Never Give Up (with Claire Sulmers) – Episode 19 of Rants & Randomness
My peoples, welcome to Rants & Randomness, the podcast where I’m talking about the things I’m loving, the things I’m side-eyeing, and having great conversation with really interesting people.
Download Episode 19 TranscriptOn this episode, I’m feeling good about the seats that black people and minority progressives won in the midterm elections. I’m ranting about the people who continue to hustle backwards by voting against their interests and spotlighting Higher Heights, an organization that is doing incredible work. My guest on this show is Claire Sulmers of the Fashion Bomb Daily.
Feel Good
This week I’m feeling good about the seats that black folks and minority progressives won during this really important midterm election. For the first time ever, there are over a hundred women with seats in the US House of Representatives. And a lot of people of color won. Latisha James is now the first black woman who was elected New York State Attorney General. Colin Allred won the House seat and unseated an incumbent. He is an ex-NFL player and HUD official. Antonio Delgado is a Rhodes scholar who focused on universal healthcare and emphasized his working class upbringing. He unseated the incumbent in New York. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are the first Muslim women to be elected to the US Congress. We have Jahana Hayes, who’s the first black woman to be elected to Congress from Connecticut. Ayanna Pressley, first black woman to be elected to Congress from Massachusetts. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.
My Rant
My rant this week is about how white women continue to stay hustling backwards. We’ve been here before. We have been here before when Doug Jones election in Alabama and how he won. We keep on saying white women vote against their interests, but then I started to realize that honestly, maybe we’re thinking their interests are different. They’re not necessarily voting against their interests. I think their interests are that they want to uphold the oppressors in their lives. They want to make sure they’re keeping their husbands and their sons and their fathers happy. That’s their interests. The proximity to power is their interest. So, when they vote for the Trump’s and the Cruz’s of the world, this is what is happening.
My Randomness
My spotlight this week is Higher Heights. It’s an amazing organization. It is the only national organization that provides black women with a political home, and it’s exclusively dedicated to harnessing their power to electing those black women to influence elections and advance progressive policies. It was founded by Glynda Carr and it is just committed to seeing black women’s political powers grow. They’ve been really instrumental in Stacey Abrams’ campaign. And their work includes investing in the next generation of political leaders, organizing and mobilizing the power of black women through their Black Women Vote campaign. And they created an environment for black women to run, win, and lead. They do online training, research, culture shifting, communications work. On their site you can go on there, you can find resources to identify black women candidates, webinars for your own political readiness, and resources that allow you to support the candidates who are running. So I need you to check out their work. I need you to support them.
My Guest: Claire Sulmers
This week, my guest is Claire Sulmers. Claire Sulmers is the founder of fashionbombdaily.com and the industry’s leading fashion blogger, chronicling fascinations of color. Her pioneering work ushered in a new wave of digital journalism that fed and fueled an underserved of African American and Latino style lovers wanting to know more about the brand from the culture.
Beyond developing and directing content for Fashion Bomb Daily, Sulmers has done extensive style writing for other platforms including Vogue Italia, Vogue Paris, Essence magazine. And she has been the influencer of choice for major corporate brands who want to reach her audience including Toyota, Reebok, Verizon, and others. In 12 years she has accumulated over 1.3 million followers, written a book called The Bomb Life, and is now working on her second book.
In this episode, we are talking about falling into business, riding the wave of the tipping point, and how to cope when your platform is disabled.
You can follow Claire on Instagram at @clairesulmers. As always, much love to the Chicago Recording Company, where I record each episode!
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