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White people and people of color learn and grow in different ways due to their vastly different cultural and economic backgrounds. Therefore, leaders should know how to properly integrate antiracism approaches into their teams to ensure every member has equal opportunities to grow and thrive. In this episode, Corinna Bellizzi sits down with Janae Peters, co-creator of the Antiracist Development Group for managers of color. Janae explains how leaders can find the right affinity spaces where they can experience personal growth and fully understand intersectionalities affecting their decision-making processes. She also discusses how to avoid burnout when advocating for work equity, which is now in jeopardy with the DEI conversation being caught in a political firestorm.

About Janae Peters:

Janae Peters is an educator, high school administrator, and social worker, and brings all these lenses to her consulting work with Think Again Training & Consulting. Janae co-created the Antiracist Development Group for managers of color. Using frameworks that address the unique challenges of managers of color, this eight-week, small-group program provides space for learning, reflection, peer support, and action to explore how systemic oppression shapes leadership and develop strategies to disrupt patterns that uphold inequity.

Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janaeapeters/

Guest Website: https://www.linkedin.com/company/90517341

Guest Social:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/90517341

Show Notes:

• Janae Peters And Her Work With Managers Of Color – 02:12
• Why We Separate People Based On Skin Color – 04:08
• Frameworks In Janae’s Leadership Course – 11:37
• Addressing The Political Pressure Over DEI – 20:35
• Taking Some Time For Self-Care – 31:20
• More DEI Books And Podcast Recommendations – 35:17
• Collective Care, Meaning Of Hope, And The Roots Of Love – 37:36
• Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words – 46:53

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Embracing Antiracism Leadership With Janae Peters

We are concluding a deep dive on what has been a series, specifically on the shutdown of DEI programs and what it can mean to each and every one of us. Way back, I introduced you to Rachel Siegel, a DEI-focused consultant that I met in an anti-racist development group for White managers. I introduced you to Davey Shlasko. He’s the person responsible for founding Think Again Training & Consulting, the group that created that program.

In this episode, you’ll meet Janae Peters. She is responsible for co-creating another anti-racist development group for Think Again Training. This one is geared at managers of color. Janae Peters is an Educator, High School Administrator and Social Worker. She’s able to bring all of these lenses together in her consulting work with Think Again Training & Consulting. I’m thrilled to have her here and I hope you can join me in welcoming her to the show. Welcome, Janae.

Thank you. How are you doing?

Janae Peters And Her Work With Managers Of Color

It’s so nice to have you here. I love that you were able to be a fly on the wall in my interview with Davey. It gives you a little bit of context for the things that we are talking about, but I’d like to start each conversation with a moment from you to talk about your experience. What brought you to this moment?

I’m one of those people who experiences vocation. I’m a person who knew at four years old, before I ever went to school, for example, that I wanted to be a teacher. There’s a video of me and my mom saying, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I’m like, “A teacher.” She’s like, “You haven’t even gone to school yet.” I’m like, “I know,” but when I get there, I’m going to teach my brother and sister everything I learned at the big girl’s school. She’s like, “You don’t have a brother and sister.” I’m like, “But I will and I do.”

If you don’t have them biologically, you find them another way.

I did end up having a brother and sister. They are twins and they came a year later, but I have experienced a vacation. I’m a person who, at every turn, has felt called to be in different places, spaces and with different movements and organizations. I’d say for this moment, for the managers of color cohort in particular, I have lived a life that has been centered around the inquiry around what will support someone who looks like me and who is from where I’m from in experiencing authentic and creative, even growth and leadership like in the places where we are not designed with me in mind and weren’t designed with my growth or my success in mind either.

I have, at different terms of life, sought learning opportunities, sought community, sought cohorts and affinities. Anything that would support me in learning about myself, learning about my needs as an employee of any sort, but particularly as a leader, and in thinking about what it looks like to support others in that process in a way that honors all of our thusness and doesn’t require us to limit or not engage some aspect of who we are as we do that now.

Why We Separate People Based On Skin Color

I have heard many people ask the question, “Why should you necessarily separate a course like this that’s cohort-based between people of color and White people?” I want to hear your perspective. I have my own, too.

I’m happy to share. I think that they have different needs and require different structures. There’s a lot of time where my learning and growth are in a mixed space. How do I get to this moment? The last piece I named around without giving up some aspect of who I am is part of the reason that affinity spaces or a space that does not have White people in it are a little extra important.

What I find is that when I’m engaging spaces where White people are, it’s either I have to make some key decisions. It either assimilates in some way to where you are, to the needs of the place, or to what people say is the philosophy of the space, which was not designed for me. It might be a place where I can make an offering and people are like, “That offering is beautiful. We are going to shift our space,” but more often than not, that’s not the case.

The decision is for what I have learned over time, what I have experienced over time is not that I can’t grow in spaces that have White people. It’s that my needs are often not met in that space because the dominant voice and perspective is there. When I enter a space not centered around the dominant perspective or voice, I’m in many ways feeling seen in this way, in ways that I didn’t before. There are different aspects of my identity. For me, race is a very salient aspect of my identity. One of my identities is targeted as opposed to a more privileged identity.

When I’m in spaces that are made for women, that is also a different experience for me than when I’m in mixed-gender spaces. For race in particular, there is so much to do with the historical context of how we have come to be and to exist in even the spaces where we are that I have found that affinity spaces are one of the few spaces where my shoulders move from here to here. It’s not like I don’t have to worry that I’m representing everyone who looks like me or is from where I’m from.

I don’t have to worry about what they might be thinking or might be holding about me and my race. It’s a space where I get to exist outside, both in a big way inside my race but also outside of my race. The other things that trouble me get to surface more because I’m in a space with other people who have a sense of or understand it, even if it’s in a different way.

A lot of people understand the value of leadership development. I don’t think that that’s lost on folks, but one of the things that I recognized pretty early on was that there is personal and professional growth that comes with leadership development. I think of it in terms of the dominant perspective. A lot of folks from the dominant perspective who are White, everything that’s around them in a lot of these spaces is encouraging their growth. They are feeling seen in other people who look like them, other experiences, and even sometimes my experience. Whereas for me, I can engage a lot of professional growth in mixed spaces, but the personal growth is a little different when I have had the opportunity to be in an affinity-based cohort with other folks of color.

The value of leadership development is not lost on people. They know personal and professional growth come with it.

The other thing that you haven’t clearly brought up is that when you are participating as a part of a cohort, you are there to learn and share. If you were mixed into a group like the White development group that I was a part of, an anti-racist development group, you might have to shift a little bit into that teacher seat or that people have in my seat may be an expectation that you would share your experience in another way. Now, you are in a space of educating me about what your experience is as opposed to being in this space of shared learning.

That’s the shoulder dropping, so I don’t have to be on and ready again and representative and educating. I can learn and even though I’m participating.

Not having to code switch the same way. As another example, you feel you can show up as your more authentic self. Not to say that you would be inauthentic. That’s not my impression, but it’s different. You come at it from a space of almost that responsibility sharing of your experience rather than that open learning space.

That’s the first step. We should acknowledge that we experience things a little bit differently and that you would want to create different spaces for each group to get the most out of these activities. What I found as a part of the anti-racist development group was that still, sometimes, people were careful about what they might share about their experience in a racialized environment because it’s even hard to confront simple things like I might have chosen to learn to speak French as opposed to Spanish in high school, and part because there’s this indoctrination that occurs in our culture that sees this group as somehow less.

European languages. Learn French, German, or Italian. That’s somehow, but because Spanish and California are especially associated with Mexico, there was judgment around that. I was also the daughter of a man who married a Brazilian woman and she spoke Spanish and Portuguese and I didn’t like her very much.

It’s always interesting how our biases.

No, I’m going to learn French.

I’m going to do anything that you are not doing.

That was probably more the motivator, but I have had for these stretches of time, even this confrontation like you look at translation of languages. If you are looking specifically at language, as an example, you take a paragraph in English and you translate it to French and often the French is longer and you take that same paragraph and you translate it to Spanish and often it’s shorter.

It’s because there are different ways to construct the language to describe things, and it doesn’t mean it’s better or worse that one’s longer or shorter, but you almost have this: “The French language is so beautiful.” “I think Spanish is beautiful too, and now I’m trying to learn it,” in protest of Trump trying to remove the second language from everything that we see out there. I’m developing more friendships with Spanish-speaking people from Mexico and from other spots around the globe with intent even.

It’s what we need.

I’m putting energy into those spaces because it’s important. If I’m going to be a better anti-racist, as one example, this is one way I can do that, like learn to speak in another language that a dominant part of our immigrant population speaks Spanish as a first language. Perhaps a little bit of a trek off the mainframe here, but I wanted to share that.

Frameworks In Janae’s Leadership Course

I understand that you use specific frameworks as part of this program that address the unique challenges that managers of color experience and the workplace and beyond because it’s both personal and professional development. There’s no way to tease these out from one another in many cases. Talk to me a bit about that. What are these structures, and how might people learn more about them if they are considering taking a course like this?

We had so much fun creating this, like what you talked about, with your intention of expanding language skills in Spanish and understanding the cultural context of that. We did something similar when trying to bring this cohort’s work to life, and one of the things that we often understand is that leadership and even great leadership, like what you were saying about it’s longer, so it must be better, it must be beautiful.

There are ways that people think about leadership and leading that are so rooted in these antiquated measures for skills. It’s like if someone is authoritative or if someone strikes you as the expert of experts, if they can say more about it, then we are like, “I must trust this person. They have got it. They are leaders.” It’s not necessarily the people who include everyone’s ideas and perspectives, the folks who demonstrate care and support.

There’s a way that people have come to think about leadership that is also grounded in the dominant perspective, and we use the language of White supremacy culture, which is again this authoritative, like if you lay down the hammer, then you must be a good leader. It was beyond intentional. It was essential for us to ground the work of the cohort in liberation frameworks.

In theories that are understood, there’s a history of oppression and the need for liberation in so many parts of our world, and our understanding of different cultures and how those cultures came to be. Our understanding of the wisdoms that have come from the different ancestral knowledge, the wisdoms for how to be in community. All of those things are knowledge and technologies that can help us more authentically engage leadership. This is probably connected a little to what I said. I’m a person who would never, on my own terms, have said, “I want to be a leader,” but I’m a person who demonstrated leadership skills in whatever role that I had, and then people will say, “You are a leader.”

Teaching is leading and this is the thing. We don’t necessarily put them in the same spot.

It’s like, “You should be the leader,” or, “You know what’s going on so tell us what to do or where to go.” One of the things that we have been mindful of when we think about leadership development is the role of self-awareness, community, conflict, and feedback, as well as all of those things and how they impact us from our racial lens and our different intersectional lenses. It doesn’t impact me racially.

Leadership impacts me because of my gender as well as everything that comes with that. It impacts me because of other intersections of my identity. I grew up in a very Christian mindset. People don’t always understand the role that religion plays in our understanding of leadership or what we have seen in leadership in our different churches or synagogues.

Gender roles, too.

Also, on how we understand who does what, who’s responsible for care versus who’s responsible for knowledge. We have taken all of this and thought about liberation in particular as it supports our understanding of systemic oppression and historical oppression and also using frameworks that help us understand our intersectionalities and how that impacts both our understanding of what is expected of us and our understandings of what’s possible for us in different contexts and situations that we use.

We must understand our intersectionalities and how they impact what is expected of us and what is possible for us in different contexts and situations.

Bringing that all together into the goal is to bring it because it’s our first cohort. To bring it into our awareness in a way that supports us in creating an actual leadership action plan that folks can come out with as a tangible thing to take with them as they are assessing on their own terms and with the support of their employees and communication the way to assess for yourself how leadership is going from a more informed and more grounded understanding of leadership theory.

I’m in my PhD program for sustainability education and one of the things we often touch on is the need to consider a course, especially one like this, as being active and open to change. As we talked about in the beginning of our conversation, sometimes somebody can show up with a new perspective that might or maybe they have recommended an article or a book that could change how you are leading the course.

The course itself is dynamic, and when you have a cohort-based experience where people meet weekly, each person brings something unique to that session, and you learn together. It’s a sustainability education and action but in a leadership framework. It’s what it feels like. That’s what my experience was.

That is so key. There’s a way of understanding knowledge and knowledge transmission that is about receiving, too, like someone speaks to me. I received the knowledge and now I have it. That is my experience of a lot of leadership development situations, and so someone saying, “I’m the best leader.”

“Read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and then do this exercise.”

For us, it’s, “Let’s think about this together. What have we learned so far? How do we take some time at every point to share about ourselves, share about our knowledge and wisdoms and combine these to highlight that there are so many expansive ways to engage us.” That’s at the root of what we are offering. I have had many experiences of people who are folks of color who enter leadership positions and feel so out of place, and it’s more than not being equipped. I think it’s not having an understanding of this larger context that’s around them and how they can navigate it.

Some of the work of this cohort, too, is expanding people’s senses of their skillsets, their possibilities and also expanding their network for problem-solving, for understanding different ways of doing things. One of my favorite things in my world, I have been an administrator for several years. One of my favorite things is a group chat with other friends I started off teaching with, who are also mostly administrators at this point or have had leadership positions.

When we are going through something in our schools or in our spaces, we go to that group chat and say, “Has anyone dealt with this? Has anyone seen this before? Am I missing something in how I’m thinking about this?” That’s a mixed group of folks, but I can say for sure that there aren’t a lot of people whose next mode is to share and gather understanding from my network.

A lot of people, because of some understanding of dominant perspectives in leadership, might instead try to keep it to themselves or handle it themselves. What we are trying to do is expand problem-solving processes. We are trying to expand folks’ prowess and experience of change theory and understanding of what it looks like to bring intention to change and growth processes for whole organizations as we think about things like equity, access, and inclusion, as much as the world wants us not to say some of those words.

We are going to go there. This is the next part of the conversation I feel like we need to talk about.

As we think about what that requires of us, that’s a lot of what the cohort is working to do. How can we get equipped to hold these larger complex processes while understanding what our strengths are, what our growth edges are, what the intersections of our identities might mean for how we are received, and what our approach might be?

We are doing all of that while creating a strong peer network, and the goal is to have something that they can always return to both like in each other and what’s created through our work in that space like in our discussions in our canvas, whatever the things are. I have something tangible that you can return to as you continue to grow, develop, and hold more evolving change processes as our world continues to evolve.

Addressing The Political Pressure Over DEI

I took this version for White leaders through the election season and election day and as you shared, you could have things come up that are affecting you and you are coming together as a group. I would say that the course itself was also therapeutic because we came together to voice our concerns with what was happening with the incoming Trump administration worries that we might have about things like funding disappearing from education.

There were teachers in our cohort who are professionals who work in DEI. There were all sorts of individuals that are connected to public programs that might be threatened, and so a lot to worry about, frankly. There is this movement to scrub all of our websites that are government-related of anything connected to DEI of removing language even related to gender basis and women from research that is funded by the NSF to halt that kind of work.

There are a lot that is threatened, some of which we knew to expect and some of which is already showing is more extreme than what we thought would happen, especially this early in the Trump administration. I wonder if you could share anything about how this particular cohort or future cohorts might help people even position their thinking with regard to the political challenges that are affecting us in and outside of the workplace.

This is a question for you. I don’t know if you are covering this in the sessions or not. One of the most important tools that I have learned over the course of my leadership career is boundary setting. Especially if you are talking about owning your own time and how much work you do outside of work hours and how willing you are to interface and the off hours and how there’s this mission creep into your personal life, a lot of which you might not be paid for and which is expected. I wonder if you could comment on those two things and then I’d like to see where the conversation takes us from there.

It’s always so interesting to me. This is my own thing, but I remember that early in my career, people kept asking if I wanted to be a DEI professional, like in multicultural affairs. I kept saying, “No. I’m going to still do the work but I don’t need it to be called that.” I say that, but it is important to name things what they are and that’s the thing that’s happening right now. They are trying hard to take away our ability to name something for what it is. I have a very logical, very practical brain. What is most confusing to me at this moment is what folks are calling DEI, I don’t even recognize. I’m like, “What do you even think DEI is?”

I have been seeing a number of practitioners who are saying, “It’s much better when you get them to say the words instead of saying DEI.” Say, “I’m tired of diversity, equity and inclusion,” which I don’t think most of them know those are the words they are saying when they say DEI. What they are saying is, “We are worried. We are beyond worried that we have to switch up this whole thing because we feel like White people, White men, aren’t getting their fair shake and things and it’s all because of this DEI.”

It feels like they are layering on it. I was an English Lit major in undergrad, but you are taught early on that your analysis doesn’t come from up top. You don’t say, “Here’s my thesis,” and then find all the evidence that supports your thesis. That’s confirmation bias. What you do instead is do the work of bringing the ideas out and from the ideas you name what your thesis or what your argument is.

One of the things I have thought a lot about this particular moment in time is that what we are being forced to respond to is the fear that a few people have that they are irrelevant, that they won’t exist, and that every single thing that has happened over the past few decades because I will say like people talk about George Floyd as a big moment for DEI rising. I would say the work had been happening for a long time before, even for that moment to happen, but what they are saying is we fear that we are not.

What it reminds me of is 1870. It reminds me of reconstruction in those times. When you read about that stuff, it’s a very similar playbook. It’s not something that people haven’t seen before. I will say that in our cohort, part of the way that we know to address these kinds of things and part of our layout starts with our why and our purpose.

I find that in these times, especially early on in January 2025, the singular disheartening thing for me was seeing people’s sense of purpose like the rug was taken from under them. There’s something about purpose. There’s something about understanding our strengths and understanding the barriers. That’s how we are starting our cohort, and I think that the way we are running our sessions are good ways for folks to stay strong and create our stalwart defenses in other parts of our worlds, too.

Acknowledging our whys, naming our strengths, also naming the barriers and constraints that are ahead of us. We have the second session. I’m pretty sure we called the next two sessions Building Liberatory Leadership and Building Liberatory organizations. In that sense, we have an individual reflection and focus on navigating and transforming systems, and then we move next to an organizational action focus.

We acknowledge that a lot of the work starts with our own awareness, our understanding of our strengths, our lanes, where we have impact, and our locus of control. We then move out to our organizational and action focus from our individual and reflective focus. We use the language. We keep thinking about leading for justice, what it looks like to embody equitable leadership in action.

A lot of the work regarding equity starts with our own awareness and the strengths of our lanes.

I don’t have to call my work equity work in order to make decisions that are equitable. I don’t have to call my work justice-promoting work in order to bring intention and make decisions that are justice-oriented. That’s the first half of our work together because we are doing eight sessions. The next half we start immediately with rest, joy, and sustainability.

I love that you are getting your PhD in sustainability practices but rest, joy and sustainability, and we start to think about what it looks like to cultivate the kinds of practices and skills that support and work our longer-term leadership and ability to hold these processes, and then we’ll move into visioning. Part of these executive orders, part of what anything that tries to tamper progress does is it tries to take away our capacity to vision, to dream and to design. Those are things that I would always argue. The hardest for people to take away from you unless you let them and I and let them is a light term. I know that so much is happening to people that are feeling hard right now.

When I say let them, I mean like I’m going to keep visioning, dreaming, and designing for a liberatory future regardless of what’s happening in these years as hard as they might be. I’m attending to them. I’m using my locus of control to figure out what my lane is, how to act, how to contribute to movements, and how to strategize. I’m doing all that, but I’m also still visioning and designing, so I’m ready when the tide turns yet again. In my actions, I’m anticipating a change in the tide and I’m hoping, I’m hopeful and embodying hope that not only in concept but in action that I’m dreaming of a liberatory future.

For our final session we have what we call collective leadership in action. To me that is one of the biggest reminders that nobody does this alone. It’s like personal and community-based planning. It’s where in the final session we’ll strategize, plan, and remind people of the rest, joy and sustainability, like all of those things and send them off in that key way.

I do think that this is in alignment with the way the world is working. We are talking about this for leadership, but this planning and these kinds of sessions are also key for getting through everything that’s happening and the deluge of how it’s coming at people because it’s meant to throw us off kilter. It’s meant to support us and not feel grounded and centered. This is also a good model for continuing to work through, strategize and dreaming even in these moments that are feeling, I would say, beyond dark and that the deluge that we are experiencing.

I have been thinking in pictures a bit. As I listen to you, I like to connect to a metaphor of some sort. If we think of it as, let’s say, traversing a sea. You are going somewhere. Your vision is of landing on the shore on the opposite coast somewhere. A storm comes through, sometimes, you have to throw the anchor out and wait it out.

Sometimes the wind dies out and your sail you are left adrift and you’ve got to wait until there’s the next wind to pick up. We are affected by natural systems, and we are affected by political systems, but if we are able to keep an eye on the things that are in front of us and within our locus of control, then we can protect our mental health and we can also prepare for that next phase like you are talking about.

Taking Some Time For Self-Care

When it’s time to tack so you can continue to sail across the seas, when the right winds come and the storms start, you’ve got to be ready for it. I love all of that, and taking some notes here, the fact that you talk about this period of reflecting on rest, joy and sustainability. This is essentially self-care. It’s mental health care. It’s ensuring that you are taken care of so that you can show up and do the work.

You talked about it in terms of boundaries. It’s like what you were saying, what are the recommendations for the boundaries that you keep? All of these things are connected especially to sustainability. I wish that earlier in my career, I had listened to everyone around me who was talking to me about the boundaries.

I remember my first-year teacher. I was 21, fresh out of college, working at a boarding school. I remember one of my first colleagues who lived in the dorm as well with his wife and two kids. I remember him saying to me on the first night that I was there, “You have to take time for yourself because this place is going to take everything that you give it.” He is like, “No one’s going to tell you to stop once you have offered it. You have to take some time and do you and not be connected to what’s here.”

That did not mean anything to me at that time, but it wasn’t until years later I was like, “I feel burnt out. I need to take some time for myself.” In leadership development, what I love about boundaries and this is still connected to locus of control. I feel this in all of my intersections. As a Black person and as a woman, I don’t know if people consider me young anymore. I’m at the mid-range. I’m several years into my career. Especially when I was 21, 25, 27, I wish that my 30-year-old self, the self that figured out how to do that if you don’t send that email at 11:00 PM. That’s okay. Tomorrow is still going to come.

I’m approaching 50, and I still have that voice in my head that says, “I have got to do it now.”

What happened for me is I learned in my body and in leadership and through cohorts and all these spaces that what I have been doing was trying to create wellness practices on top of work what I have learned over time and what I share with anyone, any mentee, anyone who will listen to me is that it’s wellness is what’s central and we plan everything around that.

The way you know that is what happens when you get sick and you figure out what was most important all the while. I look back to people like Bell Hooks when she wrote Sisters of the Yam and talked about this very thing like this sustainable practice of wellness. More than that, I look at the number of women and women of color, in particular in my experience, who have gotten unwell in their work and who have sacrificed so much.

I was like the give, give, give. At different points, we have a lot of capacity to give. That capacity does change as our wellness changes and we don’t always honor that. One thing that’s important to me in this particular cohort for managers of color is getting people to stop and think about where wellness, rest, joy and sustainability are.

For me, sustainability is wellness and it’s not sustainability so that you can do the work. It’s wellness generally because if I am well and you are well, then the work that we do is already going to be different. The work that we are able to hold is already going to be different because it’s coming from a different place and a different energy.

There’s something that’s deep in this cohort that, again, I find it to be true for a lot of women and other folks with other marginalized identities, and then when you have that extra intersection of being a person of color in these spaces, in these organizations not designed for you, there’s this extra layer of the need to have a tight boundary around what’s in your control, around your wellness.

More DEI Books And Podcast Recommendations

As you may remember from being a fly on the wall, in my last interview with Davey, we talked about the breeding list that I’m building specific to these topics. I have not read Bell Hooks’ Sisters of the Yam. I will add that to the reading list for certain. We have several here that are the best reading for anybody interested in this type of work, including two books by Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism. White Supremacy Culture, which is both a website and also a book.

Adrienne Maree Brown’s Holding Change is also phenomenal.

I will add that one in. I’m enjoying her Emergent Strategy. I’m on my second reading of it.

Another one I would recommend is two authors and I’m not remembering the second name and I’m so sorry, but Mariame Kaba’s Let This Radicalize You.

The other one that we read for this course was Me and White Supremacy, which I thought was well done, too. I have a list of podcasts as well. I don’t know if you have a favorite that you’d like to add that you think is supportive of this type of work.

I have not been good in the past several years of listening to podcasts.

Collective Care, Meaning Of Hope, And The Roots Of Love

That’s fine. We have Code Switch, 1619, Octavia’s Parables, Seeing White, and Mother Country Radicals, all of which are great, and Octavia’s Parables, a science fiction author, but she also has several books that are fun reading in general. That’s wonderful. As I sit back and reflect on our conversation, I would love for you to offer before we wrap your perspective on where we are, what is keeping you hopeful and perhaps what you are visioning, dreaming and designing.

You talk so much about what this course will do for people, and I know you’ve spent a lot of time deep in reflection as you prepare for a course like this and bring a cohort in. I think we need hope. Even hearing from someone like yourself who’s leading one of these groups, what’s working for you? What is making you hopeful or where any silver lining might be?

One of the things this moment is calling for, and I can’t stress this enough, is collective care. This is not something that any one of us can get through on our own. When even about this cohort, there are four of us who worked to co-create this and we needed that perspective. We needed that accountability with each other. We needed that care of and for each other in order to create this and to have perspective while thinking about what we are building out for others.

All of that is connected to where I experience hope. I told you I’m a very logical and practical human, so hope for me is not a super dreamy or a super abstract thing for me. It’s a very practical thing. I experience hope in seeing people responding, engaging, learning, loving, caring, and trying to figure out what to do in their different spaces.

I’m also a student of history and I see that I’m not a person who gets worried about when there’s conflict and strategy or approach. I think that there is room for all of us. I think historical lessons tell us that when people have believed that there is one right way, which we name in different spaces as a White supremacy culture practice.

There’s no one right way and that keeps me encouraged because I see people. The more people create spaces where they understand their strengths, understand how they can be creative, how they can dream, I get encouraged that somebody’s strategy, somebody’s way or a combination of those ways are going to get us through these moments, and that does on a practical level keep me encouraged.

The ways that I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming in an embodied sense. It’s something I have been a very practical and logical person. I am good at intellectualizing, which can keep my brain and nervous system calm, but I often try to challenge myself to feel beyond intellectualizing. It’s a practice I have. The ways that I have been dreaming is by trying to be my more creative emotional self.

I do a lot of work on poetry. I’m creating a book of poetry that’s about the roots of love. It’s me examining my relationship, but in a long-term relationship with my partner, and examining the roots of Black love, like what it means for two Black people to come together and decide intentionally to love each other. The histories that make that possible and challenging the joys that come out of that. It’s an examination that is helping me feel through and be my more loving, caring, open, and expansive self.

That practice helps me in my supportive young people, graduate students, mentees, and other folks who look to me for advice and thought partnership that dreaming for giving myself space to create and dream is helpful. I have been trying to do a lot more art, and these are not modes that I operate in with what I feel is expertise, but they are modes that are helping me examine my needs. There are modes that are helping me dream and they are helping me to continue to imagine.

I was affected by Ruha Benjamin’s book Imagination, and in that one, Dr. Benjamin talks a lot about what happens when our creativity and our imagination is taken from us. I think that that’s what we are being shocked into, and I’m resisting that with everything that I have. I see other people doing it, too, and that keeps me hopeful.

You are reminding me of a point I made in a reflection on reading for my sustainability education course, and the prompt was something to the effect of, “Why is the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion programs or why is a supremacist culture problematic?” The same question offered two different ways. I came forward with sustaining a supremacy culture, whether it be White supremacy or supremacy based on finances, and the two things are pretty tied together with colonialist principles and capitalistic society. We are in it. That creativity is basically the first thing to go.

It’s because when we start to operate from perspectives of fear, from what I must do, getting trapped into smaller and smaller ways of being, that our collective creativity suffers. I feel like there’s an innate truth to this. We can’t as a species succeed in doing something until we can imagine it. If we can open our minds and imagine a world that is more fair where we aren’t led by oligarchs and we are billionaires and coming trillionaires essentially lead everybody else, and we are essentially then living in indentured servitude, which is what happens when you have this vast inequity take hold in a society.

We have been living in denial for a long time in the United States, like many people thinking that racism doesn’t exist or that we don’t live in a caste system. All evidence points to the fact that we do. It is getting us to embrace that creativity and move through art because, as you pointed out, you don’t have to be an expert at painting to express yourself in it.

My very first episode of this show was an interview with the Founder of Love Without Borders for Refugees in Need. Kayra is a personal friend of mine. I brought her on to talk about what she was doing for refugees from Syria, specifically in Aleppo Grace, where many people were coming over and trying to find refuge.

She created a program specifically about the arts that would enable children and adults alike to get a little bit of training in art, to be able to express themselves and then take this art and show it around the world, both digitally because we hit COVID but also having like gallery showings and then sell those pieces with the money going back to the people that created it to help them get on their feet. It’s a beautiful program.

One of the things that she noted was that she had children who had become non-verbal from the trauma that they’d experienced and then they’d start initiating through art and then suddenly be able to begin speaking and engaging with people again. The power of art to help you in a time of emotional difficulty or need can’t be discounted. Engage in music even if you are not great at it. Sing, produce art, paint, sculpt, or whatever it is. You’ll be surprised at what it can give back to you. I love that you are writing a book of poetry and when you are ready to publish it, I hope you’ll come back and talk about it.

I will. Thank you.

If you have any closing words, I will offer you the floor now, or perhaps if you have a question you wish I’d asked that I haven’t, you could ask and answer it.

I try to always have questions, but there’s not one expressly coming to me. The call that I have for everyone is one that might seem a little out of alignment with everything that I have said so far, but I have a strong mentor, someone who’s mind and heart, I deeply value, who always says that we are at our best when we are giving from a place of abundance rather than a place of what they call raggedy.

This world is trying to make us raggedy. It’s trying to run us ragged, and so let’s keep imagining, keep visioning, keep people around you who support you in that and as you do other work too, but it is still possible to be working from a place of abundance and wellness and imagination. That’s the thing that I hope folks remind everyone in their circles and their collective care communities that it’s still possible and it’s what we are being called on to do.

It’s beyond what you must do. You must think about what’s possible too. Thank you so much for joining me, Janae.

Thank you for having me.

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Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

To find out more about Janae Peters and Think Again training, please visit their website. We have direct links to their social media and website, including additional resources that we discussed. This includes direct links to the past two episodes of interviews with Think Again Training’s Founder, Davey Shlasko, and Rachel Siegel of Towards Liberation.

I hope that you’ll join our mailing list. This will ensure that you are the first to find out about new episodes like this. I only send one a week and for every person who joins our mailing list, I am planting a tree. Thank you for being a part of this show and this community because together, we can do so much more. We can care more, we can be better, we can stay in our creative minds and do great work that moves us towards liberation. Thank you.

Important Links

• Why DEI Matters And How To Save It With Rachel Siegel Episode
• Why DEI Matters And Dismantling White Supremacy With Davey Shlasko Episode
• Janae Peters on LinkedIn
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• Sisters of the Yam
• Emergent Strategy
• Pleasure Activism
• White Supremacy Culture
• Holding Change
• Let This Radicalize You
• Me and White Supremacy
• Code Switch
• 1619
• Octavia’s Parables
• Seeing White
• Mother Country Radicals
• Imagination
• The Power of One, With Kayra Martinez, Founder of Love Without Borders for Refugees in Need
• Towards Liberation
• Think Again Training & Consulting on LinkedIn
• Why Should White Leaders Develop Antiracism Skills in Affinity Spaces?