Episode 157: Colorism, How We Get Free with Dr. Sarah L. Webb

In this episode, Leslie sits down with Dr. Sarah L. Webb, founder of Colorism Healing, internationally recognized expert on colorism, and author of a brand new book releasing July 7. Dr. Sarah is an author, channeler, and spiritual coach who has spent more than two decades transforming learning experiences for diverse groups around the globe, with features on MTV, Forbes, Fox, TED, and NPR.

Leslie and Dr. Sarah talk about colorism as spiritual work, soul work, and ancestral work, not just a social or political issue. They trace Dr. Sarah’s Chiron placement in Gemini, the astrological signature of the wounded healer, and how it shaped a body of work built directly from her own lived pain. Dr. Sarah explains why naming a painful experience matters: having language for your reality, she says, “helps you to survive that reality, and maybe reshape it,” a principle she borrows from James Baldwin.

The conversation moves into colonial mentality and internalized oppression, with Leslie sharing her own experience growing up Filipino in a mixed family in Hawai’i, where colorism showed up inside her own household. Dr. Sarah reflects on how some of the deepest wounding around colorism comes “from people that we would expect to love us the most,” and why that makes it a uniquely complicated form of pain to heal.

Dr. Sarah also opens up about building courage as an intentional practice. Before launching Colorism Healing, she made courage her word of the year and worked at it daily. She describes sitting with her hand on the publish button for her very first blog post on colorism for thirty minutes straight, “palms sweaty,” before finally posting it. That post helped her realize what she calls a tipping point: “if you sit with the fear long enough that you will take the courageous action.”

One of the episode’s most personal moments comes when Dr. Sarah describes years of waking up with dread during a period of depression, and the morning that finally shifted: she woke up and “all I heard was, I love you.” She frames it as a long healing process of “pulling the weeds out of the garden of the fear and the anxiety and the self loathing” until what was already there could come through.

The two also discuss the difference between fitting in and belonging, the courage it took for Dr. Sarah to publicly name colorism in a beloved film (Black Panther), and how her book offers “reflections and revisions” as a working document rather than a purely informational read.

About Dr. Sarah Webb

Dr. Sarah L. Webb is an author, channeler, and spiritual coach who’s also an internationally recognized expert on colorism. As the founder of Colorism Healing, Dr. Sarah is a global thought leader. For more than two decades, she has led transformative learning experiences for diverse groups around the globe. Her myriad efforts to address colorism have included designing college courses, hosting an international writing contest, publishing books and peer-reviewed academic journal articles, teaching workshops, and mentoring students across the world from Sacramento to Sydney. Dr. Sarah’s work on colorism has reached world-wide audiences on MTV, Forbes, Fox, TED, NPR, and more.

• Primary Social Links: IG: @drsarahlwebb and @colorismhealing / Threads: @drsarahlwebb
• Website: https://drsarahlwebb.com/colorism
• Order Her New Book, Colorism: The Politics of Skin Tone and How We Get Free