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Casey O'Roarty 0:00
Music. Hey everybody, welcome to the joyful courage podcast, a place for information and inspiration on the conscious parenting journey. I am Casey al Rorty, positive discipline trainer, parent coach, and honored to be your guide in the work of showing up as your best for yourself and your family. If you feel as though parenting is one long personal growth and development workshop, you have come to the right place. The conversations you will hear on this podcast are all intended to offer you tools for moving forward, for expanding your lens, for shifting your narrative to one of possibility, connection and empowerment. You can be the parent you want to be. We are influencing the world with how we raise our children. When we bring deep, listening, acceptance and courage to our relationships, we are doing our part to evoke it in the world. I am thrilled to partner with you on this path. I hope you enjoy the show. Hi podcast listeners. My guest today is Danielle slaughter. Danielle is an academic turned mommy. She has a Bachelor's of Arts from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and a Master of Arts in English from Georgia State University with a doctoral background in English, focusing on rhetoric and composition, Danielle likes to call herself and mothers like her mama demics. Mama demics is a merging of her two careers, motherhood and academia. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and two sons, where she runs both of her businesses, Mama demicks and raising an advocate. Danielle is an award winning blogger, as well as award winning for her composition work. She is a 2015 recipient of type A parents we still blog award a 2016 recipient of the Conference on College Composition and communications, scholar for the Dream Award, and a blogger voice of the year, winner for 2016 and 2017 as well as a two time nominee for an iris award for most engaging content. I found Danielle this past spring, when I was searching for the voices of people of color in the parenting world, if you listened to Episode 142 you know that I made a pledge to search out a variety of voices and personalities to come and be on the show. Danielle does really important work. I recently completed a course she offers called raising an advocate. Danielle has written a lot about the role white women play in raising social justice advocates, as well as the power that white women also have to get in the way of social justice. Hi Danielle, welcome to the podcast.

Danielle Slaughter 2:56
Hi Casey, thank you for having me.

Casey O'Roarty 2:59
Will you please share a little bit more about your journey of doing what you do.

Danielle Slaughter 3:04
Um, so like you said, I am a academic turned mom or a mom endemic. Um, I started mama demics as just a blog to kind of get out the struggles I was having trying to navigate both worlds, because I didn't feel like there were a lot of books out there for me to help me with my specific needs. And then it became that there weren't many moms who look like me who are also in academia. And then I quickly started to write about the role that academia was playing and how I'm starting to parent. And parenting a child from that sphere looks very different, at least in my opinion, it does. And slowly I navigated my way into writing about social justice, which was never really part of my plan. It just sort of happened. I got really, really upset and angry after watching what was happening in Ferguson, and I just wrote a blog, and it was called why white moms need to care about murdered black children. And my blog exploded, literally, it just exploded. And all these moms, I mean, people were really mean, but there were also people who were amazing and who just were like, well, what can we do? Please just tell me what to do. And at the time, I was still teaching English classes at Georgia State, and I kind of started talking to my students about it a little bit, and they were like, you totally could teach a class about that. Like, what I couldn't. They said, You teach us this all the time. And I started to think about, what would that look like if my students parents had taught them about this from the beginning, like, what if they understood what privilege was before they were 18 and it became a class, and this journey just keeps spiraling. Rolling so much going on now? Yeah,

Casey O'Roarty 5:02
well, it says it's so important. I mean, it's so important. And just to set context, I am a middle class white woman married to a white man, raising a white son and daughter, and this podcast and my parents support business serves primarily white parents and families, not I don't think because that's who I'm seeking out. It's just and again, and we're going to talk about, like, where our blindness lies and all that stuff. And I know that there is some diversity in my audience, but it's definitely not an audience that's necessarily representative of the population. I know that I have implicit bias, and while I recognize my privilege, there are so many places in my life, I am sure that I'm not registering my privilege, because it's just the world that I've come to live in, right? And so we don't know what we don't know. And I'm so longing. And my listeners, especially, you know, this past spring, I'm longing to learn and grow and expand, and I'm willing to be uncomfortable, and I'm willing to be transparent and say that I really want you to like me. I want you to tell me good job, Casey, which is probably like residual privilege stuff. So let's start first with implicit bias. So when I went through your course, I part of your course each week starts with this page of resources. And so I started watching some YouTube videos. And then I was I was also cooking. And so the YouTube videos just kind of kept going and going and going and the fir I noticed a lot of really interesting things, both about the videos and about the comments to the videos that we can talk about or not, but oh my gosh.

Danielle Slaughter 6:49
Well, in the different the comments off,

Casey O'Roarty 6:52
I did notice that. I don't blame you, but I did notice that the comments when the speaker was a person of color looked a lot different than when it was a white person speaking about implicit bias in particular. But we're not going to go down that rabbit hole right now, so let's talk about but let's talk about what implicit bias is. Because, like I said, while I recognize my privilege, there's so many places that I don't know where my implicit biases are and so can you start by defining implicit bias and put it into context for us?

Danielle Slaughter 7:28
Okay, so implicit bias is these unconscious attitudes that we have towards people or stereotypes of people, and they can be based on one personal experience you've had, or they can be based on a lack of experience. So it might be solely based on what you see on television, if you do not have a diverse group of friends, or you don't grow up in a very diverse community, we learn from media, pretty much. And so that's we create these like subconscious things, and we decide that this is how all people who look like this particular person is, and for me, for an example of an implicit bias that I have, is that I have a huge fear of white Men and just regular looking white men. And it's partially not only from like his a historical background, but it's also because I watch a lot of law, law and order SBU. And so when I was in college, an undergrad that actually came up in a class, and, you know, the girls in our white girls in our class, mentioned that they were afraid of some of you know, they don't mean to jump when they see a black back, black basketball or football player. And I mentioned, well, at night, when I walk home from the library, I'm like, hoping that I see one of the black football players and not just a white man. And they're like, why? And because all the rapists on law and order are white men. And it was just like that first moment that they realized that I could have some type of subconscious bias towards them. So it's, it's really kind of what we've learned and what we've engaged in, yeah,

Casey O'Roarty 9:11
well, in one of the videos that I watched, I don't know if it came from your suggestion or if it was one of the ones that just showed up as I kept watching, was a woman who, a white woman, who was talking about, you know, who works for women in leadership, and recognizing her bias is towards women and in leadership. And it was like, it was really cool, because it was one on one hand, just like you just did. She was really transparent, you know, and she was really honest about I didn't realize that I had this bias until I was she works in HR, and she had two different people in one week ask for a pay raise, and one was a man and one was a woman. And she got the opportunity to observe her own internal response to those two different requests. And it was really, it starts to become. Really fascinating. Well, it is, I think it's really fascinating to start to really pay attention. And it's very uncomfortable too. It's uncomfortable so we get to be uncomfortable. Everyone okay to recognize, like, oh yeah. That is absolutely something that shows up for me. How is implicit bias related to privilege?

Danielle Slaughter 10:23
So they kind of work hand in hand. So you have these unearned privileges that you don't really think about, just like you don't really think about your implicit bias. But it's also because you don't understand the role that privilege has played in your life. So if you've never had to consider the fact that your whiteness, or for a man, that their maleness has helped them succeed in a way you don't think about the factors that play a role for someone who to not succeed or who isn't as I don't want to say they're not As successful, but they haven't been given the same opportunities, and so that you're less aware of the ways that implicit bias factor into your daily lives. When

Casey O'Roarty 11:10
I think about that privileged conversation, you know, I think about that privilege conversation, and I, you know, and I've seen this and heard this in the world, like that conversation of, are you kidding me? I was, you know, I was raised in poverty. I was this, this, my life was hard. And I think that it's so interesting. We often put privilege with, like how much money you make or have exposure to and Peggy McIntosh, which is one of the resources that you mentioned. She's also when I went through elementary education school. I'm a former teacher. That was the first time I read anything by Peggy McIntosh. And there's this amazing article. Is it the unpacking the white backpack? Or what is the name? I can't think of the something about the backpack, yeah,

Danielle Slaughter 12:03
but I followed the privilege backpack, but I know that's not the name of it. Yeah.

Casey O'Roarty 12:07
That has to do with the backpack listeners. I'll find it, and I'll put a link in the show notes. But reading that and recognizing that privilege is also the fact that, you know, when I go to the movies, chances are the majority of the actors and the movies that I'm watching are white. Or when I pick up a magazine, you know, popular culture magazine, the majority of the people in the faces that I see are white. They look like me. And it never occurred to me that that is a part of this privilege, is seeing ourselves. And now that I'm aware of it, I get really irritated by, you know, the even just my family is like, okay, but I'm like, Look, this is, look at this movie that this preview. There's like, a group of six main characters for white, there's the, you know, there's the black character, and there's the Asian character, and it's like, now it just, it's like, Come on, we can do better than that, like, than the token, like, oh, look, we're changing it up. We're diversifying. And it's now that, you know, once I think we expand our lenses, it starts to become really frustrating and slow. Like, it just feels like, change perspective. All of it is really slow, and I can't even imagine how slow it feels for people of color. Yeah,

Danielle Slaughter 13:25
it's, it's a tangled web, sort so to speak. Because just because I, like, I tell people this all the time, just because I'm a black woman, it doesn't mean that I don't have privilege, right? We all have some form of privilege, and it doesn't matter like how disenfranchised you are. What matters is how the different your different identities kind of intersect. And that's actually something that a class that I'm working on right now. But so sometimes your identities will intersect in a way that just makes it really, really hard for you to climb this so to pull yourself up by the bootstraps. And the way I like to explain this, or I used to explain this to my students, was, we would have like, four babies. And so these four babies were all born on the same exact day, so they're, you know, they're the same age, and Baby A would be born into a family that was a

I would call them one percenter, so they're super well off. No, that's Baby A, and then Baby B would be born. You know, I give them like different identities, and what would happen is, there's often these babies end up at the same place, so they're all at the same college, but baby Dee is on full scholarship, academic scholarship, and working really hard, and has no one to help her. And she's, this is the black baby, black or black girl. And then there'd be, like, a white, you know, I just kind of intersect all these identities for them. And they'd sit there and they'd go, oh my. Gosh, it was so much harder for her so and they had to create, like, a scenario of, how did Baby D get to this to this point? So they're all at the same point, but how did they get there, and How is Baby D going to survive? Because Baby D did not have, every you know, doesn't have the support system that baby a has, and babies B and C are somewhere in the middle. So it's this kind of seeing the details of how hard it can be for someone, and then realizing, but what can I do to help those people?

Casey O'Roarty 15:29
Yeah, and I think that's a really big piece, right, that what can I do? Because I was absolutely born into loads of privilege, and recognize that, and have, interestingly enough, have always been uncomfortable by it. Like, you know, I grew up in Laguna Beach, California, and there were three homeless guys that lived in town, Clifford and miles, and another guy, I actually wrote my senior essay all about miles and because I befriended them. And, you know, the question was always what I did, I did nothing to end up in the family that I ended up in, and it so it's just always kind of been like this peripheral discomfort, you know, as well as the blind parts too. But this is for me. I you know you're and for many others, your work is so important and and I'm so glad that I found you because you have been a part of of expanding the lens that I see the world out of, and I really wanted my audience to hear from you. Hey, everybody just showing up to check in and invite you to pause for a moment. Pause for a moment and consider what the content you are listening to is worth to you, consider what kind of listener you are. You listen to the show every week. You're moved into action by what you hear. You find yourself saying, yes, someone gets me. I am so honored to create this podcast for you. I am also really thrilled to let you know that there is a way for you to be in support of its sustainability. You can become a joyful courage patron. Being a patron is giving back patrons pledge financial support that goes directly into the production of this podcast. You can pledge $1 $5 or $10 a month whatever works for you, and know that it is a win win. You exchanging energy with me and making a statement about what the podcast means to you. Can I get a big hell yes. Thank you to everyone who has already become a patron. Your support is so appreciated. Everyone else, don't wait. Head over to www.patreon.com/joyful courage, and sign up to be a patron today. That's www, dot, P, A, T, R, E, O n.com/joyful, courage, all one word. Sign up today so so appreciate you and all the ways you support the show. And now back to the interview. Let's talk about your article about the most dangerous person in America. Okay, let's just go there. Danielle, what inspired you to write it.

Danielle Slaughter 18:22
I know that people probably are not going to believe this. So I was sitting at my son's flag football game, and sometimes to just get my self through the sporting event, I like, have music playing in my head that might not, you know, like, I just, there's a lot going on, and there's a lot of people, and it's hot, and for some reason I had Beyonce lemonade album just in my head. I wasn't actually listening to it. It was in my head. And she has a quote in there from Malcolm X about the most disrespected woman in America being the black woman, and the most unprotected woman in America is the black woman. And for some reason that quote was in my head, and I looked it up, and it was literally the day that Malcolm X gave that speech, like 50 years ago. I was like, oh, okay, so I'm sitting here. I'm like, I need to write about this. I don't know what I what I want to write about. Um, and the post started as me saying that I was going to write about how I'm teaching. I want to teach my sons to trust black women no matter what, to listen to us, to believe us, to fight for us. And somehow it became a whole other thing. So that post has not been written yet. It just became this, like, well, if we're the most unprotected woman, then who's the most protected one? And then, well, who protects them? And it was easy to blame. And sometimes I find like, it's easy to blame everything on white men. But then I was like, well, actually, who am I more afraid of than a white man? And it's a white woman. And people always. I'm like, what? Like, yes, absolutely. 100% I am more afraid the dangers of being too close to a white woman or by children, you know, partnering, if they choose to be in a heteronormative relationship, partnering with a white woman, I can just see the danger ahead so much more quickly than like, I don't ever feel any danger really when my son plays with white boys, but I feel it when he plays with white girls and I and it's like, someone's gonna hurt him for that.

Casey O'Roarty 20:32
Yeah, talk more about that. Um,

Danielle Slaughter 20:35
there's this, this, this idea that white girls are like, they're like, the ideal. I mean, they're the Disney princess. So if you think of the ideal Disney Princess, it would be Elsa, and they're fragile, and we've been taught to protect them and take care of them no matter what, even at our own detriment at times. But for a black mother raising Black Sons I have to worry about, you know, I want my sons to love whoever they want. I want them to be someone who loves them and who they'll build a wonderful family with. But when I think about what they'll go through if they choke choose a white partner, it's scary for me, particularly because and in the past, you know, black boys have been killed for looking at a white woman. They've been imprisoned for a white girl having a consensual relationship with them and then saying, well, it wasn't consensual because their dad freaked out, or their dad, you know, pushing for something, even if the girl is saying, No, you know, I love this person. This is not, you know, there's so many different ways that it could end badly that it's not a road that I would want my child to go down,

Casey O'Roarty 21:52
yeah. Well, and it's so interesting too, because I'm raising a son as well, and have it's not like the race piece isn't there, and yet some of pieces of what you're talking about are definitely on my radar. You know how he treats girls and consent, and what consent is and how to stay safe, and that's hard enough. But then on top of it, you know, a culture that I don't know if demonizes is the right word, but that a culture that you know isn't safe for black boys, on top of just having a boy and knowing the boys do dumb ass things, sometimes, you know it's like and it can and,

Danielle Slaughter 22:43
I mean, I wrote another post about that, about, like, the things that scare me about raising boys. And, yeah,

Casey O'Roarty 22:50
I saw it. I read like, I

Danielle Slaughter 22:54
every I feel like I'm always telling my son, one of my friends has this great quote of, we are all in charge of our own bodies. And so I'm always telling them that, like, do you have permission to touch that person's body? Do you have permission to touch mommy's body? No, you don't like you have to, you know, ask for permission before you touch someone. And this, this idea of, like, how entitled boys are socialized to feel about people's bodies or girls bodies. It just drives me berserk, because I'm like, please, please don't be this boy. Like, don't be like, are you listening like? Are they listening to us? Are they still gonna do something so remotely dumb that, like, you can't How can I fix it? I can't fix it. I can't even help you fix it, aside from making you take responsibility, but then also just the fear of raising someone that can harm someone else, simply because everyone else in society tells them that it's okay. It's just scary. It's very scary. Yeah,

Casey O'Roarty 23:55
yeah. And I too, like, I even notice, you know, my kids listen to really explicit music, and I've just had to let it go. Nothing makes me feel older than the music that my kids listen to. And it's, you know, I remind Ian, my son, I say, you know, just think about, what is the what? You know, you were even talking about that Beyonce song was kind of on a loop in your head, and Lemonade was on the loop in your head. And so I try to point out, like, what do you want on the loop? What do you want, you know, and if it's something that's really, you know, popping pills and bitches and hoes, like, do you want that on a loop in your head? Because you're out in the world and interacting with people and sometimes making instinctive choices about what you say and what you do. Yeah. Anyway, this is totally off topic. But whoa, raising boys is not easy, no matter what, right. So back to the article, right. Back to the article that you wrote. So the most dangerous person in America being the white woman, right? So what? Is the response to that.

Danielle Slaughter 25:01
The response actually was not as bad as I prepared myself for. I was so scared. It was actually more encouraging. For the first time. I'm pretty mixed, so there are a few people who were, like, really upset about it. Ironically, those people were not white women. For the most part, I had a lot of like men, so it was one of the first times of men commented a lot on something I've written. And of course, I just wanted to be like, you're proving my point. You're like, right? Because you have to be like, save the damn so in distress, yeah. So there were, was, were a few of those going around, but mostly encouraging in the fact that white women were able to see how, despite how much they feel like, we all feel like the world has changed, that they could still, you know, be a danger, like they could still be the person who theoretically had Emmett Till killed, you know, like they still have that power, even if they don't use the power, you have that power, and that makes you dangerous because you have the power. And so the reception was pretty it was pretty good. I was pleasantly surprised that no one, no one called me a horrible names this time. So that's nice.

Casey O'Roarty 26:19
Well, that's good, yay. Good job everyone. And reading it, you know, I noticed my own response was like, well, but that's not me. Like, I really quickly wanted to disassociate myself from the white women that you were talking about in your article, right, as a natural like, but that's not me. Did you find, you know, have you had, what kinds of conversations have you had with women that you know? And then I'm like, is that just a typical, like, white woman? I mean, I can analyze myself till the cows come home, but, you know, it was even in my responsive but that's not me. I wondered. Like, okay, so where like checking my privilege, checking my bias, checking myself right, even in that response. So what were some of the conversations that you had with people who were just struggling with like yes and yes?

Danielle Slaughter 27:12
So I kind of just let people have those moments. So what I've learned over the last few years, when it comes to doing this, is to let people sit with the work and let them have their feelings and let it's not like I don't always have to be labor my point. So I wrote everything I meant what I said, you know, and also letting them have these conversations with other white women. So sometimes I'll message a friend and ask them if they have time to go over to my page and kind of feel some comments that I don't feel like I'm being defensive in those moments. And so it was really great to kind of see other white people just work together, especially white women, kind of working together so that they could better understand how they could sit in this moment, understand what I was saying, but then also process their feelings. And because I think that's important for everyone to have a space to process their feelings, but I but so the end, but it's not my job to help them process those feelings all the time. And so sometimes that looks like finding someone else who is on this journey with you and processing those feelings together.

Casey O'Roarty 28:27
Yeah, I appreciate that. So if I am a part of a group with that much power, that group being white women, yeah,

what are some ways, I mean, I have some in my head, but I would love to hear like from your perspective, what are some ways that I get to or that you've seen women use that power for good and that power to support and to care about what's happening in all the communities, not just our own little internal bubble of our family, of our right, right experience.

Danielle Slaughter 29:08
I always say so. So I have two things that, oh, I can hear the baby. I have two things that tend to surprise people. They i What the first one is to listen just, just sometimes you just have to sit and listen, and it'll be uncomfortable, but listening and forcing other people around you to see that you're listening. And so sometimes people will comment that they're they hear me, they're reading, and that'll that's just their comment. And so it kind of encourages other people to just, don't try to argue back, just sit and listen to the words and and kind of absorb the material, and then the other, which seems as a contradiction, is to speak up. So I don't know if you've seen that video going around about the woman who called the police on people barbecuing in the park, and so there's a white woman, she calls the police on. On a black family who are barbecuing, and I don't know if there was a white woman who was part of their group, like that was unclear. If the white woman was married or with one of the black men, or if she just saw what was happening, and so she saw what was happening, is pretty much started to talk for the black people and tell, like the white woman to leave them alone. And when police got there, they listened. She used her privilege in that moment. She knew that, you know, there's two white women, they're gonna listen to, both of us, but she used her power to kind of push that this, you know, this white woman was just harassing this group of black people, and she kind of stood in between, yeah, she kind of made a barrier, and that was a powerful moment when it's captured on video. It's a really long video, but what was going around was like, This is what we need people to do, is to do that and other smaller way, sitting that within your community, are just standing up in the PTA making sure that people don't assume that parents aren't participating in the PTA because they don't care about their children sometimes they can't afford to participate. It can be as simple as saying, well, we so I don't know if all schools do this, but I know schools here you have to pass a background check to go on field trips and to attend field trips for your kids, which is wonderful, but there's a fee. So every year you have to pay $50 for this. And there are a lot of parents who can't, not who can't afford it, but definitely, probably can't afford the $50 plus to take off work and find a sitter. So like last year was my son's first year of kindergarten, but I also had a baby four days after he started kindergarten, and I just couldn't go on field trips. I told my husband I was like, so we would pay this $50 background check. I'd have to find a sitter for the baby, because he's too young for me to take him with me and expose him to the germs that that that are going to be there and we are not living below the poverty line. So I can only imagine what some of his classmates parents felt in terms of that. And so maybe diverting funds talking about how we can help other parents. Maybe we just raise enough money and we pay for a certain number of parents who want to volunteer. We pay for their background checks. So things like that. You

Casey O'Roarty 32:27
are talking to the PTO President right now, Danielle,

Danielle Slaughter 32:33
but just like, these are like, really, you know, yeah, small things that we can do that we don't necessarily think about, yeah, just thinking about if you're if your kid has a an issue with a teacher, and versus my kid having an issue with that same teacher. Who do you think administration is going to believe so if we go in there together and you, you know, you let them know. Okay, my kids having this issue, her kids having this issue. This isn't something that's just being made up. Now, can we get something done about about this problem? And a lot of times, we don't do that. We only worry about our

Casey O'Roarty 33:12
child. So as a parent educator, this is what I do. I speak to parents and support, and I always want to be inclusive in my language and the conversations that I'm having, in the content that I create and in the spaces that I hold for conversation. So I'm going to be bold and vulnerable right now and ask you if you have experienced my whiteness in a way that put you off during this conversation. No, Can you stretch me out of my comfort zone and help me to see any, any blindness that you noticed in the conversation? Um, and is it annoying that I'm asking you? No, it's

Danielle Slaughter 34:00
not annoying. I think, oh, what I did, I thought about, was you saying at the beginning that you wanted me to like you?

Casey O'Roarty 34:10
I think a lot of that's pretty much the whole world.

Danielle Slaughter 34:13
Yes, I think a lot of times white women feel like I don't like them, and so they're naturally defensive around me, or they overcompensate, and not you, but just in general, it's like you don't have to overcompensate if you're trying to be friends with a black woman. You want her to like you, or you want to diversify. You know, really, we just want you to be honest, and we want to know like, are you really trying to be my friend, or are you trying to learn something about blackness? Like I had this rule in college before I even ever thought that I would do type this type of social justice work was I was often the only black girl in a lot of the groups, and I had this rule where they just if they had a question. That pertained to me being black in some way, they needed to just ask me, like, don't beat around the bush. I need you to just be very direct and ask me. And it has made people who don't know that uncomfortable in the past, which is a hilarious story you might want to edit out, but let's hear it. When my first son was born, one of my friends came to the hospital to see him, and she's white, and there's this rule, you know, we have this rule together. And so she's there with her husband. It's my first time meeting her husband. I've given like I'd like finished going labor like a few hours before that, but I was on that little hive that sometimes and my husband and my husband's friends, which who were black, she looks at the baby, and she goes, Danielle, I have a question. And I knew the moment she said she had a question, but it was one of those moments. And she goes, so I've never seen a black baby right after they're born, but is he gonna get some color? Like, why does he look so white? And I, like, burst into laughter. Her husband turns beet red. And my, my husband's friends looked at him, like, what is acting right now? But then I just took the baby and I showed her. I was like, Well, you know, sometimes it's, it always takes black babies a while to get color, but like, I showed her how he could figure out, um, kind of their skin color. So, like, look at their nails, like the cuticles around their nails, and you kind of look at their ears, and it'll give you a little idea of what their color will look like. Um, obviously, if they're in sun, you know, that can change in that moment. Like, I think her husband, like, wanted to, like, wanted to be like, Oh my god, I can't believe you were asking that. And so then I had to switch from explaining that to her, and then to tell everybody, like, this is okay, because this is how we learn from one another. And she she wasn't even embarrassed, because she knew that, like, it was going to annoy me further if she had, like, waited two days, or she just kind of beat around the place, trying to figure it out, you know, just to just be direct. And I think that that's kind of what hinders a lot of communication when it different cultural or racial things, is that people are always trying to worry about being, I don't want to say being politically correct, but they're worried about like you're not gonna like me, or I'm gonna hurt your feelings. And if we're friends, and if you're trying to build a friendship with me, then I need you to just be honest and tell me, you know, I have a question. I'm not sure if this question is appropriate. I'll tell you if it's an inappropriate question.

Casey O'Roarty 37:37
Well, I feel like at some point there was somebody that I don't know who said it or where I learned it, but there was also this, you aren't assuming that you're the voice for all black people. I wouldn't want to like, ask questions as if like, well, you can speak for the experience of all black people because you're a black woman.

Danielle Slaughter 37:55
Yes, don't do that. So don't phrase it that way. You might. People definitely do that people do. And I'll have to say so in my personal experience, things look like X, Y and Z, and I often say, remember, this is not the experience for, you know, for everyone. Now, if it's something that's like history, history is history. So I can provide you a book or, you know, a fact sheet for that, but when it comes to certain experiences there, you know, like there's no one white experience, so there's no one black one either.

Casey O'Roarty 38:30
Yeah, thank you so much for coming on and talking with me. Thank you for having me. You are welcome, and I have a feeling that I'm gonna want you back on. Definitely. In the context of all that we've talked about, what does joyful courage mean to you? Danielle, okay,

Danielle Slaughter 38:49
I did a little research for this one. I have a prepared response.

Casey O'Roarty 38:56
You're a mama. Demick, so it's okay. Your page

Danielle Slaughter 38:58
says that joyful courage is about showing up grateful for the opportunity to practice being our best selves, even when it is hard to do. And for me, that's exactly what the work of raising advocates looks like, being grateful that we can do better than the generations before us, while acknowledging that this work is not easy. You have to have the courage to work through your own biases and find joy in knowing that your children are learning from you.

Casey O'Roarty 39:26
Thank you for that. Where can the listeners find you and follow your work? Okay,

Danielle Slaughter 39:32
so I am Mama demics everywhere, pretty much mama demics on Facebook, on Instagram, on Twitter. I need to do Twitter more. I'm not.

Casey O'Roarty 39:43
I'm not either,

Danielle Slaughter 39:45
but I'm very big, so I'm pretty much always on Facebook and Instagram, on Mama's MX, and then my website is mama demics as well. And if they're looking for classes, they can look for Mama demics Academy or. On Facebook and find out the information about

Casey O'Roarty 40:01
classes. Awesome. Thank you so much. You're

Danielle Slaughter 40:05
welcome. Thank you for having me.

Casey O'Roarty 40:11
Joyful purge community. You're amazing. Big thanks and love to my team, including my producer, Chris Mann at pod shaper. Be sure to join in the discussion over at the live in love with joyful courage group page, as well as the joyful courage business page on Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to the show through Apple podcasts, or really, anywhere you find your favorite podcast, you can view the current joyful courage swag over at the web page, intention cards, bracelets. E course offers the membership program one on one, coaching. It's all waiting for you to take a look simply head to www dot joyful courage.com/yes. That's joyful courage.com/y. E, S, to find more support for your conscious parenting journey. Any comments or feedback about this show or any others can be sent to Casey at joyful courage.com. I personally read and respond to all the emails that come my way, reach out, take a breath, drop into your body, find the balcony seat and trust that everyone is going to be okay.

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