Community Spotlight: Making Black Education a Priority

By: Myriah Weatherspoon / June 22, 2020

Community Spotlight: A series highlighting Aspire to Her community members and their experiences early in their careers.

Who we’re featuring this week: Myriah Weatherspoon
Position: Investment Banking Analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

You started Diasporic Discourse, an Instagram account sharing lesser known Black history (e.g. Fidel Castro's relationship with Malcom X and Langston Hughes and a spotlight on Bayard Rustin), at the beginning of 2019. What was your inspiration for starting the account and sharing this content specifically, and have you pivoted your content at all in response to the Black Lives Matter movement?

I started Diasporic Discourse in January of 2019 to simply share real-time what I was learning in the classroom at Vanderbilt University. I had always shared excerpts and videos to my personal page and noticed that people would reach out to me for suggestions on how they could continue exploring the content I posted. With a bunch of extra time on my hands as a second semester senior and recognizing that I had access to a privileged learning space, I wanted to create a resource that made black history accessible to all.

Naturally, after graduating I found myself posting less on the page since I was no longer critically engaging with fresh content in the classroom. In April of this year,my sister, who has amassed a following of ~90k on her Instagram blog, encouraged me to post more . Ironically, this was just weeks before the release of the Ahmaud Arbery shooting video, the Amy Cooper Central Park incident, and the George Floyd murder. I found myself sharing relevant content at a time in which people were hungry to expand their knowledge base on race and racism, allowing me to triple my follower base in the past two months alone.

Given the events mentioned above, I’ve tried my best to cater my content to the rage and passion expressed by many in the current environment. As a result, my partner Brianna and I have found ourselves posting content that is primarily focused on the fight for civil rights in the 1960s and 70s, with a specific focus on figures like Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Angels Davis and James Baldwin, whose words are just as relevant today.

In addition to running Diasporic Discourse with your co-founder Brianna, you work an incredibly demanding job as an Investment Banking Analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co. What is your advice for anyone who actively wants to devote time to learning more in a sustainable way, but also works the type of hours you do?

It’s definitely not easy to dedicate your time and intellectual capacity to things non-work related, especially when you’re just starting your career and trying to learn as much as possible within that space. On the weekends, I try to carve out a hour to plan my posts for the week but I can’t say that this always goes as planned. As a result, I’ve had to adopt a “get it in where you can fit it in” type on mentality, meaning If I find myself completing a repetitive task at work that doesn’t require much focus, then I’ll play an interview in the background or listen to an e-book.

Other helpful ways have been following a bunch of informational Instagram pages. Even when I’m busy, I find time to check Instagram a few times a day so I try to fill my feed with content that makes my time spent on social media as productive as possible.

I try to remember that work is only one aspect of my life and that I’d like my legacy to include accomplishments beyond my day to day job. This mindset helps me make time even when I feel like I have none to give.

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