Sonya Renee Taylor

And that's r- really, really, really what pulled me into my devotion to never judging anybody, never participating in weight loss, diet talk.

W- and I learned a lot of this from m- mostly women of color, from The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor, the writings of Adrienne Maree Brown, the writings of Roxane Gay.

Th- there are brilliant, incredible women of color who have thought about these things because they had to before a white lady from California thought about them.

And when I realized that when, when I participate in the hierarchy of bodies, when I participate in the bizarre belief that the most valuable human is a thin, white, cis, straight man, and I get mad at my body 'cause my thighs touch or my belly hangs out or whatever, then I am participating in the oppression of everyone who's under me on this bizarre, made-up collective delusion of a ladder of humans.

I have to give credit where credit is due.

Listeners, if you have not read The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor, please go read The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor, where she lays it out very, very clearly that our relationship with our bodies especially the one that we're seeing so often, so common, especially in America, is a direct result of the relationship between enslavers and enslaved.

That this is, we have come to view this as this thing completely dehumanized that is supposed to work for us And that we are supposed to control in order to get an outcome that we want, that we're attached to.

And I could be explaining it way better than I am right now.

Um, and I'm sorry if I'm butchering some of these last names and names, but, um, yeah.

Um, another book is So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo, The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor, The Future Is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Coaching For Equity by Elena Aguilar, NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman, Unmasking Autism by Dr. Devin Price.

And we're gonna write these books on the description of this, um, so we're gonna provide them for you.

Other podcasts or voices that you can follow is The Nap Ministry by Trisha Hersey, Prentis Hemphill, Dr. Thema Bryant, Kelsey Blackwell, Adrienne Maree Brown, and any other neurodivergent insights that you can find on Instagram.

We wanna know the right answer, the answer that won't mess them up.

But it's possible that the only thing that messes them up is refusing to talk about it imperfectly, and that is why we're re-sharing this conversation with Sonya Renee Taylor.

Sonya offers a different invitation: stop trying to be a perfect narrator, and instead become a reliable one.

Be there.

[laughs]

...

but I, but I'm just gonna put you in this room with Sonya Renee Taylor, and I feel confident-

[laughs]