[INTRO]

Julia Rhodes Davis: [00:00:00] A place that I go to when it's feeling particularly dark is that the rise of fascism that we are living in and through will give rise to a movement of profound solidarity that we have never seen before because it will offer enough evidence that when they come for one of us, they come for all of us.

And so part of why it's really important in these times to look at how whiteness operates to isolate us from so many other folks is because we are completely cut off from opportunities to build solidarity with those who are more vulnerable. And I don't just mean people of color, I really mean building relationships across race and across, across documentation status, across age.

Across ethnicity, across [00:01:00] geography, but also deeply within our own communities, resisting isolationism that comes with white supremacy culture, and resisting the notion that we will be safe because I think we're starting to see the evidence of the fallacy of that.

Jenny Stefanotti: That's Julia Rhodes Davis. She's an entrepreneur and activist with the background in climate, ethical technology, and most recently racial justice. This is the Denizen podcast. I'm your host and curator, Jenny Stef. So what does it mean for white people to confront and dismantle their racialized identities?

That's what we're exploring in this episode On White Work, Julia imagines a growing movement for healing whiteness, divesting from racialized capitalism towards human dignity and flourishing for all. In this conversation, we discussed the various aspects of white work confronting what whiteness means and how it has affected us understanding our personal legacy and taking accountability for our ancestors, [00:02:00] the inner spiritual components of this work.

The cultural components. We refer extensively to last week's conversation on white supremacy culture with Tema Okun. Julia also shares why she sees this as an ongoing practice Best done community. As always, you can find show notes in the transcript for this episode on our website becoming denizen.com.

There you can sign up for our newsletter. I bring our latest content to your inbox alongside information about virtual denizen events. We're hosting several community conversations this week discussing this work. I hope you'll join one of them. Without further ado, here's Julia Rhodes Davis. 

[INTERVIEW]

Some of you may recognize Julia's name from, I don't know, three, four years ago.

Julia was a guest in a clubhouse conversation looking at consciousness and technology. And your work has evolved since then and it's very relevant for Denizen. And we've been talking about having this conversation for probably a year and a half, but now is definitely the right time to talk about white work, and I think it really builds on conversations that we've [00:03:00] had over the course of the year around TNA side and decolonization and consciousness, and most recently white supremacy culture.

So really excited to dig into this with you. Me too. Thanks for the invite. I appreciate your support and encouragement with this very critical thread of the Denizen inquiry around justice and particularly around racial justice, and I appreciate your work and your leadership here. One of the things I love so much about Denizen is we're learning from each other so often it's not bringing in people so far from the outside.

So yeah, just really appreciating you and the work that you do and the arc of your story and just the opportunity to learn from you.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Thank you so much. And I will just say that a friend of mine gave me new language recently around leadership in this work that this is an offering and an invitation, and I'm not modeling anything because to model is to presume something about myself that is not mine to presume.

So just to say I'm, I'm [00:04:00] here as an offering and hope this conversation is an offering.

Jenny Stefanotti: I appreciate that humility and that makes me think of qualified. That, that. Yes. So, so Julie and I are going to interweave reflections on the prior conversation with Tema Okun on white supremacy culture, which I'm super stoked about.

You're modeling for us, not modeling, uh, just practicing humility and practicing and orientation and partnership and that we're all kind of finding our way. That's right. And one of the things I did wanna note for this particular conversation is so much of denizen in the podcast is so intellectual and it's in our heads.

And yet a really important part of the discourse is understanding the need to get out of our heads and into our bodies. And as this is a delicate conversation, I do wanna encourage listeners to practice embodied listening and notice in their body where they might feel discomfort or contraction, or where they might feel excitement.

We, of course, will be having community conversations about [00:05:00] this topic, so I just wanted to invite everyone to practice that as we proceed. Yeah. Great. Okay, so I think we'll start with just looking at this within the context of Denizen, right? So the Denizen inquiries around systems change. We have these six pillars.

It's really had this center of gravity around economics. More recently we're diving deeper into justice and racial justice in particular. But you had some really important things to say just about, you know, that you can't do economic reform without acknowledging and integrating the racialized aspect of capitalism as we know and practice it.

So can you say more about that?

Julia Rhodes Davis: I mean, I think that a lot of my practice over some years as it relates to what is my work to do and with others around what their work is to do related to justice and related specifically to white work, is to really understand [00:06:00] who and where we come from. And that's of course an individual question, but it also is a cultural question.

It's a historic question. It's a societal question. And I've seen a lot of examples in not just regenerative economics or post-capitalist futures, or really aspirational technology projects and many other examples, how easy it is for us to become a historic. To become really just forward facing.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm.

Julia Rhodes Davis: And I long so much for a world in which we all can thrive and in, in which we all feel true, interdependent freedom and liberation.

And I don't think we get there without building new. But in order to build new, on a steady foundation, we actually have to address where we come from. And so when we're talking about the economic system. Capitalism is racialized [00:07:00] capitalism, and it's not just historically racialized capitalism in the form of chattel slavery, which then became convict leasing, which then became sharecropping.

But racialized capitalism is happening today in a lot of different ways. You know, many of the low wage data workers who are labeling images and data sets for AI are living in poverty, and they are predominantly black and brown, and they are now most often living outside of the us. That is true of almost every extractive form of commercialism, and I don't think that we can ignore that.

The racial and economic dynamics of that are deeply embedded in the legacy of US slavery and everything that has followed since.

Jenny Stefanotti: Why don't you tell everyone a little bit about your personal story. You had this really powerful quote in some of your writings where you said, I would never be able to [00:08:00] escape the anguish of my inherited spiritual disaster.

There was a moment where you were really confronted with that and you pivoted. So tell us about that.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Yeah, so maybe I'll go back a little bit further. Speaking of looking back to, go ahead. So I descend from a very deeply rooted southern family on my mother's side of the family. Some of my ancestors came over with a charter from King Charles II and a thousand acres entitling them to a thousand acres in North Carolina in the 17th century.

And I also descend from folks who came over during the Highland clearances in Scotland, which was the British crown exercising its power over the ethnic Scottish people and Irish as well. And fast forward to my twenties. [00:09:00] I grew up in this progressive white family with these deep southern roots and grew up with stories of my grandparents marching in the civil rights movement and my parents being very progressive ministers and in so doing, understanding their ministry as a justice ministry.

And so I sort of like came from these quote good white people. And then my grandmother told me this story about my great-grandfather, her father who stood up to the clan for having some role in opening the first school for black children in their part of North Carolina, southeastern North Carolina. And so I had like all of this evidence that I was good.

I came from good white people and that was sufficient for a short period of time before I started to do more research and learn more. And so fast forward, I. Some years, it became clear to me that, of course I descend from Enslavers as well as descending from justice seekers. And so I had been doing [00:10:00] work around social impact and social justice and have generally held these values.

But I remember the day that George Floyd was murdered. I had a phone call with a friend scheduled, and we got on the phone, he's a black man, and I said, how are you doing? Feeling tremendous concern for his wellbeing.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Imagining what it is to see yet another black person murdered. And this time, you know, actually seeing the entire thing happen on social media.

And he said, with so much clarity and love and invitation, real curiosity. Why are you asking me that question? Why is it that white people aren't asking of yourselves? How are you doing? How is it that you're able to compartmentalize black death and black suffering? Hmm. And that really [00:11:00] stopped me in my tracks.

And so that was an inflection point. And I had been working in public interest technology and AI policy and research for some time, and yet I knew in my body, speaking of embodied listening, that there was this dissonance between what I said I cared about and how I was spending most of my time and what my days felt like and what my embodiment felt like.

And so it was really a yet another beginning. I think that there are many inflection points in our paths in life and in our paths, especially as white folks who are trying to do our work. That. That was another beginning of really exploring how to more fully step into this commitment to racial justice that I've felt called to for a long time.

Jenny Stefanotti: One thing that's really critical that you mentioned also in [00:12:00] some of your writing, is this very important distinction between, I'm stepping into racial justice as a white person to help you, which still carries these things that we talked about in the white supremacy culture. I'm qualified, it's paternal, I'm helping you, versus I'm stepping into this work for me.

Right? Which is precisely the mirror that your friend held up for you in that moment. Why aren't you doing this for you?

Julia Rhodes Davis: Yeah, I mean, I think that it functions in a couple of ways. One, the culture, and we as white folks raised in this culture, this white supremacist culture, most of us are raised to not even think of ourselves as racialized, right?

That whiteness is the water we're swimming in. As John Bwin of seen on radio talks about. That whiteness is really focused on the other as a way of maintaining racial hierarchy, even if it's not our intention. It is the impact of not understanding how we are racialized. And [00:13:00] then what does collective behavior, white, collective behavior look like in spaces, in culture, in society?

And all of a sudden you recognize once you start seeing yourself as a racialized entity, as a, a racialized person, all the ways that it is ours. Mm. And all the ways that it's, I mean, whiteness to my mind, and I think Tema speaks to this beautifully in her paper and in your conversation, it just so limits our capacity for imagination, for what's possible for relationship, because it necessitates.

A structural hierarchy. It was created for that reason. And so if we want to create the society where everyone has what they need to thrive and where our relationships are really about mutuality, we have to address that, which [00:14:00] is preventing us from having access to that. And I think whiteness actually plays into that a lot.

Jenny Stefanotti: Sure, sure, sure, sure. What do you mean or what do we mean when we say white work?

Julia Rhodes Davis: Yeah, so part of it is first even recognizing that white work is ours. That it is our stake in understanding how whiteness operates in ourselves and in our lives, and in our families, and in our institutions, and in our culture, and how we can interrupt that.

A lot of my work has moved into really understanding that if we know who and where we come from and we're able to turn and face that.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah,

Julia Rhodes Davis: that is a really helpful starting point for understanding what is ours to do. Mm. So for me, these deep southern roots I've got, and coming from both justice seekers and.

Enslavers. [00:15:00] Understanding that, knowing that has pointed me in directions about understanding what is mine to do.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Julia Rhodes Davis: So it's like naming our starting point, figuring out where does the money and the privilege that I have access to come from. Who was harmed as a result of that privilege and resource?

What is the sort of historical and ancestral context that helps me place my people inside of the realities of their lives in a way that helps me actually build more empathy for them? Mm-hmm. I think that there's a lot of inner work. There's at the somatic level, how does whiteness live in my body?

Mm-hmm. What does that look like? There's spiritual work, there's a lot of, you know, reading gets you actually pretty far, not in terms of clear answers, but I think in terms of some helpful frameworks to parse. And then I think there's [00:16:00] real interpersonal work and understanding how we hold power with other people and really understanding how that power implicates our relationships and where we can be, not just aware of that, but in choice about how we wield that power or seed that power with a lot of intentionality.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Julia Rhodes Davis: So those are some thoughts.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. I appreciate how, again, to the tune of what you said earlier about we can't just design utopia from here, we have to recognize what we've inherited. So you, you speak to that, how do we heal and repair. Mm-hmm. But I, I think it's also really interesting because your work confronts us with what does that mean at the individual level.

Mm-hmm. Because I think it's easy to say like, oh, reparations to the state should figure this out and pay people, or whatever it looks like. Right. And that's not my role. And then you speak to, again, just to underscore what you just said, the inner [00:17:00] work, the interpersonal work. I also think the cultural work that I think comes out a lot in the TEMA conversation.

What are those attributes? What do those look like? In reflecting on that, I wanna just also, before we get into the details a little bit more, just the kind of resistance to this kind of work.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Yeah. So. I think that there is absolutely nothing in our mainstream culture that encourages engaging with white supremacy culture in a critical way, especially for white people.

It's not,

Jenny Stefanotti: yeah.

Julia Rhodes Davis: It's just, it's not invited. And that's for good reason. The system would like to maintain the status quo, and so some of it is just, there's no incentive on the face of it. Once you get into the work, there's huge incentive to stay in and go deeper because I think there's a tremendous amount [00:18:00] of life and aliveness and freedom that is available through this work.

Hmm. Um, we talked a little bit about in our prep, the experience I had, uh. Performance of life versus being in my life. And I would say that getting into this work more deeply has also given me access to living my life. Mm. Not just performing what I think my life is supposed to look like as a highly educated, affluent white woman raised in New York City, et cetera, et cetera.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. That makes me think of the spiritual accountability that we spoke to in the conversation with Ashanti Kine unconsciousness and decolonization, where you just, you feel that [00:19:00] you felt that misalignment, you felt that deadness, and it's, I think it's interesting because we are so conditioned around certain narratives of what success looks like that are conforming to the successes, wealth accumulation, successes, qualified successes, all of it's just so deeply tied to that system that we do have this deep disconnection from ourselves that we don't even know what that feels like.

Mm-hmm. We don't realize the misattunement, because it's been so pervasive our whole lives.

Julia Rhodes Davis: I mean, that's a lot of where the somatic work is and has been for me, is actually recognizing all the ways that I have learned to shut down my capacity to feel. And that is by design inherited in the culture and is what keeps us on a hamster wheel of totally, you know, the brass ring orientation.

That is all in the mix with white supremacy. Totally. I mean, I think that there are different ways to frame that, but I, I think we would be remiss not to [00:20:00] recognize the group level behavior of whiteness and white affluence because these things actually are different in class matters. And you know, when you think of sort of how normative, like what success looks like, you know, what do you picture, what do you picture, Jenny?

Like if you were to not your, your fully elevated, you know,

Jenny Stefanotti: not Jenny today. Jenny 10 years ago. Jenny.

Julia Rhodes Davis: 20 years ago. Yeah. Put the time clock wherever you want, but like, what does success look like in that mind?

Jenny Stefanotti: Oh, I mean, success looks like I. Degrees from the top institutions. It looks like being well compensated, living in a nice big house looks like having the adoring spouse and children who are thriving.

I think this is really critical. Success is intimately bound to something [00:21:00] that's competitive, like success is getting the thing that most other people don't get. Right? Yeah. Success isn't the thing that's actually accessible to everyone, which is Right. Having a regulated nervous system and experiencing joy and ease and connection to others, right?

'cause Charles Eisenstein talks about like the things that actually fulfill us are free and abundant.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Right. And I would really tie, the way that I tie that back to understanding how whiteness lives within us is not only, there are plenty of cultural mechanisms that hold those images of elite, elite spaces and elite achievement as success, but also inside of us.

I don't think that many of us have real access to a deep sense of our inherent worthiness.

Jenny Stefanotti: Totally.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Of love. Totally. And I also think that whiteness in particular, because of how it was constructed, and I'd be happy to break this down, but [00:22:00] because of how whiteness was constructed. The scarcity of belonging, the threat of non belonging mm-hmm.

Is so high.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Julia Rhodes Davis: And so those two components of white supremacy culture really live deep within us and I think actually drive so much of our behavior that is, is harmful.

Jenny Stefanotti: Totally. And this was the most significant update that to temas work in the 2021 paper where she added fear and this deep seated feeling of not enoughness Yes.

And stems to perfectionism. And that's so deep within all of us. I mean, I've done so much relational work and that's so core to our attachment responses, whether that's because we're anxious or we're avoidant, that we're afraid we're not enough.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Right. And that I think to suggest it's one thing is to be incredibly reductive, but she puts enoughness and lovability in her discussion of fear.

And I think a, a large reason for that is [00:23:00] we have not turned to face our cultural inheritance. And what I mean by that, when I said the construction of whiteness, you know, you have this system whiteness codified in the naturalization Act of 1790 in US law. Basically you had to divest from where you came from, who your people were, what your ethnicity was.

Mm-hmm. To have proximity to, to claim whiteness. And that is a severing.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.

Julia Rhodes Davis: That actually is incredibly traumatic. And I think in order to heal and repair that piece of ourselves, I. Doing this work as a white person and understanding that there's some healing that has to do with that moment of choosing whiteness over ethnic lineage in exchange for affordances is to actually figure out, okay, who were the immigrants?

Mm-hmm. At that [00:24:00] time and what did it mean for them to do that and how did they feel about that? And like my ability to place myself with them is part of. Healing and repairing my relationship to myself, but also mm-hmm. To being able to move beyond whiteness. And it's not just about reclaiming like Scotch Irish ethnicity or practices or culture per se, but it's also about really extending my capacity to hold the complexity around that choice that I don't think they really understood the consequences of that choice.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm.

Julia Rhodes Davis: That would continue to unfold. They were actually running away from oppression from the British crown too. Anyway.

Jenny Stefanotti: Fun fact, I grew up with my last name spelled with a y, Stefano with a y because my family stripped the I at the end and replaced it with a [00:25:00] y to be, not Italian. Not a big change, but that's what they did.

And when I turned 18, I changed it back to the original spelling. But of course I didn't have anything in the context of, of that history and what that reclaiming meant. But I think, you know, we talk about disconnection from it's disconnection from ourselves, so that self-love and that being such a foundational and critical piece, disconnection from our lineage, that's the ethnic side component.

We talked about that with Barrett Holmes Pitner disconnect from one each other. And, and then this was another key addition in the 2021 update around just defining white supremacy and whiteness is, is about disconnection in all of these ways of othering in order to yes, be dominate over. I wanna talk about misguided white work.

How do well intentioned white folks screw it up or you know, miss the point?

Julia Rhodes Davis: Well, I think one piece is to come back to [00:26:00] finding our way to place ourselves inside of this work of racial justice that is about being honest about the history of this country and our personal and collective histories.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Julia Rhodes Davis: The idea that this is work that benefits other people that is charitable to other people and is not about our own personal stake in a just future, that to my mind, really connects to the fact that anytime you offer a solution that does not address. The structural components that produce the problem.

You are not offering a solution.

Jenny Stefanotti: You're replicating it unwittingly.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Yeah. Or wittingly. I mean,

Jenny Stefanotti: yeah,

Julia Rhodes Davis: you're replicating it. Yeah. And it doesn't actually, it matters less if you intend to or don't intend to. So that's one piece of it.

Jenny Stefanotti: And I, [00:27:00] I just wanna bring in a couple of great quotes from your writing that just I, I thought were really beautiful that underscored this point.

You said, my conditioning was to see the work of racial justice as for other people with no regard for my own stake in the matter, which is something we've already touched on. Then you also say, acts of charity depend on the very cultural domination that justice requires that we upend. So again, this points to the paternalistic orientation of I'm qualified, I'm helping you and not, we're in this together

Julia Rhodes Davis: completely.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. You also named, interestingly, part of what. Did draw me more deeply into this thread of denizen's work is the fact that one of our values is diversity. Mm-hmm. And it was interesting because we co-defined the values. Diversity was one of them, and I immediately felt a contraction. And a lot of that contraction I think, was maybe a subconscious knowing of the ways in which that intention can be done wrong.

So the conversation that we had as a community way back then was, how do we do diversity in a way that feels [00:28:00] authentic? And for me, a lot of that has meant building deep and meaningful relationships. Not tokenizing, not being transactional, but I know it goes deeper than that. Because you had talked about diversity implying assimilation into, so say more about that.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Yeah, so along these lines of like structures and structures, loving to stay the way they are without a lot of agitation. I think that often, especially when it's. Being defined by a group of white people or a predominantly white group of people, or a historically white institution that's talking about diversity without, and it's not to say that Denizen hasn't given thought to other pieces of what enables diversity, but diversity in and of itself.

Being named as a value by a predominantly white space can just produce a context in which [00:29:00] you're saying, well, this is our space. This is how this space operates with all of these like invisible and unspoken mores that are somehow more known to white folks than other folks. But you're allowed to step into it and we want you people of color to come and step in, or we want you other type of person to come and provide diversity to this space.

Yeah. I think that it doesn't get at what I think the intention behind naming diversity as a value, which I'm sure that there are experts who have been doing, you know, organizational culture. DEI work for a very long time would have lots to say about this, but my gut is that I. That diversity might better serve as a, as an something that's as an indicator that if you have a truly diverse space, it's an outcome,

Jenny Stefanotti: not

Julia Rhodes Davis: an

Jenny Stefanotti: objective.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Correct. That, that you're doing something [00:30:00] right. If there is a huge diversity of folks who feel at home Yeah. Who feel belonging, who are in relationship with one another, that the conditions have been set for there to be meaningful diversity.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm.

Julia Rhodes Davis: So those are some of my thoughts on that.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah, I appreciate that.

That kind of distinction between assimilating into a space, because so much of, like, again, what Tema talks about in the paper and I've read in your writings, is just the, the request to, you know, that people of color have had to become and assimilate into the cultural attributes of white supremacy culture too.

Like to succeed? Yeah,

Julia Rhodes Davis: I mean, I think about this in terms of the private school. I went to high school, incredibly elite space on the upper east side of New York City. Like there was diversity, but I doubt that that school was doing much to ensure that the kids of color, my classmates felt safety, [00:31:00] felt real belonging, felt like they could be themselves.

I didn't feel like it for different reasons, but like,

Jenny Stefanotti: well, I don't think there are many spaces that are more reflective of indoctrination into the prominent paradigm than a private school on the Upper East Side. Touche.

Julia Rhodes Davis: And sometimes the extreme example is the perfect mirror for just sort of everyday life.

Totally. And so, totally.

Jenny Stefanotti: I appreciate that too. But yeah, not understanding both the co-creation and the dismantling that's required and just the, the humility that willingness to name how much you don't know and you know, have that mirror reflected back at you and to see the work that you didn't see before.

I think that's really, that's really critical. Anything else that we're missing in terms of misguided? I mean, I imagine just bypassing the inner work is probably something and you're just, just there. I was at a climate dinner last night, and I imagine that you might see this in all spaces in the, in racial justice spaces and [00:32:00] climate spaces.

I remember this was actually the reason the original game B crew fell apart was because there was this fracture over the inner work versus the outer work. Yeah. So I imagine there might be people who kind of focus on the outer work and not the inner work. Oh, I mean, that's an easy bypass.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Yeah. I mean, you can point to so many examples of that, and I also think that even the the, you know, you're describing a Mobius strip, and I would also, let's say that that as a quote timeline or like a way of demonstrating time and sort of what this process looks like.

I think that it's really fluid and I think it requires. To some degree, it requires stamina. And so I think that finding ways to get in and stay in or go deeper and stay there and not imagine that there's this place to get to Mm, yeah. But [00:33:00] rather commit to a complete re reorientation. That in that really is, I think this community is versed in notions of practice.

Right? And to my mind, this is lifelong practice work. It's not totally, it's not destination oriented at all. You asked a question earlier that I've been sort of simmering in the back of my mind with about what is this sort of resistance or impediment. We talked about shame and guilt. Tema speaks really beautifully about the distinction between productive shame and unproductive shame, because I.

White supremacy culture, racialized capitalism, and all that comes with this has been the water that we're swimming in and prescribed so much about our lives. There's also the reality that it is disorienting work, disorganizing work.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Julia Rhodes Davis: The way we thought things work, um, in society [00:34:00] and in ourselves and in our relationships.

I think once we dig a little deeper, things start to fracture a little bit and I think that's terrifying. And so that's some of where, what feels like discomfort when you sort of scratch the surface of this work. I think why one of the invitations in the practice is to stay with the discomfort is because it builds our capacity to go deeper.

And under that discomfort is like, what if the life that I'm living is' actually the life that I deeply long for. And I think that shows up in a lot of spiritual work, regardless of whether you come at it from the role of race and class, or you come at it from a different perspective. But

Jenny Stefanotti: mm-hmm.

Julia Rhodes Davis: I think one of the areas of resistance is just, well, this is what I know, and the certainty of that is comforting.

So on some level it's like with any [00:35:00] spiritual work, and this is why, you know, I love to talk a little bit about the circles of practice that I've been organizing and leading for the last five years. Circles of practice are cohort based, small group experiences, and I say experiences because it's totally not didactic and it's really practice based at circles of practice in the name.

So it invites I. Participants over seven weeks to really engage in small groups and storytelling around our race, class and money stories. Our ancestry, where that intersects with Native American genocide and displacement, where that intersects with enslavement and racialized capitalism and what that might mean for what is the repair and reparations work that is ours to do.

That can be done at a grassroots level, that can be done in our families, that can be done in our institutions that we're a part of [00:36:00] that doesn't have to wait for government action. And one of the most powerful things that I've seen over the last five years and seven cohorts that we've done is how powerful relationship and community is in this work.

We can't do it alone. In fact, it's not about a solitary experience, it's about community.

Jenny Stefanotti: You had a really beautiful quote that I just wanted to bring in here. 'cause Great. It is my experience that the only way to bring about a new world is to practice it in the here and now in community with others.

That's it. I really, I mean, that's definitely what we're getting at with Denizen, so that resonated deeply. That's for sure. But yeah, I mean, let's talk about, before we get into kinda what the elements are, let's talk about the structure that you just mentioned, which I think is really important, right?

Which I think are two separate things. One is that it's not a one and done. You don't take the course and then you're, [00:37:00] then you're done, you're, you've done the work. It's an ongoing practice commitment, which really resonates with Denizen and it's why we choose the URL becoming denizen to connote that there is always a becoming and the work is always, we're always peeling back more layers of the onion, but also the importance of doing it in community.

And so your work, as you've indicated, has these cohorts across seven weeks where you meet once a week. I think this ties also to some of the things that came up in the resistance, right. Speak more to the ways in which the community and group element of it is really important.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Yeah. So again, we have such a strong impulse to understand ourselves as white people, as individuals.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm.

Julia Rhodes Davis: We do not naturally understand ourselves as part of a collective or as a group. And so this is certainly why when I know in my own [00:38:00] work I've been. Told that I've got problematic white lady behavior. It feels really personal when you're hearing that for one of the first times. Like, oh, I've done something wrong.

I'm bad and wrong. And it takes some practice to recognize that there's a lot of group level behavior that I as an individual engage in that has everything to do with my cultural conditioning as a white person or a lot to do with it, and is actually, I'm not as special as I think I am.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm. And

Julia Rhodes Davis: there's actually kind of a.

There's a light side to that in that it's really powerful to be able to depersonalize this and say, oh, you're not telling me I'm a bad person. And in fact, like whether I'm good or bad is, uh, pretty irrelevant to this conversation. And this is where TE's racial conditioning frame I think is so powerful.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.

Julia Rhodes Davis: This is my conditioning. This is what it looks like on me and a lot of other [00:39:00] people who are, share some of my attributes. Yeah. I wonder how else it shows up in me.

Jenny Stefanotti: My curiosity is such a potent frame. Totally. But that also, this is actually the quote that I pulled to kick off the Tema episode, and then the first one that you highlighted where she one, one is just the use of the words conditioning.

It helps you separate the behavior from some indictment on you as a person. And that gap is really important to not have that shame response. And I am bad, I've just done something and I haven't learned yet, and I wanna thank you for the learning opportunity. But the quote from Temo was, and I thought it was so powerful coming from her because she's been doing this work for 35 years.

If I think about my own racist conditioning, I think it's not helpful to tell myself I'm gonna be free of it. I that I'm gonna get rid of it, that there's gonna be a time when I no longer have any racist conditioning. I don't find that helpful. What I find helpful is that I'm going to have a different relationship with my racist condition.

I'm going to be in that way, able to move through it with much more grace as she goes on to say, I'm more interested in what are we going to [00:40:00] do about the racist conditioning and mm-hmm. Yeah. I think the value of even the emotions of that being witnessed and supported in moving through them is something that a group provides.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Totally.

Jenny Stefanotti: But also the reckoning. The reckoning happening collectively.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Yeah. It's also a very different move. You know, I'm sure that this has been many people's experience, but earlier stages of the white anti-racism movement or white anti-racist communities, certainly that I've been a part of, and just more generally like progressive.

Organizations that are largely white. There's this real tendency to first of all, compete to be like the best white person ever, to be the, the most woke to use a very overused and often weaponized frame and to really create distance between ourselves and other white people. I'm really learned. [00:41:00] I'm really, yeah, and this is part of why I think I resisted the, pushed the back, what I

Jenny Stefanotti: was saying at the kickoff.

Yeah. Leadership

Julia Rhodes Davis: frame at the top. I mean, I do wanna claim my role, my responsibility and, and the fact that I've taken this inquiry really far and it's something that I'm deeply committed to and, and it enlivens me to be in this work. Yes, there is some leadership there and how I show up in that matters.

But I'm not interested in distancing myself from other white folks because of how much time and energy I spend on this practice. Yeah. And so the move to do this work in community is to actually build our muscle to be with each other in our imperfection. In our questions, in our discomfort, and to stay in when it gets hard and uncomfortable with each other, which I think looks really different than certainly a lot of other white [00:42:00] spaces, whether they're anti-racist white spaces or just in general.

You know, there's a lot of experience with exile, with severing relationship and with other forms of distancing ourselves, disconnecting ourselves from other people.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. And that's just that it go, to go back to how do we do this wrong? How do we do if when we other, mm-hmm. In our self-righteousness of how far we've come along in doing the work, or when we step into our qualified positioning because of all the work that we've done.

Right. That's right. That's a subtlety. And that's, yeah, that's a, that's a subtlety to talk about, but I think it, there is a kind of. Almost a first order of business, which is confronting the reality of whiteness and what that entails. And the fact that we have that conditioning that you like white doesn't exist without, this is from the Tema conversation.

Whiteness doesn't exist without the construction of being on top of a racial hierarchy, which you already said in this conversation. So there's that first, and then that's a whole conversation. How does that landing with you? How is that landing in [00:43:00] your body? Have you thought about this before? That in and of itself is, I don't know.

Is that how you start?

Julia Rhodes Davis: Well, the arc of the circles of practice looks like just actually relationship building and trust building in the first group.

Jenny Stefanotti: I appreciate that deeply.

Julia Rhodes Davis: And then the next four sessions are small group conversations where folks story tell around those prompts. What's your race, class, and money story?

What's your ancestry? Where does it intersect with Native American genocide, displacement, dispossession, enslavement? What does that mean in terms of repair and reparations? And what does reparations mean to you? And what action, what commitments might you take and make to take a step forward based on the who and where you come from?

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Mm-hmm. Storytelling. So we support [00:44:00] around that commitment. Making an action, taking action planning. And what's really amazing is after the seven weeks, some of the groups that met started meeting in 2021 are still meeting about a third of the groups, just keep meeting without any mm-hmm. Support.

And I think that that really speaks to the power of doing this work in community. And so I, I think find your starting point and finding your starting point around who and where you come from is a really Yeah. Useful compass.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. Well, I think these two pieces that are surfacing, one is just confronting whiteness.

Mm-hmm. Just confronting the thing that maybe you haven't named yet, and the importance of naming and then placing yourself within that legacy.

Julia Rhodes Davis: That's right.

Jenny Stefanotti: Right. Which you, which you did beautifully said, you know, at the top of the conversation, giving your context. And I gave a little bit of my context with the story of my last name.

So there's that. And then, and I appreciate that. As I mentioned, your work really lands the repair [00:45:00] in individual action and not delegating that to some other entity. And what does that look like? And I think that's a very, very personal thing. But it's interesting how also it is personal. And doing it in a small group allows you to evolve, see how other people's journey might influence your own or open your own eyes to things.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Totally, and I think it's really important for me to say that reparations is a meaningful word. It means something very specific to us and to the reparations movement. It does require policy, structural, systemic change at the municipal, state, federal level, and in many other ways that we don't have direct power over.

And I fundamentally believe that we will not get there if we do not find how each of us is connected to this story and why a culture of repair is actually deeply [00:46:00] necessary to become the America that we long to become. So I think I'm emphasizing that because I don't want to contribute to any kind of erasure of the really important, many decade long

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah, sure.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Efforts towards formal reparations. And this project is really about building a culture of support for repair and reparations, broadly speaking.

Jenny Stefanotti: I appreciate that. So there's that piece, then there's the, and so if we look at, and that also supports the backwards looking component that you mentioned.

Mm-hmm. And then there's the inner work, the somatic, the spiritual, the inner work. Or we talked about something that may not even feel obvious is just your own relationship with yourself and cultivating self-love, which also just opens up more willingness to do this work 'cause you don't have those sources of resistance to it.

Do you wanna say anything more about the inner work before we talk about power? 'cause I think power and interpersonal work is [00:47:00] super, super interesting.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Yeah. I think just to say that the inner work. The way that I would think about the inner work is how does whiteness live in you and how does it mediate your experience of the world, and what does that mean in terms of like, how congruent does that feel with how you wanna actually show up in the world?

Jenny Stefanotti: I appreciate that. And if there's

Julia Rhodes Davis: a distance there, if there's a dissonance there, that's the place for inquiry and for new practices, I.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm. Yeah, that's a great inquiry. I'm reading this book right now about relationship anarchy. Mm-hmm. You know, because when you start to question constructs about race, you start to question constructs about gender.

You start to question contract like That's right. You know, you start to question all of it. And so relationship anarchy, which we'll talk about in the podcast soon, looks at just questioning the way that we bundle our ways of relating the hierarchy of the [00:48:00] married couple is the nucleus of the family and then of society and care.

And one of the things that they talk about is power. Really looking at how power is showing up in the relationship, whether that comes from gender, whether that comes from race, whether that comes from money, whether that comes from, so I just thought that was really interesting and it wasn't, again, it wasn't a, in a similar way of racist conditioning, it's not something that you can necessarily make go away, but what is your relationship to it?

I'm just curious more about your, your take on the interpersonal component of it, identifying and naming power dynamics. How does that shift? I mean, what does, even let me ask you just a 1 0 1 basic question, or I often ask this just to get clear on language. What does power mean to you?

Julia Rhodes Davis: Well, what does power mean to me?

That's a great question. Power is. Directed life force Power is [00:49:00] energetic capacity. I don't mean to be so sort of broad or general, but power I think is also deep. I think I'm struggling with the question because I think power is deeply contextual. Hmm. I think that there's something, I have a lot of access to, a sense of my own power and the power I have with other people working on a thing together, collaborating towards a goal.

The power I have to galvanize folks. But I think the question for this conversation, or the way I would answer it for this conversation is that power is deeply contextual and that that's a really. Helpful way of thinking about in an interpersonal context, how do we hold power in relationship with each other?

Mm-hmm. And then if you wanna place that relationship inside a institutional or organizational [00:50:00] context, that layers on another set of power dynamics. And so yeah, power's contextual and actually conditioning our racialized conditioning. Our cultural conditioning means that if we are not attuned to how it moves in us, we are not moving slowly enough to understand how we're wielding power and how power is moving and operating within a context.

And that is why I think so much harm can happen in professional settings, organizational settings, institutional settings. So those are some thoughts about power.

Jenny Stefanotti: The thing that came to me was the ability to influence an outcome, which might be direct. I have decision making authority. Mm-hmm. Or indirect.

I have influence over just, we did a conversation, two [00:51:00] conversations with Ted Rao, one on Sociocracy and one on Collective Power, just looking at delegating decision making responsibility. And interestingly, he also talks about how with power comes responsibility, particularly when you're making decisions that have outcomes that affect others.

So how does this show up in the work, in the interpersonal work?

Julia Rhodes Davis: Yeah. I mean, I think that. I often say, and I'm working on a piece of writing right now that is about rupture and repair, and I think one of the most devastating parts of white supremacy culture and this inheritance of ours is that when we are in relationship with, I'll just say when I have been in relationship with AM in relationship with a black woman that I'm collaborating with or a friend of mine, we are never in the room alone together because we bring this societal context [00:52:00] into the room with us, and it means that in order for me to be a good collaborator, to be a good friend, I have to be attuned to the ways in which power structures influence our relationship.

So I think that being clear-eyed about that and taking responsibility for that, not from a place of guilt or shame or fear that I'm gonna get it wrong 'cause you're definitely gonna get it wrong. But I think that that is part of the work, and I'm starting to unpack something through supporting some friends and collaborators across a rupture where there is both race and class difference.

Where I think that we, white folks tend to think that the rupture is the thing that we should [00:53:00] under no circumstances allow to have happen. And in so doing, we can toward ourselves in ways that continue to perpetuate harmful behavior and harmful power dynamics and. I think that recognizing that the rupture predates the relationship, the field is ruptured and there are varying levels of repair and healing and harm happening simultaneously.

If we allow for that and we actually just do our best to center the relationship and be accountable, I think we'll get further.

Jenny Stefanotti: I appreciate that. We were, um, we've been talking in the council about community dynamics, community agreements. What are our agreements that then get adjudicated over by the council versus what's our culture and what's interpersonal?

Mm-hmm. One of the people really [00:54:00] was emphasizing Damian Madre. It starts with introspection around you. You get triggered, like, what is it? You know, what is that telling you about you? What can you learn? As said that, that initial process. And so I appreciate that. And also naming in the same way that we name the conditioning, like naming the power dynamics is part of that introspection, is looking at, is that something that's at play here?

And it's also just interesting, this makes me think of the Ashanti Kini conversation. She talks so much about stories and how much stories affect our beliefs or that the words are spelling. You're literally casting a spell in the ways in which groups abdicate power and abdicate agency that they have because of the internalization of those narratives.

And so even just awareness of that to invite people into a different dynamic where they may have to do that and, and so much of her work is around rewriting those narratives. So I think that's part of also the, the inner [00:55:00] work. And this comes out in your groups? Mm-hmm. What are the stories that I'm recognizing in me and how might I rewrite those stories?

Yeah. And then of course, I think this is really well. Tread in the prior conversation with Tema, just around what are the cultural organizational ways in which you're perpetuating that. So there's that piece of it too. Okay. So we talked about confronting whiteness, knowing your story. How does it live within you?

How does it live between other people? How does it live culturally? That's the, the kind of landscape, if we wanna mm-hmm. Identify a landscape. But then I really appreciate that you were like, well, let me tell you why I think live frameworks are limited, so let's make sure that we get that in here too.

Julia Rhodes Davis: Yeah. I mean, I think that obviously frameworks are helpful and I love the way that you listen and help distill. Ideas into ways that people can track over the course of a conversation. So I [00:56:00] recognize the power of frameworks and I just, because of our conditioning, I really wanna limit the idea that if we have the right framework, we can fix something.

Yeah. And that it's really more about sustained engagement and curiosity.

Jenny Stefanotti: Curiosity. That was actually the first value that we put down. I've come to appreciate it so much more. Mm-hmm. As we've continued to do the work for now five years, it's the intellectual curiosity that brought us here, but that curiosity around I just contracted.

That's interesting. What was that about? You said something that I disagree with. Instead of going straight into defensive and being right. What can I learn here? What can I learn from you here? But I just appreciate the way that you are approaching this work, which is, this is work that you commit to and it's an ongoing practice, and you're going to continue to peel back new [00:57:00] layers of the onion.

So while the framework is valuable, we wanna make sure that we don't confine ourselves to something and inhibit discovery through ongoing practice. Absolutely.

Julia Rhodes Davis: There's one other piece about community that I'd love to mention, especially because of the times that we're living in. Yeah. A place that I go to when it's feeling particularly dark is that the rise of fascism that we are living in and through will give rise to a movement of profound solidarity that we have never seen before because it will offer enough evidence that when they come for one of us, they come for all of us.

And so I think part of why it's really important in these times to. [00:58:00] Look at how whiteness operates to isolate us from so many other folks is because we are completely cut off from opportunities to build solidarity with those who are more vulnerable. Mm-hmm. And I don't just mean people of color. I really mean building relationships across race and class, across documentation status, across age, across ethnicity, across geography, but also deeply within our own communities, resisting isolationism that comes with white supremacy culture, and resisting the notion that we will be safe because we have significant material wealth, or we have a gated community, or we live in this affluent place.

I think we're starting to see the evidence of the fallacy of that. [00:59:00] I just wanna invite us and the Denizen community and myself to remind myself that there is real merit in doing white work now because there is plenty of evidence in fascist movements in history, and we're already seeing it. The ways in which power is exercised, fascistic power is exercised.

Anti-democratic power is exercised, is to target the most marginalized first and continue to chip away at society. And so. For what that's worth.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm. Why don't we close with that? Unless you have any other closing comments. I think contextualizing it is really valuable, but I also wanted to invite listeners who aren't engaged into the community, into the conversations that we're having.

So one is. This week, this [01:00:00] episode will come out on Monday. This week we're doing two conversations as a community. Wednesday at 5:00 PM PST, Julia will join us talking about white supremacy culture, and we can weave in the white work conversation. And then we're also doing one on Friday morning. And so this is an opportunity for us to reflect on, on both of these conversations and, and what they mean for us as a community and work towards this practice component of it.

Julia, it's so funny how it kind of, you do believe in divine timing. Yes, we've been talking about this. Yes, I do. Yeah, we've been talking about this for so long, but I feel like it's so. Beautifully builds on the conversations that we've been having to date this year, and I'm so grateful again to have you here to help us learn more about this, provoke us to think more about this as someone who is part of the community and is doing such important work and has witnessed our trajectory over so many years.

So I just wanna thank you and appreciate you for the work that you do and the [01:01:00] ways that you inspire me and just express my gratitude that you've continued to engage in the work that we're doing with Denizen, because I think your, your inspiration is incredibly important. Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here.

[OUTRO]

Thank you so much for listening, and thanks to Scott Hanson, also known as Tyco for our musical signature. In addition to this podcast, you can find resources for each episode on our website, www.becomingdenizen.com, including transcripts and background materials for our most essential topics like universal basic income, decentralized social media, and long-term capitalism.

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