Why I'm Not A Feminist

In this episode of Sh8peshift Your Life, I share why I don’t identify as a feminist—and why that choice is rooted not in rejection, but in remembrance. Drawing from African and Indigenous ancestral wisdom, we explore deeper pathways into the divine feminine that transcend Western frameworks and invite a more sacred, embodied, and expansive understanding of power, balance, and liberation. 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Challenging Feminism: A Personal Perspective
• 4:20 The Yoruba Creation Story: Wisdom from Ancestry
• 10:37 Contrasting Creation Stories: Gender and Society
• 19:01 The Power of the Divine Feminine in African Culture
• 25:38 Beyond Feminism: Embracing Ancestral Wisdom

Transcript

Welcome back, welcome back, shapeshifters. We are back today with a brand new episode. Today's episode is a little controversial, so you gotta listen to the whole episode. Don't just look at the title. But it's why I do not consider myself to be a feminist. So feminism essentially is an ideology that believes in the equality of the sexes, defining the sexes as male and female and believing that women should be treated the same way as men should be treated. Regardless of your sex, you should have equal opportunity in society, equal opportunity as it relates to education, equal pay for equal work, and recognition of the work that sometimes is traditionally assumed to be women's work is still as valuable as the work of men, equal participation in society as it relates to voting, et cetera. Many of you may also be aware of Black radical feminism. Black radical feminism was really a critique of traditional feminism, which was essentially created by white women that really challenge that ideology and on the basis of the intersectionality of what it means to be a black woman. It means to what it means to have a different lived experience and a different reality of what is required for this notion of equality. And there are plethora of black women that have led the notion of black radical feminism and essentially reforming, reshaping, reconstructing the white female led ideology of feminism into an ideology that is more rooted in the experience of African women living in America. And I'm going to challenge all of that. And I'm not going to challenge it on the basis that I believe that equality is not important. I'm going to challenge it on the basis of decolonization and when I say decolonization, mean decolonizing our mind from any ideologies that were birthed through imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy. And feminism being part of that, whether you're talking about feminism or whether you're talking about Black radical feminism, you're talking about an ideology that is in direct response to the system that we have all been placed in this current modern society and the harm that we have experienced as a result of that. And with all things, I believe that the true way to freedom, the true way to liberation, the true way to more expansive views is to always go back to source, to always go back to the root and to always go back the lineage that flows within my bones, the blood that flows within my veins and to seek counsel to seek support, to seek guidance from the knowledge and the wisdom of those that came before me, because I know that they have already had to encounter the realities that I'm currently facing. So when I am faced with a challenge, when I am faced with a question, when I am faced with a space of unknowing, that I can always draw on the spiritual inheritance of those that came before me, I can draw on that cachet and I'm not just drawing on the cache of my immediate grandparents or great grandparents. I'm drawing on the cache of the first humans that walked upon the planet. I'm drawing on the cache of some of the greatest empires that ever existed in the world. And so I'm drawing on the wisdom of ancient Africa. So a story that I'd like to share with you all today is the Yoruba creation story. We know that the Yoruba people represented people in West Africa. They were a tribe, they are a tribe of people who you can find in parts of Ghana, Nigeria, all the way into Togo and Benin. We know that the cosmology of the Yoruba people, although is extremely prominent today, that its roots are grounded in the cosmology of all people in West Africa and so although the Yoruba people may be the most prominent and often that is because they were the largest and last group of enslaved Africans to arrive in the New World. And so because they were large and because they came towards the end, their practices seemed to dominate in terms of how we synthesize those traditions with our own experiences living in the quote unquote new world. But we know that the roots of Yoruba culture are found throughout West Africa. And we know that West Africa is where the majority of the African people who were transported through the transatlantic slave trade, because we know that there were people here before. They came before Columbus, let's not forget. But we know that of those people, many of them came from West Africa. We also know that when you go even further back and you find the roots of those empires, whether you're talking about the Yoruba Empire, whether you're talking about the Malian Empire, that you can find that in parts of Central Africa, and you can trace it all the way back to ancient Kemet, also known as Egypt, which is the beginning of one of the greatest civilizations of all time. So we find breadcrumbs from ancient Kemet, down into South Africa, through Central Africa dotting its way throughout West Africa and then finding itself again here in the New World. So in the Yoruba creation story, we are able to, through the stories of our lineage, of our ancestors, knowing that the Yoruba people were talking about a 10,000-year documented history, a 10,000-year documented calendar. Like every culture, we all have our own ways of describing the creation of the Earth and in the creation story, we learn how societies feel about the world, how they think, how they think about women, how they think about men, how they think about life. If I was to stop and really go into the Abrahamic creation story of Adam and Eve, what do we learn? We learn that Adam and Eve were in a garden. The garden was given to them by God, God being man. We don't know how Adam was even created. excuse me. He was created by God's rib, even though we know that biologically all life comes from the womb. But okay, we're going to let that go. somehow Adam and ended up in the garden. The garden has all the things, all the fruits, all the things that they were not to eat. The one fruit, the forbidden fruit. And who was it that tempted him to eat that fruit? It was the woman, because you know, she's just a temptress. She's messing up the whole world, the whole order of things. And so also we see the role of the snake, the snake also representing a negative energy. And so we see that in the Abrahamic Christian story of creation, that the downfall of humanity was a collaboration between a snake and a woman. And they got together essentially and brought the man, Adam, off course which contributed to all of humanity being off course. We know that the snake is something that you see on all of the pyramids. You'd see the snake represented as the third eye. We know that the third eye is connected to intuition. Snakes shed their skin and they regenerate to form new life when you were looking at the Mayan calendar, where you were talking about the Dogon people, whether you were talking about Chinese astrology, many ancient cultures have the symbolism of a snake represented. And of all the cultures, it is only European culture specifically that have demonized the snake and that make the snake negative and literally associated with the devil. So everybody else was revering the snake. We can even go... to Benin  right now and they have python temples where you are not even allowed to kill a python because it is considered taboo. So we see how they think about nature. We also learn how they think about women. Women literally were the contributing factor for the downfall of humanity. We also learn that they believe that creation can come from a man, even though that is biologically impossible. So creation stories matter.
They're not necessarily true. I think every culture's creation story, it's really what you believe, but they do tell us and give us clues into how a society believes its cosmology, its values, its character. So when we contrast that with the Yoruba creation story, this is a story where we begin with Olo Dumare, Olo Dumare, Olo Dumare representing God Contrary to popular belief, indigenous cultures believe in one God. And we believe that there are other forces, there are other intermediaries, there are other entities, that God is not the only entity in the universe because we live in a multi-dimensional universe. So Olo D'Omare represents God, if you will, the highest expression of the divine, the eternal, the one that is always was and always will be Olo dumare represents a genderless spirit. is not connected to being male or female. It is the holder of the consciousness of life. And as that consciousness wanted to express itself, it began to decide that it wanted to create the planet Earth. And in this, we find that there are entities that were living in a place called heaven So again, we see this idea of heaven, this idea that there are entities that dwell in other realms, but have to come down, that those other realms are above, and that they come down from those other realms in order to come to the planet Earth. So in that story, Olo Dumares sent several male expressed entities and one female expressed entity down to build the planet Earth. And they were given an instruction by Ola Dumade, your job is to work together to go build the earth. And so the men got to work and the men got to work to build the planet earth. And everything they did, did not work. They would take one step forward and take five steps backward. They were it would hit breakthrough in one area and then they'd have a fall and a challenge in another. It was like everything that they were trying to do to create the earth just wasn't working. And they were like, what's up with this? You know what saying? We were appointed by God. We're down here. We're doing our job. We're on our divine assignment. We out here building the earth. So yeah, they went back to Ola Dumade and they were like, yo, we're listening. We did what you told us to do. We're down here building the earth and nothing's working. What's up with that And Olo Dumare said, well, I told you to work together. And they said, we are working together. And he said, but wait, you left out Oshun. Oshun. Oshun representing the only female entity that was charged with building the Earth. And as I said, the men got to work, but they left Oshun out. They were like, What is she gonna do? I mean, we're the men, we got this. We're taking care of it. He said, I told you to work together. And because you are not including her and working together, you will not be able to build the earth. You will not be able to finish this grand assignment. Not only are you charged with working with her, but because you left her out, you actually need to go apologize. You need to appease her. You need to bring her gifts and bring her sacrifices and ask her for forgiveness so that she will work with you so that you can complete your assignment. And they did that. They appeased Oshoon. They apologized to Oshoon. And they said that we will include you. Please come with us, work with us. Let us build this earth together. And in the end, they were successful. They were successful in building the earth and so what do we learn about this creation story as it relates to society that one heaven is the first home of humans that then came down to build the planet Earth. We also learn that although multiple men were sent, only one woman was required. And so we are learning that the strength of all the men combined was not sufficient over the strength of one woman If we were to go further and study the power of Oshun, we know that Oshun represents an entire state in Nigeria. We know that Oshun is connected with an entire river. Like all female spirits in the Yoruba pantheon are connected to bodies of water. We know that Oshun to this day 2025, y'all, to this day. We're talking about a 10,000 year tradition. It's 2025. You can see people speaking to the power of Osun, everyone from Beyonce to your favorite EFA practitioner. So we're talking about displaced Africans being taken in chains to Brazil, to Cuba, to Haiti, to America, to Mexico, throughout Latin America and we see that the power of Osun, that her songs, her dances, her name and her tradition still lives on and that the Osun Festival that is held in August in Osun State at the Osun River is still one of the largest African festivals on the planet. So we see the significance and the role of women and when we go even further into how this then impacted Yoruba society, we find a society that does not have pronouns. There are no pronouns in Yoruba culture. We find a society that names you based on attributes that are going to support you in the fulfillment of your destiny. We do not have gendered names. So if Osun is the entity that is here to support you in the fulfillment of your destiny, you may receive a Yoruba name with Oshun in it. It has nothing to do with whether or not you are biologically born female or born as a male. We also find in Yoruba culture, the term for king is oba. Oba is not limited to being a male or a female. It means ruler. Even when we talk about king, we know that king can be male or female. And so when we have this idea of queens, we always talk about queens and she's a queen that actually queen is not even a word that was used in Yoruba culture. Ruler was the word that was used in Yoruba culture and ruler could be male and could be female. We also know that when we look at the continent of Africa, right? Moving beyond just the culture of the Yoruba people. We find that this is a continent that produced more female rulers than all other cultures combined. I'll say that again for the people in the back. We find a culture that produced more female rulers than all other cultures combined. We can go all the way back to the erection of the pyramids and look in ancient Kemet. We find a society that allowed women to be rulers, that allowed women to be educated, that allowed women to own property. And so over and over we're confronted with the reality of the lived experience on the continent of Africa being a lived experience where women were free. As an ancestor Ibae Mama Zogbe, who has done phenomenal work with the Mamiwatas and the Sibyls and the Primordial Mothers. Please go check out her work. She's an ancestor now. She reminds us that the African woman was the first free woman. She was the first woman born free. She was the first woman that did not have to deal with the shackles of patriarchy. She was the first woman who was allowed to be fully accepted in her own self as the full embodiment of herself. Even when we come and we look at Orisha like, yeah, my primordial mother. We see Oya is the one who wore pants. We see Oya is the one who grew a beard. We see Oya as the one who stood next to the King Shango and fought on the battlefield as a warrior. We can look at the Amazonian warriors of the Beimin Empire. We know that there were battalions that were all females. So we find females. We find biological females in all aspects of leadership and rulership in society pre-colonization. So when we talk about equality of the sexes and we talk about feminism, I don't need to reach into the ideology of Europeanism to find liberation, leadership, and rulership amongst women. That I can actually go into my own lineage and I can find multiple examples throughout the entire continent. And I argue that if you really go even deeper in history, you can find how many of these primordial mothers, many of these goddesses, many of these pantheons of women, such as the pantheon of ISIS, went on and began to settle throughout the Mediterranean, throughout Europe, Latin America, and the entire planet. And so we see this influence of divine rulership. I want to make a note around divine rulership because we know that many of these societies were matriarchal, matril focal, which meant that the only way that even a man could rule was through the blood. We talked about the power of blood in the last, so you had to be a direct descendant of a female who was a queen in order to even be a king. Royal blood was passed down through the woman so here we find a society who has multiple examples of the power of the divine feminine, the power of being a woman. And so I often use this as an example to teach, especially younger people about the power of knowing who you are and knowing your history. Because if you don't know who you are and you don't know your history, you will wake up in a society that has now degraded black femininity and black women and women as a whole at the absolute bottom. And we literally have flipped everything upside down to where now women tend to be at the bottom of the leadership totem pole. We know that when we look at women and black women in the hierarchy of the planet, white men being at the top, the bottom is black women. And so growing up or waking up as a child, in the society, particularly a child who is living in the body of a black woman, it's easy to think, well, you know, I need to be equal to a man. And so unfortunately, the man that you see at the top is the white man. And that white man is living in his culture, in his ideology. He doesn't even acknowledge the fact that you can't be born without coming through the womb. He's thinking that you can make a man out of his rib he's calling the female conspiring, literally conspiring with the devil for the downfall of all men. So the only place that you can go from that is you have to then pull it out of that ideology. You have to pull feminism as your buoy, as your protector, as your shield to patriarchy. It makes sense. And I could even go further because if you literally look at the two factors that were the critical forces of colonization. You find brute force and you find religion. It wasn't just that they had guns. They brought Bibles. It wasn't just that they brought Bibles, they built churches. It wasn't just that they built churches. Those churches became the first schools. Those churches became the first universities. Those universities created the ideologies that produced feminism. So you actually find an ideology that came out of the same institutions of oppression that we're claiming we're here to combat. And when we use words like equality, because we're now using the language of our oppressors, we're using the English language. Remember, all these cultures have their own indigenous language. When you learn other languages that are not Abrahamic, that are not Latin, you find nuance you find learning in words, languages that don't have pronouns. When you have languages that consider ruler to be genderless, you learn about how a society functions, what a society's values are, your original values, not the values of the society that you have been placed in because of slavery. So we're able to get back to and reconnect with those teachings and form our own discernment and critical thinking of how we then choose to navigate those structures. So this idea of equality, we miss the nuance. Because when we think of equality, we just think of you put one thing on one side of the scale, you put another thing on the other side of the scale, and it's equal, we want to be equal, equal, equal. But inequality, we miss the inherent gifts that are unique to those of us who are born with wombs, to those of us who bleed with the cycles of the moon and the ebb and flow of the sea, you miss the nuance of the wisdom that in the creation and the birthing that can only be given by the woman. Even when you look at the word baba, baba in Yoruba culture, baba we often think Baba means father, right? Because what we do because of those imprints is we only can equate our learning with European language. So we say, baba, father. But when you study the root of the word baba, baba means to shield. Baba means to protect. When we say someone is my baba, they are not just your father. They're not just the sperm donor. Baba is the one who shields. It is the one who defends. And sometimes you can't just put the power of that divine masculine and the power of the divine feminine, the one who is here to give birth, the one who is here to nurture, the one who is here to receive, the one who is here to intuit. You can't just put those two things on a scale and call them equal. They're different. They're special. They're beautiful. They're unique. They're so much more than just being equal. We lose the nuance and the uniqueness and the power of the purpose of what these words mean. And we lose the critical analysis to really overstand what our ancestors understood. And so that is why I do not consider myself to be a feminist because feminism falls so short of the full expression of who I am and what my power is as someone that is born with a womb. That someone who is a direct descendant of the mitochondrial DNA of the first woman that was sent down on the planet ocean. This powerful woman who became a leader, a ruler that an entire state is named after her, that she is one of the most prolific and profound and renowned embodiments of spirit of African spirituality to this day. So why would I reach into the vassals of feminism for my own liberation when I can reach into the inheritance of my lineage for my own human expansion? That is what I have for you today, Shapeshifters. It's short and sweet. I invite you as your homework to explore these ideas, to learn more about other creation stories, to learn more about the Yoruba creation story, and to always analyze the continent, to analyze all indigenous cultures pre-colonization. Because often when we go even to Oshun State, I'm going say now You're looking at a colonized state. You're not looking at a state that is completely connected to its original beingness because that beingness has been disrupted through slavery, degradation, extraction, and exploitation. So we have to be called in this time on the planet to begin to open up our third eye, to begin to open up to new worlds that existed beyond. Because we are living in a multi-dimensional universe that reminds us that the further you go forth in the future, you still come back to the past, that we are in a cyclical relationship. And if you don't know who you are, you gonna be out here willy-nilly. And then you open yourself to other ideologies. So once you accept the feminist ideology, You then accept the race ideology, which is also a construction. We start accepting all these other ideologies because they're the only ones that we've been taught because we don't have the foresight to go further back. We have received a treasure trove of information and scholarship from those that walk the earth before us to allow us to receive the wisdom and the guidance that can be the North Star to help us navigate and draw upon these powerful teachings because inequality is real. It doesn't mean inequality is not real. It does not mean that sexism doesn't exist, but it gives me a richer trove of knowledge and a depthness of awareness that I can pull from when I can pull from an entire creation story versus pulling from an ideology out of somebody's textbook out of someone's university, out of someone's church that was part of the exploitation that got me in the situation I'm with. You feel what I'm saying? Like, where do we pull from that? How do we then reimagine? What are we drawing from? So no, I don't consider myself a feminist. There's so much more that I can pull from that is so much greater and expansive, that yes, I am always and forever into the sovereignty of being repositioned in my rightful place, on my rightful throne of the divine feminine. And that is what we're being called to do today. Okay. That's it for today, Shapeshifters. I hope you enjoyed. I'll see you next time. Until then, keep shifting Supreme gratitude for tuning in today, Shapeshifters. Your presence is a gift and I truly appreciate you. If you're feeling like it's time for an energetic reset, I got you. Download my free chakra tune-up, a transformative seven-day guide to realign your energy, harmonize with nature's rhythms, and recharge your spirit. Head on over to shapeshiftyourlife.com.