About Mikaila Unmuted: Beyond A Mammy, Mule, & Maid
This season of Mikaila Unmuted, Beyond a Mammy, Mule, and Maid, explores how Black women can shed the roles we were conditioned to carry — the caretakers, the laborers, the silent strength holding everything and everyone together at the cost of ourselves.
These roles were never ours by choice. They were inherited through survival, expectation, and systems that required our exhaustion.
Here, we begin the unlearning. We question what we were taught to be, release what no longer serves us, and reclaim the fullness of who we are — soft and powerful, rested and worthy, complex and free.
This season is not just a conversation. It’s a return to ourselves.
Black Women Are at a Crossroads: Symone Sanders vs. Nikole Hannah-Jones
Professional Black women in America have fought our way into rooms, careers, opportunities, and levels of economic independence that generations before us worked to make possible. But what happens once we get here? In this episode, I unpack the crossroads I see facing professional Black women through the very different choices represented by Symone Sanders-Townsend and Nikole Hannah-Jones. Do we choose access and the security that comes with it? Do we choose the collective, even when that cho...
9 Sept 2026
Why We May Never Have Another Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton’s passing left me wondering: Do we have celebrities like her anymore? But the more I sat with that question, the more I realized this may not be about whether people like Dolly still exist. It may be about how much celebrity itself has changed. Dolly became famous in a world where privacy was still possible. Today, we expect access to nearly every part of a public figure’s life—their politics, relationships, mistakes, beliefs, trauma, and contradictions. And somehow, having more ...
1 Sept 2026
Target’s Racist Costume Wasn’t a Mistake
Was Target’s racist Halloween costume really a mistake? I have a conspiracy theory—but it led me to a much bigger question about corporate power and individual responsibility. Why are ordinary consumers expected to give up the things that bring us ease, pleasure, and joy in order to hold massive corporations accountable? Boycotts can create pressure, but do they actually redistribute power? And why does protecting ourselves from corporate misconduct so often become another unpaid job for ordi...
25 Aug 2026
Jason Arday and the Deadly Cost of Paying the Black Tax
The recent death of Cambridge professor Jason Arday has me questioning one of the oldest lessons many Black children are taught: you have to work twice as hard to receive the same recognition as your white counterparts. But buried inside that lesson is a promise—that if we're exceptional enough, credentialed enough, hardworking enough, we can somehow outrun racism. In this episode, I explore the cost of that bargain: racial battle fatigue, perfectionism, code-switching, overwork, and the phys...
18 Aug 2026
America’s Having a Midlife Crisis. Here’s Why I’m Not.
I’m in the middle of a major life transition—and for once, I know it while it’s happening. In this episode, I’m reflecting on the unexpected beauty of middle age: having enough evidence of your own survival to trust yourself, enough agency to imagine an entirely new life, and enough self-awareness to decide what you want to carry forward and what you’re finally ready to leave behind. I also explore how spirituality has changed the way I move through uncertainty, why I’ve started giving myself...
11 Aug 2026
I Hate Creating Content. So Why Can't I Stop?
I'd make this one slightly more intimate because someone encountering it as a podcast doesn't need as much SEO-oriented setup: I hate creating content. And yet, no matter how many times I want to walk away from it, something keeps calling me back. In this episode, I'm turning the lens inward and asking why being visible feels so difficult for me—even after years of teaching, public speaking, coaching and leading rooms full of people. What starts as a question about content creation becomes so...
4 Aug 2026
Did Obsession Just Prove Black Women Right About Relationships?
What if the people we resent the most are actually the people who believe in us the most? This week, I explore the psychological themes behind the movie Obsession and why I believe it's less about romance and more about accountability, validation, and personal growth. Through the lens of Bear and Nikki's relationship, I examine Red Pill culture, incel ideology, and why accountability is so often experienced as rejection. I also reflect on how this dynamic shows up in Black women's relationshi...
28 Jul 2026
Holding Space for More Versions of Black Women's Pain
What happens when a Black woman refuses to hide her pain? After watching Aniyah's emotional breakdown on Love Island, I found myself asking a much bigger question: Why did witnessing her vulnerability make so many of us uncomfortable? In this episode, I examine my own initial reaction and explore what Aniyah's experience reveals about Black women's emotional expression, internalized survival strategies, emotional safety, generational wealth, healing, and the societal expectations placed on Bl...
21 Jul 2026
The World Cup Proved Anyone Can Be Woke
Every four years, millions of people celebrate diverse teams, immigrant athletes, and multicultural excellence. But the 2026 World Cup also exposed something deeper: many of us embrace diversity when it helps us win, while resisting it in nearly every other context. As a recovering DEI expert, I use this year's tournament to explore why DEI exists in the first place, what it means to compete inside a rigged system, and how the World Cup revealed the difference between celebrating diversity's ...
13 Jul 2026
How Did Black Women Become the Emotional Center of the World's Biggest Dating Shows?
Welcome to Mikaila Unmuted, where we amplify Black women's realities in a world that too often prefers to ignore them. This is the first episode of our new chapter! For generations, society has quietly decided whose pain deserves attention, whose stories deserve empathy, and whose voices can be ignored. Too often, Black women have found ourselves on the wrong side of that equation. But something remarkable is happening. Shows like Love Island have become more than reality television. They've ...
13 May 2026
S01E04 | Until the Lion Speaks, the Hunter Is the Hero — The Podcast Origin Story
BAMMM is a documentary-style podcast exploring the lives of Black women through story, theory, and cultural critique. In this special mid-season episode, Mikaila revisits the conversation that started it all. Recorded before a single episode of BAMMM existed, this intimate dialogue with her close friend Crystal becomes both a podcast origin story and a deeper exploration of the questions at the heart of this season: What happens when Black women stop organizing their lives around survival? Wh...
13 May 2026
BONUS EPISODE | Beyond the Episode: A Live Conversation with Our Ep. 3 Guests
BAMMM is a documentary-style podcast exploring the lives of Black women through story, theory, and cultural critique. In this special live episode, we go deeper into Episode 3: “What You Carry Can Break You — The Refusal.” Together, we unpack what it means to be shaped by systems that reward self-erasure — and how many Black women learn early to suppress their needs, their truth, and their voice in order to survive. But what happens when survival requires you to leave yourself behind? &...
15 Apr 2026
What You Carry Can Break You — The Refusal
BAMMM is a documentary-style podcast exploring the lives of Black women through story, theory, and cultural critique. In Episode 3, we enter one of the most misunderstood parts of any transformation: the refusal of the call. Often framed as fear or hesitation, refusal is something deeper for Black women. It is learned. Conditioned. Reinforced through love and survival. Through the stories of Mishael and Lysandra, this episode explores how refusal doesn’t always look like saying “no” to the wo...
13 Apr 2026
BONUS EPISODE | Beyond the Episode: A Live Conversation with Our Ep. 2 Guests
This episode is a live, unfiltered continuation of Episode 2 of the podcast Mikaila Unmuted—where the conversation goes even deeper. Together with Ashanti, Christina, and Charlotte, we move beyond the stories themselves and into the questions underneath them. We explore the ways identity can both ground us and restrict us…how many of us have been conditioned to perform—for safety, for acceptance, even within our own communities…and what it might look like to stop performing altogether. What u...
18 Mar 2026
A Drum Knows Its Rhythm
In this episode of B.A.M.M. — Beyond a Mammy, Maid, and Mule, we begin retelling the story of everyday Black women — not as side characters, but as the superheroes they’ve always been. Using the frameworks of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and Maureen Murdoch’s Heroine’s Journey, we explore Black women’s origin stories — the moments that shape how we learn to survive, perform, and disconnect from ourselves. Through the stories of three women, we uncover: ✨ How silence becomes safety &...
16 Mar 2026
BONUS EPISODE | BAMMM Live: Three Generations in Conversation w/ Ep. 1 Guests
This is a special bonus episode of B.A.M.M.M. — Beyond a Mammy, Maid, and Mule. After the release of Episode 1, I sat down live with the three women whose stories opened this season — Dr. Yvonne, Piper, and Ashanti — for a multigenerational conversation about identity, family, and what it felt like to hear their lives reflected back through the podcast. Together we talk about: • what it was like to hear their stories told publicly • the patterns that show up across generations of Black women ...
16 Feb 2026
More is Caught than Taught
In this opening episode of Mikaila Unmuted, we journey across five generations of Black women in one family, exploring the stories, survival, and expectations passed from mothers to daughters. Through intimate storytelling, we examine the legacy of always being strong and what it means to begin choosing ourselves when the women before us often could not. This conversation asks: What do we inherit from our female caregivers, how have their lives shaped our own, and how do we evolve that inheri...
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Spotify
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