myGwork to fund Podcast Busy Being Black
October 7, 2020In an insightful and vulnerable essay, Cynthia Keza Birikundavyi writes: “Welcoming a mixture of people into a pre-defined institutional framework and expecting them to conform doesn’t equate to celebrating diversity. We need to break down our structures, acknowledge our need for each other, and trust that other ways – ways that may be foreign or non-intuitive to white Western institutions – can also lead us to our common goals. It is only with a real shift of perceptions that we can produce an environment in which diversity is a word inclusive of everyone, and not just minorities.”
As organisations continue to adapt to the world around us, and as Black LGBTQ and QTIPOC employees respond, adjust and grapple in real-time to a year of events that continue to exert such pressure on their communities, we have been searching for ways to ensure those who look to myGwork for community, connection and guidance have the tools they need – professional and personal – that speak to and help them communicate their experiences.
At the same time, we too often rely on Black people and people of colour within our organisations to help those of us outside of their experience understand what is happening and why. We have all heard (and hopefully heeded) the calls for self-education, and the internet – particularly social media – has risen up to provide innumerable resources for non-Black people to begin the hard and necessary work of unpicking and unpacking their biases and prejudices.
We have been big fans of the podcast Busy Being Black since it launched in March 2018. The show, which is created, produced and hosted by Josh Rivers, is a growing compendium of queer Black voices in a podcast landscape with far too few. The show centres conversations with those who have learned – and are learning – to thrive at the intersection of their identities and features an impressive range of people, themes and topics. From exploring sexual fetishes, repairing familial bonds, understanding intersectionality, redefining masculinity to religion, spirituality, faith, relationships, art and culture, Busy Being Black has come to be defined by and celebrated for its breadth, depth and vulnerability.
The conversations on Busy Being Black are often described as like listening to a private therapy session, and Josh is clear that the show is intentionally designed “as a soft place for our community to land. It’s also a space that is created with queer Black and QTIPOC people in mind at all times. What questions do we have? What are we battling against? What do we hope for? What are some of the strategies for surviving and thriving that have gotten others through the best and worst of their lives?”
As we’ve listened to the show develop over the past couple years, we have been struck by some commonalities between all of the guests on Busy Being Black. There is a real commitment to personal development and joy. The guests featured on the podcast take seriously the challenge of living life on their own terms and ensuring that in the face of a world that so often dehumanises them, they find, remember and hold on to what makes them feel happy, full and alive. We believe this tender, informative and insightful podcast is a beautiful project to support and to amplify – and that it serves the dual purpose of helping Black LGBTQ people and QTIPOC feel seen and heard, and the rest of us hear first-hand about their experiences.
So, we’re really excited to announce that myGwork has joined Busy Being Black as a funding partner. We believe that investing in Busy Being Black and ensuring it’s widely available to the myGwork community enables us to offer added value to those on our platform who are particularly hard-hit by the events of 2020 and the on-going battle to protect, value and uplift Black lives.
Josh says: “Busy Being Black is heart-work. It takes a great deal of emotional labour, listening and researching, and all of the guest-finding, editing and production is done by me. So it’s great to have the support and encouragement of myGwork, a company working hard within the ecosystem of change to
ensure LGBTQ professionals are seen, respected, valued and included. I welcome myGwork’s commitment to supporting those of us doing the work to ensure the voices and experiences of queer Black people and QTIPOC are heard.”
As poet and activist PJ Samuels said of Busy Being Black, “It is a repository for collective joy, tenderly but intentionally held, documenting the persistent ways we exhale even as we gasp for air, the ways we hold our Black as evidence of our pulsating existence and how we access joy at every level in the busy-ness of our joyful queer Black lives.”
We hope that those of you who encounter these conversations feel understood and enlightened by the wisdom, insights and vulnerability of those who continue to share themselves with the world. And that you understand that all of us at myGwork are committed to reaffirming the value and sanctity of Black life.
Adrien and Pierre Gaubert
Co-founders, myGwork
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An introduction to Busy Being Black
Busy Being Black has released 62 episodes since March 2018 and features an impressive and wide-range of people, themes, topics and conversations. Here is a selection of conversations to get you started. busybeingblack.com
Lady Phyll: Mother of the Movement
We speak at length on resilience, rebellion and protest; the tender woman behind the activist; and what hopes she has for her daughter, for UK Black Pride and for us all.
Travis Alabanza: Black Bones and Cycles
Among much else, Travis and I discuss the overlapping oppressions of trans and Black bodies, the role of performance in survival and why they sometimes lean into parodies of themself when navigating white institutions.
Jean Lloyd: Emancipating the Human Spirit
Jean is a communications master who has spent her life deeply committed to the emancipation of the human spirit, and she suggests that reaching our goals and surviving and thriving in the world really all comes down to effective, considered and meaningful communication.
Fran Tirado: Content Across Differences
Queer media darling Fran Tirado (Food4Thot, Hello Mr, Out Magazine) on the ever-evolving landscape of LGBTQ media, the end of white twink idolatry, enjoying your own company, working in service of a greater purpose and extending and expanding the modern queer cultural canon.
Kelechi Okafor: Go Back to the Source
A deep-dive into the spiritual and the numinous, of those from the physical and psychic worlds who help guide her everyday. We also go deep into experiences that have had a traumatic impact and how she’s come out of and through them a stronger, wiser, more formidable and more compassionate woman.
Otamere Guobadia: No Redemption in Masculinity
We discuss the taxonomies of magic, the violence of compromise, misremembering our pasts, hypermasculinity, the boundaries of our queerness and hope, love, romance and beauty.
We explore the emotional cost of his poetry, surviving conversion therapy, his ongoing battle with his mental health, religious trauma syndrome and the journey he’s on to use his pain to help prevent or alleviate the pain of others like him. But, as is so often the case when we come together to share the deepest parts of ourselves, this vulnerable and raw conversation is punctuated with much laughter, recognition and kinship.
PJ elaborates on her refusal to make her life and her Blackness performative, and how she does this through a tenacious yet gentle pursuit of joy. She takes us back to her origins in rural Jamaica, how her experience as a refugee made her reevaluate all of her relationships, how she remembers to engage her wonder and her curiosity, and her thoughts on roots, freedom and love.