In partnership with
New in the Academy for Changemakers
Stop Pitching and Let Clients Find You:
10 Proven Marketing Strategies for Freelancers
Hello {{ first name | friends}},
This month's reboot is another from the podcast archives. As usual, I've added a couple of updates and new links. Check it out:
Today I want to talk about the idea of exceptionalism.
When I was living in France, my roommate at the time, who was a white girl from the Midwest, said, "You're not like the other Black people I know back home."
It took me quite a while to unpack what she meant. I was young, and had not had very much experience at the time of this particular type of microaggression. But I later came to understand that what she meant was that I spoke articulately in multiple languages, I was well educated, well read, and had more than a passing knowledge of global current affairs.
She'd been trained by the stereotypes she'd seen and bought into back in the US to expect the opposite of Black people. And as a result, she didn't know quite where to place me. That really bothered her and, in fact, led to her saying, on another occasion, "I think of you as white."
I'm not even going to unpack what was behind that. But suffice it to say that it took me quite a long time to come to terms with it in my own head. [2026 update: It's taken me decades to unpack it, and I wrote about this incident in more detail recently.]