How to Talk to People You'd Rather Hate (Loretta J. Ross)
Listen now (52 mins) | "You start with the self and the calling in culture. Then you calibrate the size of the conflict because if somebody's just being awkward or irritating, is there actually..."
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Loretta J. Ross is an activist, professor, and public intellectual. In her five decades in the human rights movement, she’s de-programmed white supremacists, taught convicted rapists the principles of feminism, and organized the second-largest march on Washington.
Loretta was my second guest ever on Pulling the Thread and I was very eager to have her back to talk about her new book, Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel.
Today, Loretta shares several things that were a big unlock for me.
For people like me, whose instinct is often to get into a battle when I perceive that someone is being wronged, Loretta shares an alternate approach: Instead of being in defense of the vulnerable, why not be in conversation with the ones causing the harm?
She shares what she’s learned from watching people be manipulated into hating, from taking their pain seriously, and from helping them to release it.
She talks about addressing our own cognitive dissonance; the guilt trip wires we carry internally; and learning to forgive ourselves for not knowing enough, not being enough, not caring enough.
And after everything she’s seen and experienced, she tells us why she refuses to end her belief in the goodness of people. And she shares her joy with us.
I’m so grateful for today’s conversation.
MORE FROM LORETTA J. ROSS:
Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel
Loretta’s Website & Courses
Follow Loretta on Instagram
Loretta’s First Episode on Pulling the Thread: “Calling in the Call-Out Culture”
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
We could have a philosophical conversation, surely about when the right time to publish this book is, and I wish we'd had it four years ago. And then also the timing of publication is quite stunning. I think maybe for people, a wider audience of people who are ready to listen to what you have to say.
LORETTA:
Yeah, I think it would be that at the beginning of Biden's term, there probably wouldn't be that much interest in it. People don't really look for answers or change when they're destabilized by the present situation.
ELISE:
Yeah, certainly. And I think obviously we're at a moment in time where I think people really want to understand, well, this didn't work, so what do we do? What do, do now? Keep
LORETTA:
Holding on,
ELISE:
Keep holding on. I think people will be very eager to learn from you. And listen.
LORETTA:
There is a debate in the social justice space of whether or not I'm telling people to stand down when they feel like they should be fighting Nazis.
ELISE:
That's an interesting question. That's not how I interpret what you’re saying.
LORETTA:
But the people for whom that analysis appeals are the ones that think that the call out is their only power right now, and I'm threatening to take that weapon away.
ELISE:
Well, it's not an effective weapon, I think is what we're learning When you're dealing with a group of people who don't care about reputational harm, where it's they're impervious and immune to it, right?
LORETTA:
Yeah. Well call-outs only work on vulnerable people anyway. And so if you're aiming at the person who's vulnerable to losing their job or something, there's a question of what kind of threat assessment are you doing? But you're not actually able to even reach the people who are causing massive structural harm. You're reaching a person who didn't know the latest word to use.
ELISE:
Exactly. And you're also, I think this is a question for you about the gender dynamics of calling people out, but I think women in general are much more sensitive to any suggestion that they're a bad person or they're causing harm. And so when I think about how women are fractured and why we don't understand why we can't build a coalition of women, well, when you scare women into thinking that they're going to be called out for misstepping and that they're bad, you lose them or some,
LORETTA:
I would argue that that probably works for women of a certain political bent, but there are women on the right who've made a patriarchal bargain, so they're just as invested in profiting from moral outrage as anybody else.
ELISE:
Yeah. You don't think that there's a lot of fear underneath that though.
LORETTA:
Oh, fear drives it. All
ELISE:
Right.
LORETTA:
Oh, fear drives it all. And fear is behind every instance of othering. We do lead each other. And so yeah, fear is very much involved,
ELISE:
Right? You write really beautifully about this, but fear is under the anger or so much of the anger that's expressed.
LORETTA:
You'll find that when you let go of your fear, you can let the anger go.
ELISE:
One of the things that I think is so powerful about your work, and it goes to what you learned in your work with Floyd, and I think it's an important message for this moment in time, is that you have to replace the hate and you have to hold a positive vision and create something that we can move toward. You can't just take it away and assume and leave a vacuum, and it feels like we've majorly failed to build hold. Imagine a positive vision for people to move toward. Is that true?
LORETTA:
Well, it depends on how you define the we,
ELISE:
Right?
LORETTA:
Cause the one I'm pretty insistent upon is I don't blame the left for the successes of the right. I think they do what they do because of who they are, and they're pretty much indifferent to what we do. But what I think that we have an unfortunate tendency to do is load bullets into their guns with the call out culture. So there's a difference between blaming the victim and saying that the person who's in that victim role still could do better. Like telling someone who's a rape survivor. Yeah, it's not your fault that you got raped, but next time don't go to the dark alley as a shortcut on the way home.
ELISE:
Right. In terms of the loading of the gun, and I feel like you weave this throughout the book really beautifully too, in terms of telling your own story and the work that you've done on yourself to relinquish the anger or attend to that underlying fear. But when you think about this moment when the fear is extra stoked, you have people who have been victimized and who feel victimized and are scared, and then the way that that starts ricocheting around the culture, how do you recommend that people start? I guess it's tending to yourself.
LORETTA:
The purpose of fascism is to intimidate you into increased isolation and fear. So the antidote is always going to be intentionally building human connections with each other. Don't succumb to fearful isolation. Reach out to the neighbor who you may not thought you could talk to, but you love the way she keeps her garden and talk about gardening, even though she may have a Trump flag in the yard, the more we can make human to human connections, the less vulnerable we will be to being manipulated against each other. I find that a lot of people indulge in contempt for people they don't even know or haven't even met a representative of. In the story with Floyd Cox, one of the Nazis that I helped the program, he had never met a black person or a Jewish person, but he managed to hate us nonetheless. And so sometimes you can break down those silos just by relationship because people are manipulated into hating the idea of a human being without them actually getting to know the actual human beings represented by that idea.
ELISE:
Well, let's talk about Floyd Cochrane because that's an incredible story and including your initial reaction to it, which is why do I have to contend with this man who was not the lead? Where was he in the organization? Hi, up in the organization.
LORETTA:
He was the national spokesman for the Aryan Nations in Hayden Lake, Idaho
ELISE:
Wild. But I thought the way that you explained why he joined the Aryan Nation was so compelling and this idea that it wasn't about the thinking things, it was about the way that they made him feel. Can you talk a bit about that and then the advice that you give to the moms who don't want their children to go into the Aryan nations like their fathers? Because that was a big unlock for me
LORETTA:
When I started talking to, I think I expected him to talk about negative experiences he'd had with black people or Jewish people or Mexicans or something. I was expecting him to offer at least logical reasons for him to embrace this white supremacist ideology. But what I learned was that his primary motivation was needing to feel of significance and belonging to something he learned to hate. But he didn't start off hating. What he hated was being bullied. What he hated was being beaten by his parents, but he didn't have any lived experience with the people who eventually became the objects of his hate. But it was his radicalization finding a copy of Hitler's writings and then learning that once he put on a swastika, instead of him going to school afraid, people were learning to be afraid of him. But it wasn't anything as clear cut as, I hate black people, or I hate Jewish people for him in the beginning.
But once he embraced the Nazi ideology, then he of course had to fall in line and embrace that objectification of people who were not considered proper s. So it kind of surprised me that the emotion of hate was missing from his story until it became acquired later on. And I think that happens for a lot of young people who get radicalized into the hate movement, that they don't start out, I hate women, or I hate gay people, or I hate Jewish people, or whatever. They hate being isolated alone, feeling like no one cares about them feeling like nobody thinks they're of significance and that they matter. And the white supremacist movement is adept at seeking out and manipulating those vulnerabilities in young people and then making them feel that they are part of the army that's going to save the white race, making them feel very significant, and then carefully brainwashing them into defining who are the people that you would define as your people versus who are those you can comfortably hate. But for most of the people, they don't join these movements because they start out hating
ELISE:
And his waking up or the moment when he started to experience enough cognitive dissonance to call you was when his son who was born with a cleft palate was marked to be destroyed.
LORETTA:
But let's be clear, I'm convinced if Pastor Richard Butler hadn't kicked Floyd off the compound, Floyd would still be at the area nations if it still existed, because of course, the compound has been sold and I think turned into an Ann Freight memorial site now, but he had nowhere else to go. And so if Pastor Butler hadn't kicked him off the compound, that's what forced him to call us for assistance. But if he hadn't been kicked off the compound, he would've taken his disquiet and stayed there from convention. Cause it still provided a home. It still provided a purpose. And if his buddy hadn't told him about needing to kill his son, he probably still wouldn't have questioned all of these noxious beliefs that he imbibed.
ELISE:
Right? Right. It's rare to see someone completely divorce their community at that point. And this is core to your work. It's these circles of that we can access the 50 percenters, like your parents, obviously the 75 percenters, who we can still alienate and not build movements with. And then you get into, I don't even know where you would put the ary nation 1%.
LORETTA:
They're my zeroes. They're my zeroes because we have such diametrically opposed world views that I'm not intelligible to them, and they are not inclined to trust anything that comes out of my mouth. And that's why I call 'em zeros, not in terms of their worth as human beings, but because there's too little ideological overlap between us. As I wrote, I believe that they would use the words freedom as the freedom to carry an assault rifle or not wear a mask in a pandemic or my definition of freedom would be the freedom from not to be around people like that assault rifles and want to be mask in a pandemic. They just have different definitions, and so we're not using a common vocabulary. How are we going to do common reasoning with each other?
ELISE:
Right. And your work is focused mostly on that 50%, 75%, maybe a 25 percenter?
LORETTA:
Yeah. I tend to make a sharp distinction between those who are actual fascists and those who are being manipulated by fascists. I think that the fascists are fully aware of what they're doing, and they are hurting people, their home followers mostly as they do those things. But I have a different level of grace to offer someone who's insincere pain, whose pain is getting manipulated so that they make bad choices because I want to pay serious attention to their pain and help them understand that you have different choices on how you handle it. It doesn't have to be funneled into hurting somebody else, despising somebody else. Understanding that that's a choice you can make. And if you want to hurt people, the question isn't whether you have ability. The question is, why would you want to, what's going on in your soul that makes you carelessly want to hurt people just so you can feel good about yourself? I mean, where does that inner bully come from and how can you speak to it to cause it not to be in control of you?
ELISE:
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Why has the inner bully in so many people been stoked? Is it just the isolation that we're experiencing in our world?
LORETTA:
Well, the mainstream media talks about Trump providing a permission structure. He's the bully in chief, and so he gets to provide a permission structure for others to bring out their inner bullies, and I think largely is responsible. He's also seen as breaking norms and transgressive, so it speaks to the rebel soul in people who think that, oh, this is so cool. He can say these things and get away with it. So why I, even if I can't get away with it, I'm so proud to support someone who can't. And so it's really hard to watch people let go their moral guardrails and embracing their inner bullies. I don't know if everybody has an inner bully, but I know that bullies can be created for mission granted to them to act like that. And then in some kind of perverse way, they're proud of the fact that they can punch down on vulnerable people because to them it feels like power.
ELISE:
Yeah. There's also, I don't know if you think about the work of Carl Young, but there's this idea too with Trump, I think, where he is fully expressed in his shadow, right? All of his darkness is present and he exults in it, and he isn't trying to repress or suppress it or deny it. And in the same way that his, I think you called it the bully in chief, there's this, oh, we're not going to pretend like we don't have these terrible, horrible feelings and that we haven't done these terrible, horrible things to other people. There's a reveling, I feel like in people and shadow that offers relief. I think for people who have been trying to suppress or repress their very basic human instincts. And ideally, we would live in a world where we could acknowledge, I can be really shitty sometimes, and I'm not always kind or perfect, or I have a lot of fear. I have a lot of rage. And we could process that or therapize it ourselves before we unleash it on the world. I don't know. I feel like too, Trump is some sort of unconscious, he's like a fire. I don't know what he's going to burn down. But again, it goes to that idea that in response, one of the things that we need is a positive vision. What did CT say to you after Floyd Cochrane? You have to give people something to go to.
LORETTA:
Well, he said, when you ask people to give up hate, then you need to be there for them when they do. That was one of his pronouncements. And his second one that astonished me was that he told me about how Dr. King wanted to build a human rights movement and not a civil rights movement. But
So those are the two memories that I most cherish from seek. And so fighting for their vision of human rights is the positive vision. It's where you're fighting for a world where everyone is included. People are not isolated about their racial gender ability, citizenship characteristics, but the human rights framework requires that you pay specific attention to everyone's vulnerabilities. And the easiest example I can offer is that if you accept the fact that every child has a human right to an education, perhaps you'll agree that a blind child needs her book and brand. That doesn't mean that blind child has more human rights or is getting special treatment. It means that you have to attend to her vulnerability so that she can have the same educational opportunities as a sighted child. So likewise, you would have that same kind of concern if someone lived in a rural area without internet access.
That doesn't mean they've got special rights because you're paying attention to their vulnerability. I find that for a lot of us, our parents don't know how to send a child to college. They didn't go themselves. And so we have to pay attention to that vulnerability in order to increase the success of first gen college students. So all of us are some mixture of advantages and disadvantage, and so we need to use our advantages to help people without those advantages, but also attend to those disadvantages so that they don't have a person in a way that they can enjoy the same benefits from human rights that a person without those disadvantages,
ELISE:
That's such a subtle and powerful reframe, attending to people's vulnerabilities, because I think one of the ways this victim villain, drama triangle approach oppressor and oppressed, and one of the ways that it's gone so awry is here are some people with vulnerabilities, as you said. And so our instinct is, well, who's to blame? Who is the person who is oppressing that rural child? And then it starts to fall apart because nobody wants to say, oh, I'm oppressive being from Montana in a rural state that has gone remarkably more red in recent years. When I go home and talk to conservatives. I love it. Won't surprise you at all. That's what I hear. It's like, why am I a white supremacist oppressor in this construct? I can barely support my family. I hunt to feed my kids. I don't understand. And yes, the making people wrong about language when they don't even know someone who's gay, much less someone who is trans, it immediately puts them into that victim villain construct in a way that I think puts them into fear and anger, and we lose them in that moment. But this idea that you just said of tending to each other's vulnerabilities is so loving and so beautiful that how do you make that happen, Loretta? How do we change the whole construct of language in this country?
LORETTA:
I think it's in us already because I love the way human beings respond after a natural disaster. We don't stop to say, is this person deserving of our health? Are they the right race? Are they the right religion before I go cut that tree that fell down on their house apart? We don't stop to ask any of those questions. It's already in us. The question becomes, how can we make that effortless kindness, that effortless compassion happen for manmade disasters too.
ELISE:
How do we do it?
LORETTA:
Oh, I think it's about teaching people that if I take your pain seriously, that'll help you take someone else's pain. Seriously.
It is true that people who have been through stuff, people who have survived natural disasters or some kind of unimaginable tragedy, they're the people who have the highest degree of empathy for others who go through stuff because someone took their tragedy seriously and offered them what they could in terms of compassion. And so part of what we're dealing with is people like Trump manipulates people's pain pretending to address it, where we can actually take their pain seriously and actually address it and not judge them negatively because they're in pain. Because the last thing a rural white person wants to hear is that they got it going on for them just because they're white,
ELISE:
Right?
LORETTA:
Well, yeah. A friend of mine named Walter Ryan put it beautifully. He said, the problem with explaining white privilege is that you're basically explaining it to people who don't feel very privileged at all. So the way that he puts it, he says, you might not have robbed the bank, but every white person in America is still living off the proceeds. That's a wonderful way to put it, because you're not making them blameless. I mean, you're not blaming them, but you're still helping them see a shared responsibility for changing that certain people get to live off the proceeds of the bank robbery. And certain people were the ones getting robbed. I really learned through deprogramming the white supremacist, how real their pain was. For example, I had to get from Spokane, Washington to Missoula, Montana doing some antique. That's
ELISE:
Where I'm from.
LORETTA:
Okay.
ELISE:
And Spokane is where I did my back to school shopping. So yeah,
LORETTA:
Okay. Well, it wasn't until I was out there in the Pacific Northwest that I realized that there was no plane or train that connected Spokane, Washington to Missoula. The only thing available was a Greyhound bus. And so literally I had to get on this bus in the middle of a snowstorm and ride how many hours I've forgotten to Missoula
ELISE:
Over that crazy pass. That's a crazy pass
LORETTA:
In a snowstorm, right?
ELISE:
Yep.
LORETTA:
That bus was chock full. And the thing that surprised me that I learned, I'd never been on a bus so full of white people who had never been on an airplane in their lives because up until that moment, always assume that white people got to fly wherever they wanted to go to, or they had that kind of economic advantage. And then I realized, or they had access to good dental care, a lot of missing teeth on that bus. A lot of people for whom the thought of getting on an airplane was way beyond their kin. And of course, I was the exotic only black person on the bus. There were some indigenous people on the bus. I was the only black person. So they kept being very curious about me. And so we spent the whole ride talking to and getting to know each other because we were trapped in a bus snowstorm.
So that kind of helped, but that was my first intimate glimpse of white poverty in a portion of the country that was not Appalachia, not the deep South, not where I imagined that kind of poverty existed. The white woman who was running, catching the bus to get away from an abusive husband whose face was covered in bruises, those kinds of stories. And it has been a joy to learn these kinds of things about how complicated and diverse our country is. And so I no longer can assume because of somebody's race and gender that they're not in pain. I got to assume everybody's in some kind of pain about something. Even the children of inherited wealth carry a lot of pain.
ELISE:
I think one of the great delusions that we operate under in this country is that money exonerates you from pain or from bad things happening, and it certainly can life a lot easier and it can create this idea of protection, but nobody can run from whatever is haunting them. I think a lot of people are haunted. Yes, as you said too, there's being from Missoula, I can attest to the amount of both poverty and just sort of lower middle class existence that's dominant in many parts of the world, and also how wonderful these people are. In the same way that sitting on that bus and talking to people, that's been for me, the great reminder as I go home and I ride a chairlift with someone or I sit on a horse next to someone. I love these people. These are not bad people. They are driven by their own anxiety and fear to make different choices than I do, but I'm convinced that we are mostly aligned and quite alike in terms of our values. And so going to the neighbor with the Trump flag, where do you want us all to begin? Assuming we've contended with our own trauma, I do think some people start there.
LORETTA:
Well keep in mind that every human being is capable of good and harm. Our past strategies has been predicated on identifying and eliminating the harm that we think they're doing. What if we changed our strategies to building up and emphasizing the good that they're capable of and really reward, applaud that good side of them so that they grow so much and enjoy so much being appreciated for being good people that they self-regulate themselves out of the desire to harm somebody else because they're used to getting all that criticism are nausea, but are they used to getting appreciated for being the salt of the earth that they also have in them? The Steinbeckian interpretation of what people are capable, how they're capable of supporting each other, sacrificing for their children and others, those kinds of things. Calling in requires us to just switch. Adrienne Maree Brown who wrote An Emergent Strategy, wrote a line that says “What you pay attention to grows.”
So if you only pay attention to the bad stuff people are capable of, you're neglecting the good stuff that they're also capable of. But if you give your attention to that good stuff that they're capable of, that's what's going to grow. In one of my online trainings, I had a blind participant who says that every time she has to walk up a step or through a door, this arm comes out of nowhere and places herself on her body trying to help her. And she always ballistically reacts, she's blind, she can't see it coming, so it feels like a physical assault to her just walking through my day and all of a sudden somebody puts their hands on me. And so she goes ballistic every time it happens. So she asked me, what can I do with that? Because I'm really tired of being assaulted and I don't want to go around as a fight looking for a place to happen all the time.
I said, well, why don't you reinterpret what's happening to you as a very common and frequent instance of bad kindness. Kindness done badly. So what you're calling in response to that would be number one, thank them for their effort to be kind, because you want more of that. You want more people trying to help somebody who's dealing with different abilities and stuff. Number two, set the boundary. You can say, I so appreciate your trying to help me, but I really don't like people putting their hands on me and I can't see it coming and stuff. So you can set your boundary. You don't have to just roll over and say, I'm going to let this happen. And then number three, you call 'em in. But in the future, if you'd like to have somebody who's blind, do you mind if we talk about different things you can do though? You pay attention to what you want to grow the kindness impulse. At the same time you set a boundary for what they're doing wrong. And then the third step is that you call 'em in and talk about, let us talk together about the next time you encounter a blind person. And some things you could do maybe stop and ask them what help they need. I mean, there's other stuff you could have done,
ELISE:
Right? Obviously the back half of the book is outlining strategies for calling in and when to know when it's just not worth it, and then practicing with each other, right? Because the goal, I would assume, is to not trigger someone's humiliation or fear because then that sets a whole cascade of other feelings up necessarily. Or I guess you can't avoid the discomfort, so don't avoid the discomfort, but just do it in a kind and loving way.
LORETTA:
Well, no, you don't want to shame people increase their sense of isolation and humiliation, but your motivation for calling people in has to start with yourself. How do you want to show up?
And so if you care sufficiently for yourself and not in a narcissistic way, then you care about not radiating pain to somebody else. For example. That's why we're in a terrible department of Motor vehicles line, trying to get our driver's licenses. Those kinds of settings are always fraught with ill temper because they're waiting too long. Maybe they don't have the right documentation. And so it's set up to be a call out situation. But if you've embraced calling in, no matter how ill tempered that DMV employee is, you're not going to respond any kind. You're just going to assess this front facing job must be very tough. Glad I don't have it. I'm not going to make this person stay worse because that would be a bad representation of who I want to be and how I want to show up.
ELISE:
And in the process of the mental calculus of whether you're going to call someone in or how you're going to respond to a situation, you asked some really pointed questions like, am I being harmed? Is someone else being harmed? Right? This idea that not every fight is our fight,
LORETTA:
You start with the self and the calling in culture, then you calibrate the size of the conflict because if somebody's just being awkward or irritating, is there actually a threat to you? Or is it you just choosing to make their problem your problem? And I constantly ask people, how well does handing off the remote control to your feelings work for you? Because I got a feeling they're going to be changing to a channel you don't want to see. Don't internalize other people's stuff to the extent that their distress affects your mood,
ELISE:
And I think this idea that everything that you witness, that you perceive as being egregious or aggressive maybe to someone else, that the person needs to be taken to the mat. I think that that was certainly the way that a lot of progressives like me would've handled the last eight years, is I'm going to fight this person on behalf of other people, even though I am not personally harmed because it's a quote right thing to do. I need to teach this person. I need to shame them, right? Or humiliate them or make them wrong in pursuit of justice for other people. And that doesn't seem to be a winning strategy either. You're just shutting conversation down and creating more polarization
LORETTA:
Instead of being in the defense of the vulnerable. Why not be in conversation with the ones capable of causing the harm? That's just a different approach. I tend to ask people to address their own cognitive dissonance. I use the example of pointing out the good that people do, and then ask them to reconcile. How can the good person I know you are also have these hateful things spewing out of your mouth about people you don't even know? Which friend are you to me? Are you the good person I know you're capable of being or the hateful person that you sometimes let slip out? And is that how you want to show up? Is that how you want me to see you? And how well does that work for you? Because many people want us to trust them, but they don't prove themselves trustworthy. And that would be that person who's not choosing to self-regulate that negative part of themselves, why they hope you only notice the good, but you can't change other people, but you can provide them models for how you change, and you can offer them the space to grow, but you just can't make 'em do it.
I think there was a newspaper pundit who wrote a couple of months ago, he said, you can lead, can a horse to water, but you can't make him think
ELISE:
So we started this conversation with you saying that some activists think that you are not standing up to Nazis. When you think about what's ahead of us. Are you optimistic? And what do you want us? I would say the majority of Americans who are not fascists, who are at least, let's say 60% well-intentioned and good movable, touchable, teachable, how do we move through this?
LORETTA:
I think the most dangerous things we could do is to give into fear and hopelessness and despair. I refuse to end my belief in the goodness of the majority of the people in the society, even in the people who voted for Donald Trump. I refuse to demonize them. I refuse to assume that they don't care about how they show up or their reputation or their influence and impact on other people. And so I want to model the behavior I want them to exhibit. I want them to see how much more of a fulfilled and joyful life you can achieve when you give up hating people. And how at peace you become with yourself when you learn self forgiveness, which then enables you to forgive others. And we need to learn to forgive ourselves for not knowing enough, not being enough, not caring enough. I mean, those are the kind of guilt trip wires we carry internally. And so once we learn self forgiveness, it is a wonderful thing.
ELISE:
Well, I love that you write about joy and how unfun it is to be a Nazi and how joyful it is to be a human. And also you open the book talking about, and this is something I feel so deeply, is that you are interested in living out your values. And I think about that all the time,
LORETTA:
Especially when it's hard. It's easy to live out your values when it's easy.
ELISE:
Yeah. But in this moment, it's so compelling. And I recognize the impulse to betray your values and operate out of hating, deprecating and excluding everyone who doesn't agree with you and condemning them. And meanwhile, it's like, no, let's live out these values that are beautiful and inclusive and require being kind and tending to people's vulnerabilities, right? And recognizing that there's pain and fear as primary drivers in what's happening to us. It's very hard though, but I love that you maintain that.
LORETTA:
No, it's hard, honey. I'm not lying saying it isn't. I was very fortunate last week to have to give five consecutive speeches during Martin Luther King Week. And because at the beginning of that week, I was so infused with anger at what harm is coming for very vulnerable people in our society, outrage, anger that I felt that I was betraying the very principles that I had put into my own book because I was so suffused with anger and rage and wanted to cancel everybody who had voted for Trump. I just wanted to just be through with them. And then I had the good fortune to have to reread and rechannel Dr. King's words over and over and over again talking about the beloved community, talking about not displaying violence towards the people who were brutalizing the Civil Rights movement, talking about the higher purpose, human rights and inclusiveness. And after I channeled Dr. King five separate times, I found out that my anger dissipated because I had to remind myself of division that it's possible that he gave his life for. And so I ended that week very differently than how I began that week. And then I began to reaffirm my belief in my calling and strategy because at the beginning of the week, I felt like a sucker. I'm like, I give all these people the benefit of the doubt I was working. Now look what they did.
ELISE:
Yeah, I know. And it's understandable that we think that we can only really be motivated from fear and anger to take action. And that somehow, if that's not the base that's fueling your movement in the world, that you'll be ineffective or you won't feel compelled to do something. And I think that that's not true. We can just as easily be motivated by love and kindness and a positive vision for the future.
LORETTA:
Absolutely. So calling in most matters when it's hard, not when it's easy. At least that's been my experience, and I'm so proud of myself when I've called in myself enough to show up the way I want to show up.
ELISE:
There are many ways to connect with and learn from Loretta. She runs online classes that are $5. She's a professor. This book is, I think, incredible and required reading. And I'm just going to read some parts to you that I think are important because we could have gone for five hours and we only had an hour. So here she writes about the three critical ways in which she's seen call outs, tip over the edge to become more destructive than constructive. One, when calling out becomes a way of asserting ego or power rather than a larger purpose. Two, when the harm caused by a callout outweighs the harm of the original wrong. And three, when callouts create a stifled fearful environment where people are reluctant to engage or get involved. Just want to comment for a minute here because I think we didn't talk about this in the conversation, but I'm thinking about people like Trump who are seemingly impervious to any sort of reputational harm.
But we all witnessed a pretty incredible calling in when Mariann Edgar Budde, the reverend at the inauguration, called Trump in and asked him to remember that he himself said that he had been saved in some way by God and that he should practice mercy for all of those who are scared. And it's interesting how powerful that was, both for those of us who saw it, and also in terms of the way that it actually seemed to affect him, not necessarily in the way that we would have wanted, but it got under his skin in a very powerful way. So I think that's an incredible moment of calling in just to mention, and then here is a part of the book when Loretta talks about the importance of therapy. She writes, “All of us who wish to be of service to the human rights movement need to attend to our own healing. We should not let our triggers betray our values and our common sense, nor should we use the movement as our personal therapy space where normal experiences are pathologized and over-diagnose and appeals for sympathy. If we overuse words like trauma, the less effective they become and the less meaning they start to have.” And then this, I think is a really good summation of some of what's happening, which is she writes, “Call out culture treats people as competitors for justice rather than partners capable of uniting for a common goal. It encourages us to become policer of others' behavior and unconscious service to the politics of domination. And it encourages us to spend our time and energy fleeing for the moral high ground. Let someone else come around and call us out.” In turn, I could, I have 16 pages of notes I could keep going, but please get this book.
It is, in many parts, joyful. She talks about how fighting hate should be fun. It's being a Nazi that sucks and that it can be fun to build movements. It can be fun to approach the world with kindness. It doesn't mean that you are accepting or agreeing with cruelty by responding with kindness. It is, as she mentioned, one of the tenets of a human rights movement. If you like today's episode, please, please rate and review it and share it with a friend.