How I Built This with Guy Raz - Live From The HIBT Summit: Rashad Robinson

Episode Date: August 26, 2021

We have our final main stage event from the 2021 How I Built This Virtual Summit, and it's Guy's conversation with Rashad Robinson, President of Color Of Change, the nation's largest leading racial justice organization. In this live interview, Rashad talks about finding strength and purpose through activism—an initiative that has no clear end. According to Rashad, activism does not have to center around sadness and tragedy; activism is about the power of the people, recognizing victories, celebrating moments of joy, and implementing self and community care. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hey, everybody, welcome to another special edition of How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. We're releasing the final mainstage interview from our How I Built This Summit, which happened virtually back in May. And our final episode is from my conversation with Rashad Robinson about making a meaningful impact in the world.

Rashad is an activist and the president of color of change, the nation's largest online racial justice organization. Over the past decades, Rashad has taken on everything from criminal justice reform to improved media representation for marginalized communities. Tracking back to his childhood, Rashad has pushed hard for racial justice and equal rights in all. aspects of life. Rasha joined us on the virtual stage during Color of Change's Week of Action, a series of events created to honor the one-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd. Rasha talked about why they didn't want to focus only on pain and tragedy around the anniversary, but to center it on something different, Black Joy. Black Joy is not the absence of pain, but the presence of aspiration.

Not just what we are fighting against, but what we are fighting for. And in so many of the ways in which we try to bring people together to actually accomplish big things, you know, we center black joy, we center sort of relational organizing. I fundamentally believe that leadership in activism is not being a spokesperson for people who are not heard, but about building the vehicles and the infrastructure so that people can be heard for themselves. And so when we bring people together in the spirit of black joy, I think it's incredibly, important because we're not just trying to center what we don't want, but we're trying to center all the ways in what we do want. And black people, black joy, right, has been such a centerpiece of what has made this country what it is from all of the things we've contributed from food and culture and politics to the innovations we've had to make in the entrepreneur space.

All of that, I think, is part of black joy and part of the sort of resilience and, and sort of purposeful contributions that black people have made to this country and to the world. I love that so much. Rashad, this conference is about entrepreneurship. And of course, entrepreneurship doesn't necessarily mean for-profit making. Entrepreneurship is found all across the board, including in activism in what you do, because so much of it is about creative ways to create disruption. You've been an activist your whole life.

You literally grew up in an activist home. You got involved in political organizing in high school. You even hosted a political talk show on your local access station when you were younger. Why did you pursue a life of activism? You know, I pursued a life. I pursued my purpose. I pursued fighting for the people I care about and fighting for myself. And that has led me into a world of activism.

But I never really knew until I got much older that this could be. sort of a job or a life. You know, as a young activist, people would say, particularly in the black community, that I should either run for office, and I've done everything I could to run from office, or that I should be a minister. And those were sort of the things that people would oftentimes say. And I feel like in both those cases, people were, I think, speaking to this idea of being of service. And I think that's what I continue to try to do. I think over the past year, I read that color of change, it's seen incredible growth. I mean, it's sort of strange to talk about a social mission activist organization as experiencing growth, but it's true, right?

Like we talk about startups, it's been an incredibly important year. I think your email list alone has gone from like one and a half million people to almost seven million, maybe more by this point, which is just incredible. How do you as a leader, because so many of the people watching tonight, are thinking about impact, how can I have an impact? How do you measure that for yourself and for the organization? Yeah, we think about it a couple of ways. First, we have this kind of central sort of premise to our work that I've really tried to include in all the things that we do. And it's not mistaking presence for power. Presence is visibility, awareness, retweets, shoutouts from the stage.

Presence is not bad, but when we mistake presence for power, we sometimes think we've done things that we haven't actually done. We mistake a black president for thinking that we are post-racial. We may mistake America's love for black celebrities and black culture for thinking that America loves black people as much as America loves black culture and America can love celebrate and even monetize black culture and hate black people at the world. the same time. And so that standard of not mistaking presence for power is really about recognizing that power is the ability to change the rules. And that is really where we start out in terms of impact. But across all of our campaign work, we really create goals across the organization, try to really work to hold folks accountable for what does it mean to actually contribute. And so we talk about things that are what we call pile on victories. And those are just things that

would have happened without us all the way to things that couldn't have happened without us. And we try to be in that space of things that couldn't happen without us or things where we played a unique role, a value ad that if we were not there, it might not have happened at all. The final thing I'll say about this is that in this presence versus power space, it's incredibly important that we keep a real focus on strategic action. So you're not going to see a campaign from Color of Change that says tell Mitch McConnell to stand up for affirmative action. As much as we may want Mitch McConnell

to stand up for affirmative action, there's no amount of color of change members signing a petition or building a campaign that's going to get him to do that. And so that's asking people to engage in something that we know we don't have a theory of change around. So having theories of change is also incredibly important to how we think about impact,

but how we think about asking people for their time and their energy in our efforts. You know, one of the things that is so profound about what you're working on is that there's no timeline. You know, I mean, there's no, well, in six months' time, we're going to solve systemic racism. I mean, it is a potentially never-ending struggle. And I wonder how you think about victory and victories. How do you sort of step back and look at, let's say, a timeline that has no end, but still,

recognize certain things as victories? Absolutely. I mean, that's what you have to do. And along the way, you're trying to create a more human and less hostile world. And that's how we think about this work. We also recognize that people don't experience issues. We experience life. That the forces that hold us back are deeply interrelated.

A racist criminal justice system requires a racist media culture to keep it alive, to create the demand for it, to protect it. political inequality goes hand in hand with economic inequality. These things all operate together. And so that does get us back to sort of the thing I started with, which is power, right? And this idea that we're constantly trying to raise the floor on what's acceptable and push up the ceiling on what's possible. And when we do that, we create new space for new things to happen.

But because we maybe change the narrative or we change the landscape or we've changed what's possible, then more things can occur as a reason. result. So much of what you have to do, Rashad, as a leader of such a massive organization that is addressing one of the most challenging, if not the most challenging series of issues in human history is persuasion. What have you learned about the art of persuasion as somebody who is pursuing impact? Yeah, you know, that's such a great question. I think about persuasion a lot, particularly because I've come to realize after this last summer that racial justice moved people to the streets, moved people to action. And so if you think about

over the last 10 years, right, people saying Black Lives Matter too, or it's racist to say that, to now it being, not that it's not controversial, but now it's on streets in front of capitals, it's raised up on signs. That is the power of persuasion. Persuasion is not just about some sort of messaging. It's about narrative, because narrative once again is about power, about the rules and norms of society, what is acceptable and what is possible. And so, you know, we also think a lot about the stories we tell. Far too often, we tell stories about inequality that are unfortunate, rather than stories that are unjust and really sort of illustrate the injustices. Stories that oftentimes start from a passive voice about the system instead of an active voice.

And so what I mean by that is black people are less likely to get a loan from the bank as what will oftentimes hear. Instead of banks are less likely to give loans to black people. And that may seem like semantics. But what I'm really saying here is that when you say black people are less likely to get a loans from the bank, people ask themselves, well, what's wrong with black people? Maybe we should give them financial literacy. If we say, you know, banks are less likely to give loans to black people, then we ask ourselves what's wrong with the banks. And so we don't need financial literacy to help black people do better inside of institutions, which have targeted, exploited,

and redlined us since almost their very beginning, we actually need structural change. And so when we deal with sort of charitable solutions to structural problems, what up happen in our public policy is folks sending water bottles to Flint and stopping short of actually cleaning up the pipes, doing service days at inner city schools instead of actually dealing with the fact that we have deep inequities in our public education system that are not an accident, but they are manufactured. And so for us, a color of change, how we tell the story. We don't keep trying to fix people who have been exploited, targeted, and left out, but we actually fix the systems which have done so much damage.

and which are oftentimes propped up by profiteers and by a society that where far too many people benefit from those systems being in place. Rashad, I can't help but think as I listen to you and I know your story and all of the work you've done throughout your life on behalf of LGBTQ issues, on behalf of racial justice. I'm blown away. I mean, where do you get your strength to do the work you do? It is absolutely emotionally exhausting. There are days where we get some of the most troubling and tragic outreaches from people in deep pain, and we may not have the resource to take it on, or we may not be the right organization. And so there are so many of these things that we can't take on.

And so we constantly have to think about what are the moments that we can take that actually allow us to move towards systemic pivot, so that we can win a change that can be sort of self-fulfilling over time and can lead to more change. But also, like, I'm in these stories. I'm in these stories as myself, my family's in these stories, I sometimes see my younger self in some of these stories. And you can't take yourself out of that and you can't center yourself at the same time. I also know that I am doing this work on top of a legacy of people who were entrepreneurs. You know, there's kind of like this sort of two types of entrepreneurship that I kind of see in the black community,

that entrepreneurship of trying to build something that, you know, adds a new service, adds a new resource. And then the thing for oppressed people, for black folks, for other folks that have been marginalized, is having to build something that already exist, but you've been excluded from. And having to build the black newspapers that black people literally have really created independent media in this country. And so black people have constantly had to sort of reimagine

and find new ways to build things, whether it was to provide something new or whether it was to provide the same exact thing that already existed, but we were excluded from. And it's not just black folks, I think about oppressed people have always had to figure out a way to be heard, counted, invisible, regardless of whether we are privileged or vulnerable in the majority or the minority or in favor or out of favor with whoever may be in power at the time. And those institutions and that infrastructure, I think also is something that has sustained me. I am not alone. I am not on my own. I am not out front trying to take all the bullets.

I am working to build infrastructure that is bigger than me and hopefully will last far beyond me. When we come back in just a moment, more of my conversation with Rashad Robinson on how to deal with the mental and emotional stress that comes with fighting for social justice. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to an excerpt of my conversation about leadership with Activization, and president of color of change, Rashad Robinson. We talked at the virtual How I Built This Summit held back in May. And Rashad says it's important for any organizer to create space for self and community care. You mentioned that you are also part of the story, your family, people you know.

How do you deal with your own mental stress and emotional stress personally? I have an incredible network of friends. and family who love me for my warts, love me for all the qualities that make me a leader, and love me when I don't always meet the mark, but give me the type of advice, encouragement, and critique that people in my position need. And, you know, I've been thinking a lot about what does it mean to create space for self-care. for community care, as someone who has to lead an organization of over 150 staff. We're asked to respond to viral videos where people see themselves or their family members

in there. We're acts to constantly have to wake up and drive campaigns to fight systemic injustice where all of my staff are part of the story. And the folks who are not seeing themselves directly impacted are inside of an organization with their allies. And they are working to make their contributions to changing society because they know that when black people win, society moves in the right direction. And even if it didn't, black people winning in and of itself would be enough.

You've talked about changing the architecture of what was seen as a civil rights movement. You've talked about the magical thinking that sometimes people see an advocacy work. And you just alluded to it earlier, sending water bottles to Flint, when it's actually much deeper problem or, you know, or solving, you know, unequal education at schools mainly, you know, attended by black and round students by doing mentorship and service days. That that actually isn't what what solves or begins to solve problems. It's a much, much bigger problem. And so I wonder, I want, I want you to talk a little bit about this idea of architecture, like reimagining the architecture, not only of the discourse, but of the fight.

Yeah, I mean, we think a lot about architecture, and we're constantly trying to, like, innovate the systems of how we take an information. We were founded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which was a flood caused by bad decision makers that turned into a life-altering disaster by bad decision-makers, and black people literally on their roofs begging for the government to do something and left to die. And Katrina illustrated a lot of things that people already knew, geographic segregation, generational poverty, the impacts of what we've done to our planet, all the ways in which structural racism undergirds those things and so many other systems which manufacture inequality.

And so the thing about Katrina and moments like that, you could even say this about COVID, right, is that no one was nervous about disappointing black people, government, corporations, and media. And so if you start off by the idea that One of the pieces of the theory of change is that we have to make decision makers nervous about disappointing us. Then you start to think about how do I build the campaigns? How do I build the structures that actually do that? Right. And so part of building that infrastructure is also recognizing the climate about how people are getting their information.

And so we've really built this strategy of responding to moments, building energy, finding the systemic pivot, and then scaling over time. We talk about it as respond. build, pivot, and scale. It's how we sort of still, though, respond to various moments that are happening, but then try to channel those moments and channel that energy, channel that response into things that can actually move towards systemic victories. And then if we go back and sort of evaluate, how did our efforts actually sort of lead to change?

A campaign back during the 16 election, we ran and we went back and forth with the Clinton campaign to give back their private prison donations. And we went back and forth, right? So we sent two emails to the Clinton campaign. One was like a smiling Hillary that she had given back the money. The second one was like a picture that wasn't, that was like she was upset and that she hadn't given back the money. And we explained the issue.

There were footnotes. And we sent both emails to the campaign. And we said, by the end of the week, we're going to send out one of these emails, you let us know which one. And they decided to the smiling Hillary email. And we got a lot of press and some credit about it. But no black people were freed from private prisons. No private prisons closed.

We set a new standard around democratic presidential candidates not accepting private prison donations. We create a new narrative around private prisons that made it harder for folks to defend them on the left. And that's important. So that's a momentum achievement, no matter how much sort of visibility in press you get. It's not a systemic victory. But knowing that difference is also important in terms of the architecture. texture you built. So you're actually building houses and you're building structures that are sustainable over time. If you just go around getting a bunch of momentum achievements but you don't

actually change the rules, then you've built a lot of presence but you haven't actually achieved any power. I keep thinking about how in a weather system we might put an umbrella up, but actually there are these giant rivers that run deep under our oceans. that determine currents and weather patterns that are fixed or semi-fixed. And we focus on these symptoms. I'm curious about this word progress because that's been part of our cultural narrative for decades. This idea that progress happens. It's real.

It's achievable. What do you think about that word progress? I actually think progress is very tricky, right, as a word, because the systems that we are fighting are durable and strong. And they were made to be durable and strong. And sometimes they will create space for us to have cosmetic victories that aren't actually progress, right? We can have more black millionaires and billionaires, but we still have a widening wealth gap. And so it doesn't mean that we don't. sort of recognize that progress. We have to sort of be inside of real conversations of hope,

of achievement. And at the same time, our progress oftentimes comes with backlash, right? It's not a mistake, right, that after the first black president was elected, that's when we saw that rise in those discriminatory voter ID law. You can vote with your gun license, but not your student ID. You've now see basically an attempt to strip American citizens of their right to express their will for a better future through the vote. We have to sort of both recognize progress, but steal ourselves to be able to defend that progress. And this goes back to this idea of infrastructure. Infrastructure gives us the ability to not just achieve big things, but to hold on to those big things, but also to then face down the forces that really stand in the way of change.

And so to the extent that progress is so important, but the stories that can sometimes be told of progress of the past oftentimes have singular individuals who sort of fought and overcame things instead of the stories of people coming together, building infrastructure, and then overcoming really big forces. That's the story of progress that I'm inside of, and that's the story of progress that we are trying to make more of. I think so many of us as humans are motivated, are inspired by stories. And stories can really change the way people think about things. I intrinsically believe that hope is a necessary factor, a necessary element in,

in motivating people that hope this idea that things can get better. I think I believe in that idea. Do you believe in that idea? I used to go into the voting booth with my grandfather, Eastern Long Island. The names were my frenetic, but he'd asked me to read the names. And he put me on his show. Back when they had those lever machines, and so we'd have to pull the lever. And, you know, after my grandfather died, I found out that he actually couldn't read or write.

He went into the fields as a six-year-olds, a sharecropper, never got a formal education. He still wanted to participate. I think about him so much in our work, not just in terms of hope and aspiration, because it wasn't a hope without a deep understanding of the realities. My grandfather was a race man. He liked the Mets, not the Yankees, because he believed that the Yankees didn't give a black man fair shot. And so it was very much this idea that's Senatorate Hope. And I think about the stories of the folks before him. I think about their migration from a violent

challenging racist South to a violent, challenging, racist North. And the belief that there could be something more for them, that there was something worth fighting for. There was a belief in a better tomorrow. My grandfather became a homeowner. He was part of a union. He helped get my dad in the union where he learned a skill and then became an entrepreneur. All of these things are very much part of the story and the legacy of people who are oppressed. It's part of the story of how we built social movements. It's the part of the story about why we build social movements. And I couldn't do this work every day without having

a sense of hope, which is absolutely rooted in an idea that more is possible and better as possible and that we as individuals can achieve it collectively with each other. That's Rashad Robinson, activist, advocate, and president of color of change. I spoke with him at the 2021 How I Built This Virtual Summit. This episode was produced by Farah Safari with music composed by Ramtinere Blui. Our production staff for the summit includes Neva Grant, Julia Carney, Liz Metzger, Janet Ujung Lee, Annalise Ober, Gianna Capadona, John Isabella, Ali Prescott, Joanna Palofska, and Jessica Goldstein. Our intern is Harrison V.J. Choi. And Jeff Rogers is our executive producer.

I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.