Overnight Wisdom

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. In today’s episode, Chisom turns to a word used to describe almost anything a woman does: choice. And to the lawyer who coined the term Choice Feminism in 2006 specifically as an indictment. Linda Hirshman’s target was the “alleged free choice” of affluent women leaving careers, her argument being that calling a dec...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. In this episode, Chisom turns to the word meritocracy, and to the man who coined it in 1958 specifically to warn against it. Michael Young’s satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy , predicted exactly the trap the word now sets, a society that tells the people on top their position needed no explanation beyond their own...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. What do you do when the world feels relentless? In this episode, Chisom reflects on the exhaustion of living through overlapping crises, the limits of individual action, and the pressure to keep caring, speaking, building and responding even when your own capacity is running low. From Palestine and Congo to politics...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. Politics is much bigger than elections, parties and parliament. It shapes the rules, resources and conditions we live inside every day — often so deeply that we stop noticing they were ever decisions at all. In this episode of the Power series, Chisom  explores what political power actually is, how it differs from s...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions.  Why do some voices become recognisable, trusted and consequential while equally talented people struggle to be heard? Becoming hard to ignore is not about becoming famous or accumulating hundreds of thousands of followers. Media power is relative. A small, highly relevant audience can create far more opportunity an...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. You can earn a lot of money and still have very little financial power. You can own a home and still be financially trapped. You can have a good salary and still be unable to leave a bad job. You can have access to credit and still be one emergency away from losing control of your choices. So what actually counts as...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. What if most of what we call power is not actually power at all? We often confuse power with confidence, charisma, visibility, status, access, representation, influence, or simply having a seat at the table. But none of those things necessarily tell us who can decide what happens, whose decisions become reality, or...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. What happens when we become exceptionally good at naming harm, but remain largely powerless to stop it? In this episode, Chisom moves the conversation beyond resilience, recovery, and even systems change, towards something we often seem uncomfortable naming: power. Because care after harm matters. Healing, and repre...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. In this episode, Chisom looks at the archetype most workplaces are designed for. The same behaviour, ambition, directness, dissent, refusal to conform, is coded differently depending on who performs it. One person’s vision is another person’s attitude problem, and the line between the two follows race, gender, class...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions.  Most organisations have values. Most of those values do not survive contact with pressure. When budgets tighten, when the market shifts, when someone powerful is challenged, the stated commitments to inclusion, openness, and psychological safety tend to collapse quietly, and the people who trusted them are left hol...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions.  People carry the cost of poor leadership long after the work is done: self-doubt, burnout, diminished confidence, the slow work of rebuilding trust in their own judgment. We call it personal struggle. It is not. It is the uncounted cost of a system that measures leadership by what it achieves and never by what it l...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. In Chapter 12, the final episode of this part of the series, Chisom returns to Chapter 1 and settles the word. She traces white supremacy to a defeated colonist of Saint-Domingue who in 1802 called it an axiom while the enslaved were beating France, and to the indemnity France then imposed on Haiti, paid for a hundr...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. In Chapter 11 of the series, Chisom turns the diagnosis onto the reader and refuses the question they arrive with. “What can I do to fix this?” is a trap, because its only honest answer is that you cannot, and the despair is what the structure needs. She replaces it with the question that cannot be escaped, “what am...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. In Chapter 10 of the series, Chisom turns to coloniality, the empire that stayed behind after the empire left, the quietest form of the machine and the one that leaves no graves because it no longer needs them. Colonialism was the occupation, the flag and the date it ended. Coloniality is what did not end, the ranki...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. In Episode 9 of the series, Chisom turns to the border, and to the passport as the last clause of the colonial contract. It opens on a boat that left Sfax for Lampedusa in January 2026, on the twin girls about a year old who died of cold within sight of Europe, and refuses to call them a tragedy, because the water d...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. In Chapter 8 of the series, Chisom turns to the secular machinery that took over the work, science, and the lie it was used to build, the invention of race. The claim is that power took the authority of science and manufactured race, to give an ancient hierarchy the one disguise almost impossible to argue with, the...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. In Chapter 7 of the series , Chisom turns to the institution that blessed all of it, the church. The claim is that Christianity was not incidental to white terrorism but its moral machinery and a material instrument of conquest, the apparatus that turned terror into salvation so the people carrying it out believed t...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions.  In Chapter 6 of the series, Chisom turns to the Black American experience itself and argues that it is not a closed chapter of history but the longest-running case of white terrorism on earth. The claim is that slavery in America never ended, it changed clothes, renaming itself in every generation while the line of...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. In Chapter 5 of the series, Chisom turns to what the operating system does when it compounds. The claim is that compounding is multiplicative, not additive: when rac!sm meets patriarchy meets ant!-Blackness, the result is not the sum of three harms but a third condition that neither rac!sm nor patriarchy alone becau...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. One year of Overnight Wisdom. Whew! On May 28th, 2026, my podcast turned one. One year of conversations, solo reflections, tech issues, learning in public, and occasionally wondering why I added one more thing to my already full life. Here are 8 things I’ve learned: 1. Start before you are ready. Your first episode...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. In episode 4 of the series, Chisom turns to the operating system that white terrorism built: racism. The chapter opens with the precise distinction between racial prejudice and racism: prejudice is what individuals carry, racism is what happens when racial prejudice meets systemic power. The chapter traces the const...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. In this episode of Overnight Wisdom, Chisom sits down with Logan McClure Davda , CEO of TED , for a layered conversation on leadership, systems change, joy, motherhood, power, and what it means to remain human while building institutions that shape the world. Logan reflects on her path from mission-driven work in Ea...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. In Chapter 3 of the series, Chisom turns to the present tense. Settler colonialism is not a phase that European empires went through and emerged from. It is a structure that continues to operate, on every populated continent, in 2026. The chapter opens by naming the three forms of white terrorism’s modern operation:...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. In Part 2 of a series, Chisom traces the long history of white terrorism in Africa as one continuous story rather than a list of incidents. Twelve and a half million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic between 1501 and 1866. Roughly 1.8 million died during the Middle Passage itself. The trade buil...

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. In Part 1 of a series, Chisom challenges the term “white supremacy” and proposes a language change: it is white terrorism. She traces the term to its 1824 origins, maps the papal bulls that gave genocide divine authority between 1452 and 1493, and shows how the Doctrine of Discovery is still embedded in U.S. and int...