yes, women face sexism, but the most marginalised people,

the worst offending situation is racism. It is the worst because women, yes, we're degraded and we've got a high chance of being murdered and raped and all of these things women of color are prejudiced against so much worse but it's so much worse and we just just people of color in general have this history of absolutely awful yeah and like the child it's just it's really hard to even like articulate but no i think you articulate it

right if you if you if you are a feminist you should by proxy well the point is you cannot be feminist if you're not also pushing yes anti-racism because feminism has become uh a white middle class fight thing is is that even if it does come from middle class white women that's fine they just have to also acknowledge anti-racism please platform it yeah so tips homework yeah go follow women of color on instagram in whatever interests you have so even if you're sort of like whether it's fashion fitness you know beauty wellness even if it's especially if it's beauty like a lot of the time it's sort of like oh but i don't want to follow someone of color because they're going to be using different colored makeup but it's like no there's definitely beauty aspects that we can still relate to um that that need platforming if you are of color try to broaden I I had to do it

because I realized that I was following only white women as well yeah like all fitness women I really didn't know anything is so white though everything is so whitewashed, though. We just think white is the default. Like, it's so bad. I had to ask Grace. I was like, Grace, can you, like, tell me? Yeah, she's so good. Grace is amazing, but... This is why racism, you have to understand,

racism is all about white people. This is why, I know it sounds back to back, but it's all about white privilege. Totally. So, you know, it's one of those things where I'm so, even I'm sometimes conditioned to not be aware of it. So, this homework isn't just if you're white it's like actually anyone just try to diversify your following sorry who you follow yeah also i don't want to sound like because i every single day learns it's like the minute you start doing this you see it more and more and more

and more and i don't want to sound because there's probably people listening that like you literally have no idea what we're talking about like this is the beginning of my job i've only come to i only came to feminism quite late and like totally this is but same with me i think the last like four three four years and i've really and and even within that then in the last year to the last six months i've really started to like actually seek out things i've let things come to me and i would absorb them but now i actively try and find like an argument against something so i'll be like i I've really started to like actually seek out things I let things come to me and I would absorb them but now I actively try and find like an argument against something so I'll be like I for instance got really into Zadie Smith's argument about not wearing makeup because I'm a bit of

those aggy people and then I found this counter argument that were like actually makeup's so important in the trans community because trans women are murdered all the time when people don't when they find don't look feminine enough. This also comes down to, like, if you want to go further, like, why we have such binary ideas of what femininity and masculinity is and gender. And so it's a massive mind-filling everywhere you go. You'll go down another rabbit hole.

But there's always, I just think the best thing you can ever do is find something, if you just read Nosco, you like, and just try and find the counter-argument, because that's the hardest thing to get at the minute is to find an opposition. Even on Instagram, when I was saying about repeal the ape, like we were saying, there must be a huge number of people who are pro-life on Instagram. And the worst I got was people going, it's a bit controversial to say pro-choice on Instagram,

which I was like, no, it's not. But actually, I could could have i should have if algorithms weren't there have had a huge influx of people being like arguing with me yeah it's what i i think so i think at the end of the day and i agree with you like i am very new to going on a journey of understanding feminism even understanding you know race and racism is something that's very difficult for me as an australian it was something I never thought about until two years ago you know in London you know it was something I started to address because I realized that I would always bring up in every single conversation the fact that I was brown it was like I was trying to be

like hello elephant in the room I'm brown everyone is that okay it's cool I'm just telling you I'm brown I know you know I'm brown and I'm brown and it was just this thing where i really felt like i had to bring it up almost like i was trying to wear a weakness as my armor so it could never be used against yes so even though being brown is not a weakness but that's what i thought in my head that i'm just saying that i even this is a really shitty example but like um if you don't feel that good or feel a bit you're like oh my god i know i don't look very good yeah it's like doing it before anyone else can say it to you exactly like so you're like hey i've got a massive pimple yes oh it's something like that you know what i mean but imagine feeling that way about being brown every single day of your life and so

like and that is a good way to actually kind of understand how it feels so imagine every time i open my instagram to do a story and I was like check out my skin and arm brown do you know what I mean? it's so true so my manager who is an incredible feminist but also I want to say a racialist

it's not right there must be a word, should we invent one? yeah what could it be? but humanist sounds so perfect. Race file. Race of file. Right, because you know a file means to love. Oh, I didn't know that.

Because you know you have phobe and file. So this is... Yes, file. Race of file. Race of file? Sounds sort of semi-legit. Okay, so Campaign Live. Ethnic minorities should tell themselves that they are part of the solution. racophile sounds sounds sort of semi-legit okay so um campaign live ethnic minorities should tell themselves that they are part of the solution so sir john hegarty um this this whole

article um i need to probably like try and send you the next really incredible quote um and he talks about the fact that diversity is incredibly important, not just for our industry, but for the process of creativity. Creativity absolutely thrives on diversity. The more influences that come into you, the more incredible your work is going to be. Wherever you come from, whatever you're doing, wherever you are in life,

you've just got to keep saying that to yourself. And so he also says if you come from you know people talk about ethnic minorities this is a quote by the way i loathe that phrase i talk about ethnic essentials it's essential for creativity to have ethnic diversity what you've got to say to yourself is i'm a part of the solution and it's so i love that ethnic essentials it's so true it's like creativity stems from diversity 100% it's what he's saying and also the word minority in itself is derogatory it's it's subjugating it's going like yeah it's just going oh you're just a minor you're just a

side note yeah you're just a sideline you're a cute little minority how cute and it's so yeah it's really ridiculous and that's why it's so like the like this is what i'm saying language in itself is so powerful important you don't realize how many things i think it's really important to question the language that you commonly use and and it's something for everyone it's we all need to do it because like i said like i even was like using the term curry mancha for myself like announcing that that's what i was um and part of that was because i felt like i definitely deep down was not okay with that term and felt very uncomfortable about it but i would also bring it up and use it and colloquialize it the book when she's like black people can't talk about race because you have to make the white man

comfortable because the white man is the pace of power and she uses white man as the default to be like because also it's always the man in the default but it's like even if black person wants to talk about race the white person then feels uncomfortable and the white person is in the pace of power so you're like fuck i better not talk about it actually because i don't want to make them feel uncomfortable because they they could oppress me which is what i find very very interesting about the way that i'm feeling right now as we have this is that i'm nervous about the reaction not because i'm nervous that people are going to be saying you know whatever have their opinions about race but actually because i'm like oh shit i don't want to

make everyone feel uncomfortable like that's genuinely what i feel we should feel this is the point you should feel uncomfortable you don't want like i then sometimes get this white then you get white guilt right where you're like oh my god i feel fucking awful because i'm literally doing but that's not helpful no it's not helpful don't feel guilty be proactive totally and i think at the end of the day like this conversation that we're having this podcast is not so much about just going like it sucks and you guys suck you're not doing enough it's actually just much about just going like, it sucks and you guys suck and you're not doing enough. It's actually just like, let's all like,

what can we do? How can we start to just continue to facilitate this change and be proactive around? And just talk about it. Talk about it. Yes. Let's talk about it. Yeah. And get each other's perspective.

Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like, like, yeah. Like, yeah. Okay.

So coming back to last little bit of homework, um, because I'm conscious of my editing yes um is that um so i recently did this campaign with um sky sports and the women's sports trust um which was a campaign called show up and it's basically trying to create more awareness engagement um and i guess attendance at women's sports right this was yesterday so um because sadly there is less attendance in women's sports and they didn't want to make it a negative thing they didn't want to be like just like whinging like please

like come watch us you know you should come and us. It was more about sort of like bringing awareness around it and putting more representation of women in sports, trying to break down stigmas around sports people, like women that play sport as being masculine and not really fitting into femininity. So I think that we need to look at this from a positive perspective as well and rather than just seeing it as like you know we're complaining about what's wrong with the world it's like okay what can we do to show up and I think that's what I'm bad and it's hard not to do it is I keep I

don't know I think when I talk about things like this I do it from the wrong point you're right I'm I'm like look at what we're taking away whereas we should be like look at how we can add or make it better exactly so i think it's just about each of us acknowledging our our um responsibility so i know it's my responsibility to pay attention to my my heritage my culture and try to honor it as much as possible rather than shunting it away as though it's something to be ashamed of because that's something i definitely am trying to come to terms with um and speaking about it more i know that um following and listening to and reading um and watching movies and watching tv shows where there are different races and supporting that i mean we have to think about supply and demand right if we are demanding more diversity it's gonna look at it with vegan food like as a one thing like milk

alternatives last year or the year before you'd be lucky if you could get soy now if someone in front of me orders a coffee and doesn't ask for a milk alternative you're like that's weird so that demand has happened so quickly it could turn around they will produce it capitalism will go where the money is at exactly and if you're if you're gunning to see more racial diversity ableism whatever it is exactly less ableism sorry yes if you're starting to exactly if you're putting in the demand and that has to come from all of us not just the ones with privilege but have to definitely if you've got privilege in any way shape or form then utilize it have to utilize it yeah in the right way yeah yeah exactly so that's definitely one aspect to use it as leverage i think exactly and then if you have a platform like anoni like myself please

have conversations like this because you know we need to be having louder conversations around it we need to be and in from a positive perspective it doesn't always have to be negative just like you know we love following positive vegans that are like, look at this great recipe I made and it doesn't have any meat in it rather than you're a fucking bad person. And if you are a journalist or you have some kind of connection to media, please also be willing to give voices to those. I know that you want to give voices to those with big followings because of the readership value that you will spread with your magazines or your TV shows or whatever. But the truth is that we're going to evolve in such an amazing way as a society if we continue to increase diversity. Also, if you are a journalist and you're trying to get a new readership, you're not going to get a new readership by platforming the same kind of people. Exactly. are a journalist and you're trying to get a new readership you're not going to get a new readership by platforming the same kind of people exactly you might get a whole new percentage

um of people who are women of color or people who are disabled or whatever who are will suddenly be like oh my god this entity is providing information for me exactly and you will actually provide a great niche and even if it's solely for the purpose of capitalism like do it do it because you will there's nothing to lose by being inclusive exactly although they do get scared i know of um of doing that and then alienating those that are racist but we should be alienating those that are racist make them feel uncomfortable make them feel uncomfortable make them feel angry that you've always got a brown person on the, you know, whatever. Or like gay people kissing.

Totally. Make them feel uncomfortable. Yeah. Because then it's that discomfort that causes us to question ourselves. Any time that I've felt sad or angry about something, it sucks and I hate it, but it does make me become a little bit more self-aware. Yes. And so then I can decide.

So if you make someone feel uncomfortable by, you know, kissing another man in front of them, they then will question. Initially they'll be like, ew, or whatever they might say. Why do I feel uncomfortable?

Why do I feel uncomfortable? And they will hopefully question it. And that's where evolution comes from. Yeah, exactly. Or they'll go and protest about it, but it doesn't matter because we'll just shut it down. Anyway,

it's so good to talk to you. Where we follow you show that you can follow me on instagram showing it underscore virtue i have a book called the virtue method and i have a youtube channel that i release weekly workouts and yoga sequences that you can do um in your living room actually i need to actually start doing that as well i'm going to do that you're going to do some yoga yeah your yoga thank you so much for listening as always i would love to hear your feedback so you can leave reviews please do rate review and subscribe so other people find the podcast and you can follow me i never do this but i just remember that people are like who is this girl because everyone starts following my private girl that has 300 followers because this just says anony format people are obviously like that that's fine. So yeah, my Instagram is Anoni.

My name is Anoni, but it's spelled U-H-N-O-N-E. I don't know why I just did that, but just in case you want to find me. Everyone needs to find you. More people need to find you because, I mean, you have lots of people that have found you, but you're amazing. You're amazing and you're amazing the podcast you just heard was recorded with Anchor. If you want to make your own, download the Android or iOS app completely free from anchor.fm slash podcast. That's anchor.fm slash podcast. Can we unlock the power of nature to tackle microplastics?

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