This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Episode Transcript
Lee
Lauren
And I'm Lauren White.
Lee
Welcome back Lauren White.
Lauren
Good to be back Lee Camp.
Lee
Love this guest you connected us with today.
Lauren
Yes, she is fascinating. Loretta Ross, self-described black feminist.
Lee
I think she's someone who probably meets the litmus test of most all causes on the American political left.
Lauren
Right, and yet she's arguing against what many presume to be a common tactic of the left.
Loretta
I'm concerned that people are obsessed with people choosing the right word, choosing the right gender pronoun, this feeling of walking on eggshells for fear that you will be permanently blacklisted or canceled if you don't have a perfect thought every time you open your mouth. I think we've become the speech police, the thought police, and a bit hypocritical in it, because we're pursuing political perfection from very imperfect people.
Lee
And yet, she'll go on to make it clear that she does not think that this is merely a failing of the left, but a widespread cultural thin-skin-ness.
Lauren
And there you go again, Lee, making up words.
Lee
Yes, Lauren. And I see your envy, and I maintain that everyone should try to do that at least once a day.
Lauren
And our interview in just a moment.
So Loretta is a women's rights activist, a visiting associate professor at Smith College in Massachusetts. She's also an author of the upcoming book, due to come out in 2021, titled Calling in the Calling Out Culture: Detoxing Our Movement.
Lee
And she's the author of a recent New York Times opinion piece entitled “I'm a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture Is Toxic,” subtitled “There are better ways of doing social justice work.” Welcome, Loretta. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Loretta
Thank you for having me on your show.
Lee
It's a delight to get to converse with you. Lauren and I were both just fascinated with this New York Times piece, in many ways because it fits some of our own experience of watching social media culture, and watching the polarization that's happening, and the inability to have conversations without the perfectionism, I guess, in language, or expectations about perfection in speech. Would you give us a snapshot of the overall argument that you're making in that New York Times opinion piece?
Loretta
Well, I think that we're caught up in a cultural moment where people are hypercritical of each other, and I'm sure that the political partisan divide doesn't help that. But my particular focus is on those of us in the human rights movement, why we can be better together, even if we're not having a lot of luck persuading our opponents, people who are opposed to human rights, to be better. But they're not my major concern. I'm concerned that people are obsessed with people choosing the right word, choosing the right gender pronoun, this feeling of walking on eggshells for fear that you will be permanently blacklisted or canceled if you don't have a perfect thought every time you open your mouth, and include everybody who should not be omitted when you just try to say something. I think we've become the speech police, the thought police, and a bit hypocritical in it, because we're pursuing political perfection from very imperfect people.
Lauren
So, what do you think is happening right now in this cultural moment you're describing, where we all seem to be missing this wisdom? It's puzzling, like it seems so obvious that what you're saying makes sense. So what's going on? Do you have a sense of that or a theory?
Loretta
Well, I think human behavior is human behavior. The original definition of a call-out was to a duel. I mean, that's how Alexander Hamilton got killed. We recall that. So shaming and blaming is part of the human condition, but what's different about now is social media. If you insult somebody or you feel insulted, you don't just call out the person who did it, but you can quickly energize a mob to do a group attack on that person. And the other thing that concerns me is escalation. It goes from someone saying something that you consider problematic, and you criticize that, and then it quickly slides into attacking their character. They went from saying a bad word to becoming a toxic person, and then that slides into questioning whether they should exist in the first place. So the magnification and exaggeration over social media, and probably outside of social media, is a problem, too, because it's all right to offer feedback if someone uses the wrong word--if I say crippled, when the current language is disabled--it's another thing to say that I'm a worthless human being who should be wiped off the face of the earth, because I couldn't keep up with these rapidly changing language conventions.
Lee
You know, I'm probably hypersensitive to shaming language, and I think that a lot of that has to do with the fact that, in my cultural context--my church cultural context growing up--the mechanism of shame was so powerful in keeping people in line, and so I've spent decades working through realizing the way that shaming impacted my own psyche. And so I find myself, when I encounter some of that in stereotypical right or fundamentalist contexts, highly sensitive against that. But it's fascinating to me that this is not just a right-wing thing. We see it across, or at least we see it in a variety of polarized positions. But do you think that there's parallels between a conservative or right-wing religious fundamentalism? Is there such a thing as a left-wing fundamentalism in this regard?
Loretta
Well, first let's talk about what happened within churches, ‘cause I was raised churched as any other good southern black woman was. And the first cancel outrage was around the Hollywood film industry. Remember the reaction to the Passion of the Christ and calling for people to get canceled, or the reaction to the Harry Potter books, and all of that. So it happens on the left, it happens on the right, it happens with the churched and the unchurched. This willingness to prop yourself up or boost yourself up by putting other people down is kind of like a human condition, again. And the question is, what moral compass do you use when your outrage gives you license to blow up somebody else's life for your own aggrandizement, for your own virtue signaling, showing how saintly or woke you are, in the parlance of the left? Why do you have permission to, first of all, preemptively strike out at others? And you see that strike itself reveals a lot more than you think you're showing, because, in fact, the fact that you need to strike first usually reveals that you've got something that you're desperately hiding. So you pounce first before someone pounces on you, and so it's really important for us to just pull back from the precipice of human mutual destruction. And we are all interdependent on each other, like COVID has totally demonstrated. I don't think that bacteria cares about our politics or our religiosity. Somehow it's not paying attention, and so we're all in this together, and if we can't recognize it because of this virus, I don't know when we can recognize it.
Lee
Yeah. Right.
Lauren
So in thinking about doing this differently, you've talked about calling in instead of calling out. And I like the way you framed it: that it's a matter of holding an offender accountable with love. And I'm curious if you want to just expound upon that some, but also give us some examples of how you've been involved in that kind of work.
Loretta
Well, first of all, my background led me to this moment, I'm convinced. In the 1970s, I was the third executive director of the first rape crisis center in this country. And we got this letter from men who were incarcerated for raping and murdering women, and they asked us for help, and it confused us. We're like, “Wait a moment, we're the survivors. The perpetrators are asking us for help?” And so we sat on it for a long time and eventually went out there and talked to these guys at Lorton Reformatory, and they eventually formed Prisoners Against Rape. So that happened in the 70s, and then in the 90s, I worked at the Center for Democratic Renewal, National Anti-Klan Network, and one of my mentors there was Reverend C.T. Vivian, who died, unfortunately the same day as John Lewis. But C.T. came to us as the staff one day and said, “You know when you ask people to give up hate, you have to be there for them when they do.” And this confounded me, because I was not prepared to hear his demand that we pay attention to the humanity of people in the Klan and the militia movement. As a black woman, I said, “If you can't hate the Klan, who's left?” And so that was very disconcerting to hear his wisdom coming from the Civil Rights movement, talking about creating a culture of love and respect, even as you object to what somebody says. And so that's why I arrived at this place of figuring out that our calling-in is literally a call-out done with love. You're not ignoring the harm that the person has done, but you want to pay careful and close attention to what was going on within them that caused them to want to make that harm and then helping them see if they really want to be that harm-doer, or do they want to be something else, and giving them that kind of loving attention, so that they can interrogate within themselves. Am I aligning my inner good opinion of myself with my outer behaviors? And is there something else I can do? When I teach this online--I have an online class now going on that's teaching about 400 people a week about this--I give them starter sentences, where you can start off by saying, “You know when you used that word, for me, it might've felt a little disrespectful, but I'm sure you didn't mean that. Do you mind if we go have coffee and talk about it some more?” or “I was in the meeting with you, and all of a sudden, things got tense because of something you said. So I want to stop and see what was going on with you at that time the meeting blew up, or got derailed,” or whatever. But you have to be sincere in wanting to know what their story is, because you're offering them your loving attention so that they can pay attention to themselves and seek growth. So you have to put your own needs in the parking lot. It's not about you. It's about investing in someone else's emotional growth. And I have to honestly say it's not for everyone and it's not for every situation, because sometimes people are so raw from being hurt that they're not in a place to extend that careful love to someone else. Their first priority has to be to heal themselves from the wound. And so as I teach about it, I talk about the different roles people can play. You can be the healer, you can be the victim, you can be the abuser, you can be the bystander, you can be the truth-seeker. There's many different roles that one can assume when you're trying to build a calling-in culture. And don't assume that anyone will occupy any one of those roles permanently, because it all has to be voluntary.
Lee
Yeah, that seems just incredibly helpful to me with the liberty and grace it allows in so many different ways in that scenario. One of the things you said actually leads right to one of our next questions that you've alluded to now a couple of times: that is, for someone to do this calling-in work does seem to presume that someone who may have been offended or someone who may be hurt by someone else's language or actions likely has to have done some work in healing or working through their own traumas, I suppose. What are things that you've noted about how one might interrogate oneself to see what might be a next step for them? You know, if we find ourselves wanting to lash out or do the calling out, do you have any advice or recommendations on how to interrogate oneself, check oneself--a checklist, if you will--to think through whether this is the right time for me to try to do this sort of work?
Loretta
I find that people who have a lot of internalized compounded trauma can do a couple of things with that. You can concretize that victim role for yourself so that you keep only seeing yourself as a victim, and then everything that restimulates that pain will look like a nail to you, because you'll feel like a hammer, and “I've got to pound it down and lash out at the people who keep making me feel miserable,” even if they have no relationship to the original source of the pain. Or, you can seek intentional healing around your trauma. I'm a rapist incest survivor. Trust me, healing is necessary when you can't even get out of childhood without getting deeply scarred. I sought professional therapy to work on my healing, so that I didn't think that all men were predators and dangerous just because a man had done something to me. So you can choose to work on it in that way, or generally, what people most often do is just suppress it. They want to just bury that unfortunate or bad thing that happened in their life, and so they also get blindsided when that reaction comes out. They're not ready for how they go explosive when they've been triggered or restimulated when someone hits that old pain. They're not nurturing it like they want to weaponize it against somebody, but it's there in their--what they call--allostatic load. It's there, and it will come out one way or another. I prefer to intentionally release the pressure than explosively and involuntarily release it. What I find, though, when people have hardened themselves into the victim role, is that then they don't care about what harm they cause to others, because hurt people hurt people, and they think that hurting others is justified because they're in pain. And that's when you really need an intervener, a bystander, or healer to come between the parties. And the other problem with the call-out culture is that if people are afraid of being jumped down their throat for saying something wrong or making a mistake, guess what? They're going to hide the mistake that they make, or they're going to double down on it, or they're going to go silent and withdraw from the conversation. So no healing is possible if the person first doesn't own that a mistake was made and that harm was done. And so the call-out culture actually reduces the likelihood of accountability rather than increases it. That's pretty paradoxical in my opinion, because it doesn't produce the outcomes we say we want when we jump down people's throats.
Lee
Yeah, I like that I hear you appealing to two different justifications for this different approach. One is the principled “We're all humans and we all, in our shared humanity, need graciousness, one with the other, because we're all gonna mess up in various ways.” And then two is this very pragmatic “Look, this simply doesn't work too well, and if we want to make better progress in doing social justice work, then let's look for techniques that work better.” I find that quite helpful.
Lauren
And I'm struck by what you said that connects with this about how this isn't actually about you. You know, if you're going to try to do the calling-in rather than the calling-out way, you have to check yourself at the door and see that if you're going to make real progress with someone, it's going to require helping them get there. And that strikes me as a really needed but also difficult move to make right now. What I so often hear, for example... so I work with a lot of men here at Lipscomb. I'm one of the very few females who teaches on the theological faculty. So there are men in my life who haven't been exposed to a lot of gender theory. And they'll ask me questions about what my experience is like as a woman. And some women say, “You don't owe them that explanation. They need to do their work.” And then part of me thinks, well, they're trying to do their work, aren't they, by asking me? I mean, it's imperfect. Sure, there are ways in which they could be observing this, that, and the other, other than just asking me to explain everything, but it feels like there's a need for us to have some sense of what you're describing, which is that there are stages here. Not everyone is ready to do the work of calling-in, because we need to do our healing. But to make real progress, we need people who are ready to do the work of checking ourselves and helping other people along, or this doesn't make any progress. Right?
Loretta
I would agree. I find, again, as a rape survivor, I'm so far along in my healing that I have no problems talking to people who, as I said, have done horrific things to women. And so I ask even the Me Too movement: “Listen, if in the 1970s we could talk to rapists and murderers, you're saying we can't have a conversation with someone that tells the sexist joke in the wrong way?” I mean, what are you saying? Why did we become so thin-skinned, and so intolerant of mutual growth? I really am questioning a lot that I see taking place in the name of justice and feminism and all of these things, not that I believe any less in those causes, but I think how we do the work is as important as the work that we do. It is not a punitive movement. It is not a retaliatory movement. And particularly, in pursuit of human rights, you can't violate someone else's human rights. That's a contradiction. And so I'm in a place where I can have that conversation with someone who's sexist. I can have that conversation with someone who's racist. I can have that conversation with someone who's antisemitic, but I also accept that not everybody's in that place, and they have no obligation to come out of their healing or their sacred space to see to someone else's growth. That's my definition of grace: when you can see the humanity of someone who has wounded you and build a container that can hold both your healing and theirs at the same time.
Lauren
You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life.
Lee
Most grateful to have you joining us. Please leave us one of those five star reviews over there on Apple podcasts and subscribe there or wherever you subscribe to podcasts.
Lauren
Remember, you can find more about this episode and our other marvelous guest all at tokensshow.com/podcast.
Lee
We'll also make sure to include a link to the New York Times opinion piece we've referenced in our interview here with Ms. Loretta Ross. Part two in just a moment.
Welcome back. You're listening to Tokens...
Lauren
… and our interview with Loretta Ross on her New York Times opinion piece entitled “I'm a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture Is Toxic.”
Lee
Earlier when we asked, “Is there a difference in this particular cultural moment?” you pointed to social media certainly as one mechanism that's exacerbating some of this. But when you alluded back to, at one level, the difference between what you all were able to do in the 1970s versus what seems to be a cause of such conflict in our day, are there other things you think that have contributed to a cultural prevalence of being seemingly so thin-skinned?
Loretta
Well, I think the anonymity of it. Before, if you wanted to say something harsh to somebody, you had to do it in person, or at least over the phone, or write it in an editorial in the newspaper, or whatever. But now, I think social media has created a void in the in-person community that people previously enjoyed, and so they're constructing these artificial communities for themselves through the number of clicks that they get, the number of likes that they get, and thereby are anonymous strangers who have no investment in you or the person you're attacking. There's almost a sadistic quality about it. Let me pile on somebody else, because I don't know the person who's asking me to, and I don't know the person that I'm jumping on, but I can feel good because I participated in this online bullying kind of thing. So it turns what really is a vice into a virtue: the attacking of somebody else without full information, without being accountable for your actions, for not even caring that you, like I said, blowing up somebody else's life over something that they might've done as a teenager and now, many years later, you dug out their Facebook post or their Twitter post, and then you blow their lives up over it. So I think there is something about social media where it's failing to really fulfill people's need for connection and community, and it's offering this artificial feeling of connection and community that's basically comprised of strangers who don't really care about you or the person that you're attacking.
Lee
Yeah. That's very helpful.
Lauren
You talked a lot about healthy ways of calling in people individual-to-individual. I'm curious about... what does it look like to call in systems, specifically the people who are managing and running systems, in ways that you think are actually productive? And I'm thinking specifically, I heard you tell a great story, about some of the students at Smith College who protested the administration for not defending them against people drawing swastika graffiti in the dorms. That kind of thing that happens, right? I mean, everyone wants to be that kind of activist right now, it seems like. What do you think is actually the most productive and fruitful way to do that kind of work?
Lee
Or before you do that, it'd be great if you could tell that story. I myself don't know all the details of what happened in that episode.
Loretta
Yeah, I was away from Smith's campus at the time it happened, because I was on one of my speaking trips. But I got back to school. Apparently it happened over the weekend and I got back to school on Monday, and the campus was abuzz because someone had painted some swastikas somewhere, either in a dorm or on a campus building. I'm not quite sure where. When I asked my class about it, the reaction of the class was that they were very angry at what they thought was a tepid response by the administration. Because it's students. Students have a human right to protest authority. That's what being young is, so I'm not surprised that that's where they landed in terms of being angry at the administration, because that's their job to be angry at the administration. That's not the problem. But I asked them to pause, and said, “Wait a moment. Are you more angry at the administration for not protecting you against the antisemitism than you are at the perpetrator of the antisemitism?” And that caused them to pause. And I asked them to also consider: is it possible that the administration doesn't want antisemitism on the campus, too? And that caused them to redirect the anger, in my mind, to a more appropriate place, rather than the default “I need the grown-ups in my life to protect me from this” kind of reaction that they were indulging in. And that leads to another point that I make in my trainings, and that is that we have to do better threat assessments, because everything that offends us is not a physical, bodily threat. Every time someone misgenders us or commits a microaggression, it doesn't mean they want us to be wiped off the face of the earth. And so we have to have responses that are proportional to the harm that we feel, instead of going nuclear every time we're destabilized in some way or made invisible in some way. Now, I appreciate that some of it is accumulation. I might not respond to the first racist microaggression, but I may respond to the tenth because I'm tired of it. But still, that requires a proportional threat assessment, because someone making an awkward racial comment about my dreadlocks may be just racially illiterate. That doesn't mean they're racist.
Lauren
So in the instance of the students protesting the college administration, do you think there was a place for that, or do you think they should have been doing something else altogether with their energy and time?
Loretta
Well, I think that that's where a calling-in process should have taken place, but I also think that the calling-in should be done by the administration. After all, they're the ones with the big checks, and they're the adults in the room, right? Why put all that responsibility on the student? I have a problem with college administrators and faculty so easily displacing their grown-up responsibilities onto 18-year-olds, like we're seeing with the COVID thing. I really have a problem with that, and so I really do appreciate my university president, because she's very able to listen to us when we say things like this so that she can become--and she is becoming--more proactive, because we can't promise anybody a totally safe space. People with hatred are amongst us, so what we can promise is that we'll get each other's backs when it happens. But we can't over-promise that it will never happen, even in the protected, privileged environment of Smith. But we can inoculate people from being terrified by it. And I think it's the silence, and when you give the useless platitudes about it, or the official statement, “We are not a college that tolerates this stuff,” that makes the people wounded by it feel unheard, and it makes them feel very unimportant.
Lee
I was fascinated that in your New York Times column, you said that you expected for people of all political persuasions to call you out, productively and unproductively, for the sorts of approaches that you are advocating here, because you're critiquing an entire culture, rather than simply a partisan issue here. This is something that is problematic on the Right and on the Left. So I'm wondering: what sorts of critiques have you received from Right or Left--stereotypically speaking--for this sort of approach?
Loretta
Well, it's kind of funny you should ask that, because probably a year after the New York Times article, I co-signed a letter in Harper's Magazine that was an online letter, also written by people from the Right and the Left, just saying that the call-out culture has gone too far. This canceling of people or a group for not thinking the right thoughts, or not being sufficiently woken up, or committing political blasphemy because they believe that you should go talk to the other side... these were things that people from both the Right and the Left are legitimately concerned about. And so a couple of hundred of us, I think, co-signed that letter, including J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame. And next thing I knew, I was catching it from all sides, because the signatories were from all sides. I was accused of supporting J.K. Rowling's apparent transphobia. I don't think J.K. Rowling knows who I am. I wish she did, but she doesn't know who I am. And I don't think that Bari Weiss knows who I am. I wish she did, but I doubt it. And so, they attack the messengers instead of the message. That's when you notice that call-out culture goes crazy: when you have to malign people who are saying, “Pause. Rethink.” I thought the funniest thing that was written about me in particular was that, somehow, I was pampering the privilege of rich white people who lived on the Upper West Side. I guess I was put on this earth to do that, in their opinion, simply because I call for a more rational response. I have no problems critiquing the ideas of anybody. I love debate, so I'm not just papering over political debates with this calling-in process. I think a vibrant democracy needs debate, because otherwise, how can we find the best ideas out? How can we produce new knowledge without the friction of debate? It is not debate I'm objecting to. I'm objecting to ad hominem attacks, dehumanization, going beyond the pale, just because you disagree with somebody's idea, or they fail to agree with yours.
Lee
Right, yeah.
Lauren
Yeah. In that very moment where people are angry with you because you signed the same thing that J.K. Rowling signed--just by associating yourself with someone with whom they disagree--you're automatically now a dangerous person.
Loretta
We call that “call-out contamination,” because I'm now contaminated because I was on the same paper with J.K. Rowling, and so now I've become the toxic virus.
Lauren
Yeah, and then you wonder where that stops. One thing I think that makes us all so paranoid if we're living in that mode is, “What if I'm next?” It's like you said, there's this sense of this puritanical kind of feeling of, “I have to say the right thing all the time. I have to do the right thing, because if I don't, I'm going to be labeled a heretic, and I'm going to be cast out of the community.” It doesn't feel like a real community when there's no possibility for some diversity of thought, you know?
Loretta
Well, one of my favorite self-made cliches is that when many people think a lot of different thoughts, but they move in the same direction, that's a movement. But when people think one thought, and they move in a direction, that's a cult.
Lauren
Yeah, that's brilliant. I love that.
Loretta
And we're not trying to create the human rights cult. We're a movement of many people with different experiences, with different ideas about how to create change, at different levels of exposure, at different levels of risk, and different identities. So we're supposed to be a cauldron of many different ideas and produce change, just like in the feminist movement. There are as many feminisms as there are feminists. We don't all belong to one organization, but we are landing together on the need to end the patriarchy. But we'll do it in a lot of different ways. Some of us will join N.O.W. Some of us will be in protest. And some of us will take time--like you referred to earlier, Lauren--and just offer that guidance to someone who thinks that they don't know how to give a compliment anymore to a woman. All of those are parts of feminism.
Lee
We've been talking to Ms. Loretta Ross, author of the recent New York Times column entitled “I'm a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture Is Toxic.” Thank you so very much, Ms. Ross. We are grateful for your time.
Loretta
Thank you for having me on your show.
Lee
Indeed.
Lauren
Thank you so much.
You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life. Thank you for joining us. Please remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and please remember to refer us to a fellow podcast listener.
Lee
Yeah, please do remember that referring us to other fellow podcast listeners is a great way to help us spread the good word about the Tokens podcast. If you've got feedback, email us text or attach a voice memo and send to the address podcast@tokensshow.com.
Lauren
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this podcast possible.
Lee
My co-host today, Lauren Smelser White.
Lauren
Until next time, Lee!
Lee
Executive producer and manager Christy Bragg of Bragg Management. Co-producer Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. Associate producers Leslie Eiler Thompson and Ashley Bayne. Engineer Cariad Harmon. Production assistant Cara Fox. Music compositions by Zach and Maggie White. And our live event production team at Stonebrook Media led by Phil Barnett.
Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.