A Self-Worth Conversation with My Mom with Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden
— EPISODE 90 —
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Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:00:00] One of my fears is, oh my goodness, will I be worthy if I'm not working, if I don't have paid employment? If people aren't calling me and saying they need me to do X or Y and writing a check, right? On the one hand, I know, of course, you'll be.
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Dr. Adia Gooden [00:00:23] Welcome to the Unconditionally Worthy Podcast. In this podcast, I will guide you on your journey to connect with the true source of your self-worth. Each week we'll discuss barriers to unconditional self-worth, the connection between self-worth and relationships, self-worth practices you can apply to your life. And how to use self-worth as a foundation for living courageously. I'm your host, Dr. Adia Gooden, a licensed clinical psychologist, dance enthusiast, and a dark chocolate lover who believes deeply that you are worthy unconditionally.
Hello and welcome to an incredibly special episode of the Unconditionally Worthy Podcast. This episode is so special because I'm having my mom join me, and I guess that it is perfect timing. You are listening to this in the fall, but we are recording way ahead of time, and it's actually a couple of days before Mother's Day. And so my mom is joining me for this podcast episode and we're talking about her life, her own self-worth journey. We're talking about shifting and how she is navigated various spaces. She integrated her high school. She was a first class of women at Princeton. And so it's a really connected, meaningful conversation and I think that you're going to really enjoy it. And so I probably won't say much more than that. Let's get into the show.
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I am super excited to welcome an incredibly special guest onto this episode of the podcast. And that guest is my mom, Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden, and she's obviously been my mom for my whole life, but I'm going to read you her bio so you can just understand how incredibly impressive she is. So, from 2012 to 2016, Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden served as the first Chief Diversity Officer and Associate Vice President at the University of Maryland College Park. Formerly she served as the Associate Provost for International Multicultural Initiatives at Alliant International University as professor at the California School of Professional Psychology, as director of the Student Counseling Center at the Claremont Colleges, and as an administrator in two Chicago Community Mental health centers. She is a licensed psychologist and the co-author of Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America, a winner of the 2004 American Book Awards.
My mom is a fellow of Division 35, which is the Society for Psychology of Women and 45 (Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race) of the American Psychological Association. She's a thought leader with respect to equity, diversity, and inclusion, and she has provided consultation, training, and coaching to educational institutions, professional associations and nonprofit organizations. A native of Washington DC, Kumea, was one of two black girls to integrate the Madeira School in Northern Virginia. She earned a bachelor's degree, magna cum laude from Princeton University with its first class of women and a PhD in Clinical-Community Psychology from the University of Maryland. So you see, she is incredibly impressive and she's also my mom. Welcome to the podcast. So glad that you're here.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:03:58] I'm too, thank you for that introduction. And two things that it didn't mention is I'm a very, very proud mother and grandmother.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:04:06] Those are the especially the grandma part, the new baby. That's the important part. We're actually recording this the day before my mom and dad come to see us in Chicago because Amani's birthday is this Saturday, so it's in a couple days. So she will be in her proud grandma role this weekend for sure. So I want to start this conversation where we start all of the conversations with guests on the podcast, which is by asking you to share a bit about your own self-worth journey.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:04:40] Sure. Well, I'm delighted to be here. I feel emotional seeing my daughter doing her thing, making such a humongous contribution to the world. So let me get through that sometimes helps me to say that and then I can move on. Alright. So my own self-worth journey, I grew up in Washington, DC where I'm sitting now, grew up in a middle-class family in a predominantly black city. Parents are both public school educators, two siblings, very loving home. And in the fifties and sixties with this sort of tenuous, middle-classness, a lot of emphasis, particularly from my father on having to perform well in order to be worthy. So I grew up with loving parents, but with this real pressure to do well, to show up academically and do well, meant academically well, I guess I was smart enough and worked hard enough so that I did that, I met the expectation, right?
And so one would think, well all would be good but realized as I got older how pitching my sense of worth to academic success and then later to professional success is really a trap. And so that's been kind of a core issue for me throughout my life around self-worth. I had the experience of integrating, as Adia said a white school as a secondary school student that set up another set of challenges. I've been in a black world, black schools, black neighborhood, and while I lived in a society that's white and supremacist, I hadn't faced it in that way that I did when I integrated the school. So that set up another set of challenges about who am I and who am I as a black girl, and am I worthy enough. And then as if to add insult to injury, I went to Princeton, which had just recently admitted women and was very, very white. And so issues of gender and who am I as a woman, as a black woman? And so I've had to do a lot of work post-college to sort of write the right things, to figure out and to reclaim, if you will, my sense of worth given that that pathway that I was set on and journeyed through.
It's interesting. So many decades past college. Now, even as I think about retirement, which will happen for me sometime in the next few years, it's a little, and then I feel like I've come a long way. So I feel like by the time I was in my thirties and forties, and that may seem like, oh my goodness, does it take that long? Well, for I think many of you, it won't. But for me, it wasn't until I was in my thirties and forties that I think I felt more fully worthy as a person, as a black woman, as a human being. And yet these issues linger. So as I think about and anticipate retirement, one of my fears is, oh my goodness, will I be worthy if I'm not working? If I don't have paid employment? If people aren't calling me and saying they need me to do X or Y and writing a check, right? On the one hand, I know of course you'll be, Kumea, but on another hand that's still something that I think about and wrestle with.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:08:33] I appreciate you sharing that. So, honestly, I'm struck by some of the parallels in our experience in terms of using academic achievement, professional achievement and performance to prove our worth. You and dad weren't like, you have to be the best student now. I think dad was a little bit more concerned with my grades than you were. I got like money for A's, and like, there was like a need to assess the report card. But you all were kind of more hands-off around school. And I think I was a little bit of an anxious kid and I just kind of did the work anyway. Like, I didn't need to be hounded to do work. So I think y'all were hands off and I just did it. And I also, similar to you sort of made up or internalized some messages from society that I needed to prove myself through getting good grades through academic achievement.
And I think some of it also was looking up to you and dad who had obviously performed very highly academically and thinking, okay, they're happy, they're successful, this is the path, this is what you do, right? And so it strikes me that there are these parallels, even though the context of my life, right? Growing up in the 80s, 90s, early 2000s was very different in terms of like the racism and the sexism, right? Like still existed, but manifested differently and less in your face than I think what you experienced. There are still some of these parallels, and I think there's a lot of people who are listening who can resonate with both of our experiences and both of kind of the challenges that we have sort of navigated with okay realizing like academic achievement, professional achievement, that's not going to work. Like what do we do instead?
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:10:33] Yeah, absolutely. I think there are a lot of similarities and there are probably some generational differences. I guess I'm hoping there's some generational differences. One of the things that I'm now aware of and wouldn't have been aware of even 15 years ago because I think the term didn't emerge so 15 years ago, so the whole notion of respectability politics and the critique of my generation, I'm a baby boomer, we were sort of socialized and black boomers, in particular, right? And in a middle-class family, parents were teachers very much a lot about respectability, about how you show up. And implicitly that meant a bunch of things not being too loud. Not looking too much like economically disadvantaged black people in the hood whom we were trying to separate ourselves from. And so I think that overlay sort of added to a sense of let me button down, be proper and proper meant kind of white. I don't know if I have said it right. So I'm hopeful I think part of what millennials and Zs have brought to the fore is a critique of that, and which I think is really helpful.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:12:02] Yeah. Yeah. I so agree. And I think I like to acknowledge where that comes from, right? Like, it makes sense that if you're trying to grasp any sense of like, safety, right? Like possibility of building a life for your family and navigating these white systems and doing all of this, it sort of makes sense that respectability politics would sort of emerge from that as a strategy. And then I think sort of post-civil rights era, we see like, oh, it didn't work, right? Like what we got were, oh, these black people are exceptions. They're not like other black people. And then also the restrictions, right? And we're going to talk a little bit about shifting. So I think there's some interconnection there, the restrictions that come when it feels like you always have to be perfect, perform perfect, say the right thing, dress the right way, never have an emotion that's too big or too loud or reactive.
And I agree that we are challenging that. And sometimes in my talks, I'll say, yeah if being the perfect black person or the perfect image of a black person was going to work to dismantle racism, like it would've worked already, right? We had the Obamas, right? We had them in the highest position in the land, and they certainly performed perfect. Obviously they're human, right? They're not perfect, but they're amazing. And they ticked like almost all the marks, right? And yet and still, and even in backlash to that we are navigating racism that's very present. And so I like to say that to give people, black people, people from marginalized groups permission to be themselves and to take that weight off of themselves, to feel like I've got to be the perfect representative of my group because that's the only way that I can then do my part to dismantle this racism or sexism or transphobia or whatever it is. Because the challenge is that unfortunately it doesn't work. And then we have all this pressure on ourselves for that to be a pathway to worthiness. And we don't get there that way.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:14:26] And maybe it works to an extent in some ways. When I look at pictures from the sixties of Martin Luther King and John Lewis marching in Alabama and all of the people have on suits and the women have on heels, it's kind of like right?
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:14:53] Yep.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:14:54] That worked to some extent. And people talk about how it was the photos of dogs attacking people who were-
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:15:05] Children in church clothes.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:15:07] Sitting at a lunch counter perfectly composed in spite of water being powered on them or soda, right? So some-
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:15:17] There can be a strategy into it.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:15:19] I like your use of the term strategy but what happens is when the strategies become internalized as ways that one must be.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:15:28] Yes.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:15:29] And we lose sight of it as a strategy for a moment or a place or a situation.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:15:36] Right. Right. And I'm going to jump ahead. We'll get to the other questions maybe, but it really does make me think of this topic of shifting, right? And I'd love for you to sort of explain what shifting is because I think this idea of intentional strategy and things that you are doing intentionally, right? Like maybe you are going to an interview and intentionally deciding that you might normally wear your hair this way or dress that way. But in this particular space, at this particular time, you are deciding that you're going to straighten your hair and you're going to wear the dark suit, right? Like that can be a strategy. But what we don't want is for it to be a, there's something wrong with my hair in it’s natural state, and so I got to straighten it because, it's wild and it's wrong and there's something wrong with my natural style or my body, and I got to squeeze it into a two small suit, right? So there's a difference between intentionally choosing to do something. To have savvy as you're navigating these systems that are racist and sexist versus that internalization that you're talking about. So will you share like, your take on this and also what is shifting? How does it show up?
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:16:58] Sure. Yeah. I love the way you put that. So shifting is a concept that Charisse Jones, my co-author and I developed to really speak to how black women navigate and respond to racial and gender discrimination. And it's based on some research that we did some years ago with African American women ages 18 to 90 ish from across the country, people who identified as black and as women. And what we found was there was a tremendous amount of psychic energy in navigating and responding to racial and gender bias behaviorally, the example of the hair, how do I show up if I go for that interview with a Fortune 100 company?
It shows up in our speech, how we talk, can we speak African American Vernacular English, or do we have to speak the Queen's English? And what do we say? Is our voice suppressed? Do we feel like we can have a voice? So it shows up behaviorally. It also shows up in how we think about ourselves and the world, what we can aspire to, what we think about what's possible for us. And it shows up in how we feel about ourselves, importantly, right? Whether we, our self-esteem, our sense of worthiness, whether we feel we're good enough and shifting isn't always compromising. It's not always negative. It also can be ways that we resist that we push back. So it's a really broad construct to really speak to how the variety of ways that we respond. But maybe the core issue is racism and sexism require a response, even if we're not conscious of them. There's a toll, there's often an inner psychic toll. And I think your point Adia, that the whole issue of whether we're conscious of it or not is really key.
It's really key. Is it a conscious strategy? Are we being intentional? Are we aware or is it something that's infected us on the inside without our awareness dashed our dreams? Compromised our hopes led us to feel less than, right?. And those are the kinds of shifts that are particularly concerning when we're not aware of them, and when they're affecting our sense of self, our wellbeing, our sense of worthiness.
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I think it's just so important for people to know about this because I think the consciousness-raising is like, okay, can you even observe what you're doing? And I think, as you were talking, I was also thinking about how people are socialized into shifting, right? So in the black community, we talk about racialized socialization, which is sort of preparing black children to navigate a racist world.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:21:08] Mm-hmm.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:21:08] Right? And it's this tension and balance between preparing so that they're not like, so that they know, like if you are a black teenager, 15-year-old and your friends are drinking and doing something out in the street or smoking marijuana, like you can't do that, right? You cannot do that. And you should be able to get to be a young black boy, but like, that's not how authorities other people are going to treat you. So there is that sort of explicit, but then you also don't want the, you also wanted to avoid people growing up and feeling like, I hate it here. There's nothing I can do. And sort of what you're saying, which is like the feeling like there's these glass ceilings or these concrete ceilings and I can't get beyond it and there's nothing I can do and et cetera.
So it's this sort of nuanced process. But I do think that growing up black in America, you become very aware, right? Like often you come, I think especially if you have African American ancestry, very aware of like, okay, here's what you do in this space. Here's what you don't do, here the dynamics, here's where racism may be at play. And I'm thinking about people who are immigrants, who are often immigrants of color, who are often very caught off guard by the racism because they've not experienced it in that same way. and I also think may not have some of those tools and skills that we sort of come up with of like, no, you're not going to talk like that in front of your white boss. Like, you're just not going to, right? And just thinking about how these tools can be helpful and how it's hard when people don't understand sort of internally and externally how to navigate some of the racism, like all the isms that come up.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:23:00] Yeah. It's interesting, as you were mentioning immigrants, somehow I thought of Obama, which may be silly because he was not an immigrant, but his father was an immigrant, and of course he was actually raised by a white mother. And so I think it's interesting, I think immigrants, there's some strengths and some challenges there. One strength, I see this as an Obama strength. Again, he wasn't an immigrant, but sort of this living in a somewhat different world than African-Americans for sure. Raised by a white person. I think there's a kind of chutzpah and a kind of capacity to walk into spaces oblivious to the racial dynamic which at times can help. Right. At times can help. I think Obama once said when he would walk into a room of white people. He's like, okay.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:23:59] Right.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:24:00] I'm home.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:24:01] And I think some of that is right. Because his family was white. Right. And the family that he grew up with was white.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:24:09] That's right.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:24:10] So there's a level of comfort that he's was afforded in white spaces because he was in them-
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:24:16] That's right.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:24:17] From the very time he was born that many of us BIPOC folks were not.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:24:23] Don't have.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:24:24] In those spaces.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:24:25]. He's not carrying the baggage. And yet where is he going to be tripped up, what are the unseen?
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:24:33] Where is he going to be surprised?
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:24:34] Exactly. Exactly.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:24:36] Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:24:38] But I think that sort of duality of what comes from the outside that pushes us down. But we also have to contend with what have we internalized on the inside that keeps us down. Right?
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:25:54] Yep.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:24:55] It's not to blame the victim, right? We're in a racist, patriarchal, heterocentric, heterosexist society. Right. Not to blame the victim, but to recognize what's on the inside that we may unthinkingly sort of go along with when we really have a new strategy could work in this new decade or this new era of our life.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:25:20] Right. And I think that tends to be where I'm like working. Like I think your work is very, you're shifting culture, you're shifting organization dynamics, right? Like that's, I think, often, at least my imagination of the consulting work that you're doing. And I think a lot of my work is focused on that internal, and I often do feel this tension to really balance my acknowledgment of like, these are the racist systems and the realities of the challenges that you are probably navigating as a BIPOC person or a marginalized person. And just as you said, we can't, it is not helpful to operate as victims of these systems. There is actually a place where we have agency and power to make choices about how we see ourself, about how we treat ourself, and about how we show up even navigating these challenging systems. And so it is, I think that internal and external is important.
And it's also really important. I think the internal, because shifting culture, shifting society shifting oppressive symptoms is unfortunately, you can tell me if this is different. In your experience, slow work, slow, gradual work, right? Like, usually you're not hearing like we saw everything that happened in 2020 and in response to the murder of George Floyd, like everybody had a diversity statement. And that was a great first step. But I think if you look at most of the companies that had a diversity statement had something, they were saying something, most of the companies are probably not 180 from where they were now. It's like three years ago, we're coming up on three years ago, right? It's slow, which doesn't mean it's impossible, and it doesn't mean that it's not worth working towards it, and we can't wait, right? Like, we cannot sit here and say, well, three years from now, or five years from now, or 10 years from now, that's when I'll start showing up as my authentic self because that's when a society or this company or these people will see me and accept me, right? Like, we can't wait for that. And so we have to own our worthiness, claim our power, do that for ourselves and not wait for society that we don't know how long it's going to take for them to come around.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:27:42] Yeah. It's interesting, I think one construct, if you will, that really emerged after George Floyd was murdered. You're right. We're almost at the three-year anniversary, May 25th, right? It was the notion of individual versus systemic. Now we've known about individual versus systemic for decades. That's not a new idea. But I would say that individual systemic structural really came into everyday parlance after George Floyd was murdered. The whole notion of structural racism, systemic racism. And I try to hold those two things in tandem as you were suggesting, one of the dangers is because the systemic and structural does take a long time, the long arc, right? That one danger is to only focus on the individual, right? Another danger is to not support individuals where they are now and expect, wait for the structural to change. So I think we've got to kind of hold those together.
And it occurred to me as you were talking, Adia, that your work on worthiness, while your focus is mostly on individuals, there's also implicitly and maybe explicitly a focus on how do we create a culture, a community, a society that supports worthiness, right? Supports a sense of self-worth. What are the elements of that? I just thought there's the individual and systemic there around how do we create the conditions where folks can more readily experience a sense of worthiness because the society, the schools, the neighborhoods, their parents, their church, synagogue, spiritual leaders, all kind of foster that.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:29:38] Yeah. I think it's so interesting that you say that because it's something that I realize like, I haven't talked about as much, which I am wanting to lean more into. And so you all may have caught in the bio that I read that my mom has a degree in Clinical-Community Psychology, PhD. My dad has a PhD in Clinical-Community Psychology. And what you know? I got a PhD in Clinical-Community Psychology. And community psychology is really these pieces that my mom and I are talking about this community psychology is what's the context, right? Like, what is the system, what's happening in the environment? And actually a lot of my, research when I was in graduate school was looking at that, was looking at what's the environment, what's the context, what helps African American youth to thrive?
And I'm wanting to bring that more in because I do think we do need the individual and we need the contextual and we need to sort of balance it. And we need people who have eyes on both of those things and pieces.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:30:44] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:30:45] I'd love to tie this conversation sort of back to your own journey. You have some pretty big things that you did, which was sort of integrate your high school, right? As an all-girls private school in Northern Virginia. Those of you who are not familiar with the US or the South, Northern Virginia is in the South. Virginia is a southern state. It is like in the DC area, but I think in my head it's a southern state and has a lot of those legacies of southern states.
I still remember when my uncle and his wife, my mom's brother moved to, they bought a farm in Virginia. And my grandmother was kind of like, are you out of your mind? Like, what? No, no, no, no, no. Like, we don't live in Virginia and we definitely don't live in rural Virginia, right? And I just still remember her response, which felt like a visceral like kind of trauma response even of like, that is not safe, right? You may not be safe as a black family in that part of the country. So I guess I just highlight that like, it's a private school. It's in a wealthy, all-girls private school. It's in Northern Virginia, and you are coming from a black community in DC. So that's one is you integrated that school. And two, you also then, were the first class of women at Princeton, right? So there's like very clear your blackness is very prominent when you go to high school and then you go to college and you being a black woman is very prominent. And so I'm curious about sort of what that was like for you. How you navigated, how you think you shifted, what you did internalize, what you were able to externalize in terms of what you were hearing and seeing from those school environments.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:32:49] Yeah, absolutely. So I was recruited and I was one of two black girls, fortunately to integrate Madeira, I was recruited, lived in DC, commuted an hour and a half every day. It was a boarding and day school. Fortunately I was day, I think boarding would've been just my goodness really difficult. And I'll say mostly I had a good experience. Mostly it was an all-girls school. The racism was subtle rather than overt. No one called me the N-word or my buddy Carol, the other black student. We made friends. But it was not a multicultural environment. There was not a curriculum that lifted up the black experience in any way, shape, or form. This is in the sixties. One experience I'll mention is sitting in modern European history class in ninth grade, my first year. They always split up Carol and me, almost always.
So I was the only black student in the class, right? And we were focusing on European colonization of Africa. And I remember the textbook and these pictures of African people that were just horrific and dehumanizing. And I really admired my teacher, Mrs. Wexler. And there she was talking about European colonization of Africa. And I somehow expected her to clean this up or say the right thing and she didn't. And we were sitting in a circle there. Only 14 of us classes are small. It's these desk chairs. And I remember physically shifting to try to hide out. Impossible, right? What's saddest about that experience though, when I think back on it, is how, well, several things. One, I didn't say anything. I did not have the capacity or the tools to say, hmm, what Uhuh? right? That just wasn't who I was and what I could do in 1967. Secondly, I felt ashamed. I think the hiding, right? The trying to student, there's some, even though on some level I knew something was wrong, that the depiction was wrong, I felt some shame.
So there was more shame than anger. And then add to it, I didn't tell anybody. When I got home, at the end of the day, I didn't tell my parents. I think that's all for complicated reasons. I just didn't tell them. And I think they, yeah, I think we didn't have that kind of relationship. They grew up in a black world, didn't have similar experiences. I don't think they had a sense of the social-emotional impact. They knew I could get a good education, a good centered education, but they didn't have a sense of the social-emotional impact and had to live that and hadn't lived that. And for whatever reason, I didn't tell them. So I sort of held it. I internalized it. So I think about that. I think about that. On the upside, I mean, because shifting is both internalizing, behaving differently, but also can be resisting.
Two years later of my peers, of my friends and most of my friends, I had many friends outside of that school. I had friends in the school, but I had many black friends and relatives in the neighborhood. And I was really the first person to go Afro, which was like a big deal in 1969. Right? And for me, it was against my mother's protest, she really didn't want me to do it, but she kind of tried to support me. But it was a way of saying, Hmm, I'm here. So that was a pretty for me and for the time a junior in high school, a pretty bold move. So there's both the yuck and the resistance and I think at Princeton, Princeton was a tough environment, very white, very male, kind of considered the Southern Ivy League school, even though it's in New Jersey.
It's the southernmost, and it kind of has the rep to be the Southern school, meaning more conservative. More. Right. Again, the racism and the sexism were not particularly overt, but it was an alienating environment. My instructors were fine. I mean, and some of them I liked a lot, but overall, it just didn't feel like a space for me as a black woman. Thus, I hunkered down with other black students. There were maybe 200 of us, and we were a tribe. And most of us, there were a few people who didn't quite, but mostly we were very deeply connected. And I lived in that world. So that was a way of resisting, of creating a buffer. Sadly, when I think back about it, it also was a way of not fully availing myself of a Princeton education.
So yeah, I went to classes. I did well, I did very well academically. But when I think about in high school, I'd been on the debate team. I didn't even give it a second thought at Princeton. In high school, I'd done played basketball. Well, I probably wouldn't have qualified but there, so there's a way in which though I bubbled in, I needed to, but sometimes I look back and think, did I really get a Princeton education? Sure I got the degree, but did I get what average middle-class white boy got? Probably not, right? Probably not. And yet I did what I could do and needed to do to kind of support my emotional well-being.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:39:05] Yeah. I really appreciate you sharing it. I mean, I think even when you were sharing that story of the talking, the history class, it's like heartbreaking because you went through it. And also heartbreaking, because I'm guessing there are still black kids who have to go through that, right? That there's still a miseducation happening, especially as we see attacks on critical race theory, and we see attacks on African American history and on diversity education, and it is heartbreaking, right? That at such an early age, there's a sense of shame, and then this disconnection from the true legacy and history of African people in diaspora and in the world. But I appreciate you sharing, right? Some of the challenges, but then also your resistance, right? Having afro. And I also always remember the story of at your Princeton graduation, you wore African print outfit, you and your classmates stood up and turned your backs on the racist speaker, right? And so I think that there's this even while there's a navigating these messages, there's also a claiming of like, we deserve to be here. We deserve to be seen, and we're not going to shrink and stand for something that's not right.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:40:28] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:40:31] When I think about kind of where you are now in terms of the work that you do, it feels really full circle, right? So you recently you were on the board at Madeira, right? Doing a lot of work, helping them with a lot of diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives. You do DEI consulting work, right? It just feels like you're planning for the first time to go to your Princeton reunion, right? And so it feels like there's this really full circle return evolution happening. So I'd love for you to share kind of how you think about that, how you think about kind of the threads from where the roots of where you started to where you are now, and the work that you're doing. And I'm curious about whether that feels healing from some of the things that you maybe weren't able to acknowledge, didn't have the space or the language to acknowledge when you were experiencing and going through them.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:41:31] Yeah, absolutely. I absolutely believe that I wouldn't be doing the work that I'm doing, but for having integrated Madeira, I feel like that was a really impactful point. And of course I didn't know it at the time. And then later going to Princeton kind of added fuel to the fire. I didn't know it at the time, but I feel like those experiences really set me on a path of wrestling with my own identity and worth, right? My own identity as a black person, as a woman. My own sense of worthiness, my own sense of who am I in the world, and kind of gotten major in psychology and beginning to do work as a clinical psychologist, working with an array of people, but a lot of women of color is what I was doing when I was living in California.
And teaching at California School of Professional Psychology, where there was a very strong focus on how do we educate clinical psychologists to be culturally responsive, to be able to work with diverse populations, to be able to work with people who are historically marginalized. And so I feel like my pain points have been sources of opportunity for myself. So initially, so how do I heal myself? How do I better understand myself? What am I going through? What's this about? And then that going through that process has helped me to kind of be a resource to support others. And so my clinical work when I had a clinical practice, my teaching very much focused on how can psychologists be capable researchers and practitioners.
My research on African American women and how black women navigate race and gender identities. And now, as you mentioned, my consultation and coaching work. So I'm working with organizations, helping them become more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and just primarily working with nonprofits, many times, universities and colleges, but mostly nonprofits, small and large. And then doing volunteer work on boards to help them so that it is deeply, deeply meaningful and it's healing. So I think that's a really apt word that for me, it allows me to do some things and to help to create some spaces, some organizations, some teams, some workplaces that are more like what I wish I'd had, right? Back in the day. And so it's very healing in that sense and to hopefully impart some wisdom and principles that help today's generation of students and employees to experience more inclusive, more just spaces where they can have a greater sense of belonging. So it's very, very meaningful. I feel very fortunate that I can work in a place, in places and find meaning and really draw on my own experiences and the wisdom of these, presumably the wisdom. I'd like to believe some wisdom from these many decades and have a positive impact.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:45:38] That's wonderful. That's a wonderful way that you're using your life experience, even the hard stuff to inform how you operate in the world and to create a better world. I'm so grateful for you sharing your wisdom. This has been a wonderful conversation. It is really meaningful for me to hear from you about your experiences, about the challenges you've navigated. And I appreciate the opportunity to share you with the world, with the podcast listeners. So I know that some people are going to be like, well, let me connect with Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden. And so will you tell people where they can find the book, the name of the book again, and then if somebody is looking for a DEI consultant, how they would reach you, find you, that sort of thing?
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:46:34] Certainly. So Charisse Jones and I and my name again is Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden, authored Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America. You can find it in any bookseller venue, including Amazon, Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America. And you can find me at www.shorter-goodenconsulting.com. I know that's kind of a mouthful.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:47:09] We will put it in the show notes. Yeah, we'll put it in the notes so the book and the website will be linked. Yes.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden[00:47:15] Alright. Thank you. And you can shoot me an email at kumea@shorter-goodenconsulting.com. So glad to hear from folks I'm sitting in DC, work with organizations across the nation to become more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and just. And Adia, this has been a true delight. You can tell from the emotionality how meaningful this has been for me. Thank you. I'm so proud of you.
Dr. Adia Gooden [00:47:47] Thanks, Mom. Love you.
Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden [00:47:49] Love you too.
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Dr. Adia Gooden [00:47:50] Thanks for joining me this week on the Unconditionally Worthy Podcast. Make sure to visit my website, dradiagooden.com and subscribe to the show on iTunes so you'll never miss an episode. You can also follow me on social media at Dr. Adia Gooden. If you loved the show, please leave a review on iTunes so we can continue to bring you amazing episodes. Lastly, if you found this episode helpful and know someone who might benefit from hearing it, please share it. Thanks for listening and see you next episode.
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This episode was produced by Crys & Tiana and the music is by Wataboi.
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In this very special episode of Unconditionally Worthy, I’m joined by my mom, Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden! My mom is a Psychologist, DEI Consultant/Coach, and co-author of Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America, but those titles only scratch the surface…
Today, my mom and I are reflecting on her life and her self-worth journey, shining light on how she has navigated experiences like integrating her high school in Virginia and being in the first class of women at Princeton University.
This is a very meaningful and eye-opening conversation. I already know that you’re going to love it, so let’s dive in!
A Glimpse Into My Mom’s Self-Worth Journey:
My mom grew up in Washington D.C., a predominantly Black city in the 50s and 60s, in a middle class family in which both of her parents were public school educators. She was raised in a very loving home, but a home that emphasized the need to perform well academically in order to be worthy. As she got older, she realized this pressure to do well academically, and then professionally, was really just a trap. This self-worth struggle became a core issue for my mom throughout her life.
On top of this pressure, my mom had the experience of integrating a white school as one of two Black students, which set up another set of challenges. Once she graduated high school, she joined the first class of women at Princeton, which had recently started admitting women and was very white.
All of these experiences brought to light issues of identity and worthiness that my mom had to unravel and make sense of. “I’ve had to do a lot of work post-college to sort of right the right things, to figure out and to reclaim, if you will, my sense of worth given that pathway that I was set on and journeyed through,” she says.
What is Shifting and How Does It Show Up in Black Women?
The concept of shifting was developed by my mom and her co-author, Dr. Charisse Jones, to speak to how Black women navigate and respond to racial and gender discrimination. In their research, they’ve found that shifting shows up internally and externally in Black women. It shows up behaviorally and in how we think about ourselves and the world. They found that there’s a tremendous amount of psychic energy in navigating and responding to racial and gender bias.
For example, shifting can show up as thinking, “How do I want to show up for my interview with a Fortune 500 company?” and then deciding to dress and style your hair differently than what comes naturally to you. Shifting shows up in our speech, how we talk and what we say. It impacts how we feel about ourselves, what we can aspire to, and our sense of self-worth.
Shifting is not always a negative or compromising thing, though. It can also show up in how we resist and push back against racism, sexism, and discrimination. “The whole issue of whether we’re conscious of it or not is really key,” she says. “Is it a conscious strategy? Are we being intentional? Are we aware? Or is it something that has infected us on the inside without our awareness?”
Self-Worth Insights & Affirmations Inspired by My Mom:
We deserve to exist and shine in spaces that aren’t made specifically for us.
I am not going to shrink myself to fit in.
I am not going to stand for something that’s not right.
I am worthy of being seen and heard.
Pain points are opportunities to connect with our worthiness.
I have the ability to heal and overcome this pain/trauma.
I am worthy of healing my pain and feeling joyful and free.
I can always find profound meaning in my experiences.
Although I didn’t deserve this pain/trauma, I can use it to create change and impact my community and the world.
Resources Mentioned:
Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America by Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden & Dr. Charisse Jones: https://www.shorter-goodenconsulting.com/book-articles
About Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden (she/her):
From 2012 to 2016, Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden served as the first Chief Diversity Officer and Associate Vice President at the University of Maryland, College Park. Formerly, she served as Associate Provost for International-Multicultural Initiatives at Alliant International University, as Professor at the California School of Professional Psychology, as Director of the student counseling center at The Claremont Colleges, and as an administrator in two Chicago community mental health centers. She is a Licensed Psychologist and the co-author of Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America, a winner of the 2004 American Book Awards.
A Fellow of Divisions 35 (Society for the Psychology of Women) and 45 (Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race) of the American Psychological Association, she is a thought leader with respect to equity, diversity and inclusion and she has provided consultation, training and coaching to educational institutions, professional associations and non-profit organizations.
A native of Washington, DC, Kumea was one of two Black girls to integrate The Madeira School in Northern Virginia. She earned a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude from Princeton University with its first class of women and a Ph.D. in Clinical/Community Psychology from the University of Maryland.
To connect further with Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden:
Visit her website: https://www.shorter-goodenconsulting.com
Connect with her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kumea-shorter-gooden-a7112560
This episode was produced by Crys & Tiana.
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