(Content note: Violence, murder, sexual assault)

K: Lately, I’ve been thinking about letting people in and dropping down my wall, and being really vulnerable. I want to say the process started about a year ago. When did I come out as hard of hearing?

C: I think it’s been about a year.

K: Okay. Part of this is something that’s really hard for me. That is that I have always worked really hard to, while I own that I’m Black, and I introduced myself as Black, and I am super proud of being Black, I do make sure that my Black is always palatable. I think that, for me, the Black Lives Matter movement is just not about cops killing Black people, it is absolutely about that. It’s about the quality of life for Black people. There’s not a moment of the day, of any day, that I am not aware of the fact that I am Black.

K: If you go to our Twitter page and you see me sitting next to my husband in the photo, we look damn near the same color, but I have never passed as white. Nobody has ever not known that, there’s something not quite white about me. People my whole life have asked me, except for Black folks, they know I’m Black, but people who aren’t Black have asked me my whole life, “What are you?” Which is such a demeaning question. “What are you?” That has stuck with me my whole life and has really, for a lot of years, damaged me. Now, it doesn’t, and that’s not the most damaging thing. I’ve been called every racial slur in the book, even for races that I don’t belong to. I believe we’re all part of the human race, so ethnicities that I don’t belong to.

K: I feel like, for me, me being a part of this conversation is lending my privilege because colorism is a thing, and there are spaces in which my Blackness is palatable because I’m pale, and I’m just light enough, and I’m just not “really” Black. I’ve had people tell me, “Well, you’re not really Black.” I’m like, “Yes, I am. I’m Black.” It’s so painful and exhausting to have to start every new relationship with, I’m Black, so that they don’t do the racist crap that they do when they don’t know I’m Black because I’ve made that mistake, just thinking I can just be and have people just be horrible. The reason that Chad and I are doing this episode together is because I believe people listen to people that look like them. When it comes to talking to Japanese nationals about Black Lives Matter, our son, Rasta, is the most fluent in Japanese, and he’s taking on that education burden and responsibility in a time of great pain and a time of great somberness.

K: Chad has taken on the responsibility of speaking to white people because he is white, and why is he shouting Black Lives Matter?

C: I think because people don’t listen otherwise. I think that there’s a lot of … See, I think the thing about like, “we’re all part of the human race” is one of those things that while it’s technically true, it’s so often misused and subverted that you have to say, okay, this is true, but irrelevant. It’s a non-sequitur. When you say that you always make sure that people know you’re Black when you introduce yourself, but that you’ve tried to be, I forget how you phrased it, but I think of it as one of the respectable Blacks.

K: Yeah, a palatable level of Blackness.

C: Right. That, that in itself, that concept itself implies that there is a certain burden to identifying as Black, that it carries with it certain assumptions. When people hear that you’re Black, they say, okay, well, here’s what your standard Black person is like.

K: Don’t make her mad.

C: Right. For example.

K: People telling me, “