EP2: The Power of Belonging with Dr. Rodney Glasgow
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
Release Date: 10/28/2020
S2 EP8: with Camille Leak: Exploring the Intersection of DEI and Trauma
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“Become a witness to yourself.” - Camille Leak In Inclusive Life, we are continually looking at the ways in which we can reach across differences as a path to connection and liberation. We often explore the impediments to being with one another authentically such as defensiveness, perfectionism, guilt, and shame. Camille Leak brings this conversation even deeper. She brings us to what’s beneath these obstacles to connection: trauma. Camille Leak is a DEI practitioner who believes that folks’ inability to be with other people’s differences is their fundamental lack of capacity...
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S2 EP7: with Dr. Crystal Menzies: Finding Inspiration from Maroon Communities to Guide Us Forward
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
One of the barriers for well meaning white folks and BIPOC who want to see a better world is this belief in the inevitability of positive outcomes. Dr. Crystal Menzies When Dr. Menzies drops this pearl of insight into the latest Inclusive Life Podcast conversation with Nicole, Nicole names the “inevitability of positive outcomes” as “a uniquely U.S. American specific ‘cultural hiccup.’” The belief that it’ll all work out in the end suggests a reality that doesn’t comport with the history of revolutions. There’s no one “out there” who is going to save us. Dr....
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S2 EP6: A Roadmap for Black Women to Thrive in the Workplace with Ericka Hines
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
There is something about the research project that feels a lot like love. It began with a personal need and grew into a much larger question: What would it take for Black women to thrive - not just survive - in the workplace? From this question, a massive project took shape. In this project, Founder of Every Level Leads, Ericka Hines and her team set out to understand Black cis and transgender women and Black gender expansive professionals and their experiences. Their goal was to understand them in all of their complexity. Ericka and Dr. Mako Fitts Ward wrote the report based on findings from...
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S2 EP5: Processing the Post-Roe Reality with the Inclusive Life Team
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
This episode of the Inclusive Life Podcast is an intimate conversation between Nicole and two members of her Inclusive Life team, Christina Hernandez and Laura Halpin. We convened to talk about our personal responses to the overturn of Roe v. Wade. We began with our own reactions, exploring our immediate sense of how each of our lives and our loved ones will be impacted. The Dobbs v. Jackson decision impacts all of us, and yet it is vital that we place this decision in a historical, social, and political context: the overturning of Roe v Wade is a massive step in a long history of reproductive...
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S2EP4 Part 2: Fat Phobia is a Social Justice Issue with Dana Sturtevant, HIilary Kinavey, and Sirius Bonner
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“The white gaze is upon us at all times, and the ways in which Black bodies have been destroyed by whiteness are many. But this is just one of them.” - Sirius Bonner One thing to get straight: divorcing yourself from diet culture isn’t just about being fat, loud, and proud. Sirius Bonner, who joins Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant for Part 2 of this two-part Inclusive Life podcast, drives home the importance of rooting our own relationship with our bodies in the broader political context. The context? Fat bodies are subjected to systemic oppression. Sirius deepens the...
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S2EP4 Part 1: Fat Phobia is a Social Justice Issue with Dana Sturtevant and HIilary Kinavey
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“We all eat for emotional reasons. That’s normal. Food is flavored with complex meanings. It connects us with our culture and our ancestry and heritage. We eat to celebrate. We eat to grieve. Food is an emotional thing for human beings. When we dumb it down to its nutritional components and see it only as a vehicle to give us nutrients, we are missing so much.” - Dana Sturtevant If you haven’t yet considered weight stigma as a social justice issue, today is the day you begin. Diet culture is an insidious arm of white supremacy culture that has removed us from our bodies,...
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S2EP3: Joy & Revolution Now with Jennifer Davis
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
"Creativity and engaging in creativity can offer insight into how we move forward." - Jennifer Davis There’s a sturdy and subversive thread woven through Jennifer Davis’s life and work: Where there’s an expectation to do things a certain way, of conformity or straight lines, because that’s how it’s always been done, Jennifer’s life is all about saying, “Nope. I’m doing it differently.” It feels like the “yes” and the path for Jennifer is in the joy, in the curvy unpatterned strokes of her paintbrush, in the “let’s try this and see what...
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S2EP2: Disrupting Business as Usual with Pamela Slim
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“If you’re designing a space for the most marginalized folks, by definition, the entire experience is going to be more inclusive for everybody.” It is a gift to have Pamela Slim as our guest for the official start of Inclusive Life Podcast Season 2. The conversation illuminates Pam’s skills at disrupting business as usual. She points out over and over again the choices business owner’s can make to cultivate one’s business as an ecosystem versus approaching business building as an empire, amassing market power through competition, extraction, and hierarchy....
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S2EP1: The Russian-Ukrainian Conflict from an Antiracist, Progressive Perspective: a Conversation with Dr. Clarence Lusane
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
For many people alarmed at the very visible anti-Black racism at the outset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine two weeks ago, it’s important to understand more about the history of Afro Ukrainians and Africans in Ukraine. This conversation between Dr. Clarence Lusane and Nicole Lee sheds some light. We’ll learn that it is not a new history. Dr. Lusane, who has traveled and taught in Ukraine and all over the world, shared that after Ghana became independent from British colonial rule in 1957, and in 1960 when 17 other African countries gained their independence from colonial rule,...
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EP9: Rest: a Practice to Meet Urgent Times with Jen Lemen
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“There’s a way that we can meet urgent moments without the spirit of urgency. That requires a competency and capacity that comes from deep grounding and regulation. Being able to show up consistently in ritual, rhythm and routine.” This conversation with Jen Lemen feels like strong medicine. With so many of us understandably depleted and exhausted, this topic of rest and sensitively responding to the needs of our bodies is so important and resonant. Jen has learned, through her own relationships forged in times of urgency and danger, to “interrupt” urgency. The interruption can...
info_outline“School is the absolute savior of my life. It changed the whole trajectory of who I would have been. Growing up in the 90s to teenage parents in the ghettos of Baltimore, school changed my survival rate. That’s absolutely the truth.”
Dr. Rodney Glasgow is a product of a childhood in a culturally diverse community on the north east side of Baltimore. He’s also a product of independent and Ivy League schools. He brings deep understanding to the experience of Black students in the United States.
We talk about a topic that’s near and dear to both our hearts: diversity, equity and inclusion. What I love about this conversation is that Rodney extends the reach of our liberation work out to a place of belonging. He speaks to the trauma Black students experience when they are included but still don’t belong; when they are excluded and erased even by teachers who love and care for them.
And today, in 2020, there is a reckoning happening in our schools. Students are publicly calling out their administrators and educators as sources of harm.
Then, Rodney brings us beyond belonging to ownership, something that cannot happen until educators understand and teach the United States’ true history to our students: that the very people fleeing persecution to form a more perfect union were the same who created and perpetuated persecution and trauma from the day they arrived. According to Rodney, we are facing a pandemic of many manifestations, “Americanism.”
“We are now who we have always been and that’s what we need to be teaching students. And then look at moments [in our history] when we took major leaps to not be that.”
Rodney and I talked about:
- His childhood in a multigenerational, multicultural, LGBTQ+-friendly apartment building on the northeast side of Baltimore
- How children easily adapt to difference by listening and watching
- Rodney’s experience coming out as a gay man in the 90s
- The role of education in Rodney’s life and how hiding his intelligence resulted from generational educational trauma
- How education in the US is a vehicle to propel Black kids to success yet results in ongoing trauma
- How our country, with its fixation on individualism, is not clear if LIFE even matters
- What it will take for Black folks to be whole again
- Going beyond diversity to belonging, and beyond belonging to ownership
About Rodney Glasgow
Rodney Glasgow is a speaker, facilitator, trainer and activist in the areas of diversity, equity, and social justice. He has over 20 years of experience in progressive education as an educator, trainer, and administrator for students and faculty in grades kindergarten through post-graduate. Rodney is devoted to understanding and transforming student and faculty experiences by facilitating conversations and conflict resolution to achieve not only equity, but belonging.
He is one of the founding members and now Chair of the National Association of Independent School’s annual Student Diversity Leadership Conference, a 20 year-old training ground drawing over 1500 high school students nationwide. Rodney recently launched the National Diversity Practitioners Institute, a summer intensive for diversity practitioners. Rodney is also President of The Glasgow Group, a consortium of dynamic, innovative consultants.
Dr. Glasgow is currently the Head of School at Sandy Spring Friends School in Sandy Springs Maryland and the Founder of the Student Diversity Leadership Conference of the National Association of Independent Schools.
Rodney graduated from Gilman School, an independent school in his hometown of Baltimore. He is a graduate of Harvard University with a joint degree in Afro-American Studies and Psychology, holds a Master of Arts in Organization and Leadership from Columbia University, and a doctorate from George Washington University.
Rodney is a featured writer in the book Diversity in Independent Schools, and wrote the prologue for the recently released One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium: LGBT Educators Speak Out About What’s Gotten Better…And What Hasn’t.
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Thank you so much for joining us!
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