What is the bigger picture of systemic oppression? Liana Maneese, the Founder of The Good Peoples Group’s Center on Interracial Relationships dives deep into the concept of “cultural whiteness” and why you cannot disconnect it from eating disorders. As an Afro-Brazilian, Black American, Cis Queer Adoptee, Liana is fascinated by liberation theory and identity navigation. Through her personal experience and academic work, she has an abundance of insight to share on the deeper problems that drive mental health stigma and systemic oppression.
The body is political. The body is the mark of everything. And so we have to remember that no matter what we’re talking about, we have to look at how are these bodies treated.
Liana Maneese
Catch the In This Body Series on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, Amazon, or Google Podcasts
Subscribe to The Recovery Warrior Show on iTunes, Stitcher or Spotify
What You’ll Learn
- Why Liana attached her worth to her physical body
- How eating disorders intersect with colonialism, race, slavery, and gender.
- The ways oversimplifying many issues contributes to problems in mental health and our consumer culture.
- Cultural whiteness and some of its negative effects and how many disorders can be seen as “reflections of whiteness”.
Quotables from Liana Maneese
This is what’s going to save us: reconnecting to our humanity, reminding ourselves that we have bodies. And that our bodies are not insignificant. And they are not here for labor only.
We continue to disconnect over and over and over again, that these are systemic, intentional, oppressive systems that are causing these manifestations that look like depression, anxiety, eating disorders, or more specific issues.
What would the world look like, if we saw ourselves as everything?
Every single thing that we do is a reflection of how we feel about ourselves and others, no matter what it is.
