How do we untangle the web of systemic racism and inherent bias that are deeply etched into our society’s fabric? How do white individuals fit into this dialogue, and more importantly, confront their roles in perpetuating or combating racism? All of these big questions might sound daunting, but we’ve got answers that will put the wind back in your sail.
Join me and my guest, Jen Mayer, founder of Becoming Better Together, as we dig deep to answer these pressing questions.
Jen unpacks her journey of introspection, the importance of acknowledging and embracing mistakes, and how people, especially white individuals, can learn to be true allies.
Tune in to find out what your role is in combating racism, without being performative—straight from the heart of a real visionary in racial justice.
Important Links:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenmayersandoval/
https://www.becomingbettertogether.com/the-collective-3
https://course.becomingbettertogethercoaching.com/video-series?r_done=1
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nonprofitlowdown/support
Episode Transcript
RHEA 0:00
Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown. I’m your host, Rhea Wong.
Hey podcast listeners, Rhea Wong with you once again with Nonprofit Lowdown. Today, I am speaking with one of my favorite people on the planet, Jen Mayer. She is the founder of Becoming Better Together, and she’s going to talk today about how to unfuck yourself as a white person. Jen, welcome to the show.
JEN 0:33
Thank you for having me, Rhea. It’s wonderful to be with you here.
RHEA 0:33
I am so excited. You’re a second time podcast guest, but you’ve got some interesting things brewing. Before we jump into all the things, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re doing with your company.
And. What is this thing that you’ve got going on?
JEN 0:48
Becoming Better Together is a collective of incredible consultants, coaches, and just humans who are trying to help organizations create more humanizing workplaces that are more effective. We Came together about eight years ago, and it is truly a collective meeting that we put a body of work at the center of a table.
It’s a virtual table and all come around it and try and figure out how we can be in best service of that work. And so it’s a little bit of a different model for consulting. But it tends to work pretty well. We are a intentionally interracial and intersectional group of people in large part because the world doesn’t expect to see that and.
To really create humanizing spaces, we need to interrupt the predictable patterns that we might see, or that we actually do see most times in organizations where there are hierarchies that are largely defined by race and gender. And just by virtue of who it is that we are and the bodies that we move in and how we work together we try to.
Really model a different way of being together.
RHEA 2:07
Let’s talk about this new thing you’ve got going on. you have a I don’t know if you call it a coaching program, a video series called unfuck yourself as a white person. It’s a very spicy title.
What does that mean? What was the origin?
JEN 2:21
Yeah, it’s really, it is a spicy title. I appreciate you asking about that from the get go. that title really came to me as a place of my own. Reckoning as a white person, realizing this is a system that is constantly trying to fuck us. And for me, it was about always feeling like I was getting caught in the matrix of racism over and over again.
And I was just exhausted and sick of it. And so I just don’t want any of us to get caught in this system anymore or participate in the system anymore. And so it is a little bit of a spicy title.
And it’s not necessarily with this idea of a whole lot of aggression, but Oh God can we do something different together, please? Because we just need to.
RHEA 3:11
For those of us who are new to racial equity work, new to DEI what do you mean when you say this system?
And it’s so interesting. Cause as you’re talking, it’s once you see it, you can’t unsee it, but it’s almost like being a goldfish. You’re like goldfish. Don’t know that they’re wet. They’re just swimming around in water.
JEN 3:27
Yeah, there’s a lot, there’s a really wonderful organization, the Racial Equity Institute that talks about this is like the groundwater, it’s so ubiquitous that you can’t even see it because it’s hidden but it’s everywhere all at once.
The way that I understand it is that This is a system that was built before even the inception of this country. And what I mean by that is that. My people, like literally my people in the 1500s came to this country with an agreement to somebody who had more power and privilege than they did to work a body of land that they stole from indigenous folks.
They were the Susquehanna people. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that right. I hope I am pronouncing that right. who were at that time living in the Delaware River Valley and ultimately what ended up being Quakertown. And they were indentured to them for a certain number of years.
Meaning that they gave labor to this group of people in exchange for passage and then ultimately for land in this new country. And so this idea of taking land from people, taking labor from people, extracting labor and resources from people started even before we became a country. And that has been a system where, it is purposefully about concentrating wealth, resources and power among a very small group of people who have been and continue to be in our country, white men. That was true 400, 500, 600 years ago. It continues to be true now. The 50 wealthiest people in this country hold 2. 5 trillion dollars worth of wealth.
All of them are white with the exception of one and all of them are men with the exception of six. And the six women are mostly of wealth from white men. Or Wives or daughters of folks who were white men. And so that’s the system that we’re talking about, where there’s a very few number of people who have a tremendous amount of wealth and power and have extracted that wealth and power by using other people for the labor that gives them the wealth and power that they have.
And that includes. People of color, certainly. And it also includes white people. And so when I see the system in that way, it’s a system that all of us the very large majority of us in this country and the world are stuck in and it causes us to do all sorts of really awful things to ourselves and each other that I would just love to have stopped.
RHEA 6:23
In the last couple of years, particularly, I think, after George Floyd’s murder, there’s been a lot of noise about, being woke and, Black Lives Matter and all the rest of it. And I think, I don’t know, I tend to be a little cynical about these things, which like, yeah, great.
It sounds great. But what kind of change are we seeing? So why is it important for you as a white woman to really be at the forefront of this kind of work?
JEN 6:43
I think first and foremost, I am white and the truth of the matter is that white people listen to white people. the research shows that my experience shows that.
And so if I’m not doing it, then Who else is it’s feels like it’s my job, my responsibility to do that. And I think that comes in large part from just like from the very earliest age that I can remember feeling and experiencing like playground politics and different things that were about othering or belonging and in groups and out groups.
And just a deep sense of, how harmful that was to people, how harmful that was to me and never wanting to participate in that. And at a younger age, not knowing what to do about it. And certainly, as I’ve grown up and become an adult in the world, I’ve developed more language and understanding for it.
And certainly a lot more tools for how to talk about it. And. And interrupt it so that instead of wrestling for power against each other in ways that are dehumanizing and demoralizing, we can find things that we actually care about and try to work together towards those things instead of working against each other.
RHEA 7:59
I teach people about fundraising, particularly with folks of color or fundraisers of color. What comes up again and again is exactly your point. The historic inequities and exploitation and enslavement of peoples and the current reality of needing to move resources in order to make these missions happen.
How do we thread the needle, right? Because what we’re talking about is really small in the face of deep historical inequities, and yet We’re in fundraising. We do need to move capital. And there are those who would say capitalism is the problem is the root of all of this, which like isn’t wrong.
And also I can’t solve for capitalism.
JEN 8:37
Yeah. Yeah. You’re absolutely right. Capitalism and racism in our country are inextricable from each other. We literally capitalized human beings in this country. We mortgaged human beings. And so that. History is the history upon which we have inherited and the legacy that we are living with.
You and I, and any of us who are currently living didn’t create that history, but it is something that we’ve inherited. And so I think we have to acknowledge that is true and. The feelings that often come up for folks around guilt and shame and anger that are certainly real, but often are places where people get stuck and either don’t persist in the work or people don’t know what to do with it, or they decide to.
Try and fight each other. That’s not necessarily helpful, but I’d love for us to use those emotions, those strong emotions and recognize what they are. We are really upset about generations, hundreds of centuries of injustice in this country that. Continues to perpetuate systems that we have and recognize that we are living in a time of needing to live in many different places.
We don’t live in just 1 place. And so recognizing the historical context, the reality is I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to be in the system and interrupt the system at the same time.
I also work in philanthropy, right? A lot of our clients are foundation clients and some of them don’t even see the system that they have created around them. And so that is Sometimes frustrating work, sometimes heartbreaking work and trying to get resources directly to people who need the resources is ultimately the end game for me.
If I had a magic wand, I would just be like, give the people the money, like from all of the hoops, just give people the money.
RHEA 10:48
Yeah. And I’m, I feel that same tension too, because at the end of the day yes, I, if I could open up the vaults and hand out the money, I would, I can’t.
And we understand that we have to live in a system at the same time that we are incrementally doing things to disrupt the system. let’s talk about not seeing the system, ? You and I know that those that are closest to the power are least likely to admit that there is a system,
I think I shared with you, I got something sent to me about why can’t we all just get along? And why can’t we be colorblind? So I’m like, okay. Okay.
JEN 11:22
So it’s just send directly to me.
RHEA 11:25
yeah, I actually did. I was like, you should go directly to Jen. But how do you Start the conversation with white folks who it’s almost like you have to admit that there’s a problem for us, right?
It’s hey it’s their problem. So if you think that there’s no problem, why would you seek out any education? Because you think you’re good.
JEN 11:44
Yeah, it’s funny that you talk about it I had at 1 point, this idea of doing a recovery from racism program. And maybe this is a little bit like that, where there was like, 12 steps.
And certainly the 1st step was like, admitting that there’s a problem. The person that you’re talking about, and maybe if we could more generalize it, where it’s like, why can’t we all get along? I would say the spark that I see there is at least, there’s still some curiosity that this isn’t a person who is so blind that they are disengaged, like the point of disengagement.
And that apathy is more dangerous in my mind than the place of wanting to challenge. And so when the challenge comes, I think that there’s hopefully an invitation to a conversation and, you talked about me being a boomerang second time podcaster. I think the first time we talked about the conversation being the relationship and the relationship being the unit of change, inviting people into a conversation and really trying to understand what is their perspective and just continue to be in that conversation with curiosity.
I want everybody to get along too, right? Like we have your desire there and why can’t that actually be true right now? What is the reality of the world, the historical context in which we live the power dynamics when I say power, it’s like who holds power, who has resources.
Where are those resources concentrated and just starting to talk about in ways that maybe are less threatening personally, but more understanding of an inheritance of a problem versus a personalizing I’m a bad person. That you’re a bad person. It’s like we’ve inherited a really shitty system.
RHEA 13:39
And that resonates so much because I’ve been following. As we all have, the political climate and it feels like this backlash against anti wokeness is exactly to your point that this, like this misunderstanding of what it is we’re all working towards and instead internalize Oh you’re saying I’m a bad person because I’m white.
It’s that’s not what we’re saying. But what we are saying is like, there does need to be a conversation about this inherited system. One thing I was thinking about. I just published a podcast with our friend, Darren Isom, and we were talking about creating the space to make mistakes.
And I think so much of why people feel guarded with this is it feels like we’re in such a, an emotionally raw time where we’re not allowed to make mistakes or, there’s this fear. I have this fear of if I say the wrong thing, I’m going to be, publicly humiliated and outed and canceled.
How do we create a space to make it okay to make mistakes?
JEN 14:41
That resonates so much and I have, I’ll have to go back and listen to this podcast because I am a deep admirer of Darren. And obviously of you. There’s so much I have to say about this.
You and I both come from the field of education where you can’t actually learn without making mistakes, you can’t expect a child to learn how to do anything without trial and error. And somehow we’ve forgotten that’s how learning and actually change happens. And we forget to apply that to ourselves as adults.
The other thing that I would say about that is I’m part of a program and one of the, and the program has like these wisdom keepers. And one of the wisdom keepers is a Lakota man named Four Elks. And he said something really profound the other day. He said that in the Lakota language, they do not have any word for mistake or shame.
And I thought that was really profound because. It’s just part of learning. It’s just part of living that you wouldn’t be able to live a life where you are fully human and experiencing and learning the world without. Making some mistakes sometimes. And the unforgivingness of it, I think, comes from, I’m going to pull it back to racism.
Racism’s tools are about dehumanizing people and using fear against people. And so the fear is both of. Being a mistake making a mistake and of not knowing. I think when people come for other people, it’s also an expression of their fear of being come after. I try to think about it as, not necessarily.
Something that is yours, but something that is a projection of somebody else’s on to you. I know that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier and it requires a lot of groundedness and perspective and therapy to hold that and in the public discord where there is so much fear and there is so much fighting against each other.
It’s tough. And I think we just have to find the people who we are in community with and clear about what it is that we’re working with to help us hold our centers together and not distracted by, the people who will come because it’ll come and then it’ll go just as fast as it came. And, one of the things I’m talking a lot about is just let’s come back to our sense.
There’s so much nonsense right now. Let’s just come back to sense.
RHEA 17:32
Yeah. Yeah. And it, I think it’s hard, when our amygdala is like firing and we’re in this panic state to just center and be there. Let’s talk about white people for a second. So I just watched Joyride, which is really fun.
I recommend everyone watches it. It’s basically the Asian girl equivalent of The Hangover. Anyway, there’s a character in the movie, he’s a white guy in a managerial role, and it’s it almost becomes a character, he’s no, but I’m a white ally. I’m a white ally. He’s I’m not saying that because you’re Asian or a woman.
Are you even Asian or a woman? I’m an ally. And so what does it actually mean to be an ally and how do you do it in a way that’s not performative? Because I do think especially post George Floyd, there has been uptick in people curious, willing to step into the work, but what does that really mean to do the work?
JEN 18:27
Yeah it’s that’s I’m gonna have to watch this show now. And maybe we’ll use some of our training.
RHEA 18:32
Oh my God. It’s hilarious. It’s like it becomes a caricature. You’re like okay, white guy. Like I get it. Yeah.
JEN 18:38
And the thing about that I, I think about, and I think a lot of people. Think about allyship is it’s not a noun, it’s a continuous state of being it’s more an aspiring state of allyship that is defined by the daily minute to minute actions that I as a white person would take or not take.
And it’s not something that I can. describe of myself, but rather it is something that somebody with, for whom I am aspiring to ally with, could Ascribe to me, right? I can’t say I’m an aspiring ally. I could say I’m an aspiring ally. I couldn’t say I’m an ally. That would be something that somebody who with whom I attempted to ally myself with could say.
Jen, I really appreciate your allyship today. So the absurdity in the character is really amusing.
It really means taking action. It means seeing what’s going on. It means being aware, noticing what’s happening, naming what’s happening, understanding what the power is that you might have in whatever the situation is that you’re seeing and working with the people who are being marginalized, being Abused being oppressed and saying, I, I see this thing, here’s what it is that I have the power to do would this be helpful if I did this or, some simple things that you can see on the daily, if you’re getting in the plane.
That you can just see the line in the plane and how people behave trying to get into the line on the plane or at the grocery store or getting on the subway and just taking a look and seeing, like this person who is probably a woman of color was in front of you in the line. And so please.
As a white person, get behind her in your rightful place in the line and you taking that me as a white person taking that initiative and whatever the, embarrassed anger that would come with that instead of the person of color taking that.
RHEA 21:01
What we know, especially among fundraisers of color is burnout is very prevalent. There’s a lot of feelings of being, say a frontline fundraiser in your organization. If you’re a person of color and you’re going into predominantly white spaces, there’s a lot. around, assumptions of who you are and what you are based on the color of your skin, based on these assumptions we make about people and class and how much money you have or don’t have.
There’s a lot of power dynamics. And then in addition, if you’re a woman, you’re in a relationship with a man about, Asking for resources, like that’s further complicated. I, what’s my question? I guess my question is like, how do we start to unravel this stew is a very complex dynamics and histories and feelings when we as fundraisers are tasked to do a very specific thing?
JEN 21:54
I would try to focus on what it is that you are raising money for. What is it that is the thing that you care about so much that you’re going to go into this mode of raising money, go into these Ivy towers with these people who have resources and try to pitch your case and come at it from a place of.
Of the thing that you will fight for until the day is long and use that as your source of clarity and strength. That’s what I would personally do when I go into situations from a place of, I’m the first in my family to go to college. I’m a woman. I don’t understand a lot of the nuance around the privilege that moves in those spaces.
And that’s my mindset. I am not as powerful in those spaces as when I am speaking with clarity and conviction about the thing that I want them to release the change for. And, it’s like this idea of it’s not the weight that you carry, but it’s how you carry the weight.
If I were going to carry the weight. Of all of the injustice. Into those spaces with me. It’s going to burn me out. So quickly. Yeah. I let the fuel of what it is that I want the money for be the center of every conversation that I’m having. I’m able to move in a different way
RHEA 23:30
Yeah, I love it.
It’s like burning clean energy as opposed to dirty energy. Are you getting pulled towards a vision or are you letting the injustice like burn the fuels?
JEN 23:42
Yeah. And when you’re in those spaces, they will tempt you to come back into all of the dirty energy.
Yeah. It is tempting because we are so well trained in the system of racism to play our role and just continuing to practice, to stay centered in what it is that you care about so much
RHEA 24:03
Tell us what our little tasty, fun treat. This is the prize for listening to the end of the podcast, folks.
JEN 24:07
This program is a program that you can do on your own. So it’s completely at your own pace. I think about it as you’re really curious about what to do, but you don’t know how to get started as a white person.
You can phone a friend whenever you want. I’m the friend, but you don’t have to worry about being judged by anybody else. It’s just you in that space. And. It’s a six part program that takes you through a sequence about learning some of this history that we’ve inherited, learning about what the language that’s being used actually means so that we don’t feel unskilled when language is being used and often used against us.
Starting to understand the power that we have by virtue of our social identities and how to use those positions of power to fight for things that we care about and put language around that. And then trying to figure out how it is that we can demonstrate leadership powerfully and fight for things that we care about.
The end of the program is. Primarily about like a top 10 list, which we’re going to share with your listeners so that they can look at if I were to go back, 10 or 15 years ago, here’s the lessons that I would want to have learned really quickly, but I’ve learned over time.
Things like progress is better than perfection and curiosity is the antidote to fear. So powerful lessons like that. And then it ends with so where do you go from here? And there are so many things that people can do that. I think are really powerful. And I run into lots of white folks who are like, I don’t, I just don’t know what to do.
And this is a, this program is a good place to start. And it’s exciting for me to end at the end of the program and say, there’s like a million things that you could do. So just decide on one place to start and start
RHEA 26:12
Yeah, I think that’s so important because it does feel overwhelming and we’re overwhelmed.
We tend to freeze and do nothing. So it sounds like this is good for folks who, is there a particular group that you’re targeting? Is it CEOs? Is it? program people? Is it like, who are the people who would benefit from this program that you’re offering?
RAJ 26:33
Yeah, I don’t necessarily think about it in terms of positionality.
I think about it in terms of a person who’s Oh I now understand that I am white. Which is a part of racial identity development and that there’s things that are true about that, but I don’t know what that means or then make sense of that in my life and in my role as a professional. And so I want to figure that out.
Because it’s important to my job and to my role. So it’s like a, it’s a very beginner level course.
RHEA 27:08
We will make sure to get that in the show notes for folks who want to do it. And I highly personally recommend that you work with Jen Mayer, who has been a personal coach, friend, mentor to me for the last, what, 20 years?
This is crazy how we don’t each other for this long. Bananas. And I think you said you also had a discount code for folks. Yeah.
JEN 27:28
We will have a discount code for the class that you can also access. And so there’s the self-study and then we’re also in the fall gonna launch a cohort-based program if you wanted to go through the program, either with a group of friends or colleagues, or if you wanna sign up with a group of other folks that you don’t necessarily know.
So those will be two new options that will be coming out in the fall.
RHEA 27:53
Spectacular. We will make sure to put all that info in the show notes. Just out of curiosity, when does the cohort start? Because I want to make sure we get this podcast out in time.
JEN 28:01
Yeah, it’ll be September,
RHEA 28:02
October. Okay, cool. I will make sure that we get that out in time.
Folks, learn from Jen, especially if you feel like you don’t know where to get started here. Jen, my friend, always a pleasure.
JEN 28:14
It is so good to be with you. I appreciate the opportunity always to talk with you.
RHEA 28:18
Same Zs. And this product you put together will help lots of people. White folks who need to know where to get started, start here.
All right. Thank you.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nonprofitlowdown/support
