Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 316: How to Call People In (Instead of Calling Them Out) | Loretta Ross

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

If you’re tired of the venom, preening, and predatory listening so common on all sides of our various cultural divides, this episode is for you. My guest today is Loretta Ross, who believes that “calling out,” which is quite common on social media these days, is adding way too much toxicity to the discourse and alienating people who might otherwise be allies. Instead, she believes in “calling in,” which steadfastly insists on a large measure of grace, and rejects the impulse to dehumanize. On today’s show, Loretta offers a compelling mode of engagement that is insistently open-minded and large-hearted, no matter where you stand on the political divide. Loretta describes herself as a radical Black feminist, activist, and public intellectual. She’s a visiting Associate Professor at Smith College, and she also teaches an online course called, Calling in the Calling Out Culture. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/loretta-ross-316-rerunSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. Hey y'all is your's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from.

And where's Tom from, MySpace? Listen to Baby, This is Kiki Palmer, on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. I think we can all create a calling culture in America. I don't despair. I don't think those people are disposable. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, on this Martin Luther King day, it may be tempting to fear that America and the rest of the world some concrete ideas for how you can be an engaged citizen without losing your mind, which is a goal we talk about a lot on the show. My guest today is Loretta Ross, who describes herself as a radical black feminist, activist, and public intellectual. She's a visiting associate professor at Smith College and she also teaches an online course that caught our eye recently

It's called calling in the calling out culture She believes that calling out which is quite common on social media as many of you know is adding way too much toxicity to our discourse and alienating people who might otherwise be allies discourse and alienating people who might otherwise be allies. Instead she believes in calling in, which steadfastly insists on a large measure of grace and rejects the impulse to dehumanize people with whom we disagree. As you will hear, Loretta is a long time leftist, but no matter where you stand politically, I think it's worth listening here because the point is that she's modeling a compelling mode of engaging that is insistently open-minded and large-hearted.

And as you will hear, this is something that she has personally put to the test as a black woman who has worked with white supremacists and a rape survivor who has worked with incarcerated rapists, a fascinating person, a fascinating discussion. I think you're going to get a lot out of it. So here we go with Loretta Ross. Loretta, great to meet you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me on your show.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, this is the perfect moment to have you on. I wish it was a calmer moment in history, but given that it's not, I'm glad that I have the chance to talk to you. Yeah, when I woke up on Wednesday morning after the election, I was you for it, because I knew that we had turned Georgia blue. And then five hours later, I was despairing because we had so much further to go

to bring our country back from the brink of self-destruction. And so I'm just a royalam in motions right now because I fear for our democracy, even though I call myself the queen of the call in culture, there are some people I don't want to call in at all. I'm going to call them out because they enabled this insurrection. It seems to be that if they can't control it, they don't want to share a democracy. You said before that you have the the moniker of the queen of the call in culture.

Do you have any hope that there's some constructive calling in that can be done at this time in a country where we are really at each other's throats? Well, I don't think we're all at each other's throats. If you don't mind, it doledging me, I'll tell you how I see the world. I think that first of all, I live in a 90% bubble of people who are progressive, sometimes they even call it radical,

but I don't mind, I consider that a compliment. But the people that I'm most in conversation with, we understand that there's things like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, immigration violence, and all of that stuff going into the world. We even have our own little lexicon of all the isms that we talk about. And part of my problem is that we in the 90% bubble spend too much time trying to turn ourselves into 100%ers, like we're supposed to perfectly align with every thought. And so if I work on women's rights,

that means that I'm doing something wrong, because I'm not working on trans rights. If I'm working on trans rights, I'm doing something wrong. If I'm not working on racial justice, on and on and on. That's why I call us a circular firing squad, because we're all on the same team, but we spend our best anger on each other for not being cult members.

We're all supposed to be apparently 100% aligned. Outside of us are what I call the 75%ers. These are people who don't use our insider jargon of homophobia and all of these other words, but they're aligned with us in a world view. So since I'm a women's rights activist, a 75% or for me would be somebody like the Girl Scouts, where they may not be organizing the Girl Scouts

to market a protest like I would, but at the same time, they work for women's and girls empowerment. So they would be my ally, even if they are repelled by my jargon. So I'm going to find a way to talk to them in a register that they could hear versus the register that I would use for the 90%ers. Outside of the 75%ers are the middle of the roaders, they're the 50%ers. Those are people like my parents. My father was a lifer in the military

and the army, very conservative, retired after 26 years. My mother was a Southern evangelical Christian woman. And there probably wasn't a whole lot of common language that I could use for my 90% bubble on my parents, but at the same time they taught me their values, and I'll just tell you a conversation that my mom and I had one day. Back in the 50s, my mother had started a black girl scout troupe in San Antonio where I was, because black girls want to allow to join the white girl scout troops.

And every weekend we had to cook food and feed it to the homeless people in San Antonio. And so mom could never figure out what a social justice human rights activist did. And finally I put it to her and said, mom, do you remember when we had to feed the homeless people when I was a girl scout? And she, of course, she remember. She said, Mom, be remember, when we had to feed the homeless people when I was a girl scout. And she, of course, she remember. She said, yes. I said, well, as a human rights activist, I asked why they're hungry in the first place. And she got it.

Because she said, oh, okay, I feed them and you want to know why they're hungry. And so you can use that kind of value-driven language to talk to 50% of if you stay away from your jargon and your assumptions that they don't have values that you can agree with. Now outside of the 50% are the 25% of I think those were the majority of the people who stormed the capital. They are the ones who are honestly fear that they are losing control of the country. They've been told by some various group of people that if they don't remain in power, the country is going to go to hell.

Western civilization will collapse. Christmas will not be celebrated and pedophiles will take your children. That's the kind of things that they say to each other and they sincerely believe that. And then outside of them, or what I call the zero percenters, they was the ones that showed up in military gear with the zip ties ready to actually do harm

to people in the capital. They showed up with guns and bombs and things. And so when I talk about calling in, I'm only trying to call in people from the 50% to 75% and the 90% circle. I have a totally different call out strategy for the 25 and the zeros. Now the 25% or sometimes you can talk to them. But I think that the people who could best influence them would be people like my mom and dad,

because my mom can go to the left or the right, depending on which value string is plucked, because she could use a religious background to talk that God talked to the 25% and still pulled them towards us. But if I don't pay attention to my mom, the 25% will pull her towards them. Because she doesn't believe in a lot of what I believed in about women's rights and gay rights and trans rights. She would be totally bewildered by all of that. But for the zero percenters, they know better.

They are hypocrites and cynics. They're manipulating people's needs and fears so that they can remain in power. And that's the people I'm going to always call out. So I'm not confused. That calling in is not for every situation, but I do give people a bit of a bit of a doubt, but then at the same time, like Maya Angelou says, when people show you who they are, believe them. And so I'm definitely one of those. They have shown me who they are when they try to bring down our democracy by refusing to accept the result of a democratic

election. Do you think the rioters and those who sympathize with them? I mean, we're talking about a large number of people when you include the latter category, those who sympathize with them, a large number of people with whom we share this country. Where is your optimism level around peaceful cohabitation if not mutual understanding? Well, the lion shares the forest with gear too. But the deer can make all the offers they want. But if the lion is determined to only see the deer as prey, that is not equal power relationships there. And so I'm very willing to give people in the 25% the benefit of the doubt. I mean, I've worked a deep program, people in the hate movement, former Cluclec's clansmen and Aryan nations members

and militia members. So it's not that I don't think people can change, but the desire for change for all of those people I deprogram came from within. It did not come from without. Nothing anybody said to them could have made them change their minds. They had to have those epiphanies on their own and then slow walked themselves back into normal society. It's just impossible to make anybody on the left or the right, change their minds just

because someone contradicts their views. They have to decide that they can't stand the cognitive dissonance between how good they think they are on the inside and how badly they're behaving towards others. But my concern is that use the phrase normal society, it seems like the fringe has become mainstream. We have got dozens and dozens scores of members of Congress who even after the place was stormed are talking about a rigged and stolen election. That kind of talk used to be relegated to the fringes of our society on the left and the right. And now it's like, you know, if not mainstream, certainly closer.

Well, I'm sure you've heard of the concept of the over-ten window and it's just the shift is so far to the right that what was French has become mainstream within the Republican Party. When David Duke, you know David Duke, he's a clansman who ran for Governor of Louisiana and stuff, when he formed his new clan group and he started saying that we should bar all non-white immigrants to this country that this should be a white country only, that only white voters shouldn't matter. All of those things he said in the. And then we watch, not David Duke, but his ideas march from the margins to the center. So that David Duke's plans became Republican policy.

If you're serving that same ideology of creating a partake-like system in America, so that only white people have any power and only white people get the margin to the capital without fear of police. That's not a sustainable democracy. And I don't know how we can persuade them that you can't sign up for a pluralistic democracy

and then just turn it all over just because you lose an election. So where does that leave us? Where does it leave us? It's a question of where it leaves them because we're moving towards the future and they're trying to refight the Civil War. I'm not sure how successful they're going to be rolling time backwards. I think there's too many forces, universal and political and social and emotional against them. Let's talk about some of the material that got me and my team very interested in you and

your work initially before the horror at the US Capitol. Can you talk about the difference between calling in and calling out? Oh, I love talking about the difference between calling in and calling out. Back in 2015, my grandson never answered his phone. And I finally pleaded with him, how do I reach you? And he said, what grandma get on Facebook?

And so I got on Facebook and he immediately migrated off of it because he was for old folks. He said. And so but once I got on Facebook, I noticed how mean people were being to each other through social media. And so when I asked one of the young students I was working with about what was going on, she said, oh, you mean the callout culture? And I see Y'all have named it. And she said, yeah. And I said, well, Marissa, what are y'all doing about it?

Because I'm seeing people say things online that I don't think they say to each other in person. I mean, I'm pretty old old and I've been through a lot of social justice movements. Back in the 70s, there was a part of you that had to be in face-to-face conversations. And when I asked her, what are y'all doing about it? She kind of shrugged her shoulders,

just walked away like, is there anything that can be done about it? And that's when I started reviewing at that time, you know, my close to 50 years of experience doing social justice work. And I said, well, there are things we can do about it because I live in Atlanta, and I've heard the stories of how the civil rights leaders

fought behind closed doors, but presented a united front when it was time to take on Jim Crow segregation. I've been in the women's movement. We always fight within the women's movement, but we're united in dismantling patriarchy and sexism. I mean, we don't belong all belong to one organization. We're a movement because we have a lot of different thoughts, but we're all moving in the same direction. That's what a movement does. When you have the same thought and you're moving in the same direction, that's what a cult does. And we are not a cult. And so I've been in social justice movements

for civil rights, women's rights, human rights, disability rights that successfully had the political debates that you're supposed to have in a pluralistic society, but didn't turn on each other, but turn to each other when it was time to face an opponent. But something's happened with this social media landscape. And so when Marissa walked away and she had no solution to the callout culture. I said, well, we actually called each other in. Even if we didn't agree, we called each other in so that we could be stronger together. And so back to your question, a calling in is simply a call out done with love and respect.

It's that you hold people accountable for things that either they've done or you think they've done, but it's still responding with anger and shame and blame. You pause to give them the benefit of the doubt because you might have misinterpreted, they might have misstated it, they may regret what they've done in the past. If you give people the benefit of the doubt, you ask to get a chance to peer into their heart, instead of just react to their words. So I believe in holding people accountable,

but I choose to do so with grace and forgiveness as opposed to anger and punishment. Because the other thing this contradictory for me is that if I'm an opponent of the prison industrial complex, well, why am I using its techniques on other people who I think have done wrong? And certainly I've never let a blameless mistake free life. I mean, I had to learn in my 20s to forgive myself for my little mistakes because I knew I'd make bigger ones later on. So if I could feel that about myself,

why can't I feel that about others? Because there's other people who's complicated as I am. I give them that benefit too. And so, a calling in for somebody who says something sexist would be, you know, when you use that word the other day, I'm not sure what you meant by it. Do you mind if we go out and have some coffee to talk about it? Or sometimes you can just say something simple,

like, I beg your party and then pause and let them rethink their own words. You haven't called them out. You haven't accused them of anything. You just indicated that may not have landed the way you meant that to be. I'm also critical of holding people, punishing people for things that they did long time ago, because people do change, people do grow. And so, if somebody does something wrong when they were a stupid teenager, and we all did wrong things when we were stupid teenagers, and then years later, it's found out about them. I'm first going to give them

to do process of an investigation to see where they are now. I'm going to assume that they did the stupid thing as a teenager, but I'm going to see where you are now before I weaponize that knowledge and get you, because I'm going to give you the grace of expecting that you learned from it. Now, if you have a sound that you've grown, then I'm going to use another tactic. A few moments ago, you described the move of calling in rather than calling out is a choice. That you make the choice to do this in a sort of large-hearted way where you're willing to give people grace, to not presume the worst about them,

to try to see it from their point of view. I just look at my own mind and I feel so many times I have not made that choice. How do we get better at building the decision to make that choice as a reflex? It takes a lot of years, and here I am almost 70 years old and I'm still working on myself,

so I can't say it's easy even as an elder. Again, I tell things through stories. When I was 25, I became the director of a rape crisis center, the DC rape crisis center. And we got approached by men who were incarcerated for raping and murdering women. And one guy, William Fuller, wrote us this letter. And basically, William said, outside I raped women, inside I'm raping men. And I don't want to be a rapist anymore. Can you imagine a group of rape survivors

getting that kind of letter? I mean, we were like horrified. We barely had enough resources to help the survivors that were calling our hotline. And here's a perpetrator asking us for help. So it's set there, simmering on our souls for a number of months before we could even answer, but he wasn't getting any reason,

incarcerated for life. And so finally, I got in my car and drove to Lorton, which was then DC's jail. And we threw the strip search to get, I had never been in a prison before, so I didn't know how humiliating it was, even being a visitor to a prison. And, you know, it was just really an awful experience. But once I got to meet with William, I found out that he was in his mid-30s. He had raped and murdered a woman when he was 18.

And somehow between 18 and 35, he's gotten hold of some black feminist literature. And it had changed his consciousness. And he was scary as all get out, not because of his affect, but because of his body. If you are the rapist, the big, buff man in the prison, that means you're working out, you're building up your body. You got these muscles that are bulging through shirts and stuff like that, because that's what you do not to be a victim

when you're incarcerated. So he went in as a skinny little 18 year old and by the time I met him 17 years later, he was a scary SOB. I'm telling you. And the sixth other man he bought to meet with me were also big and intimidating. So they were not the victims of the prison. They were the big boys of the prison wanting to be different. And so we started, well, first of all,

we set up some rules. We were like, okay, whatever y'all think we're going to do, we are not bringing on no cigarettes, no drugs, no tennis shoes, we're not writing any letters or pardon or support to the parole board, we are not here to be used by you. But if you're honest about wanting some conversation around feminism and how you can stop the rape culture,

we're here for you. And so for two and a half years, we would go there every Friday, rotating every Friday to have two our recessions with these men. In my library today, I still have multiple copies of books because I'd have to buy six books, take them to the prison, they could read them that I had to bring

those same six bucks back out. And so now when people look at my library, they say, why do you have like five or six copies of the same book, did you forget you had bought it? But I tell you that story to say, that was when I confronted my first big demon that I internalized because I'm a raping and sex survivor. That's what brought me to the rape crisis center in the first place. And once I heard the stories of how those men had been

violated before they became violators, because they had been also molested as children. Now, when comes out the womb saying, I'm just going to mess people up, human rights violators are created. They're not born. And so I found a little bit of my hatred of rapists, a little bit, not all of it, but a little bit of my hatred of rapists, a little bit, not all of it, but a little bit of my hatred of rapists getting eroded. Okay, fast forward 20 years ago.

By that time I'm working for Reverend C.T. Vivian, who died the same day, Congressman John Lewis died. But he was my boss, he was my mentor at what was the National Anti-Clan Network, which it become the Center for Democratic Renewal. And Reverend Vivian always said to us, when you ask people to give up hate, then you need to be there for them when they do. And the first time he said that, I murdered them under my breath. Oh, because you can't curse in front of a minister.

So I couldn't say it out loud, but that's what I felt. Because as a black woman monitoring the Ku Klux Klan, I had no problems dehumanizing them because they dehumanized me. When you're talking about lynchings, I went to Blakely, Georgia to investigate a fire in a black home, two blocks from the fire department that burnt up a five-year-old black child because the clan was running the fire department. I mean, how am I supposed to give up hate when I have to investigate the death of a five-year-old from a fire in the

fire department was only two blocks away and didn't come until two hours later. I mean, this is just what we deal with with, you have, you know, hate group members infiltrating law enforcement and fire departments and hospitals and stuff like that. And so when Reverend Vivian told us that we needed to be there for them when they do, I didn't get it. I didn't agree. I actually had conversations with my friends.

I said, you know, Jesus said, turned the other cheek, but I'm tired of my cheeks being bloody. Really, really am. I am not trying to audition for Jesus' job. I just really am having trouble with this. And so one day I get a call, this deep voice says, can I speak to Leonard Zeskin? And Leonard was our research director who led the work in meeting with people who had left

the hate movement. He would do the actual deep programming. So I said, okay, who's calling? This is Floyd Cockerney. I said, deep Floyd Cocker? I mean, because I monitored his guy. I knew exactly who he was. He was the National Spokesman for Richard Butler's Aryan Nation in Hayden Lake Idaho.

Yes, this is Floyd Cockroot, and I wanna talk to Linda Zestin. And I said, can I take a message for him? That's how I could do. And so I gave Lenny the message. It turns out that Floyd's second son had been born with a cleft palate. And his Aryan Nazi buddies told him that his son was a genetic defect who needed to be put to death because good Aryans didn't deal with disabled people. They put them to death. After Floyd realized that, he started asking questions of pastor Richard Butler as they called him. He only got a chance

to ask questions for a couple of weeks before Butler kicked them off the compound. Now, Floyd had been a Nazi from age 14. He was now in his late 30s. He knew the Bible in Sinai, he was the best recruiter that the air in nation so they've ever seen. He was nationally traveling and all of this. And so Pastor Butler, he sees, so I'll try to be respectful,

kick Floyd off the compound. And so he was at the end of the road when he called our organization because we were known for helping people leave the hate movement. So Lenny talked to him for a number of weeks, gave him food to eat and helped him find a hotel room to stay in and stuff like that. And then he was turned over to me for his reentry back into society. And so when I first met Floyd, he was a very thin five foot, seven, five foot, eight guy with a beard who smoked cigarettes and drank coffee incessantly. I don't know if I ever saw Floyd eat.

All he ever did was drink black coffee and smoked cigarettes. He was very intense, very tightly wound. But one of the things that was haunting Floyd was that he had recruited these two brothers named Freeman and Alan Town, Pennsylvania, into the skinhead movement, into the area nations, over a number of years. He got them when they were 14 or 15 years old. I'm not sure the ages. But one night, the two kids came home and murdered their entire family. Their mother, their father, their 12 year old brother. Floyd thought that this was his responsibility because he had bought those kids into the hate movement. And so what Floyd wanted to do was

do a tour of a town went. He wanted to apologize for all the harm he had done that he was now reckoning with. He particularly wanted to go back to Pennsylvania and talk to the people in Allentown because that was a horrific crime to take place. He wanted to dissuade other alienated white kids from joining the movement. So we ended up on this tour of apology. And it was in the process of learning to talk to people like Floyd that I saw his humanity. He had joined the Nazis at 14

because he was a small skinny kid that got bullied in this all white portion of state New York. He'd never met a Jewish person.. He never met a Jewish person. He never met a black person. But he found out that when he put on that Nazi insignia, instead of him being afraid, everybody was afraid of him. It's just that simple. And so I don't want to tell too long a story, but this is the truth.

This is what I've lived through. And when you learn to meet the human beings behind the hatred, it's very hard to continue to hate them. Now, if I can call in a Nazi, if I can call in a rapist, why can't I call in somebody who gets the gender pronoun right wrong? Or says something that is racist, that they may not know is racist. I mean, I kind of like tell myself, get over yourself, kid. I mean, it's kind of like, if you can figure out how to see the humanity of people who have done actual harm to others, like the rapists, most of them had murdered the women

that they had raped. Then everybody else is just a problematic ally. You know, you just gotta figure out how you can work with them. That's what I honestly feel in my heart. If you can't hate the clan, who's left? Mm-hmm. Much more of my conversation with LaRetta Ross right after this.

Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What is happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you.

But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs. And sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times. But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it?

Follow life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering Up. We're back now with Loretta Ross. Before we dive in though, I want to ask you a favor. If you have a few minutes, it would be awesome if you could do us a solid by answering a survey about your experience with this podcast.

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Thank you, and let's get back now to my conversation with Loretta Ross. As I listened to the extraordinary work you've done, these incredible stories, and I consider the toxicity of our dialogue in pretty much every nook and cranny of our culture right now. And not many of us will have the experiences that you've had, not many of us will be trained by life

in the way that you have to develop new muscles to call in rather than call out. So I guess I'm wondering what advice if any would you have for, you know, people who can hear the sound of your voice right now? Well, first of all, I teach these techniques online for $5 a class. So it's not like, I'm that smart, and only I can figure this out. It's about, first of all, understanding how you were taught as a child to be accountable for your own mistakes. Were you punished? Were you trained? Were you forgiven?

How are your fight, flight, or freeze instincts formed as a child? So in my first class, I'm going to ask that question. And whatever those patterns were as a child are the same patterns you visit on other people for making mistakes. So you're going to ask yourself, how well did that work for me when I didn't know something? And you ask yourself, how well is this serving me to carry these grudges? Am I happier because I'm carrying this grudge? Am I happier because I just blew up somebody else's life? Am I wondering if I should walk on eggshells

in case somebody blows up mine? I think these are ways that we can choose to be more peace with ourselves. By first of all figuring out how we got to where we are and making different choices to not rob ourselves our own peace, happiness, and sanity. And these are all teachable things. I'm no psychologist, I'm an organizer,

community organizer, and since I started teaching five years ago. I'm no psychologist. I'm an organizer, a community organizer. And since I started teaching five years ago, I'm a fake academic. But these are all learnable things. If a 25-year-old rape survivor can learn to talk to rapist, you tell him, I can't talk to the person who calls me the colored girl because they don't know that that's an inappropriate word right now. What you just said there reminds me of something you wrote. You wrote an excellent op-ed in the New York Times, which I'll put a link to in the show notes here. And I just want to read one paragraph from it that struck me as maybe provocative for some people. So I'll just read it. You wrote, can we avoid individualizing oppression

and not use the movement as our personal therapy space? Thus, even as an incest and hate crime survivor, I have to recognize that not every flirtatious man is a potential rapist, nor every racially challenged white person is a Trump supporter. In particular, there the provocative bit, potentially for some people would be the idea of using a movement as personal therapy. Well, I actually have high theory that I can describe that with and just personal experience.

So I'm not quite sure which way you want me to go. Either way. But let's start with the high theory because I think it's needs to be examined. I mean, we've had about whiteness studies around for since the early 1990s. I think the first book was written by David Roliker about 1990-1991. Don't quote me on the dates, but I'm pretty clear when that started to happen. And I think it is very necessary for white people to examine their whiteness and how it was constructed. At the same time, the way it's being examined

lands on a potential solution that says, and now you have to give up your whiteness, pretend that you're not white, pretend that you don't want to enjoy white privilege. And I'm like, wait a moment, nobody's in the womb saying, oh, I'm gonna be born white, or I'm gonna be born black, or I'm gonna be born a woman.

These are characteristics you have absolutely no control of. So how are you supposed to heal from this trauma and fight white supremacy by pretending not to be white? So they have a good analysis that lands at a false solution for me Because all that is done is produce a whole lot of white guilt That's brought to the movement Instead of the movement being an organizing space to overcome injustice is serving as a therapy space

for people to deal with their guilt about their immutable characteristics that they have no control over. You can't change who you are, you can change what you do. And that then will change who you are. And so instead of whiteness studies ending up in white fragility, I'd rather whiteness studies ending up in white courage. I'd rather us reading the stories about Viola Luzzo or the other early white people who

do participated in the movement, sometimes giving their lives. I want to know more about the white abolitionists in the Civil War, the white people, even in the South, who fought against slavery. I want to know more about those stories that have been totally obliterated from the history books. And it's only because I've seen it from the black side of things that I even know they exist. Most white people don't even know those

things they said that those people exist every day. But it's just like the white person in the Starbucks who pulled out her cell phone to record what was going on when these two black men were arrested for sitting at a Starbucks. I mean we can't lift up the stories of white courage instead of waddling in the morass of white guilt and fragility. And so that's my critique, both academically and politically of how whiteness studies does a great analysis of how whiteness got created as an artificial category. But just because they made it up, it doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. And then what can be done about it?

How can it be used to defeat the ideology of white supremacy? Because white supremacy is an ideology. It's not a race of people. All white supremacists aren't white, and not all white people are white supremacists. So if you can separate the ideas from the skin color, you can actually do some good work. I want to follow up on that. I'll just call out that you may hear a call out that's a loaded phrase in this context.

I'll just point out that you may hear a little background noise because I have an insistent feline who's on my lap now. I just want to be clear. You said something about how you think that white people should work to understand their own whiteness and you don't want the movement for equality to be completely stuck in therapy. How do you do both at the same time? That's the debate I have in all of my online classes, which are majority white, I admit, because that's who's drawn to

trying to learn how to live in this world differently for the most part. But that's fine. And the debate is amongst the white participants in my class, the majority of them. How much time do we spend getting to know and trust each other to do the work? That's their position. And I come in a different way. Why don't you do the work first and develop whether you can trust and get to know each other.

You'll find out who people are by working with them, by expecting them to do something that they take in responsibility for and they don't, or expecting them to build space or give up air space to somebody whose voice who needs to be heard. All of those kinds of things, is through the work you'll find out who they are and who you are.

But if you're waiting to build these bonds of relationship and trust and self-disclosure before you do the work, then you're working on the premise that the people who know you can't hurt you. That has not been my experience. I frankly think that people that hurt me the worst are the ones that are close to me. So that's a theory that I think is born of white supremacy. As I call the kit and kin system of care, which means that you're taught to only care for people who you can relate to, who look like you, and then that is your circle of care

and compassion. And everybody else is the other. And I start on the other end. I care about myself and my own integrity. That defines who I wanna care about. And then because I wanna be true to my integrity, I wanna work with everybody who's able to be worked with. And then develop through that work relationship, how I feel about them, you know. Let me tell you about how my family

was. Let me tell you about sometimes somebody didn't respect me, or, you know, I have therapists where I do that work, where they get fain very well to listen to my sad stories, but I don't organize so that I can create therapy spaces for people that are supposed to be working because they claim they want to end oppression. Let me go back to training the muscle to call in rather than call out. Because on this show, I am very interested in sort of training the mind. We talk a lot about meditation. And so when you talked about teaching people to build the muscle to call in rather than

call out, the first thing you, I believe, referenced doing is getting people to look at their own personal histories and how were they punished and how do they visit that sort of conscious or unconscious justice delivery mechanism upon the people in their world. Where do you go after that? Well, then it gets to examining how do you walk through the world right now. You know, what are things that you see around you that you wish you could speak up on and what's keeping you from doing that right now.

Let's go there. And then show me times when you've been brave, show me times when you have said, no, I can't take this anymore or this is wrong and stuff like that. So it's clear that every human being that are basically on this side of sanity have both of those things in their souls. So I want to build up that good stuff in you and let you deal with the best stuff in you because I'm not your judge and jury. I am a co-worker who's interdependent on you who believe we share this fragile planet together. So I need you to be in this planet as healthy and as fruitful and as generous as you can be so that I don't have to fight you as well as fight the

people who have no intention of being any better. What are the downsides of the call out culture? What are the deleterious societal impacts of this dynamic? I think the most toxic impacts is that it makes people afraid to share their honest thoughts for fear that they'll be jumped on or that someone will pillory them. And so it impoverishes our shared pool of knowledge because people withhold their honest selves and they start performing. Oh, let me curate what I've got to say before I say it

or not say it in case I don't get the words right or let me avoid the conflict or watch some people have a calling out conflict and just become a bystander. And I think I have anything I can do helpful to move us past this point. I think it makes people afraid to be real. I think it makes more people use it sometimes as self-acrendizement as a way to send out their own little woke signals and virtue signals and how great I am because I identified this person who was wrong, this person is toxic or manipulative or dishonest.

And then they, believefully and almost, statistically attached those labels to people. And quite often, whatever the person actually did that the person believes they needed that label for is lost in the exaggeration. So it might be you used to wear colored women as when it should have been women of color. Well, once I call you a racist, the fact that you just transpose the phrase is going

to be lost in the fact that everything else you do is going to be interpreted through a racist lens. There's no forgiveness there. It's the presumption of guilt instead of innocence. And I've gone from attacking the words you use to now attacking your fundamental character. Your moral worth as a human being. And moreover, when I see you out together with somebody, then I'm going to assume that person is racist too, because they're hanging out with you.

And I've already known you're a racist. So, of course, that person must be a racist too. And it just goes on and on and on. So those are some of the harms of the call out culture. I could talk about them at length. Uncle Frank at the Thanksgiving table will say something really awful. Like, I don't think those Mexicans should come here and take our jobs, for example. And people sit back because they don't think those Mexicans should come here and take our jobs, for example. People sit back because they don't want to confront Uncle Frank. They don't want to blow up the Thanksgiving dinner table. They don't want to be seen as the PC cops trying to police Uncle Frank and all of that.

You're basically blow up their relationship with Uncle Frank. I teach people you don't have to call Frank Uncle Frank out. You their relationship with Uncle Frank. So I teach people, you don't have to call Frank, Uncle Frank out, you can call him Uncle Frank in. You know, Uncle Frank, every time you say that word, even though I'm not Mexican, it hurts me. Do you wanna hurt me like that? Do you love me, Uncle Frank? You know, just ask some basic questions.

Uncle Frank, I really love my relationship with you. Can we talk about why you use words that hurt me? And can you choose to use words that won't hurt me, at least in my presence? But that is assuming that you care enough about Uncle Frank to treat him with respect, even if you disagree with what he says. But if you use your words, his words as an excuse to not respect him and to ruin

the relationship that you have with him, then that's a different choice. I'm saying that we have choices with Uncle Frank at the dinner table without blowing up the relationship or blowing up Thanksgiving. Have you gotten pushed back for this call-in preference? I mean, I know you signed that controversial Harper's letter that people are familiar with it. It's basically a lot of people sort of prominent intellectuals signed this letter that it was critical of the so-called cancel culture

which is related to the call-out culture. So have you gotten called out for calling in? Well, I must be doing something right because the right wing calls me out and the left wing calls me out for, for freeing the doctor and the calling in. So obviously, I'm not doing it to make a lot of friends or anything. I kind of think it's a bit ironic that I get called out for criticizing the call out culture by both the left and the right.

It doesn't affect my relationship with my own integrity, though. Because your reputation is what other people think they know about you. Your integrity is what you know about yourself. So it says, lowest McMaster Bujo, a very famous science fiction writer, I adore. And so I quote lowest when I think I'm confused and I offer her wisdom to anybody else. Don't spend a lot of time trying to protect your reputation, spend all your time protecting your integrity because you're the person you have to sleep with every night.

The criticism from the left if I understand it is that calling in rather than calling out can serve only to protect people's white fragility. What do you say when people say, if you're coddling people who are, I don't know, transgressing in one way or another, you're just gonna, you know, allow them to get more firmly entrenched in their white privilege or whatever. Well, as a black woman who goes around saying the phrase, white supremacy is often as I can to white people

and watching them gag on it. I don't think I'm coddling them at all. Oh, I mean, This is what I do as an anti-fascist activist and researcher. I teach about the ideology of white supremacy. So that doesn't sound like I'm softening my message. It doesn't sound like I'm euphemizing what is going on. I just don't feel the city humanity of the people caught up in the system. And that's all I'm saying.

I used to word white supremacy very selectively to talk about people who adhere to a certain body of ideas. I don't use it loosely to say it's all white people. No more than I used the word sexist to say it's all men. All black men are actually rapists, even though the men who rape me were black. I mean, you just don't do that. I can't do that. I was able to do that when I was 14 years old. I certainly can't do it at 67 because I had five wonderful brothers and a father who were not the men who raped me So I mean it would make sense to go in that kind of dogmatic

binary thinking That too many people are trapped in Tell me if I'm restating this correctly, but it seems like the nub of your message is you reserve the right to criticize systems and structures and even people who you disagree with, you also at the same time reserve the right to see the humanity in everybody. Right. I mean, I have to honestly say that if Donald Trump were in my backyard

drowning in my swimming pool, as much as I hate what he did, I still throw him a life rat. Because it's not about whether or not Donald Trump deserves to be saved, but do I deserve to be his executioner. And I don't think so. You know, Brian Stevenson taught us that lesson from the Equal Justice Initiative. It's not that he's done wrong. Do you deserve to kill him for him? You know, and I'm like, no, I throw him a life raft. Then put him in jail. I throw him a life raft. Then put him in jail. I threw him a life raft.

Because I don't have, I'm like, you know, it's like I'm not that innocent of person. And again, in a way, I pity the man because as I read his niece's book about how dysfunctional and toxic his father was. I mean, what child could have come out right under that kind of toxic environment? And so there's a part of my heart that feels sorry for him, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't hold him accountable for what he's done, but I wouldn't let him drown in my swimming pool either. That's what called being a complicated person.

Yeah, it's feels to me just like seeing things as they are. Yeah, I'd rather see things as they are than as I wish they were. Because then I can build the things I want to see if I pay attention to reality. I should also say I'm kind of left brain because I made you the chemistry in physics So I've always kind of had this kind of linear thinking I Think that like any science experience You're gonna experiment with stuff 99 times before you land on the 100 times as right and human beings are no different You're gonna try a 99 different strategies for changing a human heart and mind

to you land on that sweet spot that actually works. And I don't get mad at them because the 99 of the ways didn't work. It's all a big experiment anyway. We're going to post this interview on MLK Day and America will still be in the throes of post-capital riot, agony. What's your most optimistic forecast for how we operate and talk to one another as a country going forward from here. Well, first of all, I'm a black woman and I come from a lineage of people that for 400 years have never given up hope because if they had given up hope, I wouldn't be here able to talk to you. And so I'm a good promoter of hope because that's what I've had to do to survive. That's what my four parents that I can trace back to 1844 in Central Texas had to do to survive.

So I find that white people generally give into cynicism and despair too easily. Maybe that's the culture that creates that I don't know. But we've listed some of the worst things human beings Maybe that's the culture that creates that I don't know. But we've understood some of the worst things human beings can do to each other. And we still have not given a faith in each other and our ability to build a better world.

We know we're citizens of a country that has not yet come to be. We've known that all along. So that's what gives me hope because I've got these ancestors chanting in my heart saying you can do this, you can do this. I've got a lot of fundamental belief and the goodness of humanity. I mean, even the worst people I met in the world actually had kindness in them. I've just found astonishing grace in the most unlikely people in places. And if I can offer people the insight of my experiences to be able to see with my eyes,

how the most unlikely, the most improbable circumstances can show you how wonderful this world can be, then you'll get through this life pretty well. I find that as hard as it is to realize that we're the creators of our own unhappiness too often. I mean, you can't control whether you get COVID. You may not be able to control. My sister just died a week, six days ago. I'm sorry.

Yeah, I mean, I could be Debbie Doughler on your show, but I enjoy the fact that I had her in my life for 66 years before she died. I'm a soul of rate her life, not just more in her passing. And she was my second sister to die within 12 months. I should add that COVID and everything else is ravaging my community. And I still have not lost my hope that we're going to get through this. And that we're going to get through this in a way that's going to astonish us. Because we do have this depth of resilience. And I'm talking about us collectively, not just a alleged resilience of black women treated as mules and saviors in the same breath.

But this resilience in the human spirit that I just find so awesome. And like I said, I expect people who are outwardly nice to do wonderful things. But when I see it out of somebody wonderful things. But when I see it at a somebody that has every reason not to be nice and kind, do something wonderful, I'm just odd by that. So how can I judge you by your social location or your privileges until I get an idea of seeing what happened to you and what did you make of it. Loretta, it's been a total pleasure to sit with you for a little while. Thank you. I never had an interview that let me talk so much. I love people on the air because they love hearing their own voices. Don't get me wrong. No, I love hearing my own voice. Love it. But I prefer to hear yours.

Well, thank you. Big thanks again to Loretto. It was great to meet her virtually. Thank you as well to everybody who worked so hard to make this show reality. Samuel Johns is our senior producer, DJ Kashmir, as our producer, Jules Dodson, is our AP, our sound designer is Matt Bolton from Ultraviolet Audio, Maria Wartel, is our production coordinator. We get a ton of really helpful input from our TPH colleagues, such as Ben Rubin, Nate Toby, Jen Poent, Liz Levin. I should also mention Ray Hausman, Wazein on occasion with very helpful notes as well. Thank you, Ray. Also a big thank you to my ABC News comrades, Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohan.

We'll see you all on Wednesday for a great conversation with a teacher named Jozen to Mory Gibson. We're talking about classic Buddhist list, the five precepts. That's on Wednesday. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music.

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