What was the Dear White Women podcast?

Dear White Women started in April 2019, the result of two biracial Japanese and white best friends of several decades, who regularly discussed the reality of the world for their very multi-ethnic children. 

By virtue of who we are, we would find ourselves in rooms of white women - and we’d get to hear what was said, what was not said, and importantly, what was said when people thought there were no people of color in the room.

With all the power that white women have in our country, we thought, what if we were to help expand the narrative, so they could begin to listen, learn, and take different actions that would shape our workplaces, schools, and communities?  

So, as long-distance best friends do, we stuck a mic in front of our faces and thought maybe we’d have five listeners, all related to us. Lo and behold, six years later, we had hundreds of thousands of downloads, a published book, multiple speaking opportunities, and learned (and keep learning) a ton.

Enter our 47th president, and the dramatic pushback to DEI we see in our society - a complete about-face since the murder of George Floyd back in 2020 - and it made us think. 

Our purpose is to help our society realize that it’s all of us or none of us. That a world that is good for those who are most systematically oppressed, is a world that’s good for all of us. After 270 episodes, we realize that saying “all of us” means talking to all of us, too, and to do that, we need to keep getting into the rooms where it happens. Additionally, the more we’ve learned, the more we’ve also come to understand just how intertwined the systems are that hold us together and keep us apart. This is why we were excited to rebrand in mid-2025, over six years after we started, in a way that allows us to have even wider-ranging conversations than before - to What Do You Mean By That?

Because it’s all of us, or none of us. 

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