1.12 Looking Within: Do We All Secretly Want to be White?

How much internalized racism do we really carry with us? This episode we cringe at the ways that we internalized racism as children and even as adults, the line between criticizing your own culture and attacking it, as well as why we learn to desire validation from white people. We then map out steps to free ourselves from internalized racism, and because we like baby steps, we'll start by taking back our own names.  Dia's Book Recommendations Here's a few books I recommend if you want to read books by people of colour. I've made an effort to include different genres, as well as stories of both the diaspora and those in the motherland. Share your book recommendations to us @_dearbrowngirls! I Am Malala - Malala Yousafzai (Autobiography / Activism) Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi (Graphic Novel / Autobiography) Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe (Postcolonial Classic) Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri (Short Story Collection) We Should All Be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie (Essays on Feminism) The Arrival - Shaun Tan (Graphic Novel / Immigration) Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors - Sonali Dev (Romance) Akata Witch - Nnedi Okorafor (Children's Fantasy) Pachinko - Min Jin Lee (Multigenerational Epic) Why Not Me? - Mindy Kaling (Comedy / Autobiography) Season of Migration to the North - Tayeb Salih (Postcolonial Classic) *Addendum from Dia: I mentioned that reading in your native language can be mentally freeing because you aren't consuming the Western and colonial ideologies that are baked into languages like English. But that's only a privilege you have if you know your mothertongue or are able to learn it. Reading books in translation are a wonderful alternative that still maintains Eastern ideas and worldviews. Not everyone butchers "translations" like Coleman Barks did to Rumi. Furthermore, there's also power in colonized/brown/black voices taking the language of their oppressor and repurposing and subverting it to tell our own stories -- and that's why many of the books I've recommended here are books written natively in English.