The show where business meets love, and culture meets critique. We’re Aiwan and Tamanda, two Black women with 20 years each in entertainment, research, and social justice. We’re also a married couple figuring out what it means to build a life and two businesses together.
We'll talk about the realities of running a business, making creative work that matters, and navigating research with integrity.
What You’ll Find:
If you’re navigating business, love, and the messiness of life while trying to do meaningful work, you’re in the right place.
Episodes drop every Tuesday!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The show where business meets love, and culture meets critique. We’re Aiwan and Tamanda, two Black women with 20 years each in entertainment, research, and social justice. We’re also a married couple figuring out what it means to build a life and two businesses together.
We'll talk about the realities of running a business, making creative work that matters, and navigating research with integrity.
What You’ll Find:
If you’re navigating business, love, and the messiness of life while trying to do meaningful work, you’re in the right place.
Episodes drop every Tuesday!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We return to a conversation that never really settled.
After the unexpected response to Season 2’s “Episode 19: Are Mixed Race People ‘Properly Black’?”, we sit with what lingered; the comments, the discomfort, the language policing, and the familiar demand that mixed race people either ‘pick a side’ or ‘play the bridge’.
This isn’t a debate about identity labels. It’s a reflection on what mixedness is asked to do in a world structured by racial hierarchy.
We begin with language: the push to abandon the word “race,” the claim that naming it only entrenches division, and the exhaustion - especially among Black and mixed communities - of being told that silence equals progress. We ask what gets lost when language is policed, and why refusing to name race never seems to dismantle racism.
From there, we move into the deeper fault lines. The recurring pressure to “pick a side.” The temptation to claim a separate category. And the seductive pressure and idea that mixed race people are uniquely positioned to mediate, reconcile, or soften conflict - to ‘be the bridge’ in a divided world.
Drawing on personal experience, online responses, and psychological frameworks, we unpack the emotional labour hidden inside that phrase. The shapeshifting. The code-switching. The quiet expectation to absorb tension so others don’t have to sit with it themselves, and the discomfort of racial anxiety.
Along the way, we name a distinction that matters: being asked to pick a side is not the same as being asked to pick a politics. Identity does not determine values - but values do determine what we refuse to excuse, paper over, or explain away.
This episode is about exhaustion, refusal, and integrity. About belonging everywhere - and what it costs. And about the possibility that wholeness does not require neutrality, mediation, or silence.
In this episode:
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🔁 Share with someone navigating mixedness, mediation, or the cost of belonging
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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.