209. Tokenism and Gaslighting at Work with Gabi Day

Aug 8

Identity, Culture, and Work

How do your identities impact the way you show up at work and how you interact with work culture?

Preconceived notions about who we are and how we move through the world, influenced by white supremacy, colorism, and capitalism, can have profound impacts on our working life and our physical and mental health.

And while none of us can extract ourselves entirely from these systems, it may be possible–even necessary–to create new paths for ourselves when we have to say enough is enough.

Gabi Day joins Erica for a conversation about identity, work, capitalism, and her journey out of the corporate world to entrepreneurship.

Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:

How toxic educational and work environments impact mental and physical health
How tokenism and gaslighting uphold systems of oppression
Making the personal political by showing up with your values in life and work

Off the Beaten Path

Gabi left the beaten path of healthcare administration after her disillusionment with the organizational culture caused her chronic health conditions to explode. While stuck in bed with chronic fatigue and pain, Gabi taught herself cosmetic chemistry and started experimenting in the kitchen as she got stronger. In 2017 she launched Bright Body, her own line of nontoxic and refillable hair and skin care. After becoming a mom to twins in 2022, she launched Bright Body Baby, an extension of the line for little ones. Nowadays she is a full-time entrepreneur and stay at home twin mom.

A Family of Progressives

On the Pause on the Play® podcast, Erica (she/her) introduces Gabi Day (she/her), founder and CEO of Bright Body and Bright Body Baby. She frames their conversation about work, corporate culture, and why Gabi left that world by noting that Gabi is mixed Brazilian and white and that her family history includes members who have been political refugees and how that has impacted Gabi’s commitment to living her values and her politically progressive views.

Gabi says that both she and her sister picked up the thread of political activism passed down from their Brazilian grandfather, who was targeted by the Brazilian government for his leftist views. She says that her parents are less politically active, but that she and her sister are very vocal.

“I think it’s a product of being born and raised in the DC area, because government is right there and it’s always top of mind. And so that also shows up in how I run the business, in terms of, I’m never afraid to talk about where we stand on certain things.”

Toxic Culture

Gabi says that growing up, she wanted to be an architect, and that her college architecture program is where she first started paying closer attention to the impacts of social culture on corporate culture.

“That very much started the journey to where I am today as an entrepreneur.”

Gabi tells the story of a white, male, legacy admissions student who blatantly told her, “the only reason you’re here is cuz you checked the box.”

She continues, “I’ve heard tropes of that my whole life.” She notes that while she is lighter-skinned now because she doesn’t spend a lot of time in the sun, as a kid, “it was harder to hide my heritage because I was browner.”

She says that comment from her classmate was, “just a symbol of this greater culture of…white supremacy, some racism, elitism, classism in architecture.”

Erica says that a lot of people hearing or reading that story will likely recognize that moment where “I’ve been this person or I’ve witnessed this and I didn’t know what was wrong.”

She continues, “This is why it's so important to understand where your allyship efforts really can show up, how it is that you can support people around you when they're in situations…that there is something that is reminding you of what it is and is not okay to do when it comes to somebody's humanity. Nobody's humanity should ever feel invalidated.”

Impacts on Physical Health

Erica notes that experiences like Gabi’s in college can accumulate and have impacts on not just mental health, but also on the body.

“Sometimes they can feed into or trigger our bodies to respond…The trauma of what we can experience can actually prompt things to come to the surface and bubble up and the next thing we know we are physically unwell.”

For Gabi, chronic illness began manifesting in college as severe nerve pain, fatigue, migraines and other symptoms. She was eventually diagnosed with Lyme disease, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome), which is a disorder of the autonomic nervous system that impacts the heart.

“I couldn’t physically sit at my studio desk…I hit kind of that point where I was so disillusioned with the culture and I physically couldn’t do it. I was like, all right, I need to move on.”

Resisting Being Collected

Gabi decided to pursue a Masters of Health Administration at Virginia Commonwealth University. “It’s a top-rated program. They were super happy to put my face on their promotional materials.”

Erica notes that Gabi having her image used by the college to prop up their image of diversity is another side of the same coin as the classmate who told her she “checked a box.”

Gabi recalls another classmate who, “was very slick. Right from the get, I was like, oh, he’s a social climber…He’s trying to collect me cuz he thinks that it’ll be cool to have an outspoken, smart Latina in his back pocket.”

Erica says she understands exactly what Gabi means by being collected when you’re in an environment that is not diverse.

“People love to be able to say they have a Black friend, an Indigenous friend, a gay friend, a trans friend. People want to be able to utilize you as their, ‘See, I’m safe. See, I know someone. See, I can’t possibly be racist. I can’t be harmful’...That is immensely dangerous thinking. It is wrong.”

She says that when respect for your humanity is lacking or not there, “It can cause people to feel like ‘I’m not safe here, but I can’t pull myself out.’ Or even worse, it can make you question, ‘Am I safe and maybe I’m just overthinking it?’...The system wants us all to believe that it’s never as bad as it truly feels to us and that we need to be able to tolerate it because of the people that it benefits.”

Gabi says with this particular classmate using a racial slur, “He knew what he was doing. He was trying to get a rise out of me. And I would’ve loved to have been like, it’s not working. But it did work because you don’t get to use a racial slur around someone and then have nothing happen.”

But she says that even though she called him on it and tried to explain why it wasn’t okay, he didn’t care.

When she finally reported him to the department chair, she was essentially told to get over it.

“When it came to actually protecting that brown girl that they wanted to parade around [on their promotional materials], they didn’t give a shit.”

She says that even friends defended him and said she shouldn’t have reported him because she didn’t like him.

“Going through that, it could have sent me in two directions. It could have made me kind of wanna shy away from [my culture] because of that experience, but it made me just more emboldened.”

Gaslighting and Mental and Physical Health

Erica pauses to take a moment to define the term “gaslighting,” so that everyone shares the same definition.

From Medical News Today, she reads “Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which a person or group causes someone to question their own sanity, memories, or perception of reality. People who experience gaslighting may feel confused, anxious, or as though they cannot trust themselves.”

Erica says that the kind of gaslighting Gabi experienced around her interactions with this classmate and his use of racist language and tokenization of her, is “what keeps racism going because it makes too many of us that are so intimately close to when it happens unable to always truly recognize it in its large and small forms and have the safety and support to call it out.”

Gabi says, “That experience really shaped how I view my identity and my heritage and how I stand up for it. It made me more unapologetic in my identity.”

But at the same time, the stress of that experience and of being consistently made to hear other people’s stories of racist and sexist behavior, “I just internalized all of it until my health literally exploded and I had to take FMLA. I was basically laid up in bed 24/7…That was the final nail in the concept of a traditional career coffin cuz I knew I couldn’t do that.”

Erica acknowledges the connections of mental and physical health and how we can’t discuss one without the other. For more on how mental and physical health are linked and how they are connected to the experience of gaslighting, racism, discrimination, white supremacy culture, capitalism, etc, Erica suggests checking out the work of three creators: Imani Barbarin (@crutches_and_spice, Blair Imani (@blairimani), and Minds in Motion Therapy (@minds_in_motion_therapy).

She gives the reminder that “you want to receive support when you are trying to navigate your mental and physical health journey. Because doing it alone does not give you all of the aspects that you need, and it can be very lonely and sometimes detrimental.”

The Personal is Political

As Gabi started to build her health back up, she used her love of learning to begin digging into other ways she could help her body and immune system.

She started reading ingredient lists on beauty and cosmetic products, “and then I basically fell down a cosmetic chemistry rabbit hole and never came out.”

As she learned more and more, she started experimenting with formulations in her kitchen and finally launched Bright Body in October of 2017.

Erica says that, “the reality is, that there are detrimental experiences…in our lives, personally, professionally, internally, and externally, and if we have the strength and the capacity to identify what it is that we can do to shift this experience…It still may not all of the sudden become a positive experience…but there’s an opportunity for you to, within your own time…figure out how it is that you can take this negative experience and recognize choices and opportunities within what happened.”

Gabi says that all of her background and experiences show up in the way she runs her business and how she shows up as a values-driven leader and small business owner.

“Even if people are like, well, what does that even have to do with skin and hair care and baby care? I’m like, the personal is political, and this business is personal to me.”

Take Action

Gabi suggests taking action to lean into your identity.

“Things in life tell you to be quieter, be smaller, and then the older I get, the more cozy I’m getting in my own skin and my own identity…I think learning to be more unapologetic in who you are is a pretty liberating experience.”

Ready to dive deeper?

How do I share my values when they aren’t related to my work?

We’ve been conditioned to show up to work as our “professional” self and leave our personal beliefs behind. But the truth is, values inform every area of our life, so why try to compartmentalize?

Each month in The Pause on the Play® Community, we explore one specific way to make your values more explicit. Our curated connections and learning experiences will help you challenge harmful norms, show up as an imperfect ally®, and live in alignment.

Learn more at pauseontheplay.com/community

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