Working with Your Enemies (Sharon McMahon)
Working with Your Enemies (Sharon McMahon)
Listen now (54 mins) | "And this wisdom from somebody who has lived a life that most of us can never imagine, this wisdom that she has left behind for us, that your enemies..."
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You might recognize Sharon McMahon’s voice from her award-winning podcast, “Here’s Where It Gets Interesting.” And you might recognize her face from Instagram where she is affectionately known as America's government teacher. You can find her
. It's thrilling to see a longtime high school government and law teacher become an Instagram celebrity. She has over a million followers. People love McMahon, including me for her non-partisan fact-based information. She really cuts through the clutter. Today we're talking about her new number one New York Times bestselling book, The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement . And we also talk deeply about what it takes to raise consciousness in general, why it's a flawed idea to re-litigate history from the consciousness of today and where that's worth doing and where that woefully misfires. And we also spend a lot of time talking about what it is to work with the enemy to create positive change. I loved this conversation.MORE FROM SHARON MCMAHON:
Follow Sharon on Instagram
Sharon’s Podcast, “Here’s Where It Gets Interesting”
Sharon’s Website
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
Congrats on everything. It's amazing to see a history book like yours on the top of the New York Times bestseller list.
SHARON:
Thank you. I know that is exciting. It's really cool.
ELISE:
It is. And to watch your popularity across the board explode is thrilling that people are interested in this. I appreciate that.
SHARON:
Yeah, thank you.
ELISE:
Of course. It's hard to even know where to start with this book. I thank you for introducing me to so many people. Perhaps I'm exceptionally ignorant, but there were many new names for me, including Inez. I didn't know her story at all.
SHARON:
Yeah.
ELISE:
Is that what you find, that most of us aren't that educated when it comes to American history?
SHARON:
Well, no, it's not surprising that you've never heard of her. It's not surprising that you haven't heard of most of the people in the book. I intentionally highlighted people whose stories are not so, no, I don't think it's an act of ignorance on your part. How have you never heard of her? It's not like saying you've never heard of Taylor Swift. That's not what we're talking about here. So I don't necessarily chalk it up to ignorance. There has been two sort of things at work when it comes to US history. One of course is that many people's stories have been forgotten about. People like Inez didn't have children, and so there was not somebody who was sort of in charge of preserving their legacy. And you see this with an Alexander Hamilton type figure. His wife Eliza dedicated her life to preserving her husband's legacy. She did so much to make sure that his name was never forgotten.
And then of course, his children took up the mantle of preserving his legacy. So that's one of the reasons you see such a disparity between people like Alexander Hamilton and some of his other counterparts like Governor Morris who governor was married and had a child, but it was still not the same movement on the part of his descendants to preserve his legacy. So you see that. You see the fact that there's a lot of people's history. They're just sort of forgotten about maybe in a way that there's not a malicious intent, it's just they go by the wayside. And then there are people whose stories have been intentionally excluded. There has been most history books, even to this day, 70% of them are written by men and the majority of them are written by white men. So there has been both an intentional and perhaps a subconscious bias against stories like these because the people don't have the most money and the most ships and the largest platforms and the biggest elected offices. There's both sort of a collective forgotten memory and also unintentional exclusion. So no, it doesn't surprise me that people don't know these stories.
ELISE:
And as you open the book describing looking up at the sky, we have these stars who then draw a lot of attention and we miss all the surrounding light. I love that you told Claudette Colvin's story. I had just heard about her in the last year or two from, I dunno if you read Maddie Kahn's book, the Young and the Restless about Teenage Girls. I did. But it's thrilling to see people like that starting to get the air and the airtime that they deserve because Yeah, and it's interesting how, one, obviously we're highly reductive and yes, some of these stories are told with more prominence than others, and we love the story of the singular achievement. Is it just simpler to understand our world in that way by focusing on the one rather than the many?
SHARON:
I think there's this sense of the group project, it is kind of traumatic for people. We can all look back at the group project and we're like, come on. Either you were the person that did all the work and you resented everyone else, or you were the person who was mooching off the more motivated students. But a lot of people only enjoyed the social aspect of the group project. They could just chat during the whole class period. So I think there's this element of I am this rugged American individualism that I don't need to depend on my neighbors. I can achieve great things on my own. I do think that's sort of baked into our culture. And then there's the element of the group project. I don't want to depend on other people to do it for me. I just want to do it myself.
But I also think there's a more sort of granular aspect of it, which is that we do want to feel important. We do want to feel as though our efforts matter. We do want to feel as though our labors are not in vain. We want to feel like we are an integral part of the universe in whatever larger small way that is. I think there's an intrinsic human desire to be known and to belong, and this speaks to that sense of that very real human desire to want to have an important to play in their community. So I think it's probably all of those things, honestly.
ELISE:
Yeah, and it's interesting thinking about the people that you chose to profile and those who didn't want to be known, like Anna Thomas jeans and then those who, I mean the idea of fame was certainly not part of their consideration. They were just sort of getting education moving in various parts of the country. I loved the focus on education and teachers, and I understand that makes sense coming from you, but it's so essential also in as a meta theme of this book, which is who gets to tell these stories and create the social fabric, or at least the stories we're told about who we are. And it also leads me to another big theme of the book, which is, man, it's really tough to judge history through the lens of the consciousness of today. This is obviously a big theme of your work. People are imperfect. It's a failing exercise to litigate the past in many ways. I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't reexamine some of these heroes and say, oh wow, Woodrow Wilson or whomever is not maybe worth veneration in the same way. But how do you think about that? I mean, you do a great job of contextualizing all of these people throughout the pages of the book, but how do you teach that or approach that?
SHARON:
Yeah, I think that's a really great question, and I think it's a question that a lot of people today wrestle with. I hear that from people all the time. How do I enjoy learning about somebody like Thomas Jefferson? How do I square the idea that we have a monument to Washington when he was such a big enslave, when my moral values are so violated by these people that are held up as heroes of the past? How do I square these things with each other? One of the things that I try to do this in the book, and I bring this up frequently on my other writings and other things that I do, which is that first of all, there's a difference between somebody who is an enslave and somebody who has made sort of normal human mistakes in their lives, which we all have all done things.
We would look back and be like, oh no. Oh no. I don't know why I said that. That was the wrong move. That's a very normal human experience. And some of these things can be attributed to the time period in which somebody lives. There weren't a lot of people who were working for women's equality back then. That wasn't even something that was on the table for people, for most people. And so by comparison today, we might look back at the efforts of 70 years of women to even get something so simple as getting the age of consent changed from, in the case of Idaho, the age of consent changed from the age of 10 to the age of 18, how long it took to even make movement on that small issue. Well, of course we can look back now and be like, are you kidding me?
That's absurd. That's ridiculous. But you have to understand the context in which these women were working for the right to have any amount of say over their own lives. And so it's easy to judge from today's standards to be like, that's all you were doing was trying to raise the age of consent from 10 to 18. That's all you were doing. It seems like it's so little, it's so small. But in reality it was a very big deal then. And we have to understand that we cannot entirely judge the past from the present. Now, there are some things that I do think are fair to judge the past by, and those are often things that people at the time were saying, you can't do this. This is immoral. We cannot annihilate an entire ethno religious group in Europe. We cannot allow Hitler to round up all of the Jews in his effort to exterminate them. There were many people at the time who felt like that was wrong, even though there was a tremendous amount of antisemitism in that time period in the 20th century. There were a lot of people who were like that, this is morally wrong. They knew it was wrong at the time,
And there were some people who were willing to go along with the wrong thing. And the same is true of enslavement. People knew it was wrong at the time, and there were some people who were willing to go along with what was wrong, but that didn't mean that nobody knew it was wrong. No one had ever said, we should work for abolition. So those are different issues, bigger issues in my mind than some of the other social norms that have changed over time. The idea that women can and should go to college or women can and should speak in public or all the things that are very normal in our quest for equality today, I don't think it's fair to judge women of the past by how far we have come in 2024
ELISE:
And to just hold every historical figure in some sort of context. And to your point, not that we can't condemn them. I think that's very astutely said. But if we go by those standards, then pretty much every mover in the civil rights movement was a misogynist. Women were entirely excluded from that movement. When Shirley Chisholm ran for president, black men were disavowed her. Were seeing the remnant of that today.
SHARON:
Yeah,
ELISE:
Not to get biblical, which is weird, but to even think about Pharisees saying, how could you guys have killed all your prophets? And meanwhile, then they theoretically, if we're treating the Bible as a piece of literature crucified Jesus, so we do this. This is what we do. This is part of being a participant in history making. It's very easy to judge the past and say, I would've been an abolitionist, of course, obviously with today's consciousness, but I can't say that with any sense of authority that I would've been strong enough in that I would hope so,
SHARON:
Or that you wouldn't have been raised in the south. We always make this assumption that, well, my family would never have been a family that enslaved other people. We operate from the position of like, well, I don't do that now and I wouldn't have done it then. But we have a difficult time contextualizing what would happen if you were raised with different values. What would happen if you were raised to believe that your religious faith not only permitted it, but condoned it? Do you know what I mean? And that was the truth of many people. Again, this is not to say in any way that this excuses, it makes it okay. It doesn't, doesn't in any way. But yes, we make a lot of assumptions about our own moral character, our own goodness based on our viewpoint from today, and we can't project how we would've reacted in the past.
ELISE:
Yeah. It's also exceedingly easy to practice sort of right speech that doesn't necessarily correlate with right action. And you mentioned multiple people like that. The father of Liberty, I can't remember who it was who talked about Patrick Henry. Yeah, Patrick Henry who spoke against slavery yet didn't free his
SHARON:
Slaves. Yeah, that was true of a lot of people. Yes, that was true of Thomas Jefferson. All men are, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, but obviously they, he did not believe them to be self-evident because he did not believe them to be created equal or he would not have continued to argue for the concept of enslavement. The history is full of these people, so it's most fair to judge people as a whole. It's most fair to judge people from the perspective of both your contributions and the things they got wrong. And you can do that if Thomas Jefferson and be like, wow, his writings changed the early republic. He an incredible political philosopher and also these other things. Martin Luther King was a misogynist and he was a serial cheater. He intentionally excluded women from a seat at the table.
And in fact, many women who were active in the civil rights movement, they kind of felt salty for the amount of credit that Martin Luther King got because he was the great speaker and he was a great speaker. And it's unfair to say that he didn't make incredible contributions to this country. It would be unfair to judge him on only one of these two things. Like, oh, well, he was a philander and a misogynist, so forget him. And it would also be unfair to only point to his incredible rhetoric, his vision for the future, his ability to galvanize people. If you only talk about one of these two aspects of who he is, you're denying him. He is humanity. His humanity is all of those things, and it's all of our things too.
ELISE:
Yes. And this is why books like yours are so important, and the work you do is so important is injecting the nuance and complexity into all of these conversations and all these moments of history, because that's something that we collectively need to, we need to enhance that muscle of being able to hold people, as you just said, in their humanity and recognize we can learn from people or engage with their work or their lives and not wholesale, adopt or embrace every part of them, but we don't need to fully reject or vilify them either. As a historian and someone who really understands social media as well, is it that people are so quick, where does this come from? This pouncing on people or the obviously canceling and whatnot is relatively new conceit. This is sort of the scapegoat mechanism. But it is interesting how quickly, obviously people spread news or information about people without really understanding the full picture, and this whole thing is speeding up.
SHARON:
Yeah, it has always existed. It was just always much slower and in a much smaller scale. If we think back to the election between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, that was incredibly contentious. Incredibly contentious with both sides just doing an incredible amount of mud slinging where Andrew Jackson is insinuating into the press that John Quincy Adams was essentially a pimp during his time working in Russia. And where John Quincy Adams is talking about how Andrew Jackson is a bigamist and he married another man's wife, and it was a very, very, very mean me mean election. So these ideas of I'm going to drop breadcrumbs to the press, that's going to make you look bad, and that is going to get picked up and become part of the public consciousness. That's not a new thing. It's just much easier to do today because of the democratization of information and how, as you mentioned, how viral information can become so readily that it used to take a concerted amount of effort to spread a rumor around the country about somebody else.
And now we are hit with a fire hose of it on a daily basis about all kinds of rumor in innuendo that can get spread about another person. And it's a very challenging thing to deal with. There is not a good answer to police this. There's not a good answer to say, here's how we will prevent it entirely. Because in order to prevent it entirely, you greatly restrict people's free speech rights. Sure. We could be North Korea where people don't access the internet, and thus nobody has anything wrong said about them online. Like, sure, we could do that. That sounds terrible. So there is not a good and perfect way that prevents these things, but the idea that people have canceled people or spread rumor, innuendo, falsities for their own personal benefit, it's not a new idea. It's just become faster and easier with the tool of the internet.
ELISE:
It was reassuring in some perverse way to read some of the stories in your book about how bad politics has been at various points in time and to feel like, oh, this is bad, but maybe we're somehow slightly, it's a slightly improved scale.
SHARON:
Nobody's
ELISE:
Being beaten unconscious
SHARON:
In Congress. Yeah, exactly. No one's being beaten to nearly the point of death on the floor of Congress about whether or not it's okay to enslave people. That didn't happen this week. And this is something that people are like, oh, no, don't say that, but this is true. And so I've told a couple of audiences recently, I'm going to hold your hand, want to say this, when people are like, is this the worst it's ever been? The answer is actually this is the best it's ever been. And people are like, are you cat? And me, because they feel like we are about to crash land into hell in a hand basket. It is just like everything is about to just disintegrate into a giant atomic fireball. That's how it feels to some people, when in reality, this is in many ways the best it has ever been, which is disconcerting for some people to hear about. But today, you have a reasonable belief that your child born today will grow to adulthood today. You have a reasonable expectation that your child will not be sold into enslavement. When you understand enough about history, you can see how far we have come, how much there is left to do, but how far we've come.
ELISE:
Yeah. And yes, there are backslides and rights, and yes, we have to deal with climate change and all of that. But yes, I'd rather be alive right now than a hundred years ago
SHARON:
With Advil and antibiotics.
ELISE:
Yes, yes, yes, I am with you all the way.
ELISE:
All right. Let's talk about Virginia Randolph and Booker t Washington. And this is another really interesting conversation because so much of their work was done under white supremacy, and they took a lot of flack. Maybe Virginia wasn't famous enough to take flack, but Booker t Washington certainly did for what people felt like was upholding white supremacy by not demanding desegregation. So can you talk a little bit about his legacy and who she is?
SHARON:
Yeah, yeah. So there were sort of two schools of thought in the post Civil War era, the figureheads of these two schools of thought. One is Booker T. Washington, and the other is W.E.B. Du Bois. And Du Bois was much more in the camp of full equality, full civil rights, full integration of all public accommodations, that we should not be accommodating white supremacy by playing within the system. That the system itself of white supremacy must be abolished and working within the system is only helping to perpetuate the system. So that's one school of thought. And the other school of thought, the Booker t Washington School of Thought was it was a school of incrementalism that first we free ourselves from enslavement. Second, we better our economic conditions by getting training for jobs where we can support ourselves and where we can develop good relationships with whites, then we can move up to this next tier where we become more accepted by whites in society.
And we'll do that by being upstanding, respectable members of white society. And this sort of incremental approach towards equality did not initially demand full civil rights. And so thinkers like Du Bois and people in that camp really felt like you are just operating within the system as it exists, and you are helping white people maintain white supremacy by working within the system. The system itself needs to go away. That's a very common criticism of Booker t Washington. And then the criticism of Du Bois is that you're asking for radical change that people they're not going to accomplish, and wouldn't it be better to have some movement than nothing at all? So that's sort of the backdrop of the reconstruction era of the post-Civil war moving into the end of the 19th century, into the turn of the century where I pick up talking about a woman named Virginia Randolph, who really should be regarded in the same pantheon of black educators, black thinkers as Booker t Washington.
And in fact, some people during her lifetime even said that about her, like a history professor at the University of Virginia felt like the work of Virginia Randolph was even more important than the work of Booker t Washington. So Virginia Randolph is born two parents who had been freed after the freed from and settlement after the Civil War. Her father dies when she's a young child, and so she has to work from the time she is a very young girl working at a neighbor's house, and she eventually becomes teacher and ultimately Virginia Randolph revolutionizes education for black children across the entire south. And she does that in part via a grant that she receives. And that's sort of facilitated by the superintendent of the schools where she worked that allows her to and allows the school system to take her methods of instruction and to disseminate them not just across the entire American South, but also internationally as well.
And so what Virginia Randolph accomplishes with her life, and she's a very, very, very long career as an educator. She doesn't die until the 1950s. And what she accomplishes as an educator is perhaps of even greater significance than what somebody like Booker t Washington accomplished. And one of the reasons we know about Booker t Washington, and we don't know about Virginia Randolph is Booker t Washington is out writing his own autobiography. He's writing up from slavery, which was published in chapters in a magazine. It was serialized and then it becomes a book. And since then, up from slavery has never been out of print. It is a book that still sells today. So he's writing about it. He is befriending wealthy whites from the north, like the Carnegies and the people in that ilk. So he draws further attention to himself by being in the orbit of people like Teddy Roosevelt, so that his name is in the papers and whatnot. And again, let's be real, he's a man. And this is still a very patriarchal society, that women's roles were beneath those of the roles of men in almost every single way. So what Booker did for black children of his time was very important, but perhaps even more important is what Virginia Randolph did. And the effects of what Virginia Randolph did are still being felt today. You just don't know it.
You just haven't heard that story yet. And I just find that sort of like you're still being impacted by her work. You just don't know it. That is always something that's very, very interesting for me to learn about. It gives me all the little brain tingles.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, it's incredibly exciting to understand how indelible that impact was and the way that she then interacts or comes to sort of braid with the story of Sears and that, I mean, it made me want to just go buy a new washing machine from Sears, that's for sure. But can you talk about, you don't have to do the whole, as fascinating as that whole story is, but about the way that he sort of started to set up this foundation to really get these schools going in these communities.
SHARON:
Yeah. So there's a man in the book whose name is Julius Rosenwald, who eventually, by virtue of luck and proximity, which is how he describes it, becomes the president of Sears Roebuck and Co, which at the time was the Amazon of retailers. It was the biggest retailer in the world. And Rosenwald is the child of immigrants himself. He doesn't come from, he has a middle class background, but he doesn't come from wealth or prestige. And eventually Julius Rosenwald becomes wealthy beyond anybody's imagination. He is the early 20th century equivalent of a billionaire. We didn't have billionaires in the early 20th century, but he becomes the early 20th century version of that. And he realizes like I have everything anyone could ever, ever want. I have healthy children, I have a beautiful wife. We go on all these vacations and she has all the furs and the wardrobes, and we have the beautiful house, and I've set my children up for the rest of their lives and there's nothing else I could ever want in life.
And he ultimately ends up getting given the book up from slavery by a friend. He's very, very impacted by reading Booker t Washington story. And so he meets Booker t Washington at an event in Chicago, and Booker t Washington traveled all over the country speaking at events and raising money for Tuskegee and bringing awareness to the issue of black education in the South. He strikes up a friendship with Booker t Washington and ultimately sits on the board of Tuskegee. And Booker t Washington later wrote that Julius Rosenwald was one of the most important board members of Tuskegee. And that was saying something given that people like Teddy Roosevelt were also on the board of the Tuskegee Institute, and there were many, again, Booker T spent a lot of time cultivating these relationships with wealthy white people. So Julius Rosenwald begins making bequests to the Tuskegee Institute and Booker t Washington at one point, Julius Rosenwald spends him some money and he has a little bit left, and he writes a letter to Julius Rosenwald and is like, what would you think if we did X, Y, and Z with this $2,500 that is left?
And Julius Rosenwald is like, yeah, I proof that sounds great. Why don't you do that? And that yes, changed the course of history because Julius Rosenwald later went on to begin 5,000 schools in the United States, primarily for black children in the rural south. And at one point, 90% of black children in Alabama were being educated in a school that was in part paid for by Julius Rosenwald. And including many people like John Lewis and Tony Morrison, who went on to in their own way change the course of history, many of the workers in the Civil Rights movement attended a school that had been in part funded by Julius Rosenwald. And had they not had the opportunity to become educated in that time and place, the history of the country would look very different. Stories like that. Most people have never heard of Julius Rosenwald. Most people have never heard his name.
Or maybe you've like, oh yeah, I've heard that name. I have no idea what he did. What he's famous for is being the president of Sears. But by the end of his life, Julius Rosenwald has given away all of his money, the equivalent of a billion dollars. He's given away all of his money with the instructions of he had set aside some for living expenses and whatever the instructions of all of my money needs to be given away within a certain amount of time after my death. I don't want some perpetual foundation with my name on it. I don't want some JE brought to you by Julius R. Rosenwald. He didn't want his name on the side of a building. He wasn't thinking that his legacy was going to be in naming rights. He knew that his legacy was going to be in the institutions that he helped create, and the institutions that live on today and the people who attended those institutions, museums, schools, arts awards, things along those lines, the people who benefited from these institutions that he helped build who have then gone on to change the course of history, the ripple effects from having been given a book.
I love that. This book, you got this book as a gift, and the results changed the world. And his friend that gave him the book certainly did not think to himself, well give this book to JR. And JR gets to be friends with Booker z Washington and the fates conspire and the train ride and the blah blah, blah. There's probably no sense that his friend who gave him the book thought, me giving you this book is going to change the world. But that's exactly what it did.
ELISE:
Such a beautiful story. And I don't know if he pioneered this model of philanthropy, but I also thought it was incredible that the gifts were contingent, or not contingent, but well kind of contingent right on the community also pitching in.
SHARON:
They were matching grants. Yes,
ELISE:
Yes.
SHARON:
And some people have criticized him for that saying he was still putting too large of a burden on the local communities to pitch in for the 5,000 schools. And he was also a huge contributor to YMCAs around the country and a huge variety of other charitable and philanthropic endeavors. But some people have criticized him saying, you had the means and you were still putting some of the onus on these very impoverished communities. His perspective was, if I am giving them free money, but they have to come up with some of the money themselves, then we know we have community buy-in. Then we know it is not just this white Northerner who steps in is like, I'm building you a school whether you want it or not, that the community has to demonstrate their willingness to help build it, maintain it, staff it, all of these things that become integral to its longevity. So yes, almost all of his money was given away in the form of matching grants in an effort to encourage the rest of the community to give and for them to have a community.
ELISE:
Yeah, I mean, it does feel like an antidote to white saviorism and a true collective ownership of something that's sacred. And yes, of course, these schools, I mean, you can look at the system and say it's totally bullshit that these communities weren't afforded proper institute, that this had to be a community community. I mean, it's all ridiculous. It was yes, yes, yes. It's all ridiculous.
SHARON:
It's both of those things at the same time. And I think that's the sort of the angle of history that people have been missing out on throughout all of their education. It's both of these things. It's both ridiculous that a private individual should have to give money for schools when the government of that state should be paying for them. That's ridiculous. It's ridiculous that the communities had to be taxed on their property taxes and that their property taxes were not being used to pay for schools, so they had to fundraise separately. So the communities themselves are paying for these schools twice essentially. That's ridiculous. I mean, the entire concept of enslavement and segregation, that's ridiculous. None of these things should have had to have happened. And that can be true. And also what people like Virginia Randolph, Booker T. Washington, W.B. Du Bois, Jr. Rosenwald, that can also be remarkable. Both of those things can be true at the same time.
ELISE:
I know you're on a T-Swift like stadium tour, which is very exciting. Is there anything surprising in terms of its resonance?
SHARON:
It is. Yeah. I mean, I'm not playing at stadiums, but I have been already around the country at a bunch of great venues. Yes, I've been talking to my phone for four years from a dirt road in Northern Minnesota. You know what I mean? That's where I live. And so the idea that I get to be in a room with all of these other people who I have never met before, you get to see me, but I never get to see you. You know what I mean? That's what's happened with my work. I don't get to see, you get to see me. The idea that we can all just be in a room together and the energy and excitement in the room is just like it has been as a certified homebody. It has been far more gratifying and fun than I ever thought it would be.
I thought it was going to be fun, which is why I planned it. I thought, this is going to be so fun. So I went into it anticipating this is going to be so fun. It's way more fun than I anticipated to be able to see all these people. And when I do these sort of meet and greets after most of my community is women and some men, but it's mostly women. And a lot of the men there have sort of been dragged there by their significant others. They're out on a date night or whatever it is. And it's been really fun to see all of the dudes who are like, damn, that was actually really incredible. You know what I mean? They were thinking, it's going to be braid your hair, kumbaya girl books for girls. That's going to be the vibe. And they get there and they are just like, I had no idea. That has been a really fun part of my tour.
ELISE:
No, I get it. And to that end, just to close it out, do you have a favorite child in this book, Sharon?
SHARON:
I don't have a favorite child. I love them all for different reasons, and I would be really sad to lose any of them. I fought really hard for every single person who is in this book. My editor tried to get me to cut more than one person, and I was like, no, they are staying in.
ELISE:
I know those arguments.
SHARON:
Yes, there were some people who did get cut. And I'm like, okay, you know what? You were right about that. But every single person who's in this book, I'm glad that I fought for, but one of the people that I love her so much is Septa Mcclar, and I just love her. I really like people have different beliefs about the afterlife or even if there is an afterlife and that's all well and good, but if there is an afterlife, she's somebody that I would love to meet someday. She's somebody that I would be like, I just have so much respect for you, so much admiration for you. She had a set of life circumstances that nobody would ever want to replicate. Her husband is a serial. Her husband's married to another woman, secretly married to another woman, has children with another woman, and then he dies leaving Septima a single mom, which was a tremendous burden.
It's a tremendous burden To be a single parent in 2024, let alone in the early 20th century to make a living and provide for your child as a woman was very challenging. She's falsely arrested. She's fired from her job. She's almost killed a bunch of times. She works under terrible conditions. She lives in the segregated south. The totality of her life circumstances are such that you were just like, oh my God, how much adversity must one woman overcome? She's very depressed. She contemplates suicide. And then at the end of her life, when she's had this very long career as an educator and she eventually becomes the mother of the civil rights movement, somebody asks her, what have you learned? What have you learned from all of your many decades of doing this work? And she says, I've learned that I can work with my enemies because you never know when they might have a change of heart at any moment.
And dang it, if that is not a message we need today, I can work with my enemies. Not I will block my enemies, not I will delete and unfriend my enemies, not I will cancel my enemies. I can work with my enemies. That idea seems absurd to many people today. Seems absurd. What an absurd ask that you would have to work with your enemies. But she says, why? Because she has learned, and this is a woman with actual enemies. This is not a woman who works in a cubicle and her enemy is a dude in her office that microwaves fish. That's not what we're talking about here. You're listening to this. Stop microwaving fish. No one likes you. When do you do that? Okay, nobody. Right? Raving fish is the worst. We're not talking about a perceived enemy. We're talking about an actual real life enemy like people who are trying to kill her.
She can work with them because they might have a change of heart at any moment. And this wisdom from somebody who has lived a life that most of us can never imagine, this wisdom that she has left behind for us, that your enemies and change, and how will they ever have a change of heart if they don't have a relationship with you? We all know the best way to influence somebody is by having a warm relationship with them. We have the greatest amount of influence over the people we are the closest to. And one of the reasons people like me can be influential, we're all influential in our own ways. But one of the reasons people listen to me is because they feel like they know me, because I share aspects of my life on the internet and they feel like they know my personality and they know what I'm about and what I stand for, and what I don't like what my quirks are.
They feel like they know me. Your enemies have no hope of changing. If the only other person that they are influenced by are other people in this enemy group, that relationship is an important component of change. And it's one that we have become so disinclined to value that we just light it on fire the second somebody disagrees with us about something. Well, I don't agree with this. I think this should be illegal. Those people are bad, wrong or stupid. Our inclination is to just be like, you're dead to me. Essentially. That's not the place that our ancestors may change from our ancestors who changed this country for the better, worked with their enemies. And that is like, whoa, that is a big thing to get your arms around today. I have somewhere with people who think that, but I hate him. It's a big pivot from where most of us exist today. So I love her.
ELISE:
That's a beautiful example. Thank you for bringing her into the conversation because yes, the tenets of DEI would suggest that we don't get to exclude people and we have to include diversity of thought. And yet it chafes. I know it's very chafing to people to not morally exclude or physically exclude the people who are on the other side, but we're not going to get anywhere if we keep doing that.
SHARON:
No, it's obviously our knee jerk reaction is to just be like, listen, you can't be here if that's what you think. Right? I truly do understand that response. It's very self protectionary because that's what our brains want. We want us to be safe. Your brain wants you to be safe first and foremost. But how will, and again, I'm not suggesting we should make unsafe environments for people. I'm not suggesting that, but nevertheless, how will somebody who is wrong in their thinking about some other group of people, how will they ever see the light if we don't show it to them? And people do not change their mind by being shamed and ridiculed as much as we wish. That was a useful tool. If shame and ridicule worked, nobody would be an addict. Nobody would ever commit a new crime. There'd be no criminal recidivism if that actually worked. It'd be a very different world, but it doesn't. Somebody has to show them the light. And it might as well be me, and it might as well be you.
ELISE:
It should be all of us because we're running this episode on the eve of the election. But regardless of who wins, it will be close. And to see half the country as an enemy and as a loser in this particular election is no way to move forward. We have to figure out some sort of deep embrace of each other, as unsavory as that may feel. That's the work.
SHARON:
Yes, the tent has to get bigger. That's the bottom line, is the tent has to get bigger, and we need to stop checking IDs for do you belong in the right group? And as much as that feels like scary and unsafe, that is the way forward. The tent has to be bigger and it has to include more people. And we cannot continue on the path that we have been on of like, well, we disagree, so we're not friends. That's not how positive change happens.
ELISE:
Thank God for people like Sharon McMahon for the good work that she does on social media teaching all of us about history and government. I'm such a fan, and it was really fun to sit with her. And this book, which is essentially a giant braid of various braids, is a really quick, fun engaging read. And I learned about so many people. Unfortunately, we barely scraped the surface of what's in this tight 280 pages, but you will really enjoy the small and the mighty. I promise. It would also be really fun to listen to, I would imagine. But it offers a far more nuanced and complex picture of history than I've read it in a while.