Somewhere on Sunday: Errinn Whitney

We discuss church, The Fifth Floor, and celebrating Blackness.

For sometime now, I’ve known that I needed to take a new direction with If I’m Being Honest, something I waxed poetic about in my piece “The Personal Essay is Limiting.” As much as I love sharing my story, there is so much more I’m curious about, including the journeys of other people, and that’s how we’ve arrived here.

Welcome to Somewhere on Sunday, a conversation series where I get to know people from all walks of life, through the lens of how they spend their Sunday. I decided to focus on Sunday because it’s a day where people can, typically, choose their own adventure and prepare for the week ahead. The way a person spends their last day of the weekend, and first day of the week, says so much about how they live and what they value.

My first guest for this conversation series is Errinn Whitney, a content creator, experiential producer, film director, and aspiring creative director. Whitney resides in New York City, in one of the internet’s most popular apartments “The Fifth Floor,” which is the name of her content series. Whitney’s journey on “The Fifth Floor,” goes beyond traditional home decor content, and is a celebration and extension of her Blackness. We discuss all of this in detail down below.

Errinn Whitney

Amanda Greenidge (AG): Okay, so the series is called “Somewhere on Sunday.” So when you hear the word Sunday, what does that mean to you? What's the first thing that comes in your mind when you hear that word?

Errinn Whitney (EW): Honestly, “church.”

AG: You talk about church a lot, which I want to get into, but what were your Sundays like growing up?

EW: That's why church comes to my mind. Being Black and from the South, church is just a part of me. I’m really tied to my religion. So Sundays we getting up, we going to church. We might spend all day at church because I have an uncle who is a pastor, so we were going everywhere with him. I was singing in the choir. I was a praise dancer. I spent a large portion of my Sunday in church, and if we weren't in church, like having church, I was teaching a dance class, we were having choir practice. So Sundays, as a child, meant church for me.

Sundays now as an adult, they still include church, they just aren't fully surrounded by it. So I'm going to church in the morning, if I can get up, please, let's be for real. If I can get up, I'm going to physically go there. If I cannot, you will catch me on the fifth floor, on my couch watching it. I'm on the live stream. My mama likes to call it “Bedside Baptist.” So if I'm not physically in the church, I'm at “Bedside Baptist.” And then after church, it's a reset for the week only because my hands are just in so many different things. Sometimes my girls ain't hearing that, and it's “bitch we going to brunch, and I don't want to hear nothing about that get your life in order for Monday.” It just depends on the week.

AG: Okay, so you talked about your Sunday routine now, but you're like church is a part of it, but it's not the whole thing. So take me [through] a typical Sunday, from time you get up to the time you lay down, what is your day looking like?

EW: Oh, let's see. Okay, so imma take you through this Sunday. Let's take you through tomorrow. I'm going to get up, first off fingers crossed for what happens tonight, but I'm going to wake up, I should eat breakfast, but I ain't. I'm gonna get dressed, get to church. I'm gonna to be late. Fight me. I'm going to be late, but I'm like my mama, I like to be in the front. As close to the word as possible.

AG: You’re gonna be making an entrance, walking up to the front.

EW: And that's my mama's fault. My mama used to say, we don't have to preach, we don't have to pray, nor do we have to sang, like girl, we don't have nothing to do in church, but to sit in the pew. We don't have to be on time. That is not proper, okay? But same girl because now I live that wholeheartedly. So I'm gonna get to church, I’m gonna get there late, I’m gonna sit in the front. After church, I have a lot of friends that also go to the same church, so we're gonna keke, “hey girl, hey girl, who's hungry?” If nobody's hungry, we're going to go our separate ways.

AG: But that's probably rare.

EW: Yeah, it’s very rare that we go our separate ways, or that I come directly back to the house. So let's say we go our separate ways. My month of May is full, so I need to pre-pack a bunch of bags; pre-pack for vacation and pre-pack for work. I have a lot of content that I need to shoot. So, I'm gonna come home, I'm gonna try to get all my content in. I'm gonna try to do all the things. But if we don't part ways and we go to brunch…

AG: That’s it. The day’s kind of done, because once you have that first mimosa, it's like…

EW: The thing is, doing an eight hour shift at brunch is crazy work, but we do it all the time. Sally's specifically, we're gonna go and we're going to be there from literally [when] the sun is out, [and] the sun is going to be setting by the time we leave, and we're not going home. Once we leave Sally's, we're going to go to Dick & Janes, [for] sports, prosecco, and a good time.

AG: And then if you do this, you still have to come home and work I'm guessing?

EW: Still have to come home and work, depending on what the next day holds, which is truly always something different, I gotta go to work. Or, I got emails to set for 8 AM because girl, please. I’m gonna schedule fifteen emails, so it looks like I'm at work at eight o'clock and I'm not [laughs]. Or I'm going to edit content that I should have done three weeks ago.

AG: That's interesting, because Sunday you're kind of off, but you're not really, this is also a work day for you. How does that look like when you're trying to set up for the week? Cause you talked about Sunday’s [being] a reset, but then you’re also working. How is this routine sort of preparing you to jump into this next week?

EW: Honestly, for me personally, it doesn't even really prepare me for the week, it gets me prepared for Monday. If I can prepare for the week, cool, but Monday is truly what I'm fixated on. My Monday is wake up at 7 AM, go to the gym, be back on my laptop by 10 - that means I got to shower and eat in between. But from the gym, to showering, to that, I might want to post some content. I'm gonna find myself like this [on the phone]. As much as I try to be really structured in my schedule, I’m human and I'm gonna fall short. I'm gonna be on Tik Tok longer than necessary. Or like, one of my friends will FaceTime me and everything that I thought I was doing [is gone]… now we sitting on the couch kekeing for hours.

Errinn and her friends.

AG: Obviously, [if] we’re talking about Sunday, we're talking about home. You talk about a lot about home, because you talk about The Fifth Floor. Describe the series to people that don't know, and tell me what inspired you to start it. Because I think it's really cool.

EW: Okay, thank you! I think I must preface this, I live on the fifth floor, and I always hold up a four in the video and people are thoroughly confused. People, Black people specifically, lock in. On Martin, there's a character, Bruh Man, and he lives on the fifth floor, but Bruh Man don't got it all, so even when he's referring to the fifth floor, he holds up four [fingers]. When I'm holding up four, I'm smart people, thank you. It’s just a reference, it’s a cultural reference.

I started the fifth floor because I wanted a place to pour my Blackness into that wasn't just me, I think I exude [Blackness]. It's in the way that I talk. It's in the way that I sound. It's in the way that I show up in the world. It's in the way that I dress. But because I don't have kids, I don't have anybody to teach this [to], so The Fifth Floor is my baby. I want to pour in all the things that I've seen and all the things that are important to me into it. The Fifth Floor is not just a home decor, home improvement series, it's a dedication to my Blackness.

AG: I love that, and so I wanted to ask you about your Blackness and being rooted in it and being proud of it. I think it's a complex thing. I think if you haven't lived this life you wouldn't really understand. I love the way you say, like, how I show up, how I talk, whatever, is all showing my Blackness. I think for me…I had my own evolution. This is not about me, but it's just like -

EW: It can be, we can have a joint session.

AG: So my brother, for instance, like, we both grew up down South. My parents are from New York, so they always had that northerner accent. I have some type of weird hybrid accent. My brother, however, like so Black, he has a full southern accent. I'm like, how are we in the same household? I don't understand. But I think for me, having to spend so much time studying, working, living in white spaces, you're unconsciously assimilating. So sometimes I'm like, dang. What would it have been like if I could just fully embrace my Blackness in how I sound and how I show up? And I think my hair for me is part of that…was part of that evolution. So I do want to talk about this thing of like, how do you embrace your Blackness and navigate the world? Because even when you love it, it's like you also have to be in defense of it, right? Because it's not something that's accepted everywhere, though it is imitated everywhere.

EW: [laughs] She talking that shit, she talking.

I just don't know no other way to be, and it's also a struggle for me. Being in corporate America and having the accent that I have, having the dialect that I have, I still struggle going into white spaces and being myself and or, like code switching, even my code switch got an accent [laughs]. My code switch is Black, it's just less Black. And I think because, I don't know what my mother and my father did to me mentally, to make it a switch in my brain [where] I can't be nobody else. I don't know how to show up as anybody else, and not even that I don't know how, I think I've tried for so long. I think when you're younger, the people that are bullying you, the people that are telling you “you should do that, like, you don't need to do this.” But I got older and I started to realize that everything in this life, I have to curate it. If I don't eat breakfast today, it's my fault. It's because I didn't eat breakfast today. It ain't because my mama didn't give me breakfast. You know, if I don't like my outfit, it's my fault.

I feel like I don't let life happen to me because I know that, I try to be in control of all the things. That is not a good thing. My therapist has told me about that, but that's another story for another time.

AG: But you're curating, you're curating your experience.

EW: Literally, I think everything is a curation, and I don't think people understand that. I know that everything isn't positive but try to find the silver lining because it could be so much worse. So in understanding that it could be worse, all I gotta do is change my mindset. All I gotta do is change the way I view it, so I can't be anybody else. It's truly harder for me to be somebody else and hold all the things that I do at the same time.

That’s one less thing I got to do, I can't be you and be a film director and be a content creator and an event producer and be a friend. I can't do all of those things and be somebody else. I think our parents said it all the time, if it ain't one thing, it's another. It's just one thing that I'm pulling that off the plate - imma show up as me. I'm gonna do my best not to offend anybody, I’m gonna do my best not to make anybody feel uncomfortable. But I’m…

AG: But you're you.

EW: I’m me. I can't do anything about that. And also, if I show up as somebody else, you're not getting…you're getting a representative. Do you really like me or do you like who you thought I was?

AG: So bringing it back to Sunday, what's one thing that you would recommend people to do every Sunday?

EW: Now I did this yesterday, but this is also good [for a] Sunday. I recommend you getting on a bike and playing your favorite album. Yesterday, I got on a Citi bike [once] I finished out the work day. My girls were going out. They were like, “you're gonna go with us? No.” I double dog dare you to take a bike ride through the city on your own, cut your favorite album on, take one ear out because safety, please, and just vibe. I road maybe three miles through Brooklyn, and I cut on Renaissance and honey, [sings] “I feel like falling in love.” I had the best time, and it just brought me down. It gave me a moment. So, if you have it, I strongly advise that you go ride a bike, sit in the park, get with yourself outside. The weather is changing. The sun is coming out. Don't do it in the house. Don't do it on the fifth floor. Go outside by yourself and people watch, and listen to your favorite album and then come back.

AG: That's such a beautiful way to ground. I love to be outside on Sunday.

EW: To ground. That's what touching grass is. It's not going outside, specifically; it's going outside and doing nothing. Doing nothing, don't answer no text messages. Put that phone on do not disturb, and cut that hour and a half long album on and just go.

Thank you for reading, you can keep up with Errinn on Tik Tok, Instagram, and YouTube.

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