Heben Nigatu, Another Round - XOXO Festival (2016)

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>> I'm Heben Nigatu, you know me from the podcast "Another Round." We were named best of for, like, all the lists. Just trust me..
ITunes, New York Times, Slate, Vulture, blah blah blah, you get the point. My partner in crime is Tracy Clayton, she couldn't be here right now, but she loves you guys and misses you already. XOXO, if you will..
Hugs and kisses..
She's a big fan of corny jokes, that's why I said that..
I'm very excited to be here with y'all. You could’ve been anywhere else in the world right now but you’re here with me, and I appreciate that, to quote Jay Z. This is the title of my talk. How to channel your inner Kanye and win friends and influence people and have the most poppin’ podcast of all time..
Of all time..
[Laughter].
We're going to have some fun. So I have a few things I want to say before I started because all speeches need caveats because everyone speaks from a very specific point of view..
So I want to make sure I point out that even though I really, really appreciate that XOXO is a festival that celebrates independent artists..
But I am not an independent artist. My platform is BuzzFeed.com. At one point, it was a scrappy startup. It is not anymore..
It would be very disingenuous to be up here and tell you all just believe in yourself and go do the thing, and then you will have it all..
That's now — that’s not how it works. But I do want to say the platform is a big part of our success, but it's not the only part of our success, and I just want you to bear that in mind as I'm talking. So shout out to all independent ladies. Honestly, women are the only people I care about..
[cheers and applause] My talk is going to center women of color. This is wild and real. So when I say I'm going to center women of color, I'm talking about women like myself, not, like, the white ladies up here. This is sidebar from, like, a magazine in Utah..
Surprise..
But I think centering ourselves is a big part of why our show is successful. There are very few affirmative spaces for women of color in all of media. I'm hard-pressed to find five I could name. Like, a handful of affirmative spaces for women of color in media. So it's very important to me that I'm, like, talking about this kind of space that we're building and this is the kind of people I imagine when I say "you," the second person, which is not the same kind of person people imagine when they say “you” in the media. I knew there would be a lot of white people in the audience today because Portland. Yeah, you guys got to laugh at yourselves a little bit..
And I've learned in my life that white people sometimes have a difficulty with things that are not centered around them. Uh-huh..
Consuming media that does not take whiteness as its center is just not a muscle that you guys have had had the ability to flex because there's not much of it. So I hear you, I hear where you're coming from..
But you know what?.
I believe in you guys. [laughter] [applause] We can do it..
We can do it together. We're going to make it as a family. Y'all got this..
We do it every day..
We relate to things that are not about us. Welcome..
[laughter].
I also want to make a caveat about being mindful about who is not in the room. So that means, again, Portland. But also not everyone has the chance or the space to take time to go to conferences like this or have the money or just the energy. And I really wanted to acknowledge those people because those are important people as well. For those of you -- [Applause] Yeah..
So for those of you who are going to share these conversations that we're having via Twitter, the hashtags for this talk are #XOXOfest, #YeezyTaughtMe, and #HebenTaughtMe. [laughter] Is that presumptuous? Yes, but I'm going with it. We begin our journey in 2012. I left school for about a year. And in that time, I began the fellowship at BuzzFeed that turned into me being a full-time staffer there..
This is about four years ago. I was the first full-time black person there. This will be relevant to my journey. At the time, I was feeling very anxious about these milestones you have, like, rites of passage..
They're, like, you graduate, you get married, you do all of these things, and I had this whole vision of a timeline of things that I was supposed to do. So interrupting that timeline felt really off to me..
But I was, like, you know what? I'm doing it..
I'm going to do other stuff. And I think, just listening to The College Dropout literally every single day while I was, like, oh, am I going to make it? Is kind of pretty much how I entered my love for Kanye..
He spoke to me at a time when I was really truly having difficulty understanding what I was doing..
One of my favorite things about The College Dropout is the skits. There is this guy who is struggling who was a proxy for anyone who grew up during the recession and is pretty much anyone who grew up postgrad in this time. I really love when he's talking about, “when I die, buddy, you know what's going to keep me warm at night?.
Those degrees!”.
Which is, you know, it's sad but funny. Which is the same as me. I hope that's how he will describe me. But I felt anxious about taking an untraditional path, as I was saying, about what you're supposed to do..
At what age, at what time. But as soon as I got to BuzzFeed, I learned that this is actually pretty common and a lot of people especially in the fields that I'm interested—comedy, media, writing, etc—come from all sorts of places. That realization was really settling. It really helped me center myself and realize that it's okay to not do the thing exactly as the thing is supposed to happen. There's no exact perfect way to get to the thing..
That is allowed..
Find your path to dopeness, if you will. So, by 2013, my cohost Tracy Clayton joins BuzzFeed.com..
She's the fifth black person. Yeah, I'm excited..
[laughter] At the time, having five whole black people was truly astounding to me. [laughter] BuzzFeed by far is the most diverse place I've ever worked at, and I did not realize how much -- well, I did. But I forgot..
I did not realize how much of a luxury it was to have other brown people to talk to. There's something that happens when you're actually included in things, and not just superficial diversity but actual inclusion, where people create the space for you to thrive. Where you do not have to write the “race beat” or constantly be responding to the the horrible racist news of the day, which is literally every day. There's something that happens to you when you have the freedom to do that kind of thing. When you have an editor that understands your references or you don't feel completely alienated in your workspace..
What?.
Turns out the work gets exponentially better when you have these kinds of circumstances. So Kanye so beautifully says touch the sky. And it's not just that the work gets better, but your universe expands. Your dreams get bigger. The simple task of centering yourself in the things that you are thinking about and the goals that you have expands your universe. Also, touch the sky is a thing I learned from white boys in media..
Let me tell you about white boys in media. [laughter] I learned a lot from them. And one of those important lessons is summed up by the writer Sarah Hagi, I hope I'm pronouncing that right..
“Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.” Let me explain..
[applause].
I think touch the sky is a thing. You know, it's a celebratory song, but it took me a minute to realize that I had sort of -- how do I say this? It took me a minute to realize the confidence white men have when they speak is not because they're particularly confident. It's because they live in a world where everything they say is validated. Every time they speak, it's seen as a thing that is valuable..
That is not a thing I have grown up with. So when I say carry yourself with the confidence of mediocre white man. What I mean is they be having the worst ideas, and they're still out here. Out here..
And imposter syndrome is a thing that we deal with because of that. I wish I could tell you that I gained the confidence and self-esteem to do this kind of work by just believing in myself. But part of it if I'm being honest is that I saw the mediocrity around me. [Applause].
Yes!.
Yes..
So when I got access to these sort of huge white media spaces that I've heard about but, you know, didn't really ever have anyone, even a point of reference for how to get into that space, when I finally got access to those kinds of spaces, I felt like an imposter. I thought one day they would be, like, nope, what’s Heben doing here? Get her out of here..
But with enough time in those spaces the cure for imposter syndrome is that you just see the imposters..
With enough time in those spaces, I started to see the real imposters. It's a huge sea of mediocrity out there. Failing upward is a phrase I learned from white people in media. People are out here being hired from the places they plagiarized, okay. That's what I mean by sea of mediocrity. And I learned that as much as I can watch the white men frolic, all of those lessons do not apply to me..
But do not let that diminish your spirit because you have a right to take up space. Imposter syndrome is real, but you are realer. With all of that in mind, as you're thinking about, like, what other people are doing and do I belong in this space? Those kinds of things end up distracting you. They distract from the work that you're actually here to do..
I'm not here to fix diversity for your company. I just have, like, some issues that I care about that I want to talk about or some things that I want to explore in my writing. I'm not here to fix the system. And you are often put in that position if you are in a company like this. So I always tell people my advice is that don't ever let anyone come for the work. Always come correct with the work. One of the side effects of having to work in an environment like this is that you get distracted and Toni Morrison, the god, has a quote about this..
And we're going to get through it as a family. This really helped me understand how to approach my work..
Toni Morrison says, “The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is..
Someone says you have no art, so you dredge that up..
Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up..
None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” And Toni Morrison ain't never lie. So as many women of color know, you have to work twice as hard to get half as much, and that's a lesson I learned pretty quickly. But having that Toni Morrison voice in the back of my mind, it was crucial to the way we started the podcast because we didn't want to have a podcast that's about race with a capital R. Meaning you're responding to the news of the day, you have all of these thoughts about race and how we should think about it as a society..
The simple fact of responding to the racist things in the news is distracting from the work that we want to do. So it's very important to us that we were simply ourselves in the show, that we weren't just, like, hey, white people, you see there's race in the news, let me translate it for you..
This is how I feel..
Blah blah blah..
There's this whole cycle that you get into if you're stuck in a space where you're the only black person or you're one of a few and they need you to do a thing. And learning to ignore that was really honestly transformational for my work. And a big part of the reason we're successful is because of diversity. Diversity is a word that's used so much that I wonder what people mean by it. We thought hard about how we wanted to -- diversity is a big part of every aspect of the show that we do..
We thought hard about how we wanted to break the color barrier and have a white person on the show..
Of course it was Chris Hayes. The episode was called The Reverse Jackie Robinson..
[laughter] But, yeah, I think I often am asked to give talks about diversity and my advice is always just try..
Which is a thing most people do not do, I have found..
Claps for effort..
Honestly claps for effort. Don't talk about it, be about it. Talking about it helps signal to people that this is the thing that you value. But being about it gets people to actually come and work at your organization. Yes, girl..
Another thing we learned that was super important is that self-care is a central part of how we live our lives and how we do our work. So what that means is at first I honestly when I was first introduced to the subject of self-care, I thought it was a little bit self-indulgent..
And honestly distracting from important ways we can do care together as a society. Like, health care and stuff. You know?.
Real ways we can all affect the care we give ourselves..
But self-care is important for us, it's not just a thing we talk about, it's a thing we practice in our daily lives. Mental health is a big thing that we talk about on the show..
And having those little things where you're, like, you know what?.
I'm not going to listen to people today. I'm going to watch BoJack Horseman and tune the world out and not think about police brutality just for one day..
Those kinds of things are important to do, and it absolutely affects the work that you do if you at least have the peace of mind to come into work and not just feel exhausted by the thought of the things that you're doing. I want to talk a little bit about this phrase that I learned from a sociologist at Harvard called “spirit murder.” It's heavy..
We're going to work through this as a family. It comes from Patricia Williams, who's a Harvard sociologist, and she's talking very specifically about, the context she uses this phrase -- she's a legal scholar..
She's talking about when you're wrongfully convicted, you spend a huge chunk of your life in jail and then the ruling is overturned for some reason, Project Innocence or something. [drops remote] Oops..
That didn’t happen. So your sentence gets overturned, and the state owes you some sort of amount of money. A few million maybe..
But how do you account for the things that are lost in that space? I do not want to lose that context because I think it's very important, that's a very important conversation. But I think that's a useful way to think about all the things you have to deal with. The toll on your psyche when you're dealing with all of this stuff. I feel exhausted all the time. I feel tired all the time. I come into work, and I wake up and I'm, like, I don't want to be a black woman. It's not that I wake up thinking woe is me, you know?.
I'm just living my life. But then you enter the universe and you're, like, shit, what am I doing? It's exhausting, and I feel like not enough people talk about that. It's important to talk about the things that frustrate you and the things that stall your work, which is life..
The things that stall your work are the things you talk about in your work. For me especially..
So spirit murder is an important way I try to convey to people what is lost in the conversation about race in America. Even when I’m talking to white people about police brutality..
We can point to stats or videos that we've all seen together that have traumatized us all..
We can see national headlines where mothers are crying and children with toy guns, really rhetorically the easiest way to get people to be, like, hey, there's something happening here..
When people don't respond to that, how do you describe that?.
What is that feeling for you? To me, it feels like a spirit murder. Heavy, I know..
But one of the things my cohost Tracy Clayton taught me is that you have never not survived a day..
And it seems so simple, but that changed my life..
So be kind to yourself is what I have learned in this process..
Don't beat yourself up. Sometimes you just have to tune out the world and tune into yourself. Or as one of my favorite guests, Aparna Nancherla, told us..
“Self esteem is an inside job.” So practicing self-care is important not just so that you are, like, physically able to be at work, which is what it's important for me for..
But also so that you learn how to grow in public..
When you have a solid foundation, this kind of work where you're exposing yourself, you're feeling vulnerable to the world at large, doesn't feel like such a heavy burden. Being honest and vulnerable is honestly how great art is made..
From that place instead of all the other places from which we make art. And some of those are defensive. Some of those are reactive in a way that's just, like, reactive and not thoughtful., etc..
What I'm saying is when you take the time to think through what you want or what you're dealing with, it makes it so much easier for other people to latch onto those things. And people really respond to vulnerabilities is what I’ve learned. I have had to push myself on a podcast to open up..
My cohost Tracy, she will live-tweet her period, live-tweet a Brazilian wax. [laughter] I will not. [laughter] I really have had to push myself to learn how to be honest and vulnerable in And it took a minute, even simple things like learning what your voice sounds like in public is frustrating..
But you get over yourself, and you learn how to grow in public..
That's how you get to iconic lines like this. First thing's first, I'll eat your brains. I know I said this is talking about Kanye, but we have to take a little detour for Nicki. [applause] Yes, I see y'all. I say this to myself, like, when I enter any room..
Any boardroom, any meeting. Also sidebar, I also say who the fuck do you think I is?.
You've got to add to the repertoire. But self-care brings you to a point where you can honestly and confidently say what's going on?.
I will eat your brains. What's happening?.
Another important lesson I learned from Kanye is flex, yo..
Have fun..
I feel like that's so simple and corny. But it's surprising to me how much gets made from a place of having fun. So here is the pod squad. I want to be clear in every talk that I have that we would be nothing without our team. Having this kind of team lets you be your full self..
Lets you feel confident. Makes you feel like somebody is going to be checking you if you're out of pocket. Those kinds of things are important and creating a kind of workspace where you guys can, like, check in with each other or think about self-care as an actual practice of your organizations instead of just, like, oh, we're cute women where we do this thing where we check in with each other..
This is real important work, and it's important to redefine a workspace that is actually hopeful for humans..
Because I find other workplaces very alienating, and I wish everyone did the things that the pod squad did..
One of the things I learned as I was making this PowerPoint is that there is no question mark in the title of this song, “Who Gon Stop Me”..
Who is going to stop me, not even a goddamn question mark..
[laughter] And that's how I feel when I have that kind of squad, and I'm feeling that kind of carry yourself with the confidence of the mediocre white man, I'm just, like, shit, who gon stop me?.
Not a period..
Not a question mark..
And I cannot emphasize enough what having fun has done for our show. I think some of our best episodes aren’t the ones where we’re like, we need to talk about this topic, they’re the ones where we're just goofing off and enjoying ourselves and creating a space to be like, hey, we're just little black girls having fun, that is so rare..
I cannot emphasize how rare that is. Again, I cannot think of that many affirmative spaces for woman of color. So here's my cohost Tracy as Steve Harvey. [laughter] During our Kwanzaa Spectacular. Aka our Christmas special. Here she is again..
This is a pretty representative picture of our dynamic..
One of my favorite things that we did is we interviewed some folks from Bob's Burgers, which is, like, one of my favorite shows. And then someone illustrated us as characters in Bob’s Burgers, and I am living, y'all. Eugene Mirman told us we have an 8% chance of getting on the show. Honestly I really did just take this detour to up those chances..
[applause] I love Bob's Burgers. Here we are goofing off with our pal Hillary Clinton..
[laughter] I am really serious when I say that having fun and talking from your point of view makes your work better. A lot of the things that were said about our Hillary Clinton interview is basically that she has never had to do an interview like this, meaning she had to come on our terms. We asked her the questions in the way we would ask anyone else, and she responded well to that..
Here we are having fun with Lin-Manuel Miranda. [applause] Most fire mixtape right there. Another thing I learned from Kanye is that you should demand croissants at any space you're in..
How is this related to the talk I’m giving? Not really..
[laughter] Croissants are good. That’s all I’m saying. Croissants are good..
Am I wrong?.
Is Kanye wrong?.
[applause] If you were in a French-ass restaurant and someone was taking their long-ass time with your croissants, you would say hurry up with my damn croissants too. And lastly, I think one of the important lessons I've learned from Kanye is also about putting people on..
Meaning, as we say in the community, putting people on, lifting as we climb. Which is sort of the civil rights movement’s version of putting people on. Meaning, black women in general have not only taken care of the community, but built up the community..
And as much as we are excited to do things for ourselves..
As much as I love doing things like big celeb interviews with Uzo Aduba, Lena Dunham, all these folks who are big people in our culture, the things that excite me the most is when we get to be, like, hey, there's this little-known artist in Brooklyn that you guys don't know about had but she's doing dope work. Peep this..
It's very important to us that we take our platform seriously..
We never take that for granted. And we really, really appreciate that people are still rocking with us. One of my favorite Kanye quotes comes from this New York Times interview where he's saying, the things I do, honestly, I do it for justice. And justice doesn't have to be this large grandiose thing about war and peace and all this stuff..
Justice could just be clearing a path for people to dream properly. The thing I value most about making the show you is the community we built. People write us the most incredible emails. One of my favorites is just literally one sentence where a black girl says thank you for validating the fuck out of me as a black girl..
That is all..
[Applause] Yes..
And one of my favorite one-star reviews we got is “too political.” That's not related to anything. I just like it..
But, again, building community is the whole entire reason for our show. One of the things that our -- it's just really simple for us to do but people think it's, like, a huge thing..
We have a little section in our newsletter where we shout out other black podcasts. One of the reasons we do this is that so other people never say, we can't find black podcasts. Diversity is hard..
No, they're out here. It's easy..
We're doing it every week. Every week..
So it's important to us to just be, like, we're out here..
But also, it does not take away from us to give other people a platform. Putting people on is part of the work. And that's honestly what The Life of Pablo is probably pretty good for is the cameos. I don't know think anyone -- even Kanye scholars, of which I count myself — would say that's not the case..
One of the best cameos is Chance the Rapper, and he says -- [Applause] Yes. He says I met Kanye West, I'm never going to fail..
And I truly feel that in my spirit, even though I have never met Kanye West. I also truly feel my spirit that I will meet him..
I feel very confident about that. We're going to meet, it's going to be cool, we're going to chat it up. Et cetera..
And the reason I feel that confident is because of Kanye..


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