Shaking The Table Supporting Inclusive 
Leadership 

ZOE FLOWERS: Welcome, welcome, welcome. Zoe flowers here, 
and I am here to talk with you about creating and supporting 
inclusive and intersectional programming for victims of crime. 
And so I am the founder of Soul Requirements, and I am also the 
lead consultant with the Woman of Color Network. I have been 
speaking for over 18 years now, specifically on the issues of 
domestic and sexual violence, particularly in communities of 
color. And so the goal of this conversation is to really help you 
create spaces of mutual respect, and to take risks, and support 
other people in taking risks when you're having these kinds of 
conversations. 

So the first thing I want to do is I want to start off with some 
foundational concepts to get us all on the same page with 
intersectional programming. So we have, and I love this 
particular image because it so clearly states the difference 
between equality, equity, and liberation. So on the far left, you 
have the box that says equality, and you have the one gentleman 
that is standing on the box although he really doesn't need it to 
see the game. And then you have the person in the middle. He 
has the box and he can see a little bit of the game. And then you 
have the smaller person and he can see just a sliver of the game. 


So for all intents and purposes, everybody has access to the 
game. But obviously, they don't have the same view. 

Even when you get to equity-- so the person on the left he 
shared this box, and so the person on the far right, the young 
child, now he has better access to the game. But they are still not 
experiencing the game in the same way. And so then we come to 
liberation and there is no fence and nobody needs anything extra 
to be able to see the game because the fences, the barriers, the 
blocks have been removed. So I really love this slide because it 
just sets the stage for what we're going to talk about. 

So I want to go over a few definitions. And so we have diversity 
and that is based on race, ethnicity, sexual, identity, and gender, 
et cetera. And it includes, and it accounts for differences within 
each of those groups. And then we have privilege. And privilege 
includes the unquestioned, unearned, most often unconscious 
advantages, choices, benefit, assumptions, and expectations 
granted on people based on their membership in the culturally 
dominant group. It is easily named by communities that have 
been oppressed, but to those who have it, it is invisible. 

So for example, when I moved through my everyday life, I am 
not necessarily thinking about being an able-bodied person. That 
is the privilege that I have. I get to just move through the world 
in that way. I speak the language of the dominant culture. And so 
that allows me some more comfort as I'm through the world as 


well. So I encourage you to think about where your privilege is. It 
is not something that can be given back. There are no exceptional 
men or white people for whom privilege is not a constant reality. 
And your intention has no bearing on privilege, because again, 
you cannot give it back. It's yours to keep. 

And so in thinking about privilege, I like to think about the two 
faces of privilege or talk about the two faces of privilege. So one 
is granted privilege, and that is the privilege that the society 
gives to members of the privileged group. And then there is the 
internalized privilege, and those are the expectations and the 
assumptions of superiority and entitlement internalized by 
members of the privileged group. So if I was unaware-- 
obviously, I'm more aware of being an able-bodied person now 
because of doing the work. But if I wasn't, then I would probably 
assume that wherever I went, my needs would be met as an 
able-bodied person. If I am traveling different places as an 
English speaker, I might assume that everyone that I come into 
contact with speaks my language, and I would be able to 
communicate with them effectively. That would be an internalized 
privilege that I would have. 

So we're going to talk about granted privilege. I'm going to show 
you this video about Black male privilege in the #MeToo era, so 
let's just jump into this. 


THEO E.J. WILSON: --that my mistakes and the sad narrative on 
that page. And to think that I was about to end it all because of 
the story in my head, like I had hope but I needed direction, and 
more than that, I needed therapy, like we all do. I humbled 
myself and just got help. And on my specialist's request, I 
meditated daily and found that I could exist without thinking at 
all. What a concept? That that freight train of thoughts driving my 
life off the rails was actually the source of my toxicity and I could 
stop that. And so much clarity comes in that silence. 

I began to examine my ideation and found that I was not alone. 
In fact, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention states 
that 47,000-- 

ZOE FLOWERS: We'll just skip forward a bit of it. 

THEO E.J. WILSON: --for help. Here's a shocker, you all, men 
compartmentalize. 

--independent owner, but just because it comes back on one 
piece doesn't mean he's not shattered. 

--very well for. When a straight man fall in love for the first time-
- 

--plus, heartbreak is just a trauma that our culture doesn't 
prepare men very well for. When straight man fall in love for the 
first time, it is usually not with the woman that we will marry and 


we all in coverage from every angle to practice sex without our 
hearts involved, the split continues, and that compartment takes 
on a life of its own. Well, I didn't realize that this was a gendered 
privilege. Ladies know that as soon as they act out sexually the 
same way the men do, that slut-shaming is a common because 
they don't have that privilege. And privilege seems to be a hard 
conversation to have with men, and race to that equation, and 
prepare for battle. It's hard enough to get white men to 
acknowledge their privilege. Even-- 

AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE] 

THEO E.J. WILSON: Even with them making up 44 of our 45 
presidents. Even when their faces on all the currency and Mount 
Rushmore on land they're not indigenous to-- 

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS] [APPLAUSE] 

THEO E.J. WILSON: Even with them making up the majority of 
CEOs and military high command, they still struggle with this idea 
that this culture privileges them. Just a 400-year coincidence you 
all keep on winning, right? 

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS] 

THEO E.J. WILSON: OK, so imagine talking privilege with Black 
men. The historically oppressed do not react well when 
confronted with their role as oppressors. OK, brothers got to 


aggressively clapping, hey, hey, it's like, where's my privileged, 
bruh? You know what I'm saying? Privilege to be 40% more likely 
to be killed by the police? Privilege to have one in three of us 
incarcerated at some point? Privilege of being racially profiled and 
followed around stores? Privilege of being guilty until proven 
innocent like the Central Park Five? I had those exact same 
questions when I was confronted with the idea. 

And then a Black feminist that I know, she said, Theo, when was 
the last time you were actually afraid of being sexually assaulted? 
I was like, well, you know, most of my life is spent walking the 
streets trying to convince people that I'm not about to do that to 
them, so. She said, answer the question, brother. I said, well, the 
only time I was ever afraid of that was during a short stint that I 
spent in jail. She said, well, every woman you know is in jail. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Yeah, 

AUDIENCE: Yeah. 

THEO E.J. WILSON: Yes? 

AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE] 

THEO E.J. WILSON: This realization hit me like a ton of bricks, all 
right? And I mean, honestly, I had never considered that there 
was another gender and culture intersection. You see, like many 
young Black men, I grew up in an area that was overshadowed 


by gang violence. Growing up in a crossfire was traumatizing, but 
it gave me a bridge to a necessary conversation. You see, if you 
try to talk to the average hoof fella from around by way about 
toxic masculinity from a feminist lens, you're likely to get cussed 
down and dismissed. 

But if you say to him, brother, toxic masculinity is the reason for 
almost every funeral in the hood. It is part of the reason why if 
you get murdered, it will be most likely by somebody who looks 
just like you. Well, then you got the chance to hear, all right, bro, 
you got 30 seconds to sell me on this crap, what's up? How do I 
know? Because we took this conversation to the streets. I called a 
community forum in some barbershops to discuss the idea of 
Black men and privilege in relationship to the treatment of our 
women. And we talked about-- 

AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE] 

THEO E.J. WILSON: We talked about female physical and sexual 
safety, was led to talking about culture, was led to talking about 
the music we grew up under. Guys like Tupac, Notorious B.I.G., 
Snoop, the Infamous, Dr. Dre-- 

ZOE FLOWERS: So we will stop there. So I hope that you got a 
good glimpse right into the complicated conversation of privilege 
that Theo is engaging the audience with at this TedTalk. Talking 


about really recognizing his all-male privilege as a man of color. I 
hope that you were able to pull some things from that. 

And so one of the things that he talked about was when the 
conversation was asked if he ever feared being sexually 
assaulted, and he says he spends most of his life walking through 
the streets trying to make sure people don't feel like he's going to 
assault them. And so that brings us to this conversation of 
implicit bias. That is what he is talking about without even having 
to name it. The attitudes and stereotypes that affect our 
understanding, our actions, our decisions in an unconscious 
manner. 

I shared last week that I find myself playing into, or used to, 
playing into the implicit bias. Meaning, as a woman of color-- and 
I'll talk about this later in the conversation-- how we are often 
viewed when we stand up for ourselves or speak up for ourselves 
as the angry Black woman because of that implicit bias. And so 
how that's played out in the past is me dampening my responses 
to things or being silent in some arenas because I don't want to 
be viewed as the angry Black woman. I don't want that implicit 
bias thrown on me. So I might be quiet instead of standing up. 
That's how that plays out in real life. 

And I've seen others-- it gets internalized, just like internalized 
privilege gets internalized, internalized implicit bias does as well. 
Like we are aware of these things and so I see men of color 


moving out of my way when I'm walking down the street. 
Because like he said, he spends half of his life trying to make 
people feel comfortable around him. And so I've seen them do 
that if I'm walking down the street and they're walking behind 
me, I've seen them walk slower so I won't perceive them as a 
threat. I've seen them back up in the elevator If it's just the two 
of us so that they won't be perceived as a threat. So these things 
are very much internalized and it's almost like it's on autopilot. 
The way that we are programmed to walk through the world, 
unless we're consciously interrupting the programming. 

So one of the other things about privilege is this idea of speaking 
in universals. If I had privilege and I was in charge of language, I 
could speak in universals. I could believe that my perspective is 
the valid one, and the one by which all other people are judged. I 
would have a false sense of the universality of beliefs, 
perspectives, perceptions, responses, and knowledge. And what 
this does is because the people who are in charge of language are 
the people with privilege, who believe their perspective is the 
one, their perspective is valid, what that leads to are these 
stereotypes, these biases, because they are not walking in the 
shoes of people, they are viewing people through their lens of 
privilege. 

So what does that mean? That means that when you see groups 
of folks of color gathering, from an outside perspective, they 


might be viewed as dangerous, as noisy because of implicit bias, 
because of the stereotypes of those people. Whereas if you see 
people from the dominant culture, I don't know, ripping chairs 
out at a rock concert or destroying an arena after a hockey game 
or doing whatever, that would be looked at as all those kids are 
just, they're just burning off steam. They're burning off steam 
because the perspective of the dominant culture is the one that 
gets to say what's good and what's bad. So anything other than 
how the dominant culture behaves, how they speak, how they 
wear their hair, how they move through the world naturally is 
going to be a problem because the dominant culture has set the 
standard. 

And so this leads us right into institutional racism, and it is a form 
of racism that is embedded as normal practice in society or an 
organization. It's woven into everything that we do. And so here, 
Michael Welp is going to talk about the granted plus internalized 
privilege. 

MICHAEL WELP: Unconscious bias-- 

--spouse, I don't want you to fix this, I just want you to listen. 
Anybody hear that? As white guys, have you ever heard that 
before? Also, our culture teaches us that we can't be rational and 
emotional at the same time, so we leave our emotionality behind. 
Other cultures don't do that. When I live in this, invisible to me, 
cultural box, I don't even think of it as a culture. I just think of it 


as being a good human or a good American. And I judge others 
by this invisible cultural box and that puts them in a place where 
they feel judged. 

Unconscious bias, that's what it is for me which is that it's like a 
background operating system on autopilot, that I don't even 
know is running in myself. I might say I'm culture-blind or I 
might say I'm gender-blind and that I just treat everybody the 
same. I don't realize that others hear that as having to fit into my 
cultural box. 

And I don't even know that I'm causing that assimilation in 
others. Others can be frustrated because they know they have to 
leave part of themselves at the door. And what's even more 
interesting is we do that to ourselves as white men. We also fit 
into the cultural box, and when we do that, we leave some of our 
humanness behind. The second thing that most white men don't 
know is we don't know that others are having a different 
experience in the world. Most of us just naturally connect on 
sameness and commonality. In fact, intercultural research shows 
that when you engage difference, most people either deny or 
minimize those differences. And that pattern shows up for 
younger generations as well. 

And yet, women, people of color, and others have different 
experiences. And if I'm only connecting on sameness, I'm not 
seeing another part of their reality. It's not that my view of the 


world is wrong, more likely, it's incomplete. So for instance, I 
don't have to think about my own safety. If I go jogging at night, 
most of the time, I'm pretty comfortable even going alone. I 
travel on business a lot. I arrive late into airports, and I drive to 
the hotel. Sometimes I get lost. And I'm not too worried about 
that, it's just not easy but it's not unsafe for me for most of the 
time. 

Many women would want to arrive in the hotel before dark and 
would want your hotel room to be off the ground floor and not 
near an exit. I was traveling with my business colleague bill to 
Kalamazoo, Michigan to work with an executive team. Well, right 
after I flew into O'Hare Airport, thunderstorms closed the airport. 
Soon, I found out there were no more flights to Kalamazoo and 
there were no more rental cars. Bill's rugged individualism kicked 
in and he propositioned a taxi to take us all the way to 
Kalamazoo. 

We got there 2:30 in the morning, and by 8 AM that morning, we 
were standing in front of the executive team, crowd, and talking 
about how our adventure was, and we were going to get there. 
Failure wasn't an option in that rugged individualism. Well, there 
was one woman on that team. She raised her hand and she said, 
"I would have never gotten into that taxi and driven across rural 
America at night with a stranger as a taxi driver, and I would 
have made up an excuse so you wouldn't think I wasn't a team 


player." I looked at her, and I looked at Bill, and I looked at the 
group, and I said, "I teach this stuff and I'm blind to it at the 
same time." 

The word privilege is a hard word for us as white men because we 
don't feel privileged. We actually feel like we've worked incredibly 
hard for everything we have. And I would say a deeper 
perspective is, yes, we have worked incredibly hard and there are 
things that we haven't had to navigate or negotiate or think 
about that other groups are. For instance, more examples of how 
my life might be different being heterosexual. At work, I can have 
a picture of a loved one on my desk and not worry about what 
other people think about. Or not worry that it might hinder my 
next promotion or get me fired. 

As a cisgendered person, I can go out on the spur of the moment 
with friends and know that I can find a bathroom that I can use 
without being harassed or beat up. As a white person, at work, 
people don't look at me and think I got my job because of 
affirmative action, and therefore, have me feeling like I've got to 
work twice as hard to prove I'm qualified. Or I can easily find 
mentors of my race at all levels in most organizations. Or I can 
buy pictures, postcards, greeting cards featuring people of my 
race easily. Or I don't have to have the talk with my white kids 
about how to literally stay alive if stopped by the police. 


So for me, the layers of privilege go on and on. Being able-bodied 
or I might say, temporarily able-bodied, I didn't have to figure 
out how to negotiate my way through this facility to give this talk. 
Being Christian, people know my holidays and they align with 
time-off. So privilege is stuff that I don't have to deal with. It's 
not having to navigate or deal with some of those things. It's not 
something I chose. And what happens is others assume we, as 
white men, know about our privilege, and that we see it. And 
they assume we just don't care or want to hoard our privilege so 
they attribute negative intent onto that privilege. 

When we start to see our privilege and own our privilege, it 
removes the burden from others to have to educate and prove to 
us their different realities are real. I can use my privilege 
honorably. For instance, if I'm in a meeting and a woman shares 
an idea and it's ignored, and a few minutes later, a man repeats 
that, I can use my privilege to point out to my male colleagues 
that, hey, that was originally her idea. If she was to do that, she 
might be seen as having a chip on her shoulder around men. 
When we acknowledge other people's experiences as valid and let 
our hearts be impacted by their experience, we create more trust 
and more openness. I saw this happen in South Africa and I've 
seen it happen around the world. 

ZOE FLOWERS: And so we're going to stop that there. One of the 
other privileges that I was thinking about while he was talking for 


white men in particular is being given the benefit of the doubt. So 
when he's talked about the mentorship and all of those things, 
that is really critical, particularly in the domestic and sexual 
violence movement. Thinking about who's in charge, who are the 
leaders in charge, how did they get there, it is predominantly 
white women, very few people of color, some men of color. Very 
few women of color are actually in leadership positions and so 
much of that has to do with mentorship. And so many women of 
color are not mentors. 

In fact, they are often exited from domestic violence shelters, 
programs, coalitions, agencies for maybe doing the same 
behaviors that non-women of color do. And they are let go. And 
our white colleagues are usually trained and given mentorships 
on those things. Because again, it goes back to this idea of 
implicit bias. And yeah, folks of color not being believed, not 
being given the benefit of the doubt. 

And so on this implicit bias, this institutional racism conversation, 
this racism that's woven into everything we do, it's woven into 
housing, it's woven into education, it's woven into the medical 
industry as we've seen with the case of COVID, one of the other 
topics-- we're just now beginning to talk about anti-blackness, 
anti-blackness from other folks of color in addition to white 
people. But there's this other idea of mysogynoir that we don't 


not talk about often. At least the collective we hardly talks about 
it at all. 

But folks who are in these movements, social justice movements 
are beginning to have these conversations more, folks in 
academia, I guess, are starting to have these conversations a bit. 
But mysogynoir is the very specific type of misogyny that is 
inflicted upon Black women in particular, Black women who have 
a very African phenotype strong-ish African-associated features. 
And mysogynoir was coined by queer Black feminist Moya Bailey 
in 2010 who created the term to address the misogyny directed 
towards Black women in American visual and pop culture. It 
extends way beyond that, and I'm going to talk about that. 

So mysogynoir has a couple of components. And so one of the 
components of mysogynoir is painting us as unattractive or 
animalistic or angry. So we have here Serena-- the photo on the 
left, the caricature or the cartoon on the left was done by an 
artist several years back. I don't know if you all saw it. This was a 
portrayal of Serena Williams after one of the large tennis matches 
where she stood up for herself, where she spoke back to the 
referee as many of them do. And this was what the person 
painted. 

Now, what you don't see in the larger image is a picture of the 
girl who she was playing against. It's painted almost as a blonde 
white woman when it was an Asian. It's an interracial, multiracial 


young girl who happens to have blond hair, but the way she is 
depicted in the picture, she looks like a white girl. And so that in 
itself, there's issues with that too. But the referee is saying just 
let her win already. So again, playing into this angry Black 
woman, playing into this as if she was undeserving, as if anyone 
let Serena and Venus get anything just because-- as if they didn't 
have to work twice as hard, as if they were not dealing with 
racism on the court and off for most of their career, for most of 
their life because they've been playing tennis since they were 
little kids. 

And so I've been using this photo for a while, photo on the left. 
And then last week, it dawned on me that I actually need to give 
equal time to how Serena really looks. How Serena is most often 
portrayed in other venues. So that's why I have her here as a 
mother, looking beautiful, on Vogue cover, elevated, elevated in 
her status as she should be. Because I didn't want this vile photo 
to be the one that has the final say. I wanted to elevate her and 
give her the respect that she's deserved after the work that she's 
done. So that is why the photo is here to respect this mother. 

And so another critical component of mysogynoir is Black 
women's pain as entertainment and also used for profit. So 
Russell Simmons, and if you all have not watch the video, On The 
Record, about the sexual assault charges that have been lobbied 
against Russell Simmons, it started to come out about him. 


Please watch On The Record, it's interesting-- by his accusers, his 
alleged accusers. I watched it last night, actually, it's on YouTube 
for free. 

So Russell Simmons posted a parody rape video of Harriet 
Tubman on the same day that Ava DuVernay shared a beautiful 
Black love film which I think was called Far From Home, if I'm not 
mistaken that's what it was called. And he posted this rape video 
on a new platform, new online platform that he was launching in 
August 2013. And this video, it was her being raped by a slave 
master. Millions and millions and millions of people came to his 
online site, came to his-- hold on, I'm going to pause the video 
and start it again. 

To his online platform. So he used this video to drive traffic to his 
platform, his platform that he was launching that day. Of all the 
things that he could have chosen, he chose to post a parody of 
one of our leaders, one of our heroes being raped. And after 
millions and millions of people went to his site, mission 
accomplished, he deleted the post. But the damage was done. 
This is a part of mysogynoir. So mysogynoir does not just come 
from the dominant culture, it comes from literally every direction. 

And so these are things that we need to understand when we're 
dealing with victims of crime, when Black women don't report, 
these are the reasons why because we are not believed, we are 
not respected, and we are not protected. So when that woman 


comes into a program, just thinking about domestic and sexual 
violence now, when she comes into your domestic violence 
shelter and maybe everybody else is talking, these are the 
reasons why she's not saying anything. So many times, women of 
color come into shelters and because they don't fit the norm of 
the good victim, they don't get the services, they don't get the 
attention. In fact, they get written up, she's non-compliant, she's 
anti-social, she's oppositional. And then she's exited. She's 
difficult. These are the reasons why they're not speaking. 
Because when they do speak, they're not believed so often. 

So this thing about being animalistic. So this is a reporter-- well, 
he was a reporter. I don't know what he's doing now. But he used 
to be a reporter for Univision. And he said on TV, on live 
television, "you know, Michelle Obama looks like she's part of the 
cast of the Planet of the Apes, the film." And so this is a form of 
mysogynoir also. If you look at how Venus and Serena, I just go 
back to them because it's so obvious with them also because 
they're darker skinned, the way that they are portrayed so often. 
Comparing Black people to apes is a very old trope. It is an old 
stereotype. And so here's this gentleman saying that about the 
former first lady of the United States. Mysogynoir. 

So taking it out of the realm of celebrity because people can say, 
all those are celebrities, they'll be fine, they're rich. How do these 
things-- whatever. But these things have real world effects for 


everyday Black women. So because doctors perceive Black 
women as having higher pain threshold, they are treated 
differently. I talk a lot about the opioid crisis and one of the 
reasons why the opioid crisis has not hit Black people in the same 
way that it hit white people is because doctors perceive that Black 
people, as a whole, do not feel pain. There are studies, you can 
google them, there was one that was done in 2016, 2015, where 
they hold doctors and they said they didn't believe Black people 
felt pain. So we weren't given the opioids. 

Black women are viewed as threatening or angry whenever they 
speak up for themselves. I've already talked about that. Maternal 
mortality rates for Black women are three times higher than for 
white women in the United States, which many attribute that to 
racial bias in the health care system. Again, not being believed. I 
have story after story after story of friends of mine who, including 
myself, who have gone to the hospital, has been treated horribly 
by doctors who have not been believed to have been talked to 
and all kinds of crazy ways. And one of the things we know is that 
a person who is experienced, who has had a bad experience with 
one service, that can tailor how they experience all other 
services. 

So what does that mean? If a victim of a crime has had a bad 
experience with the medical profession in her life, if she is abused 
or if she is assaulted or if she's robbed, whatever has come to 


now make her a victim of crime, how likely is she to go back to 
that same medical system, to that same hospital? Not too much. 
If people of color have had negative experiences with law 
enforcement, when they're not victims of crime, when they're just 
driving down the street and they get pulled over, how likely are 
they to believe that they're going to be treated fairly when they 
are victims? All of these things come into play. 

And so this also has an impact in interpersonal relationships. 
Because of the stereotype of the strong Black women, many 
Black women are not allowed to show any emotion, any pain, any 
distress. And so I would argue that this is why we see the high 
numbers of homicide with Black women in particular in this 
country because they think they can handle it, they want to 
protect their partners from the criminal justice system. And so 
they are not reporting, they're not asking for help, they don't 
want to be looked at as weak, they don't want to be looked at as 
traitors to the community. They think they can handle it, and one 
of the things we know is that violence escalates. 

And so by the time that the violence has escalated to the point 
where she's ready to leave, and she does, it's either too late or 
we know that the chance for homicide goes up when you leave. 
And again, maybe she thinks she can handle it, she can handle it, 
she can handle it. And then it's too late. Another for another form 
of mysogynoir styles that are deemed unacceptable when worn 


by Black women are celebrated when worn by white women. So 
all across the country, we have young Black children, male and 
female, actually, being kicked out of school, being suspended, 
having their hair cut during games. Because the way our hair 
grows out of our heads naturally has been called unprofessional, 
ugly, et cetera. 

One of the things we know is that poverty is one of the highest 
indicators of intimate partner violence. If your education is 
interrupted, if your education leads directly to your ability in the 
most part for you to be able to make money, for you to be not in 
poverty. So if you're suspended, all of these things going on your 
record, you're being tracked, all of these things are happening. 
How do you think that impacts the child's ability to grow up and 
actually earn money for themselves? Black women being fired 
from their jobs or being not hired because of the way their hair 
grows out of their head, these things are happening. What if she 
is the only earner in that home? So that's why you see women of 
color wearing-- one of the reasons why you see women of color 
wearing all different styles, it's changing now somewhat, but 
there is still a stigma particularly in education and in corporate 
America. The state of New York had to create a whole law 
banning schools from not kicking children out, to ban hair 
discrimination, and other states across the country are doing that 
as well. 


But when they are worn on white women, they are celebrated 
i.e., Kim Kardashian, any one of the Kardashians, actually. Back 
in my day, it was Bo Derek, it's ghetto on a Black woman, it's 
exotic on everybody else. And that's our hair, that's our styles, 
the way we dress, all of those things. And then again, this idea of 
pain as entertainment. 

So culture and cultural identity. Why are all of these things 
important? Why do we even need to talk about these things? 
Because as I said, culture shapes an individual's experience of 
violence. Culture shapes the harm-doer's response to the 
interventions and acceptance of responsibility. Culture shapes 
access to the other services that might be crucial for the victim, 
as I said. The categories of race, class, et cetera, do not exist in 
isolation from one another. That is another reason why these 
conversations are important. They intersect, they interconnect in 
different ways for different individuals. 

Cultural identity can influence how others see the presence or 
absence of interpersonal violence. Remember the same when 
Michael Phelps said that as a white male, he had no idea that the 
experience he had-- why this thing gets open like that-- he had 
no idea why the experiences-- that other people were having 
different experiences than him as a white male walking through 
the world. So when I show up to a program or when I show up to 
a bail hearing or when I show up in front of the judge, I'm 


bringing my culture with me. And the culture of that courthouse, 
the culture of my city, the culture of the attorneys, all of that is 
going to influence the outcomes for me. And it's going to 
influence, again, the presence or absence of interpersonal 
violence. Does the harm-doer even know what they're doing is 
wrong? 

Cultural identity, a person might also identify strongly with one 
culture than another. They might experience several identities 
simultaneously or shift between identities, culture shifting. So for 
that reason, it's dangerous to use categories to categorize and 
define an Individual this creates and perpetuates more 
stereotypes and more misinformation. Every person, regardless 
of initial appearance, has a rich culture that they are driving 
from. So remember that culture is complex. It is fluid. It's not 
bound by time and space. Identities are bound by time and 
space. 

Now, identities are also bound by time and space and are usually 
multifaceted. So when we're talking about cultural competency or 
we're talking about being more included, we need to understand 
that it is a challenging and continuing process because everything 
is always in flux. There are no simple answers. And I think I said 
that one, Identities are not bound by time and space. And culture 
is not bound by time and space. And that's what makes it 


challenging. So we're going to talk a little bit about 
intersectionality. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term. 

KIMBERLE CRENSHAW: Intersectionality is just a metaphor for 
understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality or 
disadvantage sometimes compound themselves, and they create 
obstacles that often are not understood within conventional ways 
of thinking about anti-racism or feminism or whatever social 
justice advocacy structures we have. Intersectionality isn't so 
much a grand theory. It's a prism for understanding certain kinds 
of problems. African-American girls are six times more likely to 
be suspended than white girls, that's probably a race and a 
gender problem. It's not just a race problem. It's not just a 
gender problem. 

So I encourage people to think about how the convergence of 
race stereotypes or gender stereotypes might actually play out in 
the classroom, between teachers and students, between students 
and other students, between students and administrators, and 
commit themselves to understanding that as a way of intervening 
and providing equal educational opportunity for all students 
regardless of their identities. Identity is simply a self-contained 
unit. It is a relationship between people and history, people and 
communities, people and institutions. So schools do a good job 
when they understand that, and when they commit themselves to 
curricular development, to opportunities in the school for all 


students to understand the histories that have brought us to this 
particular moment. You can't change outcomes without 
understanding how they come about. So independent schools can 
take the lead on that, to be responsive to their student 
populations and to the communities out of which the students 
come. 

ZOE FLOWERS: So I love that video because even though she's 
talking about schools and intersectionality, the conversation 
actually emerged out of a conversation about housing, issues that 
she was seeing and talked about obviously it can be applied and 
is being applied to victims of crime. So I want to talk a little bit 
about the racial and economic equity of survivors project that I 
was a part of at the Women of Power Network. 

And so this project sought to increase the capacity of the field to 
address racial and other structural and institutional biases that 
pose barriers to economic stability for survivors of domestic and 
sexual violence. So women of color network partnered with the 
Southwest Law Center-- Southwest Center for Law and Policy. Let 
me do that again, Angelina, because my words got a little-- 

Project was developed by the Women of Color Network, the 
Southwest Center for Law and Policy, Asian Pacific Institute on 
Gender-Based Violence, the Texas Council on Family Violence, 
Casa de Esperanza, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and 
Ethnicity, Camille Holmes, and Bill Kennedy. So our process was 


that we had three calls with advocates of color who also identified 
as survivors. So I was in charge of those calls with my colleague, 
Sara Wee. Our attorneys on the project, they did calls with other 
attorneys who were also people of color and aspiring white allies. 
And then we had two calls that were with economic justice or 
policy staff from state and tribal coalitions who are people of color 
and/or aspiring allies. 

And so the snapshot of the questions we ask were, how have you 
practiced both self-examination and self-care when it comes to 
racism and racial bias in the work? We asked, how could you 
foster more conversations with survivors about opportunities with 
the barriers that they face? We asked, what are your 
organization's policies, practices, and protocols to address racial 
disparities for survivors within their organizations and within the 
movement as a whole? And we asked, what would you like your 
organization, community, or state to look like or be doing in one 
year, five years or 10 years? And we asked a lot more questions 
than that, but that was just a snapshot. 

And so one of the things we heard was, "I'm really struggling with 
being within a primarily white-led organization, working with 
sexual assault survivors and trying to contemplate how we 
fundamentally restructure our practice to center folks of color, 
queer folks of color, it's uncomfortable to me." One attorney said 
they were a white person and it's uncomfortable for them to talk 


about racial equity because they don't feel like they really can. 
They see things happening, they want to fix something, and they 
don't know what to do. That is something that I hear a lot now. 
And then one person said he's gay, he's a male, and he's 
Hispanic. And so even though he's a part of the Hispanic 
community, he has white skin privilege and he has male privilege 
that he himself needs to work on. 

And so I wanted to share this case study. This was what an 
advocate actually told us in the report. And I chose to pull it out 
for these conversations and really pick apart what's happening. 
So we have here, there was a survivor who was staying at the 
shelter, who was already accepted into the transitional housing 
program. She was a woman of color with one small child. But the 
staff at the shelter knew little to nothing about her actual 
circumstances and basically they were complaining about her. 
And so when I talked to the advocate, they said I was hearing 
stories about this person. We need to exit because she keeps 
breaking curfew. 

Now, one of the things that's interesting about this, for us, we 
wanted to think about what could be happening. What were the 
staff perspectives, what the survivor's reality, and what did the 
advocate possibly see from where they were sitting. So what was 
showing up for the advocates, a woman of color with one small 
child was constantly being complained about because she was 


always breaking curfew. That was the staff perspective. This 
woman was problematic because she kept breaking curfew. 

What her reality was that the transitional housing program staff 
knew that she was breaking curfew because she was relying on a 
cousin to get off work at 10:00 PM at night to give her some tips 
each day until she got started on her job. She was waiting on 
school to start her job because she needed the school as child 
care. Shelter staff were complaining even though they never 
attempted to have a conversation with her. 

What we were also told by advocates was that survivors of color 
were more likely than white survivors to receive caps on funding, 
being placed on payment plans, experiencing strict enforcement 
of shelter rules, and being exited from programs and shelters. So 
what happened to this woman was not uncommon to what other 
women were experiencing. Other women of color. What we were 
told is when it came to getting funding from the shelter, just like 
she said, women of color were given caps on how much they 
could get, or they were put on payment plans, but that was only 
done to the women of color. 

And so we wanted to know what possible assumptions and beliefs 
were underneath this treatment. And so the staff's assumptions 
and unconscious biases were the over-reliance on assumptions 
based on stereotypes or media images, i.e., the angry Black 
woman stereotype, the woman being lazy, being disrespectful, 


rather than actually inquiring into what was going on with her. 
This also showed us that there was a lack of knowledge, skills, 
and capacity on the survivor's part because the advocacy 
approach relies on service delivery rather than assessing 
survivor's holistic means. The staff lack resources and support to 
assess and address survivor's multitude of needs, this also was 
an issue with the program, with transitional housing program, 
and the shelter staff were not communicating about cases. 

And then there was also the economic and social reality that 
because of historical and systemic discrimination, because of 
redlining which denotes what areas of neighborhoods that people 
of color can actually live in. And segregation results in less wealth 
being accumulated in family networks. So that is why she's 
relying on tips to help her get around until she could start her 
job. And all of those things are happening in communities of 
color. So the social networks and families are unable to offer 
much financial or material support to survivors of color. And all of 
these things, again, lead to the higher numbers we see of 
homicides for women of color. And then their existing policies, 
resources to provide income streams to women facing violence 
are not a high priority. All of these things were happening. 

And so some of the suggestions we heard from the advocates of 
color who were also survivors, that they wanted people to create 
avenues for conversations with other survivors, colleagues, and 


staff, acknowledging racial bias and the difficulty of navigating 
systems. So the advocates that we talked to who were also 
survivors, they wanted to have frank conversations. They wanted 
the white people to do their own work. They wanted them to do 
the inward and the outward work for equity. And they really want 
to see innovative programming. They want to know to what 
extent and who at every level of an organization is carving out 
space to allow that wisdom that is generated from partnerships to 
really infuse the organization. 

So I really invite you all to explore who are you serving. And who 
is offered what services? And what services are survivors actually 
receiving? And how are you collecting data? That question of data 
is so, so, so important. And what program data do you collect to 
help examine issues like this? What partners could you partner 
with? Who could you partner with? In what ways are you 
engaging with the communities you're working in, and our staff 
engaged in systems change efforts. 

So often, advocates get so excited to do this work, they come to 
a training back when we could meet in person, and they would be 
so engaged and so energized to do this racial equity work or any 
kind of systems change work and they would go back to their 
agencies and they're just not able to do the work that they really 
want to do. So I really would encourage leaders to engage staff in 
these systems change efforts and let them know what is going 


on. I can think about the times when I was an advocate. We 
weren't told about lobbying. We weren't told about so many 
things. And it's really important to have everyone at the table 
when you're making programs, policies, and decisions that really 
are life and death services. 

And so thinking back to our case study, what is your standard of 
protocol for this situation? What do you do when things like this 
happen, when you have advocates who are not talking to actual 
people in the program? And how are you training your staff and 
what are you training them on? And how do you share 
information across programs? How can you make sure that that 
happens? What does your language access policy? What are your 
policies for accessibility? And who's at the table developing 
organizational policies? And who could be? I encourage you to 
really ask these questions. And intersectionality is not about 
making sure that every oppression is named. It's about making 
sure every person is accounted for. 

So I have a couple of reflection questions. What are some historic 
blocks or barriers unique to your area that would prevent people 
of color from coming to or obtaining services? That's a question 
for you to ask yourself. What can you do as an organization to 
become more accessible? What can you do in six months? What 
can you do a year from now? How would you like your 
organization to be different? And where do you have power? 


Where is your privilege? Sometimes as advocates, we can feel 
powerless. But we're not. So where's your power? 

And then what was challenging for you? What would you like to 
see in the future? What did you like? What was helpful? And so 
you can direct any of those questions to the resource center. 
These are the video links for the videos that I shared. And you 
should be able to reach me, yeah, here's my contact information, 
zflowerswocinc@gmail.com, so you can reach out to me with any 
comments you have. I'm happy to answer them. And I'll see you 
next time. Bye.