Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Zerandrian Morris. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Zerandrian , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

I have two businesses: The Ignant Intellectual® Group & Funny Acting Black Girl™. Funny Acting Black Girl was trademarked in June 2022. The official formation year of The Ignant Intellectual Group is 2018 although I have been doing (what is now being termed) DEI work for at least 20 years.

The Ignant Intellectual® Group is a Racial Equity Strategy Group that guides organizations and companies through the process of transforming themselves into anti-racist places of business. We explore current policies/practices, think through the “blind spots” in organizational culture and develop small scale strategies resulting in large-scale systems change.

Funny Acting Black Girl™: The Mischaracterized Black Girl Brand is a response to the dehumanization of Black girls, Black non-binary people, Black femmes & Black women. Its mission is to highlight the various ways that we are misunderstood & mischaracterized. Our current catalyst for achieving this is via clothing. My ultimate goal with Funny Acting Black Girl is to present a more expanded (thus humanizing) perspective about Black girls, Black non-binary people, Black femmes, & Black women.

Candidly, both of my businesses are monetizations of who I am as a person. I didn’t have to go very far to get the ideas for them; I went inside myself. My sun is in Libra and both businesses reflect the deep & profound “both/and” nature of who I am at my core. They force me and others to reckon with what often feels like realities that cannot co-exist, but do. Realities that are in perpetual tension.

I created the name “The Ignant Intellectual” way back in my Tumblr blogging days. I am both Ignant and I’m an Intellectual (not relegated to academia). I’m the person who can have you cracking up and in deep thought at the same time. I challenge what we (think we) know to be true.

The name Funny Acting Black Girl is my taking something I’ve been called all my life “funny acting” and making a business out of it. Have you ever been called stuck up, standoffish, sometimey or FUNNY ACTING? When really you may simply be hungry, sleepy or ain’t feel like comin?!? Or maybe something a bit deeper like overwhelmed, introverted, or experiencing a moment of anxiety. Funny Acting Black Girl is really a way for me to say “DAMN! CAN WE LIVE?!”

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

Whew chile. Let me try and make this answer concise for your readers!

I will begin with my formal education. I am formally trained as an Epidemiologist & Biostatistician. I have two public health degrees from Tulane University School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine. I have always been good at math & science. My mother is a retired NICU nurse (who also spent part of her career in the Psychiatric Ward as well as in Labor & Delivery) so science was just always around me. I also grew up in a home that provided me an unearned structural advantage by providing me access to encyclopedias, programs rooted in the sciences, family friends who were in the sciences, etc. For my 8^th grade science project back when I still wanted to be a Cardiothoracic surgeon, my mother somehow got me two real pig hearts for my science fair display. One, I dissected and labeled the inner anatomy and the other I left whole and labeled the outer. I kept those hearts in preserving fluid in my childhood bedroom until Hurricane Katrina. I am convinced I would still have them otherwise! Needless to say, my mama allowed me to explore my creative brain in pretty much whichever way I wanted (as long as them grades was right!)

Regarding my training in Public Health: Even though I am an Epidemiologist & Biostatistician, my studies were rooted in Social Epidemiology. So not just that HIV can lead to AIDS, but Ok we know that, but what is it about people’s worlds that results in Black people being disproportionately impacted by HIV. Because you wasn’t neva gon make me believe that it’s just because we are inherently deficient! NO MA’AM, PAM.

That specific asking of “Why” lead me to studying the societies in which people live versus just studying the diseases that people have. FUN FACT: Until I was in my early 20s, I was headed to medical school. My entire life until then, I wanted to be a Cardiothoracic Surgeon. Recall the pig hearts! I am from New Orleans and I was at every Xavier University summer science program they had (Math Star, Chem Star, Bio Star, you name it Zerandrian was there). I got accepted to Spelman College as a Chemistry Major who participated in the college’s Pre-Freshman Summer Science Program. Lissennnn, you couldn’t tell me I wasn’t going to med school. I even took the MCAT. TWICE! Then after a series of events (long story), I realized that I was far more interested in the sociology of people versus individual disease.

All of that somehow lead me to The Ignant Intellectual® Group: my service-based business that provides racial equity strategy services. You may have heard of the term DEI which stands for Diversity. Equity & Inclusion. In 2023, that would be a familiar umbrella my business falls under. Who knows what we gon be calling it next year! What this business does is guides companies & organizations through a process of becoming as anti-racist as possible. That can look like workshops, trainings, strategy sessions, organizational evaluations, equity audits, etc. HIRE US! www.TheIgnantIntellectualGroup.com.

My newest baby: Funny Acting Black Girl™ is a product-based business (that I will likely be expanding) that uses clothing & other apparel to highlight the various ways that Black girls, Black non-binary people, Black femmes & Black women are dehumanized and pigeonholed. We are often mindlessly pegged as being standoffish, sometimey & funny acting instead of allowing us to be full humans who experience things like anxiety, hunger, overwhelm, underwhelm, attraction, etc. SHOP WITH US! www.FunnyActingBlackGirl.com.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

I wouldn’t say it was a side-hustle as ain’t nothing side about this! But, The Ignant Intellectual® Group is an example of me taking my full-time job and making them my client.

My last formal full-time role was a combination of my formal education (Public Health) meets my unpaid passion (challenging people’s beliefs). I was the Lead Racial Equity Trainer at the country’s largest city health department. My primary role was to facilitate racial equity trainings called “Core Workshop”. Every agency employee was mandated to take Core Workshop, so it was a very busy and very visible role. I also spent a lot of time creating strategy and guiding divisions through ways to make the agency more equitable.

About a year into that job, I knew that it wasn’t personally sustainable for me. By the time I resigned, I was managing a cohort of 40+ staff co-facilitators and personally coordinating and facilitating no less than six 8-hour workshops per month. As well as leading individual strategy work across multiple divisions. NOPE! So I began strategizing my exit.

Given the volume of work I was doing, I was severely underpaid and I was physically becoming exhausted so I began viewing my job very differently; I began seeing it as my future client. I began exploring and understanding the process of becoming a M/WBE vendor, I began exploring how much contractors & consultants in my field were being paid by my agency (which made me even more mad when I looked at my own pay). Just to provide some clarity, my agency is the country’s largest city health department with an annual budget of $1.6 billion and more than 7,000 employees throughout NYCs five boroughs & a sizeable percentage of that 1.6 went to contractors and consultants. I WANTED A PIECE OF THE PIE. So I began looking at the sheer size of my agency and started shifting my mindset from employee to business owner & eventual agency consultant. Within about a year and a half, I had transitioned from full-time employee and am now a consultant for the agency.

Some key milestones for me was for one, I shifted how I saw my job. I began asking knowledgeable people key questions, I meditated on who to tell my plans to and which pieces of my plans to tell. I started scheduling meetings with key folk in HR, communications, etc. I began identifying what things I would want in place if I were a client, etc.

Actually, as I think of it, I have laid out a lot of my thought-process on this process in two places:
1) I created a 20-Page Career Transition Guide
(https://theignantintellectualgroup.thrivecart.com/career-transition-guide/)

2) I created a 4-part 7-session conversation series called “DEI Beyond the 9-to-5” (https://theignantintellectualgroup.thrivecart.com/dei-series-1-recordings/)

These two offerings are specifically for professionals ready to take strategic risks to leave their 9-to-5 and build a brand.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

One of the biggest lessons in life I had to learn is how to go from “a scarcity mindset” to “an abundance mindset”.

I am well-versed and quite astute at writing to get funding, scholarships, etc. AKA “My poverty story” as a lot of what’s required in those spaces is crafting a story of lack. From young, many of us are molded and shaped into telling our story in that way. You may have heard of it as “resilience”, “perseverance”, “determination”, etc. But the foundation for those narratives is often a deficit model. Otherwise, what exactly did we persevere from? What was demanding our resilience? whispers WHITE SUPREMACY!

That mindset as well as seeing my immediate world (the Hollygrove neighborhood of New Orleans) was absolutely one of lack. I was not always able to articulate that I grew up in a home where I had unearned structural advantages (a/k/a privilege). Why? Because I was told so frequently that I was the exception to the rule, that I was from a single-parent home in an impoverished city. That I had to leave home to “make it” meaning abandon all that I know, all WHO I know in order to be “successful”. That’s JACKED UP!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.FunnyActingBlackGirl.com AND www.TheIgnantIntellectualGroup.com
• Instagram: @FunnyActingBlackGirl AND @TheIgnantIntellectual
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheIgnantIntellectual/ AND https://www.facebook.com/funnyactingblackgirl
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zerandrianmorris/
• Twitter: @FunnyActingBG AND @IgnantIntellect