Welcome back to another episode of the Origination Point Podcast! Join Bill as he talks about the Aretha Franklin biopic and how everyone works through their own personal biases. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you can get notified when new episode releases.

 

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Origination Point Podcast Ep. #25 – Respect

I’ve got a number of topics I want to share with you. My mind has been busy and full of so many things that I can’t stop them from coming out, so I’m going to jump right in and remind you that the origination point is about the point of healing and understanding. It’s a place of grounding, finding community and comfort, and being able to share, talk and have real conversations in an authentic way. If anything that you read piques your interest, find somebody to talk to. Ask a question and tell a story. Do something that creates some connection with somebody that either you know, somebody you don’t know, or maybe somebody that you haven’t connected with in a while.

I’m going to start with what I did one night. I decided to watch the Aretha Franklin documentary. That was an amazing story. I had no idea the things that she went through as a Black woman growing up in the pretty White male music industry in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s and everything that she had to go through. What an amazing person she was, the authentic person that she came to be.

The trials and tribulations that she had to go through to find herself were heartwarming and heartening to watch that a Black woman in America could step into her full self and decide, “This is who I am. This is the music that I want to play,” having to work through mostly White men but also Black men who told her that they had their interest at heart and yet didn’t always treat her that way.

This isn’t an episode about people’s race. It’s an episode about people’s humanity and the authentic parts of ourselves that we show and what’s real. She had men in her life like her dad, her manager, and her husband whom all acted in some way. They supported her and yet treated her in many ways like they didn’t and how that affected her sense of who she was and how she saw herself even to the music that she wanted to sing.

A Little Respect

That Respect song hit me hard because that’s a big message for our world, asking for a little respect. Respect is something that is hard to see in some places like in our world, communities, workplaces, businesses and schools. The messages of her music were encompassing her challenge, struggle, growth and even the musicians that she picked.

She didn’t pick musicians based on how they looked. She picked musicians based on how they sounded. She told the managers and the producers, “I want this particular group of musicians because they play the music I want to sing to.” Being able to step into her most authentic self took a lot of grounding and self-awareness.

 

It was an amazing movie to watch her grow through the music industry and have people try to tell her what she should do and how she should sing because that’s what sold records. There were people along the way who pushed her also, gave her a lot of support, and said, “You need to sing what you want to sing. Stop worrying about what all these other people are trying to make of you. Do what you want to do. Sing the songs that you want to sing.”

That’s when it started to blossom in her life and career. She was such an amazing woman. I had no idea that she was friends with Martin Luther King Jr. and that she walked, sang and marched with him. She was very close to him. Her social justice roots are much deeper than I ever thought. All I thought was she was a great musician. I had no idea that this social justice part of what she did was so much a part of her life and the way that she did it with such fierce, pride and determination that no matter who it was, her daddy, mom, sister or grandma and no matter how she was affected, she wanted to make this happen.

She had addictive patterns with alcohol. Those were her demons that were part of her growth. It’s those demons that are part of everybody’s growth. We all have those things, whether it’s with a substance, a narrative or some type of treatment that we got that we took in so deeply that we decided that that’s who we are. Everyone has those.

The ability to move through those types of things in our life takes a lot of support and getting down to the bottom. It’s this whole idea of growth from what I saw. I know that a movie is part fiction and part truth, and I’ll admit I haven’t done my research on her to see exactly what was true and what was not, but I do know that struggle is real.

 

As a Black woman in the music industry in that era, those challenges were probably pretty close to what she had experienced. The ability to work through them struck me. It was so heartening to see her finally stepping in. You could tell because it breathe life into her. Even in her music when she was 80 years old, I could close my eyes and hear that same voice that I heard at twenty years old. It was so powerful and strong.

It made an impression on me because here I am still talking about it. It gave me a lot of messages about working through challenges and not letting anybody define for you what your path is. We all have a path, a passion and some purpose that we were put on the planet for. She started singing at a very young age. I knew that that voice was what her passion was. It’s what she was put on the planet for. To be able to fully step into our passion, to me, that’s what life is about.

Everyone has a purpose on this planet. Life is about fully stepping into our passions. Share on X

Bringing Your Authentic Self Forward

For anybody out there reading, whatever your passion is, whatever it is that grounds and supports you and that is your authentic self, figure out a way to bring it forward. For myself, I’m stepping into my authentic self and finding that what I’m doing is who I am. This is what I was put on the planet for. It’s taken me a long time because I’ve had those same types of tribulations, both with people in my family and outside of my family who said I couldn’t do what I wanted to do.

I wouldn’t be successful and accomplish that. I had to do something different than what I loved. What I’m finding as I step into my passion is I’m stepping into my love and heart. It keeps driving me and moving me in this direction that I’m able to share with the whole world. For me, it was through my voice. For other people, it’s through music. For other people, it’s through the arts, writing, or some other creative endeavors.

Part of my challenge to everyone reading is to find your passion. You’ll know when you find it because you’ll feel it in your heart and emotion. You’ll be walking along one day and something will come to you and you’ll feel this sense of overwhelm emotionally. It will be like, “This is it. This is what I want to do. This is what I love. This is what drives me. This is my passion.”

It was a pretty good movie, and it hit me on a lot of levels. The social justice piece still rings so true for me and so deep that we’re in an era where we have social justice, however you want to define that. For me, social justice is about connecting with each other in a more authentic way and how I see you as a human being and look beyond what I see to experience who you are.

Social justice is about connecting with each other in a more authentic way. Share on X

What I see gets stuck sometimes in my judgments, biases and stereotypes. Who you are will stay with me because who you are is your authentic self. That’s where we have to share our stories and connect from our hearts. Think that that’s an important message. That’s what I got from watching that movie. I was so happy that I did it. Think about that. Her song Respect, I find out what it means to me, and you all need to find out what respect means to you. Believe me, we could use a big dose of respect in our world.

Concerning Education

I’m going to switch topics. I told you I have a lot of random things that I want to share on this particular episode. I want to talk about education. I can’t continue to watch what’s happening in our country and not start to speak about it. At the end of the day, the people who are getting hurt the most are our kids. I used to be on the school board, so my heart is in this. I know what school boards go through every day doing their best to make decisions.

While I got on the school board to advocate for kids who look like me and kids who are what we used to call minority but what we now call kids of color, that was the main focus that drove me. I saw that from a resource perspective, they didn’t have the same resources and support in school as other children. When I got elected, I realized that I had to advocate for 29,000 students. While that’s what drove me, I had to care about all children.

Even though there were 4 of us who were what we call the majority, we didn’t treat the other 3 people like they were less than. We worked hard to have them be a part of our school board because we were a group of seven. We weren’t always unanimous, and I didn’t always win the vote. For the most part, the majority of the things that we did as a school board was based on doing what was right by our students.

It was so interesting because, at that time, everybody said, “Education’s not political.” I was like, “Thank goodness. I don’t have to run from a particular party. I can be involved in education and care about kids.” What I found out is that was a false narrative. Education is very political and is more politicized than it has ever been. People are running for the school board based on some false narratives around what’s happening and then going in and changing it based on not having a lot of facts.

 

I’ll talk about one piece where people talk about critical race theory as something that is indoctrinating our kids to believe that why kids are oppressors and kids of color are oppressed. In the schools that I’ve worked in, I’ve never seen that in many years of doing this work across the country. Are there people who facilitate this work like me who message that? Absolutely.

There are probably too many people who not only message that but also message that White people are all racist. They’re doing a lot of damage. In our former President’s executive order, in which I read the whole thing around critical race theory, two things were said that struck me. I’ll say them both because they’re both in the same sentence. The sentence was, “This work that I’ve done for most of my career was un-American and divisive.”

In other words, talking about the implications of the role that race plays in our relationships was divisive and un-American. I will tell you that that’s a false narrative from my perspective because, for years, the way that I’ve approached this conversation, it has been the most American and inclusive approach that I know because it’s all designed around creating connections with each other and having people realize that there is way more that connects us than divides us.

 

If we could get past all of these false narratives and start to research, talk about, and think about what’s being said versus what’s happening, we could start to have these conversations. We could move past this idea that there’s a certain group who are racist because of their identity. That’s wrong to say. I have never in any of my workshops ever told a group of people, “You’re racist. You’re bad. You are the problem because of your identity,” whether it’s race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, political ideology or any other identifying factor.

Disrupting Stereotypes, Biases, And Judgments

When we do that, we’re being exclusive. What I’m working to disrupt are the stereotypes, biases and judgments that have been put onto me as a person who doesn’t identify as White based on how people have stereotyped, judged or put their biases against me. Subsequently, what’s happened is that we have a whole group of people who have been excluded based on those factors, stereotypes, judgments and biases.

What I see happening in our country is I see those same groups who have been marginalized and excluded treating another whole group of people, mostly White folks, the same way, and yet in some way, they’re better and that logically doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how you can exclude somebody and label them the problem and feel like you’re better or more righteous than they were in the treatment toward us. It logically is a disconnect for me.

As I approach my work and my approach to inclusion and belonging, it’s through this lens of connection and relationship. Relational leadership is something that we need more of. What all relational leadership means is you lead from the heart. What all belonging means is, “I can be a part of this group, organization and community without having to give up a part of myself to do so.”

Inclusion means looking at the policies, practices and protocols that either create a sense of belonging or perpetuate a sense of exclusion. All of these false narratives around this idea of indoctrination and telling people that they are a certain way because of their race, for the most part, is a false narrative. It’s not true.

Inclusion means looking at the policies, practices, and protocols that either create a sense of belonging or exclusion. Share on X

I say for the most part because there are people who facilitate this work and give that message to groups of people that you are the problem, you should be ashamed of yourself, and you should feel bad and guilty. I don’t do that, and I don’t think that we’re going to get anywhere if we continue to treat people that way and see our fellow humans as the other.

I implore school boards across this country to start to think about our kids and include their voices. As I work in different communities across the country, high school students especially are saying, “All these decisions are being made, and no one is asking us or listening to our voice.” If we’re going to create leaders of the next generation that is going to go out and fearlessly engage with each other, talk to each other, and solve some of the issues that we see in 2022, we’ve got to include them.

We can’t just come in and say, “We’re the majority, and we’re going to shake everything up.” That doesn’t help anybody. It doesn’t support change in a way that allows people to be engaged and get on board. It creates more havoc and then more people use their energy to do things like recalls and have Facebook pages that are demeaning and denigrating.

We’re putting all of our energy into fighting with each other when we should be putting all of our energy into accepting each other, loving each other, and figuring out a way to be together. We can’t continue to be divided. We have to figure out how to build a community that is self-aware, authentic, and grounded and creates a level of support and comfort so that our kids know that we’re working to do something better for them than what we’re experiencing. That’s all of our responsibility.

We're putting all of our energy into fighting with each other. We should focus more on accepting each other and figuring out a way to be together. We can't continue to be divided. Share on X

No matter what you do, how you look, or what your identity is, we are all part of this country and world. This whole idea that we’re in this together became this false set of words because, at the same time, I heard people say, “We’re all in this together,” and yet all they were doing in their behavior was exhibiting, “All I care about is myself or a small group of people.” That’s not going to get us where we need to go.

My challenge to everybody who’s reading is, how can you show up and be more authentic? How can you increase your self-awareness? How can you support your community in a way that guides people and engages people in deep conversation that allows each person to show up as their most authentic self? That’s what our country needs.

I’ll go back to Aretha Franklin. You don’t want me to sing Respect, but what we need in our communities is a little bit more respect. Let’s work together. Let’s be hopeful and think about the next steps because the next steps are not out there somewhere. They’re all within us. They’re all in our hearts. Get out of our heads and get into our hearts. Start to make these connections with each other.

Be more loving and kind. Realize that we’re all in the same community together. I look forward to our future conversations. Reach out if you have questions. If you have a story and you’d like to be part of this show, reach out. Let’s talk. It doesn’t matter what your ideology is. If you’re ready to have a real conversation that shares information, I’m open to it. Thanks again for reading. I will see you next time. Keep growing.

 

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