Shay Stewart-Bouley, Black Girl in Maine Media

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Shea Stewart Boulay is the executive director of Community change, a nearly 50 year old anti racism organization based in Boston that organizes and educates for racial equity with a specific focus on working with white people. She is also the creator of the well known blog Black Girl in Maine. Thanks for coming in today.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

Thank you for having me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So you have actually a lot of interesting things that we could talk about.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But I'm most interested in, I guess, first coming to Maine. I mean, you've been here for quite a while. 2002.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Why choose essentially one of the whitest states?

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

I didn't choose the state intentionally and I rarely talk about the reason why I moved here. I've been married twice. My first husband and I, when we divorced in God knows, like 1990 something, our son was still pretty young. We'll just say that our custody arrangement at one point just required us to be in the same place. And since he had moved back here and was unwilling to move back to Chicago, I was pretty much forced to move here.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, that's kind of unfortunate. That's an unfortunate way to have to

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

come to us, right? Yeah. So to be completely honest, when people always ask like, how did you choose Maine? I would have never chosen Maine on my own. It was sort of like, you're a mother, you need to do what's best for your children. You go where you have to go.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

All right, so now you're here.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

I am here.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And it must have been an interesting journey for you.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

It was quite an interesting journey in that it really just flipped my whole life upside down in terms of everything that I was planning on doing. Prior to moving to Maine, all of my work had been in social services, primarily working with homeless people. In Chicago. I was program director of a couple of different homeless shelters. And that was really my focus in working with low income homeless people. Just, I grew up working class, so definitely had quite an affinity for, like, how to help people. And moving here just changed all of that. I did that for a number of years, but, you know, certain things sort of just unfolded. The more I was, the longer I was here. And it was like, oh, okay, I guess I'm going to be doing different work now.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So you chose well working with homeless people, and that's difficult just to start with. How did that grab you? What was your intention when you first started in that field?

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

A lot of it had to do with my own childhood. There was about a six month period when my parents were homeless. Thankfully, we met many great people along the way. I was about 10 or 11 at that time, and I never forgot those people and what that work meant to me. And just thinking about services for homeless people in this country have really sort of deteriorated over the, I would say, the past several decades. So I felt a really strong, you know, just affinity to give back. And it just, you know, made a lot of sense. It worked really well. Homeless shelters have really interesting hours when you're raising children because they're, they're open at nighttime. So I, you know, my first job was, you know, doing like the third shift at a homeless shelter. And it just kind of, it was work that I just had a natural fit for.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Most people don't have a natural fit for working in that field.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

Well, I mean, I was able to understand our clients really well and just understand, like, well, you know, there's so many reasons why people become homeless and especially people with children. And so for me, it was really, again, a way to just sort of give back and. No, I mean, when you're a child and you're thinking about, what do you want to be when you grow up? Working with the homeless isn't on that list. My daughter, who's 12, will often ask me, what did you want to be when you wanted to grow up? I actually wanted to be either an actor or an attorney. I am neither of those things, though I did study theater for a number of years in Chicago up until the point in which I moved here when I was close to about 30. I would often take improv classes in my 20s, so I mean, I'm sure it's a really good skill to have, given that I talk a lot, but I'm neither an actor or an attorney.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But you have created something that's really important and probably the experiences that you've had in acting and in speaking really contributed positively to that.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

Oh, yeah. I mean, I definitely would say that those experiences, I mean, I'm a person who, I feel every experience that I have, it's just a building block. It, you know, builds on top of something else that I do and most certainly what I've created in terms of my work with Black Girl in Maine, which actually started off as a joke in 2008, I, you know, like many people kind of got caught up in sort of the economic crash and started working with a life coach and was trying to figure out, what do I want to do with my life. Like, I've always wanted to write, but I'm not the greatest writer. And at that time I was still doing some writing for the Portland Phoenix here, but I was really feeling hemmed in by the limitations of writing a regular column in a publication where it was like I had 600 words and I had all these things I wanted to say. My daughter at the time was three and you know, working with the life coach, one of her suggestions was, what if you start a blog? You know, that's at the time time the mommy blogging thing was really big. I had a 3 year old and a 16 year old. So I thought, great, I've got tons of years of parenting experience, let's write about my kids. And the name, even the name of the blog is a joke because I, you know, told my then husband, yeah, I should call it Black Girl in Maine. And he goes, why don't you call it Black Girl in Maine? And I thought, I don't know, I don't know, it sounds kind of weird to call your blog Black Girl in Maine. But then I thought, well, that's actually reflective of who I am, so let's call it Black Girl in Maine. And in the earlier years, I would say 2008 to probably about 2012, I did do a lot of postings around parenting, specifically through the lens of raising black children in Maine. However, one of the things I discovered with blogging with an intention on parent focusing on parenting is that your children get to a certain age where you can't really write about them. And given that, I started the blog when my son was 16. He was sophomore junior in high school at that time. He was pretty good natured about me writing about a lot of stuff. But when he went to college, it became really clear that his stories weren't really my stories to tell anymore. And so I just started to have a shift in terms of writing more about race, especially as I started seeing things more through a racialized lens in terms of understanding how Maine operates and why it's so white. So it really was just this natural. There was no. There was no thought to it. There was no game plan. It just sort of where the blog is now was never part of my life plan. It just sort of happened.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So what, what did you learn? Why is Maine so white? How does Maine operate? Because having lived here all my life, it's harder for me to see, you know, what somebody who's more objective can see.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

Well, in part because white Americans in general, and it's not just Maine, operate in what I call the silo of whiteness. And I should probably backtrack a little bit. One of my degrees, I have an undergraduate degree in African American studies. So I understand a lot about history as it relates to African American people. And understanding that a lot of history that's taught in our school systems actually is pretty whitewashed. Maine operates in what I call a silo of whiteness. I think there are a number of reasons that it just is not an attractive place for people of color to live. There's the economic component. I know that one of the things that was hard for me moving here, I started graduate school when I was here and I went to graduate school in New Hampshire, was just looking at sort of the economic difference in terms of salaries and thinking, why are the salaries so much lower here? That's partly why I actually have a job that's based in Boston. But I think that just the culture itself, it's very insular. It's very, very much a very New Englandy type of place. That's my sort of made up word there, New Englandy. I don't think it's really warm and receptive to newcomers. I mean, that most certainly was my experience for many, many years. I also think that the culture here is very polite in the sense of people don't really ever go deep in their conversations. One of my biggest pet peeves of living here is how surfaced people are. Do we really care about the Patriots or the Red Sox or the weather, which is my biggest pet peeve? I hate talking about weather. Of all the things in the world that I can talk about, talking about the weather seems like a waste of time for me because guess what? I Can't change the weather. And it's funny to me because Mainers are very territorial about their weather. And it's like, well, I've lived in the Midwest and traveled through a good chunk of the United States. The weather is just what the weather is.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So if you are entering into a conversation with someone and they're asking you yet again to talk about the weather or the Red Sox or the Patriots, but you'd prefer to talk about something else, how do you move in that direction?

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

It actually depends on who I'm talking to. I mean, some people you can just kind of gauge they're not going to want to go deeper with you because a lot of times people aren't comfortable having deeper conversations. I mean, you look at where we are in this country right now and it feels like every conversation is like off limits in the sense of people don't like to talk about politics, they don't want to talk about race. And it's really funny because in this moment, as we're recording this, thinking about the past just couple of weeks in this nation and some of the things that have been going on with the administration and then circling around race, and yet most of us in our day to day conversations that are sort of the passing conversations, we never know, do we actually say, so what do you think about this whole me thing? Like, you know, what's your, what are your thoughts on it? People don't have the language, I think in many cases specifically white people to have those conversations. And a big part of it is how I would say white folks are socialized. I mean, I think a lot of folks, depending on the generation that they come from, probably starting from generation X down, well, we shouldn't talk about race because it's not nice. But the fact is if we don't talk about race, we allow certain attitudes and stereotypes to continue to sell, perpetuate. If there's one thing that came out of what happened in Charlottesville to me that stood out was that these were younger white people. These were not, you know, your grandfather's generation of racists. These are younger people. How does someone in their 20s and 30s in this day and age harbor those types of views? Probably because they were raised in a family where nobody talked about race. More importantly, if you operate in what I call that silo of whiteness, most of the people that you're around are just like you. So you never actually have to confront any type of difference. You don't have a vocabulary to do that. And so it's sort of Like a fertile ground for just letting whatever grow in terms of the weeds, and that starts to choke people's humanity.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So why are things off limits? Why have we gotten to this place where people are so concerned about what they say that they can't say anything at all?

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

I think to some degree, we've always been that way. I mean, I think what were the big ones that people used to never talk about, like religion, politics, think money, sex. And we've just continued that culture, which is rather ironic to me, given that we live in the age of Facebook and people can just go online and share whatever, but in our face to face encounters, we don't feel comfortable having those conversations. A lot of my work, frankly, is about getting people to sort of work through that discomfort. Getting them to the point of, you know, if I talk about race or we acknowledge you that, oh, that is a black person or that is an Asian person, that's not a bad thing. In fact, we should never be colorblind, because being colorblind doesn't help anything either. But really being able to feel comfortable naming things and understanding that naming something is not being against it or being racist. But I think part of it's just the culture that we've all been raised in and that if we're not intentional and we don't say with intention, you know what, we're done with that. We're gonna start talking. It just continues.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, let's start with naming. I mean, this is. This is something that I think a lot of people struggle with. We don't know, we don't want to step. Step wrong into a space where we say, this is the name of a person of color.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Because even that we might get called racist for so well.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

And it's interesting that you say that because frankly, that is such a. It's a very, again, a very white American mind. I feel like white people get. They're more bothered about being called a racist than they are in terms of actually engaging in racist behavior. That's hard. I mean, you've just got to get over that. I mean, it really is. I'm sorry, you got to buck up and just get over it and realize that naming something is not racist. Racism is a system. I use the academic definition of racism, which is power and privilege. And you look at who holds power and privilege in this country, and the vast majority of power and privilege, it's held by white people. So I think that for white people, when they look at racism, they're looking at it from an interpersonal, personal Perspective and not looking at the structure of racism, not looking in their own communities and going, gee, I've never really thought about, why are all the teachers in my community white? Why are all the police officers in my community white? What does that mean? If there are families of color or folks of color in my community and all the systems and structures are made up of white people? Because if you don't have different people at the table, you most certainly are going to continue to perpetuate, well meaning, yet racist behaviors.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So one of the things that we have talked about, and you know, at Maine Magazine, we're all white.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

Why are you all white? I guess I would ask.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

First of all, I don't know why we're all white. I think probably because, and I'm not the person who does the hiring, but we haven't had a lot of people who have been. And would you prefer person of color black?

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

I'm black. I can't. I don't speak for people of color, but I'm black.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I'm black American. Black Americans. We just haven't had that many people who are black American, for whatever reason come to the magazine to want to work here. So we all happen to be white, and yet we also would like to be inclusive and we would like to cover people who are black and of other. And I'm trying to talk in a really awkward way, so you know that I'm coming from my own silo of whiteness here.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

No, I can tell. I'm looking at your body language. I can tell that, like, you know, given everything that you do, that this is probably like, wow, I'm having a moment where I've got to think a little bit about this. And I can tell it's probably not a regular conversation that you have.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's incredibly difficult because I don't want to say anything that is insulting or wrong, but I really do want to engage in this conversation because I think about trying to be inclusive. And sometimes when we're trying to be inclusive, it ends up being kind of more tokenism.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

Right. And you definitely.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

That's even worse.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

Right. And you definitely don't want to do that. But I'll just say the flip side of this and just thinking about the structure of this publication. When I first moved to Maine, I spent years, like trying to read all the different magazines that were Maine based, different publications. And I know at one point this publication came across my desk and I thought, wow, it's glossy, it's put together well, there are no people in it that reflect Me, why the hell would I keep, excuse me, keep buying this and thinking about, well, if everybody who works here is white, then that impacts to some degree what you put out and continue sort of that, that circle of never really being inclusive and thinking about, well, why are there no people who are of color who work here? And probably a big part of it is when you think about how people are often hired, a lot of times it's through friends, it's through word of mouth. And so if everybody in our circles are always white, again, it becomes harder to bring on people of difference. And that would probably be one reason that the publication really hasn't shifted in terms of the racial demographics. Or I would say the management would probably need to make a concerted effort and say, you know what, we really want to be intentional about changing the demographics here. And that requires stretching a little bit in terms of. I'm sure there are plenty of well qualified people of color to work at a publication. Just as a Little side note, 20, what, 23 years ago, I worked in a magazine in Chicago. So I've actually worked on magazines. And it was funny because at that time, even in Chicago there weren't that many people of color. But thinking again, for me, like, what are our hiring practices? Do we create an environment that would feel welcoming, or do we expect the one person of color that we bring into our space to sort of fit into our way of doing things without thinking about, is this a culture that in a space that's accepting and tolerant of all, and I really hate to use the word tolerant because tolerance annoys me because we tolerate Brussels sprouts, in many cases, we don't like them. So

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

if we're in this place where we would like to have people who are black Americans or really, really any other type of race and just be more inclusive, but we're still in Maine and we're still trying to figure out how to be intentional and reach out to people. That's not always easy.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

No, it's not easy. And again, that's why I often come back to the word intentional. Because honestly, you do have to be intentional and you are going to have to stretch and you are going to have to reach in terms of, okay, I'm going to have to put some effort into this that we really are going to have to think about how to do this. You're right. Otherwise, if you expect that it's going to change without putting in extra energy, it's not going to change.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So let's assume that we would like to be More inclusive, not only in the hiring, but also in the coverage that we have. And we actually are actively trying to do this and be intentional. Do you have suggestions? You know, how do you. How would you suggest that we go about being more.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

Well, one of the things that I would suggest, and I know there are other publications in the area that have reached out to me, and I just, as a, you know, I should probably mention, I do. I am a contributor myself to the Portland Phoenix. But I know that in the past year or so, the Phoenix has really made an effort to bring on writer, other writers of color. I think For God, over 10 years, I was the only writer of color. And now there are multiple writers of color, even the writers themselves who are, you know, permanent there, doing more work in terms of sort of developing their own knowledge around anti racism work. I would say that's a really big first step in terms of if an organization is committed to making that change. Okay, maybe we need to do some work as an organization around creating an anti racism lens through which we do our work. In that case, I would say, you know, bring in an outside consultant, figure out, okay, let's look at all of our hiring practices. But also let's sort of like start with ourselves because ultimately every system is made up of people. You know, we would talk about like the criminal justice system or whatever. I always remind people, but who's in that system? Who makes the actual decisions? People. And those are the people that you really have to. You have to affect. You have to get them to start having a shift in how they view the world. I think once an organization makes that commitment, and it's been fascinating to me in the past year that in New England in general, more and more organizations that have always been predominantly white are starting to realize they do have to do that work. And it typically, again, it does start with the conversations. It starts with definitely, I would say, leadership, taking the lead. It's really hard to affect that kind of change from the bottom up. I think in order for it to really feel like the organization is committed, it has to come from the top down.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I mean, it's what you're talking about, I think is important. And I know that my daughter, who's in college, who's a senior, we have conversations about this. And her issue, she talks about gender. Gender is her big focus. Obviously she's also white, so just, you know, this is just the direction that she's gone in. And even that is really difficult. It's really hard to, like, affect change and help people you know, move their lens with regard to gender.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And we have. We have plenty of women working at this magazine, and we have plenty of women who are represented on its pages. So.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

But again, if you're making that change, where is it starting from? Is it starting from the middle? Is it starting from the bottom? Or. Or is the commitment starting from the top down? Where everyone says, okay, let's look at everything here. If we're gonna, like, look at the gender, you know, gender roles, look at everything in terms around gender, where is it starting? And really, I think putting an intensive lens on it to say, this is what we wanna do.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So what I'm getting from this is that it's just. It's not an easy fix. It's work to be done.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

And this is a country. Well, I mean, when you think about this, historically, this is a country that has never, like, had a major dialogue on race. This was a country that still owes a lot to Native Americans and black folks in this country, given our history. And we've never really acknowledged that. When you actually think about the civil rights movement, I think people have this really glossy sort of like, oh, that happened so long ago. But last year it was interesting for me. I did a TED Talk. And in particular, preparing for my TED Talk, I spent a lot of time talking to my father, who grew up under Jim Crow in the south, and realizing that the last laws that were really taken off the books with regards to Jim Crow were taken off the books less than 10 years before I was born in the late 1960s. So we really aren't that far along as a nation when it comes to dealing with race, because you still have then the generational effects. I mean, my father grew up having to go to segregated high schools because it was illegal for him to go to an integrated high school. He grew up drinking from that colored water fountain. So then when you look at other factors, like, you know, the. The educational piece, the. The economic piece, and you realize, wow, there are still people grappling with that, but yet we've never had a dialogue beyond that. As a nation, we talk about and how we teach our kids. Well, you have the Civil Rights movement. There was mlk, which is always fascinating to me because most people, when they think about his, you know, they only look at the really pretty words, the ones that made people feel good. They don't talk about the ones where he said, you know, white progressives are really not doing their job. And then we, of course, from the MLK days, we skipped to what I call the Obama days and how we instantly wanted to label that post racial. It's like, oh, my God, we've elected our first black president. We're so beyond race. But I would say the events of the past year plus are showing us clearly we didn't go beyond race because we went from our first black president to a man who doesn't want to engage on a deeper level around race. So all of these things, to me, are just indicators of how much more work we actually have to do. And again, you live in Maine. It is to some degree easy to avoid that work because it's easy to go, well, there are no people of color. I don't have any work to do. But the thing is, the work doesn't require people of color to be involved in the process at all. The work actually requires white people to start thinking critically around whiteness and thinking about what does it mean to be white in this country. And, I mean, going beyond Peggy McIntosh's checklist of, you know, my white privileges, but to really think about what has been bestowed upon me by virtue of my skin color and how do I create equity and equality moving forward so that we can get out of this system.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I'm glad that you are putting all this energy into it, because I think it's really important. And even if this is just the beginning of a dialogue that you and I are having about this, I hope people who are listening will think about themselves and also think about their own place within this. This larger structure that you've been describing.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

I think, and I will just because I give this resource to everyone and should mention she's a colleague of mine and a collaborator. But there's a fantastic book that any white person who hears this and is thinking, I have no idea what this woman is talking about. I am not racist. There's a book by a writer by the name of Debbie Irving. Book's called Waking Up White. Debbie is now in her 50s. Yeah, Debbie's in her 50s, but in her late 40s, she started a process of sort of, as she calls it, really waking up. She had grown up fairly wealthy, fairly privileged in New England, never really thought about race. Had done some work at, I think, in Cambridge with communities of color, but never really felt connected. And through a class that she ended up taking when she was in a graduate program, it really made her start to kind of look at race critically and launched her into this whole sort of journey of sort of discovering herself and sort of looking at race, but then looking more critically at the structures which uphold whiteness and racism in terms of housing and redlining in this country and why so many people in this country live in racially segregated areas. And understanding the role that the federal government played, understanding that, you know, World War II, what came out of World War II was the creation of the basically the white middle class. Well, why was only the white middle class created? Why was there not a black middle class created? In part because the black GIs often, when they came back to the states, were not able to take advantage of the benefits that had been promised to them in terms of being able to go to school in order to access the low, you know, the low interest loans. So everything that helped to create the white middle class did not create the black middle class, in part because the federal laws help to uphold certain systems. So that's the work, I would say, that white people need to do. And when you understand that, it becomes easier to go a little bit deeper and to push a little bit harder and to really, as I call it, become a troublemaker.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

All right. Well, I will read that book.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

Great.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yes. I've been speaking with Shay Stuart Boulet, who is the executive director of Community change, a nearly 50 year old anti racism organization based in Boston that organizes and educates for racial equity with a specific focus on working with white people. She's also the creator of the well known blog Black Girl in Maine. Thank you for having this conversation with me.

Shay Stewart-Bouley:

Thank you for having me.