How Denise Gordon Turned Racism Into Empowerment: Lessons on Health, Wealth & Resilience

Hustle Zone

On this episode of Hustle Zone, host Ryan Perez sat down — over a somewhat shaky Fire Talk livestream connection — with Denise Gordon, a Toronto-based entrepreneur, Master of Social Work candidate, and the natural-hair advocate behind the “Embrace Your Kinks” event that Perez’s company, Bow Tie Kreative, had filmed years earlier in Calgary. The conversation ranged from childhood to marriage to money, but at its center was a simple question Perez kept returning to: what shapes a person, and what do they do with it?

Humble beginnings, held together by love

Denise described growing up in Toronto and later Mississauga and Brampton as the only girl among four brothers, in a strict but loving Christian household. Her parents, both born in Jamaica, immigrated to Canada for a better life after childhoods she calls genuinely rough — her mother, she said, walked to school with no shoes and was once burned by an iron because she had none. Decades later, on a trip back to Jamaica to bury her uncle, Denise visited the house where her father grew up and found a family squatting there, including a girl of about 13. “That could have been me,” she recalled thinking, and it moved her to tears.

Her parents have now been married close to 40 years. Denise was candid that there was “always” some tension in any relationship, but said her parents got through it through their Christian faith, deliberate communication, and a shared commitment to doing everything — arguments included — “together.”

Confidence built against the current

That foundation didn’t erase everything Denise had to work through on her own. She described being shy and lacking confidence growing up, and traced part of it to an experience in primary school: a teacher, she said, repeatedly asked her invasive questions about her skin and hands, and she was placed in an ESL class despite English being her first language. She didn’t understand at the time why she’d been singled out, only that it planted a quiet belief that she might not be able to go as far as other kids. She also spoke about wanting straightened hair as a child because she rarely saw anyone who looked like her held up as beautiful — a longing that later fed directly into her adult work in natural hair advocacy.

Asked what she’d tell that little girl now, Denise didn’t hesitate: “You are beautiful. You are special. You are unique. There’s no one in this world that can do what you can do, so go ahead and do it… keep going, you can do it, don’t listen to the naysayers.”

The blood pressure cuff moment

The episode’s health segment centered on a specific, almost mundane turning point. Denise had always been active in sports but never at the physique she wanted, and her weight crept up further after she moved back from Calgary to Brampton. The wake-up call, she said, came when she tried to check her blood pressure at home and the cuff wouldn’t fit around her arm. That moment convinced her she had “no excuse” — she had no children, no diagnosed health issues, nothing stopping her except habit.

She started her lifestyle change on January 14, 2015, after years of failed attempts at raw food, vegetarian, juice-fasting, and smoothie diets. Notably, she kept the journey almost entirely private for more than a year, telling almost no one but close family, because she wanted to prove to herself — not to an audience — that she could follow through. It was only after posting a YouTube video about a hairstyle, and later a workout clip for a Facebook fitness challenge, that people began noticing her transformation and reaching out for encouragement. That response, she said, is what pushed her to start sharing openly on Facebook Live and Instagram.

Health as a community issue

When Perez connected the conversation to Black Lives Matter, Denise reframed health as a holistic and communal issue — physical, mental, spiritual, and cultural — and pointed to a shortage of visible health and fitness role models in Black communities, especially women, as something she wants her own story to help fill.

Denise closed the conversation by thanking Perez for making her first Fire Talk experience easy, and shared her Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook handles (all under variations of “Denise H Gordon”) for listeners who wanted to follow her natural hair and wellness content. Perez, in turn, plugged Bow Tie Kreative’s disabilities empowerment program, which donates free websites to entrepreneurs with disabilities.