In this episode of The Widest Net Podcast, Pam is joined by Omkari Williams. With over 30 years of experience as a political consultant and life coach, Omkari has been supporting introverted and highly sensitive activists in making a difference in their communities. As a queer black woman, she brings her own story of challenging injustice to empower others. Omkari is the host of the popular podcast, Stepping into Truth, where she interviews activists from all walks of life. Her brand new book, “Microactivism: How You Can Make a Difference in the World Without a Bullhorn,” released on October 23, 2023, with Story Publishing, LLC.
We’re thrilled to have Omkari here to share her insights and wisdom on microactivism for introverts and highly sensitive individuals. Let’s dive into this meaningful conversation and discover how we can engage in sustainable activism that creates positive change.
Here’s what you can expect from this episode:
- Discover the power of microactivism as an introvert or highly sensitive individual and make a meaningful impact on the causes you care about
- Learn practical strategies for engaging in sustainable activism while juggling the demands of a busy life
- Embrace diverse perspectives in your activism and gain a deeper understanding of the issues, enabling you to build stronger bridges and amplify marginalized voices
- Unlock the power of in-person connections in your activism endeavors, cultivating meaningful relationships that will fuel your passion and expand your impact
- Harness the transformative power of listening and understanding in your activism, creating change by truly hearing and empathizing with others’ experiences
Here are the Show Notes.
Here’s the transcript:
Welcome to another episode of The Widest Net Podcast. I’m your host, Pamela Slim, and today I am joined by my guest, Omkari Williams. Omkari has worked as a political consultant and life coach for 30 years with an emphasis on supporting activists who identify as introverted or highly sensitive. As a queer black woman, she shares her own story of challenging injustice to empower others in making a difference in their communities, and as host of the popular podcast Stepping Into Truth, where she interviews activists from all walks of life.
00:07:32
She can be found at OmkariWilliams.com her brand new book, Microactivism: How You Can Make a Difference in the World (Without a Bullhorn), comes out on October 23, 2023, with Story Publishing, LLC. I am so excited to have you here to have this discussion today. So thanks for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really happy to be here as well.
00:08:00
You probably know, because we have had the chance to work together before that. I did a large project with Susan Cain, who wrote Quiet about the power of introverts. And I say all the time, I am literally the only person in my family, my current family, husband, all kids, and my family of origin, mom, dad, sister, brother, who is an extrovert. Everybody I love, my family are all introverts, which is what I learned with Susan, makes them the most patient, tolerable people in the world, because they have supported my extrovertedness before I realized how it impacted others. And I think it is so powerful in centering this experience.
00:08:43
First of all, because there are just so many folks wired that way in the world and in the world of activism, I think there’s a probably unfair understanding about what it is and how it operates that in some ways could make introverts feel like, oh, I don’t necessarily feel comfortable doing that. So what drove you to write this particular work at this particular time? Well, I think it was a couple of things. One is, as you said, there are a lot of introverts in the world. Numbers are somewhere for the United States.
00:09:21
And so I’m going to assume it’s pretty much consistent around the world. In the 55% to 60% of people identify as introverts. And when I read that number, I thought, that’s a lot of people that we could be engaging in the work of activism if we didn’t make it. This thing that feels like you have to be leading a movement and standing on a stage and all of the ideas that pop into our heads when we hear the word activist. And so I started having conversations, and then I started doing workshops.
00:09:57
And then, honestly, I was approached to write this book. And I started the book with a really hard lean towards writing it for introverts and highly sensitive people, and then sort of pulled back a bit and thought, you know what, that’s going to be part of it. But it also has a broader reach for people who are more extroverted, because it’s basically about doing what you can do in the life that you’re currently living. You don’t have to leave your family and go migrate somewhere. You can do this from home and doing it in a way that’s sustainable.
00:10:34
And that’s as much of a challenge for extroverts as it is for introverts, because time pressures and family demands and jobs are not things that are limited to introverts. So while I do definitely look at it through a lens of how do I bring in people who don’t necessarily want to be front and center, it also has applicability for those who are very comfortable in the limelight. That is very helpful and true. I love that, that there can be the micro, and you know how I feel about tiny habits. So I love micro.
00:11:13
So micro can be helpful for many reasons, to make it feasible, sustainable, and also to develop it more as a habit as opposed to a one time thing, but also can be fit into everyday life, as you said. So that people might not just put off taking an active role in their community or in the world until they. I’m doing air quotes for people listening until they have time. Because in many cases, it’s just, no matter what, there’s always things that take your time. Yeah, if you wait to have time, it will never happen.
00:11:47
It will just never happen, but you can make five minutes. Five minutes is doable. And so part of the reason micro is so important to me is because we have so many demands on our time, but also because micro matters. The little tiny things, if you think in your own life about small things that have stuck with you over the years, whereas bigger things have sort of, you’ve forgotten about them, but little tiny kindnesses that someone has done for you, or a little harmful thing that seems little but still sticks with you, small matters.
00:12:30
And I think that it’s important to recognize that because it elevates our individual power when we recognize that the small things do matter, not just the big dramatic actions. I guess, in that light, how do you see the overall, first just definition of activism, and then just the many different ways in which people are activists, within which microactivism sits? I’m just curious, do you have, like, a framework or a thought about how you see the whole picture? I really look at activism as the word really. It’s to take action.
00:13:09
It’s not necessarily to take action in only this one way. It’s to take action. And I look at the spectrum of activism. I actually created what I call the activist archetypes, and those are ways of identifying what kind of place you might find for yourself in the world of activism. So there’s the person who’s the headliner, and they’re the ones standing up on the stage.
00:13:38
There’s the person who’s the producer archetype, and they are the person who has the whole picture in mind and all the various pieces, and they’re going to assign those things out. Then there’s the organizer who’s going to take on one of the tasks that the producer assigns, and they’re going to see that through. And then there’s the largest category, what I call the Indispensables. And those are the people who really, you will never know their names. You may never see their faces.
00:14:07
They are way behind the scenes doing things like making sure there’s coffee in the break room, making sure there’s toilet paper in the bathroom, making sure that people have maps for the route that you’re going to take to this particular event. All of these things without which nothing would happen. The indispensables are there doing all of those unglamorous but so necessary jobs. And I think that what we sometimes don’t realize is that if we don’t have all four of those types working together, nothing gets done. The analogy I like to make is Greta Thunberg sits in front of the Swedish Parliament on Fridays in her school strike.
00:14:55
But if she doesn’t have millions and millions of people supporting her work, then she’s just a kid skipping school on Fridays. So we need all of those people. We need everyone doing the thing that they can do to make a difference in, the thing that they choose to make a difference in. And it doesn’t have to be the same things that I care about or that you care about. There are 8 billion people on the planet.
00:15:19
If we all do something, it’ll all get done. Absolutely. And I love that you’ve created the archetype model, because that was one of the questions is what are ways that people can first choose the kinds of activities and actions that they want to take around which issues. The two pieces that I’m curious about. So it is so handy in having the tools of having a description where people could recognize themselves.
00:15:48
I think about it from a body of work perspective that I imagine that could change a little bit. So depending on what’s going on in your life, the interest you have, the time, energy, money, resource you have, you could maybe take on different roles at different times. How do you work with people through that mix of what should you work on and what would be the kinds of actions that could be meaningful. First off, you’re absolutely correct. Your archetype is not set in stone.
00:16:22
You can have a predominant archetype, and you can have other archetypes that are really close in on that predominant one. Or you can really be more of one thing. I mean, that happens more with the headliners and the indispensables. They tend to be more very much in their particular niche. But for most of us, if you think about it this way, how we respond to a circumstance is going to change depending on who we’re with, what the circumstances, our relationship to the person.
00:16:58
For instance, if you’re on a subway in New York and someone starts yelling at your kid, you might be the shiest person in the world, but that person needs to be careful because they’re now in danger because you will defend your kid to the death at home. In a different circumstance, you might be really a shy, retiring person who doesn’t speak up so much because it’s just not who you are. But given the right circumstance, you will show up as is needed. And I think that that is really what happens with the archetypes, is depending on where we are in our lives, depending on the circumstances, we show up as needed. So if you have small children, you’re not going to have the capacity that someone who’s retired might have.
00:17:46
You’re spending a lot of time just raising these little humans into decent people. And the retiree has moved past that and has more capacity to put their time into whatever cause is really calling to their heart at that point. So I think it’s really important to recognize the season of life that you’re in and to recognize where you can make a difference without draining yourself dry. Because we also don’t need people sacrificing themselves on the altar of change making. We need people who can stay in the game over the long haul, and understanding where you are in life and what you can do is a big part of that.
00:18:35
Yes, that’s really helpful. I know that in the book, you have a lot of different stories of microactivism. So I’d love to hear some of your favorite stories from the book and just real life examples so that we can get a sense in full color, full contact, is the way I described it in Body of Work. What does it look like? And who are some of the folks that would be exciting to follow?
00:19:01
Yeah. First off, let me just say how grateful I am to the people who shared their stories with me for the book. And there were more stories than I could even fit in the book, unfortunately. But one of the stories that I really love is this man. His name is Don Estel, and he’s a filmmaker in LA, and he has made this film that is really an homage to black women.
00:19:29
And it’s just a beautiful, beautiful piece of filmmaking. And he felt inspired to do this out of his love for his mother, out of his love for the black women in his life. And I found it so powerful to listen to what he had to say about the experience of making the film, but also just the experience of being a black man in the United States in this moment in time. So he’s using his art to open a conversation wider that needs to be heard. So he’s one of the people whose stories I really love.
00:20:10
And then sort of on the flip side of that, there is this guy. His name is Bob Norton, and Bob is a white, upper middle class guy, really just a lovely human who realized at some point that he had no idea of how much privilege he was walking through the world with. And he thought, okay, I need to understand something. I need to learn. So he set out on a mission to learn.
00:20:41
And as part of that mission, he gathered a group of his friends, also whIte, middle aged, well to do men, and started having conversations with them on his porch. And they would just sit and talk about their place in the world and the things that they had not really had to notice, and how once they started paying attention, they could see the inequities, and they could see where they could actually learn and make a difference and contribute, and just if at the very least, do less harm. And it’s been such an interesting journey watching Bob through his evolution. And then I’ll give you one more. Coco.
00:21:33
Coco Guthrie-Papy is one of them. I mean, if you think of the word badass, it should have Coco’s face on it. Coco is amazing. She does so much work around reproductive rights, justice, and she does so much work around changing our carceral system and creating a structure so that people have avenues to find bail if they have been arrested for something, so they’re not sitting in jail waiting for trial for months on end, losing their jobs, losing the connection to their families and their communities.
00:22:15
And Coco just is one of those people who inspires me every day with her passion and her commitment. And she is someone who could easily have decided, my life is very good. I don’t really need to do any of this. But instead, she’s using her position of education and privilege and capacity to make a difference in the lives of people who really need advocates. And honestly, she’s one of the inspirations for the book.
00:22:49
Wow. In these describing it, it is so interesting to read all the different stories. And I know it’s inspiring for folks often just to think about different ways in which activism can happen. And as you said, everything from the conversations on the porch that is so powerful when you just think about what that would be like for peers to really creating pieces of art, pieces of work that can go all over the world, are there ways that you think about micro activism? And as you said, in particular, for folks that might identify as introverts, which we know, it doesn’t mean folks are shy, doesn’t mean there’s not a strong opinion.
00:23:29
There’s a lot of misconceptions about introverts. But when I think about it from an energy perspective, for example, for introverts in my life, there may not be the same desire or tolerance for spending lots and lots of time, like in large groups of people, that would really be depleting the battery. So I’m curious, when you are thinking about micro activism and helping people to get that sustainable, small chunk of things that they could do, what are some of the pieces of it that people use in order to plan what they would actually do in a given day or week or year? Well, another person from the book is an old friend of mine. Her name is Lisa Brown, and she is truly an introvert.
00:24:18
And she’s also an artist. And what she does is she writes postcards to voters all over the country, not telling them who to vote for, just telling them that there’s an election coming up in their area and to make sure that they vote. But she makes these postcards, little works of art, so that when they show up in someone’s mailbox, they don’t just look at this thing and it’s just got words on it, it’s got art on it, and so it stops them. And you look at it and you think, oh, what’s this? And you read it and you think, if it were me, I’d probably stick it on my refrigerator and be much more likely to go vote, because that thing is there reminding me.
00:24:57
And it’s so cute, you don’t want to just toss it in the trash, right? It’s like, oh, this is really kind of fun. So that’s what she does. And she’s been doing this for years now, and it’s a regular thing. And I really appreciate that because it matters.
00:25:16
In elections, where someone wins or loses by two or three votes, it matters, right. And I think that we tend in this country to have this go big or go home kind of mentality. The whole point of micro activism is that that is actually not a sustainable way for most of us to live. Most of us cannot live in that space of huge actions, but we can live in the space of saying, once a month I’m going to go and I’m going to do 2 hours at the food pantry, and I might just do those 2 hours filling boxes that they’re going to give away to people in need. So I don’t even need to talk to anybody.
00:25:56
I can just fill my boxes by myself with my headsets on listening to whatever. Or we could say, I’m going to go to the library and read to small children once a month, or once a week. And whatever it is, the point is to find something that speaks to a cause that you care about and that you can contribute to in a way that does not feel draining for you. And that’s true for introverts or extroverts. The point is to be able to keep doing it.
00:26:27
And if it feels draining, you’re going to stop. That’s just as clear as day. You will not continue something that is a struggle. So it’s about finding the thing you can do in the way that doesn’t require you to struggle, to do it in the way that actually gives you energy, and that you can build community. So maybe you and a friend go and do some work around the local community gardens in season, and you do that together, and that’s your hangout time.
00:26:59
It doesn’t really matter to me what people do. What matters to me is that they do something, because that’s how we stay connected to one another, is by participating in our communities, by contributing to each other, and really from the perspective of sort of mutual aid right. It’s like, I’m going to do this thing for you, but I’m getting something from it, too. I’m not just being this humanitarian out here. There is a benefit to me that is accrued from it, whether it’s a better community, whether it’s just a closer relationship to my friend who I’m working side by side with, whatever it might be.
00:27:41
And I don’t think we should judge. I don’t think we should judge the reason that we’re doing something that is good. We can just do something that’s good and be happy with that. Yeah. For people who don’t know, they might say, I know that I want to be doing something, but I don’t know what it is.
00:28:05
And I guess that could either be at a local level or on a national or global level. Are there any places that you can go in order to find out opportunities for activism? Volunteering or activism? Actually, I think the place you go first is to yourself, and you go to what I call your origin story. And that’s the story that made you want to do something in the first place.
00:28:33
It’s the thing that made you think, oh, this is not okay. What’s happening is not okay in this realm, whether maybe it’s the environment, and you hear about countries in the Pacific that are starting to be flooded, and so these little islands aren’t going to even exist in ten or 20 years, and you think, this is not okay, let me do what I can for this. Or maybe it’s that you have a really strong feeling about animal rights or any subject, it doesn’t matter what, but there’s going to be something where you remember feeling this thing that’s happening is not okay with me. Let me start there. And I feel like if you go back to that story and connect to that, then it will lead you to finding what you need to find.
00:29:29
You can then go online and literally type in what to do about island sinking in the South Pacific, and something will pop up on the search engines, right? You can type in animal rights and you will be overwhelmed by options, but you can then narrow it down. Animal rights organizations near me, you can look for things that are local, or if you want to do something more global, you can search for that as well. But I think the thing that is most important is to start with the thing that you care about, because that’s what will keep you going. When it gets hard, when it gets disappointing, when someone behaves really shamefully, which people do, going back to that original impetus keeps you moving forward through the disappointments that are part of activism as they are part of life.
00:30:33
Yeah. It so immediately flashed upon my own. A lot for me goes back to just growing up, watching my dad, who happened to restore a school for 40 years, seeing just very local activism in terms of doing something local, that inadvertently really got me excited about local development. Just what I saw, seeing that every day where I realized that it doesn’t really matter what city I’m in, I can just get excited. If there’s some kind of community space, I immediately want to go in there.
00:31:02
And I think part of it is noticing where that happens. So that can be super powerful to see that for the types of areas that you might want to make change in. I have a question that’s more of an intersectional question, specifically around white folks and my own identity. And this is a point of view that I hold, that what I see in my own community is often folks that have really good intentions, have an incomplete understanding about often systemic inequity, and can be excited to take action without the participation of communities that we want to make change in, or often doing things that can actually cause harm as opposed to make change. I have a good friend of mine, Teddy Rouge, who is Ugandan, who now is back at home in Uganda.
00:31:54
He’s been in the US and in Europe. He’s written many articles about, for example, the flood of T shirts and clothes that people might say, let me do a clothing drive for the people of Africa. And he writes extremely strong, compelling posts saying, do not do that, because you, first of all, are not addressing anything about the roots of poverty, and you displace people who are making textiles in Africa, et cetera, et cetera. So I just specifically wanted to get your point of view about what I see a lot in white activism. And I know it’s not unique to my own community, but it is what I know in my own identity.
00:32:31
What is different counsel that you have for folks who truly do not set out in any way wanting to cause harm, but might jump to action first without really having discernment about the actions they’re taking? Yeah, that’s such a good question, because no one who sets out on the path of activism says to themselves, oh, let me see how much harm I can do today. Nobody does that. Right? But sometimes it happens.
00:33:01
And I think mostly it happens when we forget that when we’re entering into work that we haven’t done before, that there are people who have been doing this work for a long time, and that the best way to enter into that work is as a newbie and being willing to just sit and listen and watch and be curious and ask questions and really listen to the answers, even if they don’t match what you think they’re going to be. Because I think sometimes we ask questions and we have an idea of what the answer is. And when the answer is different, we can get really snippy about it. And I think that it’s the hardest thing in some ways, because part of the challenge of white privilege is that it’s so woven into our society that it can be so difficult to notice it, and it can be so difficult to disentangle yourself from it and not feel like someone saying, actually, no, you don’t know what you’re talking about in this circumstance is just the truth. It may not be comfortable truth, but it is truth.
00:34:30
I once had someone say to me, a white woman say to me, I know what it’s like to be black because my daughter is black. And I swear to you, I almost passed out.
00:34:44
I literally had to get out of the conversation because I was so enraged by her refute. When I said, no, you don’t. She insisted. She did. And I was so enraged by her refusal to even hear me that I had to withdraw from the conversation.
00:35:04
And she is a well meaning person, but that is maybe in the top five most ignorant things I’ve ever heard in my entire life. Yes. And she didn’t know that. She didn’t notice that because she’s so enmeshed in this structure that we have. So it’s really tricky.
00:35:26
And the best thing I can think of for someone to do when walking into a circumstance where this kind of thing might happen, but honestly, really, anything where you don’t know a whole ton is to say to people who have been doing the work, tell me more, tell me more. Those words will never get you in trouble. They will never get you in trouble. And if you actually listen, there is so much wisdom that is possible on the other side of those words. That is so helpful and just in taking time, really seeing it as part of what seems like a paradox.
00:36:12
But to me, it’s not that the first step of action is in action. We could probably look for anybody of just learning more, spending time listening, as you said, especially where there could be a case where you are excited about a change happening in an area where you’re unfamiliar with a community. You don’t know the complete set of circumstances. And as you said, this is every day of my life as a parent of biracial children. As somebody who does work in community, as you know intimately, because this is your life’s work, like, the work is present all day, every day, multiple times a day.
00:36:52
Just ask my kids or people in the community, and it is hard and awkward many times, but also in a very beautiful way. It’s also so beautiful to be deeply connected with community and just to constantly be, I think one of the great gifts in my own experience of being surrounded by such unique, diverse, intersectional community is it gives that opportunity, as you said, to recognize things that I never would recognize if I was just either sitting with myself or with other of my own folk. And so the way I see it personally is it is in really understanding and over time, depending on the type of activism, whether it could be a long standing commitment to do deep work within one community over a long period of time, or whether it is looking at ways that you might be working on issues, maybe like a local issue and a global one, but with some kind of a thread to it, that one never has the inside track or scoop. Identity always matters, and identity matters in so many ways, just within community. I remember one time, and it was so real and right, and I totally understood where the person was coming from.
00:38:15
But we had an almost all indigenous event here in our space. Our space is a Navajo word, as my husband named it. And I think I was maybe the only white person in the room, or maybe there was one other person, but a Navajo woman came in, and she was really incensed. And she was like, who the hell is this woman who’s, like, using this word for this space? Like, how?
00:38:39
She’s just like, what is the clothing Line that appropriated?
00:38:45
I forget, some kind of clothing Line that was like naming something Navajo, I couldn’t remember. But anyway, she was understandably incensed because she felt like I was just taking that name and using it for my.
00:39:01
And my husband was there. There was other folks from the community that was saying, this is actually a family space. Daryl really holds the name within his own tradition, and it is one of the reasons that we have been very intentional of not. The name is for the physical space that really is held, activated by me and my husband, but really held spiritually by him in his own tradition. It’s why I don’t talk about the model in my identity as a white Woman being married to him, being in this building.
00:39:35
It’s not the K’é model. It’s Main street learning lab. And we’re talking about things that we’ve learned. And to some folks, they sort of look at me sideways of like, well, what’s the big deal? To me, it’s a gigantic deal for all the reasons that people can have, understandably, there’s a very strong, valid critique that that particular Navajo woman can have.
00:39:59
I totally understand it of maybe, like, I shouldn’t be involved in any way in that, right? There’s. I totally can understand that point of view, and that could be within the black community or any community in which you might be coming and not being there. But especially for me, like, in my own lineage as a white woman, I can see and understand it. And that’s sometimes the way that a very personal choices and flavors come to be is in partnership with community, is where you decide it.
00:40:29
So I didn’t mean to sort of tangent on that so much. But it’s an important thing, Pam, because I think that we don’t realize, especially as Americans, we don’t realize how much we just take from other people unless we’re paying attEntion, because that’s just sort of the model of the country, right? It’s the model of the United States. And words and names have power, especially in non white cultures, words and names have power. And so honoring that and respecting that is something that I think is a different experience outside of the white experience than it is for the Latino experience or the Black experience or the Native experience, where words are used differently than just they are in English.
00:41:35
We don’t really sort of assign words in English an experience outside of just what they mean. And so I appreciate your sensitivity to that woman’s complaint, and I appreciate her complaint, because I think it’s really important that she voiced that and that then gets looked at. And what you decide to do from there is a different story, but it’s the looking at. We need to be looking at things, not just looking past them because they’re uncomfortable.
00:42:14
Yes.
00:42:18
In the heart of doing the work, in the heart of activism, as you can see, in so many different ways, and I’m sure for everybody that you’ve featured in the book, in their own way, in which they’re making change, there have been so many different challenges that have gone through that right times where they were like, what am I doing and why am I doing it? Misunderstandings and back and forth. That is, to me, an important part to raise for the topic. When I was writing Body of Work, I was just finishing the book, and I was reading to my dad when he was still alive at our kitchen table. I was reading passages, and he had been like 40 years in this project.
00:42:53
In his community of raising money for redoing a school and volunteering. For 40 years, he gave money, never received $1 for work. He did very joyfully to restore this school to be a community center. And right towards the end of the project, toward the end of his life, there was a group of local folks that lived in the community because they were getting to a sustainable model where they wanted to have a school, a school of sustainability that would come in as sort of a primary resident, that would allow the school to have some stability in folks there to be activating the community center. And so there were some folks from the community that were against that.
00:43:30
They felt like outsiders were coming in to take it over and had a lot of pushback, political pushback signs in their tiny little town. And I swear it broke my dad’s heart. And it makes me very emotional just remembering that.
00:43:48
I feel that. But I think that to me, the most powerful part of that story is the lesson that we need to listen to one another, really need to listen, because if we listen to one another with an open mind and an open heart, then we can understand the intention behind what’s happening. And it’s not like intention is always the be all and end all, but it is important to understand what’s the intention, because then if the intention is in some way not actually working in the way it should, then you can adjust. Right. But if you don’t know the intention is sort of where you’re going, you can take different roads to get there, but if you don’t know where you’re going, but if you realize, oh, we’re going to the same place we are, just on different roads, maybe we can make those roads intersect and build in community that way.
00:44:52
That’s a different experience. So I feel like the listening and the willingness to hear and give people grace, assume the best. Unless they’ve really given you reason not to. Exactly. Yeah.
00:45:09
And I think that it definitely was very personal thing of just watching it up close and personal in that point. I think my dad was very discouraged in that moment of just like, gosh, why have we been doing all this work over time to get so close, to really activating it. But what I told him in the moment, and I believe it to be true, so it could. I never want it to happen, but there’s earthquakes in Northern California. Like, the building could go away.
00:45:34
It’s really not about the building. It’s about what I saw as a kid growing up and watching you do talent shows and art Shows and raise money, joyfully and do all kinds of things to connect the community that is something that you can’t ever take away. And so in watching it up close, I think sometimes living it, it is the part where we see activists getting discouraged, because either there’s just all the stuff we see right now within so many of my friends and clients who do work around racial equity, where we have lawsuits and all this pressure that’s coming, directly attacking the work around activism. It is, I think, just important, like you’re saying, to recognize, first of all, there’s just moments in history in which it can maybe be easier to take action, and moments where it can be harder. But doing this sustained micro activism, not just throwing your entire life force into one thing, where then you attach to the outcome that it’s only worth it if you get the big change that you want to get.
00:46:38
And many times changes over decades, or hundreds of years over generations, I think. People need to release the idea that they’re going to see the outcome that they’re working towards. I think that is the healthiest thing you can do, is look at it as planting a seed for a tree that you may never experience the shade of. And yet you plant the seed. You plant the seed, you tend to the little sapling, you do your work, and then the next generation continues the work.
00:47:14
And sometimes you get lucky and you get to see the fruition of what you’re working towards. But that can’t be the whole motivation, because you’ll stop. You will stop because there are too many disappointments along the road. And it’s also why we have to do it in community, because those are the moments when you need someone to say, I know you are completely bummed out. Take a break.
00:47:42
I’ll be right here when you’re ready to come back. But we are not stopping this work. And that’s what you need. You need people by your side in the fight for the long haul who also recognize, I mean, it’s like the people who built the pyramids, they didn’t get to see the end of the pyramid. They never got to see it.
00:48:02
The people who built Angkor Wat, they didn’t get to see this magnificent structure that thousands of years later is still there, and people are still flocking to, but they did their part and they are honored by the structure. Right? That’s how I experience it, yeah. And it is the way you’ve described it earlier and in the book, that by definition, it is a nourishing activity to take a micro action, to be an activist, that it feels good where it’s coming from, a place of doing what you can in the moment out of love and a desire for a more positive outcome like that feels good. I know I mess myself up when I get too attached to outcomes, which sometimes is inevitable when you want something so much, so bad.
00:48:53
Yeah, but that’s often where I think we just get thrown off, too, where we don’t have an appropriate role, because any change worthwhile involves many people all the time. So everything speaks, I think, to the model that you have of micro activism. It makes so much sense. Thank you. I really appreciate you saying that because it’s certainly how I have pursued my work.
00:49:20
Even though this is my work, I still do it in the micro. It’s like, okay, what do I need to do next? What’s the next small thing? And I have a big vision for the goal. And if it happens, that would be lovely, but I just keep doing the work because that’s my responsibility.
00:49:42
It’s my obligation.
00:49:49
It’s the thing we have to do because we’re here and we all need to make a contribution, and that’s what we do. We just keep doing the next thing. Yeah, it’s really powerful. So, speaking of steps, knowing that you have a book coming out shortly, at the time we’re recording this, where are places where you’re going to be and how can people connect to you and the book? Well, I’m going to be actually in a number of places.
00:50:20
I start in Boston, then I go to New York, then I go to Atlanta, Savannah, Decatur. No, I’m sorry. Atlanta, Savannah, Brunswick, Georgia, Louisville, Kentucky, Chicago, Illinois, and Oregon. So. And all of these stops will be on my website.
00:50:44
So you can go to OmkariWilliams.com, and the events page will have everything listed. A couple just got added, but by the time this comes out, everything will be updated and you’ll be able to see where I’m going to be. And I would love to see people. It is my great joy to actually get to interact with people in person, especially after three years of pandemic. And hello, Zoom.
00:51:12
How nice to see you. Yes, I feel people are hungry to see each other in person. Yeah. Because it’s a different kind of energy. Right.
00:51:22
And I really love that. I love the energy that’s created when people come together and the inspiration that comes out of that. So I’m very excited for this. The book is available from your favorite bookseller anywhere. And, yeah, this was a dream I did not know I had.
00:51:42
But now that it’s happening. I’m just beyond excited for it. That is so wonderful. What a beautiful way to close. Well, I’m so thankful for your time and for joining us on the podcast and wish you just great connection and joy with your book.
00:51:59
I know it’s going to stimulate so much great change in individuals’ lives who are taking actions and also in folks that are impacted by. Well, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, so you can find our show notes on the podcast link on pamelaslim.com. We’ll definitely link to the book and also Omkari’s website where you can see if she’s coming to a stop near you. I am obviously advocating for a stop in Mesa, Arizona, here at the Learning Lab.
00:52:26
We’ll work on that on Rev. Two. We’ll get you over here. I want to thank my 31 Marketplace production team, La’Vista Jones, Tanika Lothery, Jose Arboleda, and our narrator, Andia Winslow. Until next time, be sure to subscribe to the show and enjoy building work that matters at scale.
00:52:46
Bye.
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