The Social Justice Doula with Lutze B. Segu - Episode Transcript

Adrienne: Hello everyone. And welcome to feminist hotdog, the podcast about finding joy through feminism and living your best feminist life. I'm your host, Adrienne van der Valk. And over the last two plus years, I have asked a lot of questions on this show, but there are two I don't think I've ever asked. What do you want your feminism to do? And what are the conditions necessary for you to practice the feminism you want to practice? 

My guest today is the very woman who first asked me these questions, and they've had a pretty profound effect on how I perceive myself as a feminist. Her name is Lutze B. Segu, and she is a fascinating feminist who is doing really interesting work in social justice spaces and provoking, critical thinking, wherever she goes. I have had the pleasure of being one of Lutze's feminist coaching clients. And if you didn't know feminist coaching was a thing, neither did I, until I met her through Instagram and began following her work. Lutze is committed to helping her clients think of their feminism as a practice, not just a slogan or a list of policy preferences. For me, this has meant identifying the ways that white feminism in particular shows up in my sociopolitical thinking and action, so I can be a more deliberate and informed anti-racist feminist practitioner with the emphasis on practice. I have learned so much from her and I know you will too. So, please enjoy my conversation with Lutze Segu, with a few interjections from me.  

Adrienne: We have so many juicy topics and questions saved up to dissect together, so thanks for taking the time.

Lutze: You're so welcome. Thank you for asking me and I too, am excited. I've been doing a lot of podcasts lately, but this is the first one that I'm talking to an unapologetic out loud feminist. And so I feel like I could frame my questions in a more pointed way. I’m myself wherever, but it's just nice to know, like, when you and the person interviewing you have a shared knowledge and shared framework. It just makes that easier. So, thank you for inviting me.

Adrienne: Absolutely. I'm so glad you're here. So, to start off with, do you mind just tell us a little … like, if I met you at a party, and I didn't know you from the internet or didn't know you from our coaching life together, how would you describe what you're about and what you do on a day-to-day basis?

Lutze: So, what I'm about, and what I do on a day-to-day basis is where, ancestrally, I got the name, the social justice doula, cause I'm an elder millennial, and I do a lot of things. I'm a social worker. Some people would consider me an activist. I've been a gender justice organizer. I'm currently a doctoral student studying gender, race, sexuality, and social justice.

So, I would say all of my work is oriented towards justice, is oriented toward a liberatory future. And there are different buckets in how I do that work. And so right now, the way that I've been articulating myself in all the work that I do is under the umbrella of the Social Justice Doula. I'm friends with a lot of people who are in a birth world, and we know that midwives are the people who catch the babies, but people might not be as familiar with doulas. And doulas, I would say they curate and create the conditions for transformation to happen, for birth to happen. So, we know at a birth, the midwife is tending to the business of “how are we going to get the baby here,” and the doula’s tending to the business of the person giving birth: What do they need? What does the space need, so that what needs to happen can happen? We know that there are death doulas, people who radically hold space for people who are transitioning out of this life. We know there are abortion doulas, people radically holding space for people who are terminating. And we know there are medical doula, people who are radically holding space and advocating for people. 

And so, for me, when I looked at all of the work that I do and that all of it is oriented towards Black feminism, is oriented towards social justice and all these kinds of things, I see myself as a social justice doula. Like I hold space and create space for individuals in organization to transform, to be transformed by their politics and to operationalize their politics, to operationalize their anti-racism. And so that's what I do. Whatever needs to happen, I bear witness to people. I hold space and I kinda just like, you know, doula people, like literally just like help shift energy, help shift thinking if there's issues among coworkers that stopping a really good and great project from happening. What's the thing that needs to happen to move that energy along so that we could get to the other side of the thing that we're trying to get? So that is how I would describe me.

I would've never thought on my own to name myself this, so this is how I know it came from the ancestors because this is way too smart and on point and so beautifully branded in a way. And so, it's interesting; since I've been operating under this word, people really get it. People who find, who want to work with me, the people who I want to work with are finding me much easier now that I'm using these words right now to describe what I'm doing. So that's how I would describe myself at the non-existent party.

Adrienne: At the party that maybe we'll have in like two years.

Lutze: Yeah. Right. Totally.

Adrienne: And I know, like in our work together, you would kind of consistently press me on that question of, “What conditions need to exist for you to realize your feminism or for you to operationalize your feminism?” And my reaction was like, “Well, what do you mean? I just have to want it. I just have to do it.” If that were true, then I would have already been doing it and I wouldn't have needed to reach out to you. So, I think that question about the conditions is so on point, but also so challenging. So, I love that that's part of your, uh, the work that you do. 

Can you tell me about your path? What led you to identify strongly as a feminist and some of your big feminist milestones in your life?

Lutze: I am the oldest of four children in an immigrant household. I'm first-generation Haitian American, so even if I did not want to be a feminist, my birth order and the fact that I'm the only girl child in a family, in an immigrant family, all of those conditions were just like, “Absolutely, you're going to be a feminist,” because I remember really early on feeling like, “Why do I have so many responsibilities compared to my brothers? Why am I responsible for certain things and not my brothers? Why am I not allowed to do things but my brothers are?” So, I just, before I even knew what discrimination was, what gender bias was, I was already feeling those things in my body. And so that made me like go on a quest. So, I've always been…as a kid, I was really well-read, really precocious because my parents didn't allow us to do anything or go anywhere. And so I made really great friends with books and things of that nature. And so that pain I was feeling in my body led me to go searching for things and reading things. And I just remember just always asking and questioning and looking at things from a gender lens and understanding.

And I really can't tell you quite when I found feminism, but all I know is that once I realized like, “Oh, people are treated differently because they're girls are women,” I didn't need much more receipts or evidence. I was like, “Oh, I understand that.”

Adrienne: “Oh, There, there is a word for that!”

Lutze: Right! So to me, when I found feminism and we found each other, because I was searching, because I just always remember just always constantly, “No, this is not fair.” That phrase was always constantly reverberating in my spirit. 

And so to me, a feminist milestone I would say is when I really got introduced in a very serious way to Black feminism, in the English department at Florida Memorial University, it was just a Historically Black College in Miami. That was to me, like a big thing. And then when I really got to know bell hooks’ work, that was like, like, that took my feminism to the next level. Finding Audre Lorde was also a really big milestone because that, to me, here was a…first, she’s also a first-generation Caribbean-American queer person. And that was the first time I saw myself in real time, in a very specific way. The first book I was introduced to Audrey Lorde was Zami. I was 18 years old, and I went to one of my favorite English teacher's house over the summer, right before I went off to school. And she just had like, her house was like the African-American library, like Black figurines everywhere, Black women writers everywhere. And I remember something about that book was calling to me and picking up that book in reading it and just like finding myself and, again, finding language for myself and who I am was completely a game changer for me.   

Adrienne: Lutze emphasizes that, for her, feminism is not an identity or a belief independent of her other identities and beliefs. Rather, she practices her feminism across disciplines and in her approach to all of the many social justice issues she cares about, and in the many different roles that she holds.

Lutze: That's a big deal when you're able to marry your politics with your feminism. One of the last formal jobs I had, I was as a gender justice organizer, and this was around the time, like the word intersectionality was just taking on a life of its own in pop culture. And I feel really proud that, at that time, as a gender justice organizer, I was able to bring middle-class white women to sit down at a table and literally rub elbows with sex workers, with young people, low-income Black and Brown women, domestic workers, undocumented folks. And they were all sitting at the table, all talking to each other, talking with each other, and understanding like… We were doing work we understood completely, like “no one is free until all of us is free.” And we were working towards, under a woman of color, feminist ethic of solidarity and making solidarity. And that to me was a huge, huge milestone.

I also got to meet Kimberlé Crenshaw and sit on a panel with her when the African-American Policy Forum, the think tank that she heads, they put out the report “Say Her Name,” and I was one of the founding members of Black Girls Matter, Miami, and, she was doing these town halls all across the United States. And I got to testify from that vantage point. Like why is important? Why do we need to center Black girls, Black women, femmes and gender expansive people in a very particular kind of way? And so it was a big deal when Black feminists came together to say, “Say her name,” came together to say, “This is why Black girls matter.” And it's not to take away from Black boys, but it's like we understand, specifically in acutely, like, you know, women's and girls, women and femmes, we’re attached and responsible for so many people. So, not to say that you need to pick one or the other, but like, we need to center everyone, and these are all the reasons why we need to center girls and femmes. 

And, so, this is like, in the middle of my being politicized in a very particular kind of way, I'm reading about all of feminist things online, Tumblr, Twitter. This is like the beginning of Twitter. This big, you know, thing starts to form, quote unquote Black Twitter, that everyone's obsessed with. And on Black Twitter, Black Twitter is pretty much spearheaded by Black feminist thinkers who are constantly sharing books, sharing PDFs of bell hooks, of this out in a third, and just learning intersectionality in a very specific kind of way, reading about it.

And then, I just remember walking into this town hall and everybody who's going to sit on the panel and testify, you know, they have some food for us. And I walk in and I see this Black woman with locks just like eating some fried chicken, and I said, wait, “Is that Kimberlé Cresnshaw? Just kicking it, like hanging with us and eating fried chicken?” And it was her and she was really nice, really, really gracious. And that to me was like a big freaking deal to be able to sit and testify, to be asked questions by her. 

And, also, to see so many people show up just to hear about Black girls. Obviously, the room was predominantly Black, but it wasn't just Black people. And it was a really long meeting and people stayed. And to me, like, just thinking about it now gives me goosebumps and makes me like a little emotional, because it's, it was like a first representation of what can happen when we really centered Black women. You know, this work is just very emotional. You go from these really high highs to these really low lows, but in that role, what I felt was the future. I saw the future: What's possible when we center the most marginalized in that, in centering the most marginalized, that is how we all get free. And so that to me is a very big milestone. 

I'm grateful that I have been able to meet some very heavy hitters of feminist thinkers. Like Mariame Kaba; I've gotten to meet her several times. I've gotten to sit at her feet and learn. And so that, to me, those are those kinds of things. It's like, this is not some person who just lives on the internet, who lives in these books, or in these articles, and in these, whatever. This is someone who I get to see practice their values in a very particular kind of way. I find that really beautiful that I have a possibility role model who is living and breathing that I can fashion myself behind. So, all of those things are part of my feminist milestones. My feminism is so alive, and I love that I get to make it and get remade. It gets animated by all the other feminist thinkers and doers in my life who we keep each other accountable. And we're like, you know, doing cool stuff with each other and I'm dreaming a future. So all of those things, I would say are milestones for sure.

Adrienne: I think it's such an important reminder for me and for other people listening that, like, the people that we look up to have been on their own journeys and they haven't always known that things that they knew. And they learned those things by seeking out proximity to the people who are doing this thinking and putting themselves in locations, you know, virtual and non, where those conversations were happening, you know, and that being a practice as you mentioned. So, thank you for emphasizing that.

Lutze: Yeah, for sure. I just love, the Angela Davises of the world, the Mariame Kabas of the world, the Ruth Wilson Gilmores of the world. You name it, like, these are people who practice being in coalition all the time. They're not like these loan thinkers or whatever. Like, feminism is a social communal practice. I don't know if one can just go off into the woods by themselves and be a feminist. I don't actually believe that. I think feminism, anti-racism, social justice: These are things we do in community. Because we have to practice because when revolution comes, we have to have some basic things figured out to move in a very particular kind of way. 

I'm always reminded of what the Combahee River Collective wrote in 1977, that their whole thing is like, they believe that Black women, Black people are levelly human. And, so, I try my best to always make sure I, especially for Black feminist thinkers, that I think about them in that way from a process that I don't deify them, because that is another form of dehumanization, and anti-Blackness is rooted in dehumanization. Like, these are people just like me. They have the same kind of questions, just like me. But the difference is, they've taken their questions seriously enough to grapple with them and to create the space to be with them. And so that's what I'm trying to practice in my life with others, which is why I'm constantly saying: It's a practice. What are we practicing? What are we doing? What are we going back to? Who are our touchstones? What are the texts that we will read over and over again? Because we know it endures. And every time I read it and I'm with it, something new is sparked in me because I bring to it a new consciousness.

Adrienne: A question that I get a lot is, given the unfortunate reality that so many oppressive dynamics are at work in our world right now, why does feminism feel relevant as a practice to talk and center work around when there are so many other oppressions at work?

Lutze: Yeah. So, if you understand how Turtle Island became to be one side the United States, the other side Canada, then you understand that is a deeply, that was a deeply racialized gendered project. When the settlers came over and they stole land from the Indigenous people, on top of the genocide, the smallpox and everything else that they inflicted upon the Indigenous people, they also inflicted a very colonial understanding of gender.

And so the cutting of the men's hair, you, we know that Indigenous people always have language for two spirit, always had space for all sorts of ways that people can be. They kind of annexed that out of those folks. There was stealing the children and putting them in boarding houses to Americanize, Europeanize, them. We know that a lot of Indigenous folks have matrilineal lineages, and so making them switch over to patriarchy, you're looking at a very gendered project of what the settlers did to the Indigenous people. 

And then the settler goes to the continent of Africa, steals these people, Black people, these Africans, bring these Africans to the United States of America. And from the process of the continent of Africa to the Middle Passage, to them arriving into quote unquote New World an engendering process happens because you can't treat people like a thing if their human categories are still in place. So, the whole dehumanizing project was also an engendering project. So Black men, Black women, and we know there are queer folks there as well, and I'm sure there were gender expansive people as well. And what happens is, in order to turn these people into a thing, you have to strip them of their gender.

That is a very racialized gender thing, and so that is what gave us North America. The whole project was rooted in patriarchy. The whole project was rooted in racism. The whole project was rooted in gender. So, I don't understand, I don't see how, I don't care if you're working on climate, gender justice, reproductive justice, you name it: I don't see how you're not going to have a gender liberation lens because until there is gender liberation, there's a whole sorts of things that's not going to happen. Like, I don't think it's by happenstance because we think about the earth in a feminine kind of a way, which I actually don't disagree with. But it makes it easier to abuse into ravage and pillage and to not be in right relationship with a planet when you see the planet in a very specific kind of a way, because misogyny is alive and well within our community. So, to me, you don't have to call yourself a feminist per se, but if gender liberation is not the foundation and the cornerstone of the thing that you're fighting alongside with, that informs your analysis, it's essentially white supremacy because white supremacy understands that gender is important, so much so, which is why it institutes what it institutes. So how ridiculous is it that we're going to intervene, we're going to confront, we're going to disrupt, dismantle, and diverse from white supremacy, and think we're going to do that without not truly taking seriously the project of gender liberation?

Adrienne: And I love that you are characterizing this as gender liberation and not as, what I think many people mistakenly think of feminism as liberating women from men, right? That this is, these are categories that in fact, everyone of all genders is suffering under the system and that it is directly tied to white supremacy too. I think that's a point that often gets lost.

Lutze: Yeah. So, depending on what kind of feminism you practice, maybe your feminism is just trying to liberate women from men, right? Cause there are some people who are practice perhaps hegemonic feminism aka white feminism; maybe that is your project. My feminist project, which is rooted in Black feminism, women of color feminism, animated by indigenous feminism, and we could go on and on, cause we know there's transnational feminism, there's third world feminism, there's a whole bunch of feminisms. We understand that children are oppressed in a society like this. Two spirit people, gender expansive people, women, you name it. What happens when those women were no longer young and cute in a very specific way, and we become old? What kind of oppression happens as we get older? Right? So, yeah, it's gender liberation. And we understand that patriarchy does harm masculine people, and so they are raised and socialized in a very particular kind of way that puts us all at risk, because if someone feels entitled to exact domestic terrorism around a whole massive group of people, I think it's safe to say, like, we all need gender liberation. And so, yeah, we have to liberate all bodies, all beings from this settler colonial understanding of sex and gender that only works for white people. And if it's already failing white people, it’s gonna fail everybody else who aint white.

Adrienne: You've mentioned that you feel like this year has really shifted your feminism. Can you talk about how, and in what ways.

Lutze: So what happened is, once the pandemic started, for some reason I felt really compelled that I needed to deepen in my practice of abolition. I don't want to defund the police, right. I want to abolish, like, I don't think they should exist. They don't deter crime. They don't stop crime. We are not safer because of them. And so since the pandemic happened, I've been having to re-evaluate my ethics and my values and ask myself deeper questions and go deeper.

And I'm just thinking about like, as an abolitionist, I'm very concerned about tearing down and rebuilding in the same way. So that is how all of these things have been animating my feminism. Obviously, we saw over the summer, like a huge, multi-racial, multi-ethnic intergenerational anti-racist coalition that coalesced around all of these deaths and I've just been thinking about, okay, “how do we get to the business of making solidary?” 

Like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the geographer, the abolitionists, she describes solidarity as something we make with others. And so I've been very animated, been very hopeful. I'm very intrigued by the multiracial coalition I see that's getting serious around asking yourself some serious questions. And so to me, the organizer in me is just thinking like, “well, how do we organize these people in such a way to be with difference?

How do we strengthen our analysis? And so that we understand that our struggles are interconnected and at the same time we don't flatten each other out?” And so I've been thinking a lot about anarcho feminism, because again, as abolitionists, I want to destroy things and I'm thinking about, “what's the thing I want to rebuild?”

And I think there's a way in which people tend to think anarchy is just about, “there'll be no government there'll be no, this and there will be no that,” and I don't think that's quite the case. At least not the Black people I'm watching who identify as anarchists. That is not their orientation to the thing.

And so, the moment is asking us to ask ourselves really big questions. The moment is asking us to clarify and get clear, because it's like, there's a sorting of sort, right? There are people who are doubling down in their white supremacy and they're going off with the MAGA group. And then there's people who are really doubling down and like, “wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.” Cause the first time Black Lives Matter started like, you know, people in, let me say liberals, ‘cause those are the people I know, those are the people I see all the time. White liberals were just not having it, were not having it with Black Lives Matter. And so there is a way in which, now, it almost seems not good for the brand if you're not saying “black lives matter.” I've been thinking about that as well. 

And what do we do? And so that is my… I'm making my way to the basement floor of myself, and inviting myself to consent and re-surrender again to my ideas. Just asking myself, “how serious are you about this thing? How serious are you about practicing this thing? How serious are you about living out your ethics and your values?”

Do we all who say, who call ourselves feminists, who are serious about liberation and gender liberation, all those kinds of things: Are we ready to meet the moment? That's where I've been and asking myself, because I think that's really important. 

What is this pandemic asking of us? What is this pandemic wanting us to learn? What is there to learn from? How can I translate that into my socio-political values? How can I translate that within my relationships? How do I make sure that I don't lose what I'm learning right now? And so that's, to me, just asking myself those really deep questions, which, you know, I get it. Some people are baking bread, some people are, you know, doing other kinds of things. And if we're going to talk about this time in apocalyptic terms, are we taking it seriously, though? What does apocalyptic times ask of a feminist? I think it asks a lot.

Adrienne: How would you like to see feminists meet this moment and rise up in this moment? What are some, some visions of that future that are coming to you right now?

Lutze: What I want to see is like, I want us to go past identitarianism and really get to the heart of the matter of what are our politics, what are our values as a determining factor of who our people are? What I see right now is just a lot of people just putting way too much stock in identities and not asking the real questions, but what do you practice?

I only know a mango tree is a mango tree if it bears fruit. I only know if an avocado tree’s the avocado tree if it gives me avocados. And I just think people are just so stuck on, “Oh, you're a feminist. I'm a feminist. Okay, great.” What I'm getting to, the question I'm asking people, “What animates your feminism? What kind of feminism do you practice?” If people can't answer that, I surmise, safely, like, “Oh, then you're probably practicing white feminism,” which is, you know, it's a thing. White women are not the only people who practice white feminism. And so to me, it's just like, “Oh, you don't have like a deep, serious analysis with this thing,” right? 

And so I want us to get to the point where we're, like, really coalition-building for real, for real, asking people, “What do you practice? What do you believe?” And so that we could be in principled struggle with each other, and we can, and even around abolition, asking, “Where are you and your practice of abolition? Where do you struggle?” So asking each other, “Where in your ideology do you struggle do you constantly have to go back to?” because, in this season, you think the question is settled in this other season is not settled. And what I want to see is just less trying to be cool and palatable to the mainstream,

Right, and let's just get to the business of raising consciousness. Let's just get to the business of doing what we need to do. Like it's not our job to convince anyone. It's just our job to show up and do the feminist thing. 

So I guess I'm just, what would I like to vision is just like, do we have the courage to practice what we want to practice? Are we living feminists live or are we clocking in on the internet and showing people that we're living feminist lives?” That is the kind of question that is the kind of things in re-imagining and just really asking ourselves, like, what are the conditions that we would all need to create inside of our lives to ensure that what happened to Brionna Taylor, to George Floyd, Tony McDade, all these black people we've lost. Ahmaud Arbery. What are the conditions that would need to be created so that Black people across the gender spectrum can have gender liberation and not be killed around on their Blackness? What are the things that would need to happen that will render us all safer within our expression of who we are, because the society that makes it okay to kill Black people without impunity is not a society in which anyone can feel free inside of their body. We have to be honest about that. I don't care how much sex positivity, I don't care how many times you're having sex a day, this, that, and a third. A society that can snuff out people that quickly, trust and believe you are not accessing the full level of pleasure and you are not experiencing the breadth and depth of home inside of your body that you could be, because that is a thing that that is possible outside of you. 

If we say none of us are free until all of us are free, like how deeply and acutely do we understand that knowledge and that truth? Because if people really understood, on a cellular level how real that is, like people would be like, “Okay, I get it. Throw the tables down, let me join the people who've been protesting for what? 119, 120 days. For real, for real, if I can, because this shit got to go.   

Adrienne: I would like to talk about accountability for a moment if we could. First of all, I feel like accountability is like one of the buzzwords of 2020, and I'm, I mean, I'm here for it, but I also want to interrogate it a little bit. Especially since we've seen recently a number of Black leaders in progressive spaces, excuse me, white leaders in progressive spaces step down after being held accountable for their white supremacy behavior. And I know that you do quite a bit of consulting work with HR departments and nonprofit organizations. And so, I'm curious to see in that, in the work that you do in those kinds of organizations, and sort of what you've observed with these high-profile, uh, dethronings, I guess you could say, based on this, you know, perpetuation of white supremacy culture, what are some of the patterns that you really want feminists to be aware of it, you know, particularly white feminists, that you're seeing in these workplaces, where folks are maybe using the word accountability, but not practicing it.

Lutze: So first and foremost, I want us all to disavow ourselves from this belief that accountability is a thing bad people need to take and do. Like, my feminism requires that I've constantly holding myself accountable and I'm asking the people who love me, who liked me, can work with me to hold me accountable.

So, accountability is something that anyone who is oriented towards change should just have a resiliency and flexibility around practicing. So that's number one. Number two, the patterns I'm seeing is that we as feminists have got to get clearer on talking about all the different ways. Power shows up in all the different ways. Power gets animated because there's this belief that when, as we watch people get dethroned, I think people struggle. And, and right now I'm talking about people who are quote unquote “on our side.” Because there's this inherent belief that people think that some people should be empowered and that asking them to give up that modicum of power is somehow removing all of their power. And it's just…it's almost as if we're feeding people to the lions, like is how I see things get escalated. And this is like, “No, you don't have to be the CEO of this place. You don't have to be the general manager. You don't have to be the top of, like you don’t have to. We're not saying you should never work again. We're saying you don't need this job because you have proven you can’t govern yourself effectively and because so many people report under you, so many different kinds of people report under you who no longer trust your leadership. Therefore you should move away.” But because people, even feminists, think power is finite. Power is this thing. And if this person gives up power in this aspect of their life, they somehow have now gone to zero power. This absurd to me. 

Accountability is something we… we don't make people take accountability. We don't make people accountable. If you call me in on something or you call me out on something, I then have a choice to be like, I could either submit and be like, “Okay, Adrienne, you're right. I'm actually going to take responsibility. How can I atone? How can I make this better?” No amount of calling people out or in quote unquote will make them do anything that they don't want to do.

And we've seen that. We've seen that. So I want us also to understand that, just because something might look like a good tool, doesn't mean it always gets us to the right end. Accountability is something the person, the individual, has to decide if they're going to take for themselves. Now, as an abolitionist, the thing I know and I understand: There is no incentive in this society to tell the truth. To humble yourself and say, “yeah, I messed up.” There actually is no incentive for that in this in this society, the way we deal and talk about power, because people go into the punishment mindset. So, I'm not big on punishment. However, I am big on consequence. And if, to step away from a job, if you have to be on a 90-day probation, if the person you harm wants to have a restorative justice circle with you, this that and a third, yeah, all of those things are good. All of those things are great. 

And so, the patterns I'm seeing is that, especially in social justice movement organization, people do not have a nuanced, capacious understanding of power. And there's institutional power, gender power, historical power. Just people are just not clear. I think people, those of us on the left, we’re really like: we could see white supremacy, we could see male supremacy. But the nuances—like this person can both have one foot in a privilege, one foot in oppression, and both of those things could be in conversation in one situation—people struggle with that.

I'll give you an example. I know lots of the women who are executive directors or high-level folks in nonprofits. These folks supervise people of different races and ethnicities of them. I don't know how many times a Black woman leader has come to me, frustrated, even crying, saying, “You know, this person I supervise is completely undermining me. Completely disrespected me, this, that, and a third.” Now, if I don't have a keen, fluent understanding of power, what am I going to respond to her? I'm going to be like. “Sis, you're tripping. You're the executive director, or you're the CFO. You're the, whatever. You have all the power in that situation,” forgetting actually that non-Black person of color has racial privilege, class-wise, they might have… and the reason why this person feels so comfortable, dismissing this black woman's leadership is because they are aware of the power they have, even from quote unquote “the bottom.” So, this assumption that only the people only in a situation where the person's on top has all the power that's absurd. That's not true. 

That's something I see a lot in the non-profit world because, Black women—it doesn't matter what position Black women have—if there's a way to disrespect and undermine that Black woman, you best believe people are going to find a way to disrespect and undermine that Black woman, whether that person be a Black man, any man, a non-Black woman of color, or white woman. Most Black-led organizations, especially if they are led by women and femmes, those people are constantly being tested and tried and disrespected in ways that their male counterparts or even their white women counterparts—no one would ever think to disrespect those people in that way. That is something that is really important for us to know and to understand.

Adrienne: The last thing I just wanted to ask you about: The posts that you made on Instagram that first really turned me on to your work and and drew me in to the Social Justice Doula world were specifically about intersectionality because that is a term that is very popular among feminists right now. You've encouraged people to develop a deeper relationship with the word intersectionality. And I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about how that came to feel urgent for you and what your goals are in talking about that. Cause I know, you know, I've taken your class about it. It was great. I encourage everyone to take it ‘cause I know you offer it periodically and I think it's called De-gentrifying Intersectionality, is that right? 

Lutze: Un-gentrifying Intersectionality. 

Adrienne: Yeah, so, what does that mean? How do you un-gentrify intersectionality? 

Lutze: I want to say it was maybe a year and a half or two, I was in grad school and—I consume a lot of social media—and I was just scrolling through and I just realized, I was just like, “How come I'm like, well, I feel like I'm pretty well-versed in feminism, pretty well-read on feminism. How come I'm no longer, I can no longer decipher intersectionality?” Cause at one point I had to stop and I had to go look it up again cause I was just like, “Wait, did the definition change and I not know about it?” Because I was just noticing, I'd be on Facebook, I'd be on Twitter, I'd be on Instagram and it's just like, people were using this word and also it was looking less and less recognizable to me. 

And I'm a black feminist, right? I've read what I read, what the people have had to say. At first I was scared, like, hold on, hold up, “Did a shift happen? Have I been too buried in my books and something happened?” And then that's when I realized, Oh, so what's happening is because people are so uncomfortable with centering Blackness and because people are so uncomfortable and, you know, there's a serious disdain for Black women, which means there's a serious disdain for our ideas. There's a way in which that people think to make intersectionality global—which I think it can, and it should be—somehow we have to disavow it from it's from Blackness and from Black women. 

And so when I say ungentrified intersectionality, I mean if 10 people use the word, then we all need to be able to understand each other. What I saw is that, when we're arguing the ideas of white men, male philosophers, dead and alive, people are really clear about no, no, no, no: Cite this person. This is what they meant. Don't speak for this person, this, that, and a third. The majority, a lot of the Black women who have done wonders with this work are still alive, and they're being erased. That word is being rewritten and erase in real time. And so that to me, as I was getting into academia, I was like, “This is not okay.” It felt harmful. Like it made me physically uncomfortable, and I'm not Kimberlé Crenshaw. I'm not Patricia Hill Collins. I'm not any of these people, but I was mad on their behalf. And also, I was just like—because I always go back to my organizer roots, I always go back to my practicality, feminist roots—I'm just like, this is actually going to harm us if we continue to do this. 

So we know that intersectionality is a framework; it's an analytic, it's not an identity. And that's my bane of existence right now, how we're trying to turn everything right now into an identity. There's no such thing as an intersectional feminist. Anyone who says that is wrong; like you're not using the word correctly. Like, like I know it's harsh to say like. It’s literally factually, if you look up the word you read, you read what the authors have had to say, there's no such thing. It's an analytic. It's a framework. A way of reading and understanding power.

Intersectionality asks us to think about “how do social categories create new sufferings and new oppressions.” So essentially, so what does that mean? That means if we look at race, gender class, your citizenship status, your ability status, all of those things, what would put them all together? Are they creating new areas, new systems of oppression for you? That is what intersectionality is now. 

It kind of dovetails perfectly to the thing around power, because if you master intersectionality in a very particular kind of way, you get really good at reading power—the nuances of power—because you start to understand like, race is always attached to a class, always attached to a gender, always attached to this, always attached to that. And so you're constantly looking for, “Okay, are we creating new things? Systems of oppression? Or are these things being ameliorated?” So that is what I mean by ungentrifying intersectionality. We do not….

How do we take seriously, the intellectual ideas of Black women and understand that it is a suffering. It is chattel slavery. It is the subjugation. It is the rape of Black women that gave that. That was the impetus in the jumping off point for intersectionality. So, to misuse that word is to engage in a very specific kind of colonial violence of further disrespecting the Black woman and her intellectual prowess in saying that “it doesn't matter what you think it is, Black woman, Black lady. I'm just going to put my own shit on it. And that's what it's going to be.” So, intersectionality is a framework that all feminists can use, but let us never forget that it is Black feminism that gave us this idea.

And so that is what I mean by we need to ungentrify, we need to take seriously that, for almost 180 years, you look at the history of Black feminist thought, that word, that there's always been a word to animate that and to talk about that. And so that is why it's really important to me. 

And I understand why a quote unquote “fourth wave feminist” might want to call themselves an intersectional feminist. So, I just want to be, this might be, I think this is the first place I'm saying this in this way: I personally, Lutze B. Segu, the Social Justice Doula, do not believe in waves of feminism. Right? I don't believe in that, because waves of feminism thinking about feminism in waves is to posit North American feminism, is to posit the United States, in a very specific way. And it also makes us seem like we are the only people who are the gatekeepers. We are the arbiters. We are the architects of engineers of feminism, and we are not. Wherever there have been people on this planet, people have been struggling for gender liberation.  

Adrienne: As I often do I ask Lutze if there was anything she wanted to add that we didn't get a chance to cover in our conversation. What she said really captures and communicates an idea that I sincerely hope this podcast supports in your life as a listener, at least on some level.

Lutze: Wherever you are in your practice of feminism, I want everyone who's hearing this. Whenever you're, whenever you're here, ask yourself: Can you go deeper? That's it. Can you go deeper? And if for whatever reason you can't, then ask yourself, “What are the conditions I need to create in my life to go deeper in my thinking and in my practice of feminism?”

Cause feminism, I just can't say it enough: It's a practice. What are we practicing? What are we showing up? Is our feminism showing up in our love life, in our parenting, in our auntie-ing? In being a neighbor? If I sit on a board, if I am a leader, if I'm a consultant? Wherever you have power, does your feminism really animate how you interact with your power and shape your power?

 So we're ending where we began: with questions, about how we want our feminism to show up and what we want it to do. I had a really hard time editing this episode because Lutze has a lot of things to say that I believe literally everyone needs to hear, but these last few sentences really bring it home. And I hope that for everyone listening, that you find a way to carry them with you and access them when you need them in any and all areas of your feminist life. 

I want to thank Lutze, not only for taking the time to speak with me, but for the tremendous influence she has had on my thinking and for introducing me to some really exciting authors I had not previously read, I will link a few of them in the show notes.

You can follow Lutze on Instagram. She's at the @socialjusticedoula, and I also highly encourage you to subscribe to her newsletter, which comes out every month and includes not only her original writing, but links to fabulous feminist resources. You will not want to miss it.

If you're listening before new year's day, 2021, I'm running a giveaway on Instagram right now. So, go check it out if you want to win a Feminist Hotdog t-shirt and, more importantly, I'm also doing a $100 donation to the mutual aid or bail fund of the winner's choice. So don't miss out on that. Tag a couple of friends and share the post to get entered. 

And finally Happy New Year to all of you, and thank you so much for being with me throughout this wild ride of 2020. I feel incredibly fortunate to be in community with such generous supportive listeners. So please know that I do not take your time for granted and I look forward to continuing to find joy through feminism with you in 2021.

Our theme music is by Ava Luna and Loyalty Freak Music. Until next time, friends, and as always love yourself and love your buns. Goodbye.