What are the ways in which we can decolonize ourselves through deep inner narrative work? How does this intersect with consciousness and spiritual practices? Activist, artist, and slam poet Ashanti Kunene shares four unlearning principles that support us in coming into alignment with ourselves.
This powerful conversation explores the relationship between decolonization and consciousness. Ashanti is a systems change agent focused on helping organizations deconstruct dominant narratives of colonization and replace them with life affirming narratives that support a regenerative future. She believes that true transformation must begin within, guiding leaders to embrace spiritual coherence and walk their talk.
Jenny and Ashanti discuss:
Resources
[INTRO]
Ashanti Kunene: [00:00:00] Even when you're talking about race or white supremacy, we're not actually talking about skin color, where it's a question of power. The color line is a power equation. We're talking about who has power and who does not have power. Yeah, and what does power mean for you and afford for you? This is why part of the work of regenerative systems change is rethinking our relationship and our understanding of leadership, of power.
Right now, we understand leaders as people that have power over The community when an actual effect to be a leader is to serve the community. The posture, the practice is very different.
Jenny Stefanotti: That's Ashanti Kunene. She's the founder of Learning to Unlearn, where she works with clients, to deconstruct the dominant narratives that we have come to accept as truth and put in their place. Life affirming narratives. that support regenerative futures. This is the Denizen Podcast. I'm your host and curator, Jenny Stefanotti.
In this episode, we're discussing decolonization and consciousness. [00:01:00] Ashanti and I explore how we can unlearn colonial mindsets and address white supremacy by cultivating coherence between our beliefs, thoughts, and actions. We discuss her four unlearning principles, Ubuntu, the Zulu principle of interconnection, love as praxis, open, honest communication, and spiritual accountability.
As always, you can find show notes in the transcript for this episode on our website, becomingdenizen. com, as well as our newly launched sub stack on our website. You can sign up for our newsletter. I bring our latest content to your inbox alongside information about virtual denizen events, including community discussions with our podcast guests.
So if you'd like to join us and meet Ashanti, sign up for our newsletter or contact me directly from the website. Again, that's becomingdenizen. com.
All right. Ashanti is also a slam poet and contemporary artist who chooses her powerful words with great care. I'm excited to bring this rich conversation to you.
[INTERVIEW]
I usually don't start my conversations this way, but in your case, I would really love to [00:02:00] hear. A little bit about your story. Tell us about you and what brought you to the work that you're doing today.
Ashanti Kunene: Oh, I want to be spicy and ask you, do you want the healed version of the unhealed version of the story?
Jenny Stefanotti: I want the real version.
Ashanti Kunene: The real version. The real version is that I am the reincarnation of the divine feminine principle in the universe. I'm here to come and show everybody that there are consequences to your choices. Everything in life is a choice. We chose to come here, you chose to be who you are, live what you're living, experience what you're experiencing.
It was a choice you made before you came to ETH. And so the mandate is to remind you that you came here. Already blessed with all that your heart desires, the blessings that you desire was the payment or the deal for you having the [00:03:00] courage as a spirit to come to earth because living and being a human is not for the faint of heart.
It is not easy. It is full of all, excuse my French, all the fuckery in the world. And the beauty of being alive is that you get to curate this experience, however you want, you have the power to have a life, however you think it must be. So if you think yourself sad, it is going to be a sad life. If you think yourself delusional and happy like me, it'll be a delusional and happy life.
So that's the real vision. You are getting a download from the goddess today. So hi.
Jenny Stefanotti: I'm so glad that I asked that question.
Um, you know, if I have to describe denizen, the main thing that denizen is about, it's about a provocation [00:04:00] to do the work and to see what the work is. And you already said it, you mentioned something about, like, I am here to make you aware.
And you have also said, we are all complicit in one way or another of upholding a society where evil and bad behavior is accepted.
Ashanti Kunene: Uh huh. And rewarded. We are rewarded and incentivized to do the wrong thing, to do the bad thing, to do the unloving thing, unfortunately. How we got here, you know, is anyone's Take at it, but doing the right thing or even defining what
Jenny Stefanotti: the right thing is,
Ashanti Kunene: it's not easy, it's not easy.
Your spirit, the life force that lives within you, your conscious knows what the right thing is to do. Because whenever you're doing the wrong thing, it feels icky, it feels sticky, it doesn't feel nice. You struggle to sleep. You can't do the wrong thing without feeling sticky. You've not listened to your conscious or that still small voice in a very [00:05:00] long time and she stops speaking to you, but everybody knows you can't describe it.
You feel that you've crossed the boundary that you're going to cross, you know, whether you want to acknowledge what that means is a different conversation, but we all kind of know what's the right. thing to do. Your spirit. You're
Jenny Stefanotti: so right. I really appreciate that. It's a question we've been pondering with Barrett Holmes Pitner, who is a guest a couple of episodes, but that nails it.
She said, I've come to understand that for a true transformation to take place within organizations or society, the people themselves need to unlearn colonial modalities of being in the world. It's the inner work.
Ashanti Kunene: It's the inner work, it's the inner story, it's the who you think you are. Who do you think you are? Who are you? And what gives you the authority to be who you are? And why must you do any of the things that you're doing? Who are you? What is your heart posture? [00:06:00] Where do you begin? Right? So thinking about colonial modalities of being at a very generic base level, the identity of blackness is such that you are a victim.
Am I? Found out that as a black woman, I am triply oppressed my race, my class, my gender. Yeah. So three layers of oppression as a white person, your modality of being is that of superiority, supremacy, always being the center, being the default normal, right? These are modalities of being that shape our consciousness in ways that are not necessarily in alignment and in truth with who you are and you can be told who you are, but only you can find out.
And so if I say to you that you are. A cosmic orgasm living, you are the manifestation of everything divine in existence. You are literally source divine love. I can say that, can hear it. You may not believe it, but I know this to be who I am. And so the identification of [00:07:00] blackness as victim is not an identity I wear.
That is a colonial modality of being, again, like I said, if you wake up. In the day and immediately put on this cloak of blackness or victimhood of, Oh, everything is set against me. Then yes, that becomes true because thoughts are power and words are magic. There's a reason why we call it spelling. You're literally casting spells, abracadabra.
That's what you're doing. And so when I say like the work becomes, it's an inner work, the provocation is what is your heart posture? What is your starting point in life? For any of the thing that you're doing for the work that you're doing, what is your starting point? And particularly for leaders, people who are in positions of power and leadership at this time, my provocation for you is, did you choose power or did power choose you?
Because if you put up your hand to say, I want to be in charge, I want to be powerful, I want to lead [00:08:00] others. In the context of the poly crisis, why you need to go get yourself checked out. Why would you want to be responsible for other people other than yourself and your family at this time? Why would you want to do that?
That's a crazy thing, man. That's a crazy thing. There's so much chaos and hate and evil in the world. That's a crazy, crazy thing. So, leaders have a
Jenny Stefanotti: That's a really potent provocation.
Ashanti Kunene: I mean, but it's the truth.
Jenny Stefanotti: Did you choose it or did it choose you?
Ashanti Kunene: Cause power, mmm, power is a very interesting something.
Even when you're talking about race or white supremacy, we're not actually talking about skin color, where it's a question of power, the color line is a power equation, we're talking about who has power and who does not have power. And what does power mean for you and afford for you. This is why. Part of the work of regenerative systems change is [00:09:00] rethinking our relationship and our understanding of leadership, of power.
Right now, we understand leaders as people that have power over the community. When in actual fact, to be a leader is to serve the community, understand the posture, the practice is very different. If you understand yourself as a servant to the community, you understand the gravitas of the responsibility of leadership, and you won't take that thing.
But if leadership is power, which equals money, you're in that space for not the community, but for your own story that you need to figure out. You need to figure that thing out. Ask yourself, why are you reaching for power and money? What is it? What is it that you're trying to do?
Jenny Stefanotti: Case in point, Elon Musk right now, right?
Oh, this is so rich already. I love it. What's very interesting too about power. You talked about the sort [00:10:00] of internalization of inferiority and the victim mindset, which is abdicating power that you have by having a victim orientation. And we talked about this in the last conversation with Diana Chapman.
That's why I wanted to release it before this one with you. She talks about these different levels of consciousness. She talks about four, but one of them, the most common orientation is to me, the world is happening to me. It's a victim orientation and moving from to me to buy me, which is I am an agent and I take responsibility.
And then it moves to through me. I'm connecting to source. And then as me, I'm one oneness. And so when you talk about power, When you have this victim orientation, you're not stepping into the spaces where you do have agency and you are empowered. And so it's an abdication of power, that orientation. And that's what's so interesting is the empowering nature of saying, I'm actually responsible here.
What can I do differently? [00:11:00]
Ashanti Kunene: But you see, that's the interesting thing about victimhood, especially when you've been a victim for so long, if you can stay with the racial context, that's why you have the white savior complex, right? Because, oh, they can't do anything for themselves because they've abdicated the agency, which then perpetuates the justification for saviorship or philanthropy, what do you want to call it?
But part of the difficulty of letting go of. Victim hood is the responsibility because now I have to be responsible for myself. It is much easier to have someone to blame for how my life is going than to say, okay, my life is this way because I made decisions. I made choices and I'm living through the consequences of the choices that I took, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether I was aware or not, whether you want to agree or not, there were certain choices.
that I made that have led me to where I am right now. Full stop point period. [00:12:00] This is the difficulty about victimhood and yeah, it allows the perpetrator or the master or the, you know, whoever is the. person oppressing to be fully wholly responsible for everything. And so it also allows them to then not take their own responsibility for their oppression because no, but look at these victims, they can't do anything for themselves.
We have to, we have to, you know, self fulfilling prophecy. It's why internal work is so hard to do. It's why those hearts and minds and. Retelling of stories and reframing of internal stories is the one thing people would rather not get themselves involved in because it means that you have to make me acknowledge my skeletons and in me acknowledging my skeletons, I have to tell you all the dreams I killed.
To fit into the system and in telling you all the dreams I killed, I have to retell the story of the MEDA, the parts of me that [00:13:00] died in order for me to assimilate and survive and be whatever it is. The system has said you need to be by way of socialization, you know, and that's hard. It's not nice. It's not a nice process.
And for white people, at least here in South Africa. Thinking about, you know, see what's happening in the news. America is threatening to remove us. And apparently there's a white genocide. We're stealing all the land from the white people here, but the power of story and identity, what it does and how it moves is powerful.
And part of the problem of. Also not properly dealing with your own trauma is that you re traumatize further generations down the road, right? To the point where now the cognitive dissonance is not just within one person in one lifetime. It is now multiple generations across centuries. You've even forgotten how you've come to be where you've come to be because the origin story is so painful.
Yeah. And so part of this work is [00:14:00] remembering the things that you've spent centuries trying to forget and put distance. Yeah,
Jenny Stefanotti: I mean, the crux of, of your work, or at least a subset of your work that we're talking about in this conversation is that we have internalized these stories and we take them as truth.
And you spoke to earlier, like, you know what good is when you connect to spirit, but we've disconnected from spirit and connected to the story, right? And so your work is really about deconstructing the story. and understanding what stories even are, and then connecting to source.
Ashanti Kunene: 100%. The ultimate aim is to try and get you to reconnect to source, because that's the thing, to use a very capitalist example, it's like flying first class for the first time, after having been traveling economy, and then being expected to be comfortable with economy class, after having experienced what's happening up there.
First class. This is how I understand [00:15:00] knowing source and knowing spirit and touching purpose and just having a taste. It is indescribably blissful in the midst of all this violent, evil, hateful chaos to have that kind of. Feeling. I don't even know how to des what the word is, but what happens when you reconnect a source?
You're walking. You are sashaying through the valley of death with no fear. You're not running away from the devil. You are flicking demons away like flies. Life is nice. Life is peaceful. Life is graceful at your own pace. That's what happens when you figure out purpose and reconnect to soul.
Jenny Stefanotti: Well, that's an enticing proposition as we're witnessing the world ostensibly fall apart before our eyes right now.
Ashanti Kunene: Yeah. That's the crux of the work. How do you remain peaceful in the context of chaos? You know, how do you find contentment and peace within self? In the midst of all of this, because we started the [00:16:00] provocation as spirits. We will come here at this time. We chose to come and be alive at this time. We were the ones that were like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Send me, send me. This looks exciting. This looks exciting. I want to go there. There's so much change happening. Let's go explore. We made the choice to come here, you know, and so you didn't come here without the tools to do whatever it is you came here to do. That's not allowed. You can't come here unequipped.
You already have everything you need to live here and flourish here and find coherence, whatever that magic is, you know, and so it's also sitting with self. It's part of why I think. psychedelics, this turn that you're seeing a lot of people go do ayahuasca trips and blah, blah, blah. And you know, a booger or whatever is like this lack of spiritual connection, right?
You've disconnected from source. Now you're trying to find Ways back to source and [00:17:00] oftentimes you're using indigenous plans as a way of escape, right? You've convinced yourself you're on the healing journey, but you're actually escaping, waking states of consciousness. What is it about waking states that you want to go to an altered state?
What's the problem with your current states of consciousness that you're looking for? You want to go and experience altered states. Why? What's happening? It's one thing to go on a diet with the elders, et cetera, but it's another thing if this is now used as a way to find rest for the internal restlessness, cause you're not dealing with whatever's coming up for yourself.
Jenny Stefanotti: Escaping numbing out and bypassing and not actually sitting in the discomfort that you have to walk through to get to source. I love this quote of yours. I want to talk about your unlearning principles is a lot of richness in them. There's four of them. So we're gonna [00:18:00] talk about all four of them, but I love this quote of yours because we have to walk the talk.
Or simply stop talking.
Ashanti Kunene: Listen, because you talking when you're out of coherence is causing more harm. So shut up and sit down. Allow other people to do the work. Stop talking. Like this one is mine. This is a pet peeve of mine. You know, it's like not everybody is called to do this work. Not everybody can do this work and it's actually okay.
So rather than talk and posture and pretend to be something that you're not just find Whatever it is that you are, make space for the people that can actually walk the things that they're talking properly. Because the gap between what we're saying should be done and what is actually being done is causing more ruptures.
We're not preparing the youth, the young people psychologically for the world. We're telling them that it's okay to say ABC and walk XYZ. That's what we're saying. And that [00:19:00] thing for me is a problem. There's too much happening. There's too many crises happening for us to allow such poor, poor, poor leadership.
Oh, uh uh. Mm mm. Just sit down. It's okay. Okay. Nobody's going to judge you.
Jenny Stefanotti: Well, we do judge, and that's part of the problem.
Ashanti Kunene: Yeah, but we respect an asshole that knows that they're an asshole. Yeah.
Jenny Stefanotti: Okay, well, let's, I'm not gonna go in order. I'm gonna go out of order in the four learning principles, because I think this is, your comments are making me think of it, because this is really critical.
Love as praxis.
Ashanti Kunene: Yeah,
Jenny Stefanotti: I just read in preparation for this conversation, white supremacy culture. So the original publication was in 1999. There was a update in 2021 and a really big piece of that update is I'll read from it. I and colleagues have come to see other central elements of white supremacy culture that need to be [00:20:00] named fear.
is an essential characteristic. And so love as practice is addressing that. It's this conversion from fear to love.
Ashanti Kunene: It's a conversion from fear to love. And that's the other, you know, amazing thing that white supremacy has done so well is instill fear, irrational fears, rational fears into people. And.
Because the fear was cultivated out of nothing, out of non-truth. It shaped behaviors that then over time justified the fear . Mm-hmm. So an example would be here in South Africa, they was saying the kfar, the black danger. You need to fear the black danger because if it was us, we would kill you if you free us.
Like, how can you just forgive us? Cause in [00:21:00] 1994, when you talk about our truth and reconciliation commission, when you talk about how South Africa as a nation, we decided to prioritize the Zulu concept of Ubuntu, Ubuntu being a relational ontology that says my humanity is intimately tied to me recognizing the humanity in you, right?
And that can be applicable to all living things. It means that my life, me being alive. It means I have the capacity to recognize life and others and wherever I see life, I find myself because life energy is the same everywhere. That thing that woke you up this morning woke me up this morning. It's the same.
Yeah. So wherever you find that thing. You see yourself, that's humans, animals, plants, whatever. Celebrated as a human rights example to follow, but there was no asking for forgiveness. We gave forgiveness before it was asked for. And so, you fast forward a couple of decades later, our race relations are still [00:22:00] just as tense.
Just as tense because we didn't have actual honest conversations, but we chose to show love in the face of the fear, right? Because if we moved through fear, the response would have been rightly so to kick out all the white people from the country or go into a civil war or whatever the, how do you justify and respond to hundreds of years of intentional dehumanization?
That's the other thing that people don't actually quite clog. This didn't just happen. Like white supremacy as an idea, as a system, like all of these systems of extraction, whether it be gender based violence, whatever it looks like, this was in, by design. People sat down and thought about how we're going to structure our economics, how we're going to structure our social structures.
This didn't just occur. Out of nothing. It was an intentional project. And so part of the unlearning and the reworking [00:23:00] and the trying to combat moving with fear, which has now become our default, to moving with love, is we have to be just as intentional. We have to be just as intentional. So that provocation I gave earlier, that when you wake up in the morning, what is your hot posture?
Uh, things on social media. It's like, I woke up today and chose violence. Meaning I'm going to go be a villain out in the world. That's you moving and cultivating fear. Whether intentionally or not, but the point is to say that life is a series of choices. Your day to day is a series of choices and moving from fear based to love based.
Praxis is a choice. Love is a choice, not a feeling. You have to choose to love me. Every day. Even when you don't know how to love me, you have to love me. You have to choose. You know?
Jenny Stefanotti: You say love is a revolutionary act in a world driven by fear and scarcity. It's a daily practice of expanding one's spirit to take in the other as part of the self.
Then you also say, and this is something we were talking [00:24:00] about before we started recording, this requires us to love each other through our ugly.
Mm
Ashanti Kunene: hmm. Because what else can you do? What else must we do? If not love each other through our ugly. All of us, we've all fucked up. All of us, we're all complicit.
Everything that we're trying to change, like the bad guys, the good guys, we are all. I'm a bad guy in somebody's story. I'm a good guy in another person's story. We're all complicit. So we have to love each other through our ugly. And what that means is show each other grace. Right? Show each other grace, show each other, I want to say, part of a righteous walk is to allow yourself and those around you to experience the full cycle of their karma.
Right? Me loving you is me allowing you to experience the full cycle of your karma. What that means is that if you are making choices in your Life and I'm your friend [00:25:00] and I think you're going,
you're coming out the way. I can't judge you. I can't correct you, I can't 'cause I'm not walking your path, but I can bear witness and be there for you. Right. For also when you're coming to the return. And so part of the work is exactly that, like loving. Myself enough to learn the lesson, because if I don't learn the lesson, the same experience is going to keep happening in my life.
That's a law of the universe. If you don't learn the lesson, you're going to keep going through the same experience. And if I love you, I will not out of softness and love for you, stop you from learning your lesson because of the choices that you've made because otherwise I'm not helping you. If I interrupt you getting your lesson, right,
Jenny Stefanotti: that's an important point
Ashanti Kunene: we enable, which a lot of us do, we want to protect, we rescue protection.
We incapacitate like stories [00:26:00] about mothers that are overly protective that they don't give their children the skills to actually be out in the world. So, yeah, man, loving each other through our ugly is. that I'm not going to throw you away, but I'm going to bear witness to your journey of you coming full circle.
You know, there are choices that you made in life that meant X kind of consequences. And it's not for me to take away those consequences for you. It'll be unrighteous and out of alignment for me to remove you learning your lesson.
Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. Well, that's so interesting. The message is that. Sometimes the way to love rightly to your point is to allow you not protect one from the consequences of their actions, not inhibit the learning that needs to happen.
And so that doesn't necessarily look like the love that we're taught love. Should look like culturally if we're talking about the narratives versus this kind of more nuanced more true way of loving it speaks to our kind of [00:27:00] discomfort with Uncomfortable or painful feelings that we try to protect from them when that's not actually what?
Loving rightly would look like and I think that's interesting how this also gets into really interesting tension between loving others and loving ourselves And again, you know, if we just look at love as this microcosm for this broader conversation that we're having around what have we internalized versus what is source.
I thought a lot about bell hooks, all about love. When I was reading about this piece of your work, she talks about love as a willingness to extend oneself for another spiritual growth. So here we go. Spiritual growth. You need to experience the consequence of your actions to grow. One thing that was really potent in her work, well, once she talks about love is the same, whether it's a kid or a partner or a friend or a colleague, it's the same thing.
It might take different forms at different levels, but a love ethic is the same. It's care, respect, and nurturing, etc, etc. But she talks about how we have [00:28:00] internalized these narratives of love that involves self sacrifice, which is not loving rightly because we're disconnected from ourselves, our source that says, like, actually, this is a boundary for me.
Right. And that loving ourselves will inform where are those boundaries? Yeah. Where I actually let, I need to let you flail.
Ashanti Kunene: Yeah, we have to let you fail. But that's also like the brilliance of patriarchy, right? Because we are the ones that do that self sacrificing emotionally, mentally. And one of the things I've also come to learn, and I fully agree with both of us is that loving you.
Would not mean diminishing myself. If I have to diminish myself in the name of love, that's not love. If I have to take away any part of me, hide any part of me, be ashamed of anything that has made me who I am in the name of love, that's not a love. And so the difficulty about trying to introduce a love ethic in our world is that it's a dog eat dog [00:29:00] world.
Me winning means you losing. It has to be winners and losers. It's a zero sum game. There's no nuance anymore. There's no in between area. You're either with us or you're against us, right? It's so black and white, but there are so many infinite shades of gray. And the love, exactly about the right love, looking the same.
Love, as Bell Hooks says, requires, amongst other things, respect, trust, honesty, consideration. There are certain elements that have to be present for you to call it love, right? And that would be applicable across Not just romantic partners, but what would that look like in terms of work, systems change work, or thinking about trying to build regenerative futures?
Part of that would mean intentionally thinking about who's doing the thinking about the systems, because we're breaking now under a system that only took [00:30:00] into consideration the white man's worldview, a European white male world, everybody else was excluded from the creation of society. Hence why we are not dealing with the problems that they were dealing with now because you wanted to pretend that there aren't other people in this human family, right?
So the work is to get the human family, all of us to contribute and think together, what kind of world can we all together live in? And one of the examples I like to give in my, I'm learning white supremacy. workshop. It's like in the hierarchy of humanity, the black woman sits at the bottom, the black African woman sits right at the bottom, the hierarchy of who gets to be human.
So me as a black woman thinking about the world, I have to look up and see all of you. So when I design a system or a what have you, I have to take all of you into consideration because you're in my immediate world view. You understand? Whereas the white man at the top of the pyramid. [00:31:00] Doesn't see anyone below him.
He sees the expense, the next frontier, the next new market to conquer. And as you should, cause you're sitting at the top, you're not seeing us. You're not interested. And so what kind of system. With someone sitting at the pinnacle of that pyramid build, it'll inevitably be different to the kind of system that you'd build if you're looking at it from the bottom up, right?
And the bottom up is just as a way to say that this is a, we are all collectively responsible. And if we offload our agency and our power to the powers that be, because, oh, this is not My portion, it's not my cup of tea. I'm not a political person. I don't want to choose side. I don't want to get involved.
You're tacitly approving the current system, right? You're inaction and your non involvement is saying as it is, I'm okay.
Jenny Stefanotti: You
Ashanti Kunene: know?
Jenny Stefanotti: Well, also your, the inaction, non involvement, this [00:32:00] is the crux of the message when I think about denizen. It's not just your non involvement, it's also your oblivious perpetuation of it by virtue of your behaviors.
Or even just
Ashanti Kunene: your own
network.
Jenny Stefanotti: Right. By virtue of the fact that there's only a bunch of white men at your table. You
Ashanti Kunene: want to say, oh, I'm an ally, I'm open, I'm this. Your friendship group, who do you hang out with? What do they look like? Is it representative of this global citizenship? Citizen who you think you are,
Jenny Stefanotti: you
Ashanti Kunene: know, so these are very small, reflective things that one can do, but it's also, it's not easy work.
You know, love is hard, love is kind, love is patient. Love is all the things we are taught not to be in this world. And so the capacity to love in the context of chaos is also a fundamentally revolutionary act. The capacity to find rest and joy and barely laugh while there are genocides happening around the world is a profoundly revolutionary something.
Jenny Stefanotti: You also talk about, [00:33:00] you just want to put this kind of into the context of what it looks like in terms of leadership. You spoke to leadership a little bit, but I love the richness of which we're digging into the love as a practice. But you say when leaders operate from a foundation of love, they're able to transcend the limitations of transactional relationships and build organizations that are truly inclusive and equitable.
This kind of leadership is revolutionary because it disrupts the dominant narrative that power must be exercised through control and fear. It affirms that power can and should be exercised through care, trust, and mutual respect. Just to tie those earlier comments, right, around power, I was in a conversation yesterday about steward leadership, this notion of stewardship and care, and something that's really, that I think about a lot in the context of dentists and in the community that I build and the way that I work is moving from transactional to relational.
Ashanti Kunene: Because that's the thing, that's your heart posture, right? You came at me with your heart posture in the correct place. And this is one of the things that I, you know, I often say that white [00:34:00] supremacy exists at these mundane, in between spaces. It's exactly that, how we began. Your heart posture being where it was and Being able to engage, you being a privileged white woman for the States has no bearing on that because you're a spirit, I'm a spirit, we're connected.
And if you're starting there, everything else will work itself out, I promise you. If that's where you start with people. We have a running joke here in South Africa that says, the white people that can speak an African language after having been here for 500 years, you can keep your land. Those that have learned the language and I've made intentional connections, y'all can stay, you can keep your land because you're now part of us.
It's these other ones that have just been here, not wanting to integrate, but wanting to have power over whose land must be taken. I said that in jazz, obviously, but it's like the question of connection. People are simple. We're all the same. People are people are people. And we [00:35:00] are designed to be interdependent.
Like our matter, even the atoms were connected energetically. I can't separate myself from you. You know, that's that quantum entanglement stuff, especially if you're taking Ubuntu as a worldview. Wherever you see life, you find yourself. Um, that. As a starting point changes how you move through the world, particularly when it comes to power and leadership, you know,
Jenny Stefanotti: yeah, love is praxis is one of the four and learning principles, obviously very, very rich one, because we've been talking about it for a while.
And then Ubuntu is another which you've spoken to. Already, which is really the fundamental principle of interconnectedness is a starting point. And that is the first one that you articulate. Typically, I just wanted to go into love because it bridged, um, so organically from the comments that you were making.
Let's talk about open and honest communication. That's another one of the [00:36:00] principles.
Ashanti Kunene: Yeah, that actually is one of the first principles I ever developed at the risk of oversharing, prepare yourself, trigger warning listeners. My father died of suicide. I was 14 and his death showed me the importance of having open house conversations with people that you say you care about, especially when it's hard, because how dare I say I love you, but you can't talk to me.
Huh? How dare I say that I care for you, but there's no space for you to actually come and share what's going on with you. That's not love. And at a fundamental level, I feel like if my dad had someone to talk to, honestly, he'd still be around, you know? So yeah, like he is a big reason why I do the kind of work that I do around like dialogue facilitation and getting into the uncomfortable stuff, because I know.
What the end [00:37:00] result is when you don't talk about it and you just pack it away and you keep it moving. The alternative literally is death. That literally is the alternative. The alternative to open, honest conversations is death. 99 percent of all problems can be resolved if people can be honest with each other about the difficult things.
We can just talk about it. If I can meet you and be honest, and you can be honest, and we're not checking out because your honesty is too much for me to bear emotionally, if we can just have those kinds of conversations, most of the problems in life can be resolved. I'm deeply impressed.
Jenny Stefanotti: There's so much here, right?
I mean, I think a really critical piece of this that you speak to, that you write about on your website, are just the ways in which those conversations themselves are a redistribution of power.
Ashanti Kunene: Yeah.
Jenny Stefanotti: To allow voices to be heard and integrated.
Ashanti Kunene: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Because open conversations are not easy, especially about stuff [00:38:00] that people feel that they'll be shamed for.
You know, like men, my father committing suicide. Was like the first wake up call for me about just how much more patriarchy is painful for men than it is for us. Yes, we are suffering as women under patriarchy, but patriarchy tells men that you have no emotions. All the narratives around what it takes to be an actual man is really.
Tough. Men generally, black men especially, you don't have space to be vulnerable. As women, by default, we talk to each other. We talk to each other about the stuff. Guys, I don't know, actually. Like y'all have to be a certain way. And even amongst each other, there has to be a particular kind of, It's even why it's difficult for other men to call out their friends when they're being problematic because you're socializing to not doing that,
Jenny Stefanotti: you know?
Well, I think there's a nuance here that I think is really [00:39:00] important, you know, to talk about culture and fear, right? Calling out, there's a shaming associated with calling out versus calling in. It creates an environment of fear. God forbid I say something, the consequences. This isn't a safe space for me emotionally.
I can't fuck up. God forbid if I fuck up, I'm going to get canceled, right? Yeah. And it's really important. How do we create safe? I'm sure you've read Adrienne Brown's We Will Not Cancel Us, which I thought is so powerful, just a little pamphlet. It was a blog post turned into like a tiny little booklet.
But she talks about punitive versus restorative versus transformational justice. Punitive justice, like calling out cancel culture is a punitive. It's you hurt me. I haven't dealt with my trauma, so I'm going to hurt you if you fuck up. And now I'm the one who's strong in this power [00:40:00] dynamic, right? And really powerfully, she talks about canceling is a tactic that is valuable as a last resort.
Right. Upping the reputational cost of your behavior if all of the other opportunities have failed. Have the conversations behind closed doors. Have the open and honest conversation. I think that punitive frame perpetuates fear, perpetuates harm.
Ashanti Kunene: It's an interesting one, right? So calling out versus a calling in because the calling in also implies I have grace and I care about your emotions.
And oftentimes this is like one of the, I suppose, what is the phrasing? This is like one of the, I suppose the critiques of the things that make racial relations like really sticky is like, why do you get to have grace from me? What makes you think you deserve comfort and grace for these difficult conversations?
When I've had to, historically, I'm not generalizing, self regulate and do that without your grace. This is part of what Paulo Press [00:41:00] speaks about, you know, as pedagogy of press, like the double burden of the press, right? It's like, yes, we all have this thing that we've been socialized in. And it's part of why that loving each other through our ugly is so hard to do.
Jenny Stefanotti: It's hard to
Ashanti Kunene: do because it is dependent on capacity, you know?
Jenny Stefanotti: But I think it's different. So one of the attributes of white supremacy culture is a right to comfort, right? But I think there's a nuance here that's important, which is like, I'm not saying that you deserve to be comfortable because me telling you what you're doing that's problematic is uncomfortable.
It is uncomfortable, but I need to learn the competence to do that with care from a love practice.
Ashanti Kunene: Right? A hundred percent, because the bottom line is nobody responds well to being shouted at irrespective of what the issue is.
Jenny Stefanotti: And you need to learn to sit with that discomfort and be like, Oh, I'm feeling shame.
I'm wanting to shut down. Let me sit with this for a minute. And again, this is open, honest, [00:42:00] vulnerable sharing of your experience that facilitates these interactions. But when we come at it with. It's something that feels like an attack, right? Well then we're in a paradigm of fear because my nervous system is going to go into like, you know, defensive.
Ashanti Kunene: Sure. And again, part of why that's also a complex nuanced thing is that, and I've seen this time and time again, just mentioning the word race, people get into defense mode, you're attacking me. That's right. You know. So how do you then with care, engage with someone that just the phrase white supremacy makes them shut down and trigger and shut away?
Like what, uh, I haven't threatened you. And that's part of the socialization around the fear. You know, there's nothing to fear about black people, but you are already like this. Why, what is it for? We're living in the incredibly sticky, [00:43:00] messy, both end up dying inside our time. It's why finding your own internal anchors and your own coherence that is internal to you, not external to you is so important for this time, because it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Do you see what's happening? Yeah. It's going to.
Jenny Stefanotti: Well, yeah, but if you're anchored in a kind of healthy sense of self, right? You don't feel like you're not in your ego space, right? You don't feel so threatened. Your existence isn't threatened by the critique.
Ashanti Kunene: You have the capacity to engage, like, for example, one of the core markers for me about open, honest conversations, particularly if I'm thinking about my unlearning workshops.
Can we talk about the facts of history without you getting emotional? Can we talk about slavery and the breeding farms that were set up to breed? Like, can we talk about the facts of [00:44:00] history as they happen without people getting emotional and defensive? Because the history is what it is. What I'm trying to get to with that starting point is that your emotions must not make it such that you then shut down and check out of the conversation because what you're hearing about the history is too difficult to bear.
That's what I mean by, can we discuss the facts of history without you getting emotional to the point of checking out? Yes, these things are emotional. Yes, get emotional. Yes, feel all the feelings, but it mustn't be that. Just, we can't talk about history because when you are going to start crying white tears.
That doesn't make sense. Or you as a Black person are now going to feel all the vi like, it doesn't make
Jenny Stefanotti: Isn't that the starting point for the unlearning then? The starting point is like, okay, well, what's going on with you that you are so inhibited and let's honor that?
Ashanti Kunene: Exactly it, mommy. Everybody's got their own unlearning starting point.
And that is
Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.
Ashanti Kunene: Can you talk about it? And if you can't and it's too emotional, what's up, what's going [00:45:00] on? That's where we deep dive. Yeah, exactly. And most people don't do this work. They just bypass the conversation and therefore bypass that work, which is the story work. Why is this thing making you so Uncomfortable.
And I can tell you that, you know, we've all been socialized into this global system. We all have our stories. Everybody's got that trauma, et cetera, et cetera. And what I fundamentally do believe part of the, if you can't walk the talk, sit down and shut up. Is you don't get to treat other people badly because you had trauma.
You really don't. For sure. Just because your life, we all, all of us have baggage, doesn't mean you get to mistreat others because you're going through things. Yes. I love the quote,
Jenny Stefanotti: your trauma is not your fault, but it's your responsibility. It's true. Okay, so we talked about love as praxis, ubuntu, open, honest communication.
The other one, we've been referencing [00:46:00] it through the conversation, but spiritual accountability.
Ashanti Kunene: Okay, so now this is where it gets interesting because there is an ongoing spiritual war, like it is an actual thing. There are forces that are designed and intentional for darkness and same, same with lightness, right?
What I fundamentally believe is that light will always outshine darkness. Darkness cannot exist without the existence of light, but light can be without darkness. The spiritual accountability piece is this. Can you sleep at night? Is your spirit allowing you peaceful rest? It's at the end of each day, the deed.
So thinking about the, I think it was a 42 laws of my art. Did you sin? Did you lie? Did you steal? Did you hit others? What did you do? And what is the spiritual content, karmic content of your actions? And how are you accountable to self? Because the other thing that people, [00:47:00] I think that we've forgotten and like this, this connection from source is that we all have a witness.
To everything that happens in our life, that small in a spiritual voice, even if you switch it off and stop listening to him, her, they, whatever you refer to, it's there, it bears witness and it is your accountability at the end of your life. So when you get to God or Buddha or Allah, whoever it is that you prayed to,
and they ask you,
Ashanti Kunene: so were you a good person?
Did you do what we sent you out there to do? You can't lie because that spirit is going to be there to say, yeah, I was there. I watched her. Oh, no, she didn't do this. That is your inner world, your inner spirit. And we all have this, we all have this, we all have that, that inner witness. And that is that accountability piece.
If that inner witnesses at peace. You're spiritually accountable to the things that you're doing. But if she's niggling you, there's something not in alignment and you have to look at that. Yes.
Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. You talk about [00:48:00] coherence. Coherent leadership requires personal integrity and spiritual accountability to your purpose.
Alignment between your beliefs, thoughts, and actions. This is walking the walk, not just talking the talk.
Ashanti Kunene: Yes, ma'am. And you can walk the walk and talk the talk, but not be in the correct heart posture. Your spirit can fundamentally not be happy. A lot of people do things that they don't want to do every day, right?
So you could very well be doing something and saying the right things, but you personally don't fundamentally agree. And that. At least from an energetic point of view seeps out of the most insidious way. Like it really, it shows, it shows, it really shows, particularly in the context of allyship. You could be doing the right thing, saying the right things, but because your spirit says no, I, my spirit says watch here, watch here.
Jenny Stefanotti: Right. And this is the spidey sense that you were talking about the last time we were on a call together. You talked about this, a white woman who's [00:49:00] prominent, who came to you and wanted to work with you and you were just like, yeah, no.
Ashanti Kunene: You
Jenny Stefanotti: felt it.
Ashanti Kunene: Having spiritual discernment. Yeah. Because one of the things that I've also learned in life.
Cause I'm also like a, I'm a very like bubbly person. I really like to share and spread love. I've got a lot of love to give. I feel things quite deeply, but people then get attracted to that energy and then feed off the source. Right. Cause I'm also an affirming person. Words of affirmation on like one of my.
Love languages. So I'll throw me out all the things. And so the capacity to also understand one's boundaries in terms of your resource and your capacity just to hold other people is also an important thing to just monitor and watch as we do this work because people will take advantage, right? You will make someone feel like they've taken a glass of water for the First time.
And they've been stranded in the desert just by your energy. And now suddenly they cannot live without you. And you found yourself a [00:50:00] spiritual energy leech, like these dementors in Harry Potter, people like this, you need to assess who are your energy dementors in your life.
How do you
Ashanti Kunene: feel once you've left someone's presence?
Are you feeling energized or are you feeling drained? The body never lies. What's the other piece? Ooh! I love that. Why the intelligence, why I think life is so magical, like, it's magic. The body never lies. And she tells you, you have that relationship with yourself that you can hear your body cause it's your spirit, it's your body, it's your soul.
And
Ashanti Kunene: particularly if you take the premise of, you know, your thoughts become energy that then manifests into physical. Reality. I'm going to take this as, because this is quantum science now, quantum entanglement, blah, blah, blah. The science says this is true. What you think you become. [00:51:00] That is fundamentally true.
What that means is that you need to be vigilant about your thoughts. And how many people have this kind of self control? Hmm? Self motivation to be vigilant about your thoughts because the thoughts create reality. And so if you're living in a way that you don't like, you have to assess what you're doing internally because there's nothing external of you that is not a direct reflection of what's happening internally.
It's an esoteric science. And that's like hard to grab your mind around because especially when bad things. happen. Nobody actively seeks bad things to happen to them, right? But what I've come to understand about, I suppose, energy and karmic cycles is that nothing just happens out of the blue. There's a sequence of decisions that are connected.
Between all people that cause things, [00:52:00] right? So it's the thing around what energy frequency are you vibrating at? And if you're vibrating at a lower frequency that's attracting negative experiences, then figure out a way to get to a frequency of love. Love is the highest frequency because it's the original source.
Love, love, love. Understanding divine love means experiencing life as a cosmic orgasm, where life is made for you. Everything is always working out for your highest good. And this particular experience, this particular situation, only good can come from it. You know, these are affirmations and daily things.
Your reality might not show it. But convince yourself internally with all that emotion, and then it'll become, I think I sound like such a woo woo girl right now.
Jenny Stefanotti: There's a quote of yours that I really appreciate from the YouTube video that you have on your website. I mean, I think I feel like it really lands more now that I'm revisiting it post this conversation [00:53:00] where you say, I found it spiritually important to pay attention to the language and the narratives that I use.
Narrative shape modalities of being in the world. And so we spoke at the beginning of the conversation about how. We have these narratives that we've internalized, right? We kind of connect. To those instead of source, right, that's where we find the dissonance, whereas if source is informing the narratives, then you have the coherence, right?
And so that's why when you speak to, it's spiritually important to pay attention because if you're not paying attention to this, which is such a huge component of what you're manifesting in the world, right? If you're not paying attention to whether there's coherence. It's between source and purpose and the things that you're saying, which then lead to what you're manifesting and doing.
That's the spiritual accountability. That's why the attention to narrative and language is a spiritual practice.
Ashanti Kunene: And I mean, that applies at all levels, not just for systems change work, like, you know, at a personal level, even [00:54:00] one of the narratives that I've had to unlearn was me being unlovable or too much.
Right. I'm crying. My relationships are not working, but. Inside, I'm running a program that says I'm not lovable. And so therefore I'm attracting situations that say that. And so I had to, once I understood, suppose the very interesting connection between that, I had to then change the kind of story I was telling myself, you know, and that's like, it's not easy to do.
And it's not a once off event. It's an ongoing. things. Sometimes you forget you've got programs that have conditioned you to a place that you don't want to go and you have to rejig the programs. It's okay.
Jenny Stefanotti: Well, you know, I think that everybody has that story that I'm not lovable or the fear that I'm not lovable.
And I, it's, it's sort of ironic that you made that comment today because I just. published a blog post on Friday on Valentine's day about self love. And I said, Hey, if there's one intervention that was the highest leverage point that I can [00:55:00] imagine, it's that we all learn to love ourselves. Because if we don't have that, then we're not acting from right foundation, right?
Either love versus fear. Right. And so I really appreciate how you're kind of elucidating the ways in which our stories are such an essential part of that practice.
Ashanti Kunene: And also self love is love for others. Yeah. Yourself is not exclusion to everybody else. If you're saying that I have self love, you have love for humanity and life.
That's what that would mean.
Jenny Stefanotti: Well that brings us back to Ubuntu, which is I think a great place to close.
Ashanti Kunene: Yes. A person is a person because of other people. My humanity is deeply tied to your humanity. So if I cannot see your humanity, I cannot be a human. I cannot see the life in you. What life am I? And so I think.
Yeah, exploring what it [00:56:00] means to show, you know, I suppose, like I was mentioning in South Africa's case to show forgiveness before you are asked to forgive, to show grace before it is required, to show understanding and compassion and consideration and kindness and all the things. That we also want for ourselves before those things are demanded.
And the, you know, a simple one is also to put yourself in another person's shoes. Nobody likes to be shouted at. Nobody likes to be spoken at in weird ways. Me, I'm also very clear in terms of knowing myself and my shadow. I'm loving and light filled by intention, by design. The brightness of my light is equivalent to the darkness of my shadow.
So don't try me. Just stay in the light. Let's do things nicely and properly the first time. I was giving a guest lecture and I'd said that, you know, part of the praxis of walking with Ubuntu. To use a small examples that if you see a statues, [00:57:00] wherever they're placed, statues always face the sun, right? A statue will never turn away from the sun into its shadow to deal with you if you approach it from its shadow.
And what we need to remember as people is for our spirit to be and remain statues facing the sun, facing our ultimate light. Do not turn away. From your light, because somebody wants to deal with you in the darkness, right? Make that person come to you at your light. Otherwise they can remain cold in the darkness.
Do not turn away from your light to deal with people in their darkness, because that then diminishes your spirit. And that diminishes your access to source and your access to love and your access to sleep peacefully and deeply, like,
you
Ashanti Kunene: know, so. Allow people to experience the full consequences of their choices.
So if you choose to come at me from my shadow, you're going to get my shadow. That's okay because you asked for her, you know? And so I know myself well enough to know what I am and [00:58:00] how I respond and what my triggers are. And so my practice is to, you know, intentionally every day, my heart posture, check my heart posture, stay in my shanty.
Shanty is a peaceful version of me, you know, in peace. You can't put a price on peace. You really cannot.
Jenny Stefanotti: Here, here. Thank you so much. I could talk to you for days.
Ashanti Kunene: I'm so grateful to be connected with you. You're such a wonderful spirit. And I think, you know, the work is the work is the work and you find your community.
You find the people that are meant to be in your life. You find the correct. All of it, energies, people, places, things. Once you decide to walk your path and I'm here in your life because you chose to walk your path. And I'm here also because I chose to walk my path. Had we not both decided to follow purpose, we wouldn't have crossed paths.
[OUTRO]
Jenny Stefanotti: Thank you so much for listening and thanks to Scott Hanson, also known as Tycho for our musical signature. In addition to this podcast, you [00:59:00] can find resources for each episode on our website, www. becomingdenizen. com, including transcripts and background materials. For our most essential topics, like universal basic income, decentralized social media, and long term capitalism, we also have posts summarizing our research, which make it easy for listeners to very quickly get an overview of these particularly important and foundational topics.
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