Loretta Ross is a public intellectual, professor, activist, and author of Calling In, a collection of stories from five remarkable decades working in social justice movements, including reproductive justice, white supremacy, and women of color organizing. Loretta and Leader’s Way host Brandon Nappi go deep into conversation about why calling people in—inviting them into conversation instead of conflict by focusing on your shared values over a desire for punishment—is a powerful and strategic choice toward making real change.
68: A World Thirsty for Accountability with Loretta Ross
Host: Brandon Nappi
Guest: Loretta Ross
Instagram: @theleadersway.podcast berkeleydivinity.yale.edu/podcast
Brandon: Welcome to the Leaders Way podcast.
I am overwhelmed by gratitude for the conversation that we’re going to share today with Professor Loretta Ross. She’s done incredible work as an advocate and activist for justice, as a teacher, and as someone who is calling us in to honoring our shared humanity in the world. And, you know, I’m increasingly asked, how do we insulate ourselves from the meanness of the world? How do I protect myself from the viciousness and spiteful conversation that seems to be on the rise in the United States right now? I mean, of course we live in such an age of division and fragmentation, and we’re growing to fear each other more and more. We live in an age of distrust. And so I’m not surprised by the question, right? How do I protect myself? Is there some kind of insulation? Is there some kind of armor that I can create?
And, of course, it’s asked of me as a spiritual teacher, as a contemplative practitioner.
So it’s asked as a kind of spiritual question, right? What are the spiritual tools that I can bring into my life to insulate myself? And, of course, the answer to the question is that I don’t want to live armored up. I don’t want to live in such a way that my heart is continually barricaded from the world. I don’t want to be numb to the suffering of the world. I want to keep my heart open, and I want to keep my heart soft, and I want to keep my heart porous.
So I’m not looking for armor, and I’m not looking to develop protection in a way, and I’m certainly not looking for a spirituality of hiding, and a spirituality that creates a bunker where I, and a small circle of my loved ones, can be safe. There’s a danger at this moment that we will draw the circle of care far too small. And so I think the kind of love that is at the center of certainly Christianity and nearly every spiritual tradition is not sentimental. It’s not superficial. It’s not a kind of saccharine invitation. This kind of love, certainly for me, at the center of Christianity, is a radical act of defiance that says, “You cannot make me hate you. You cannot colonize my heart with fear. You cannot force me to draw my circle of love smaller, and I would rather be tender and brokenhearted and scorned by the harsh criticism of others than be jaded and cynical and coldly detached from the world’s anguish.”
So I don’t want to be protected from the world and its suffering and its cruelty. I want to be anchored in love because the kind of healing that we need in our culture only happens in the presence of love. Bold love, courageous love, a kind of costly love. And Professor Loretta Ross has lived this over and over in her life and in her work. And she stands as a kind of testament to the possibility of compassion and love and deep listening while maintaining deep boundaries, while maintaining deep and clear convictions about justice and equity and belonging. And her life declares over and over, “We cannot cancel our way out of the current crisis.”
So it is such an honor to have one of the great elders in the Civil Rights Movement with us, one of the great living elders and sages in the Justice Movement with us on the podcast. Let me tell you just a little bit about Professor Loretta Ross, if you don’t know her work. She’s a public intellectual thought leader, professor at Smith College in the program for the study of women and gender. She teaches courses on white supremacy, human rights, and calling in and calling out.
Her story includes surviving sexual violence and involuntary sterilization, which fueled her decades-long career advocating for women’s rights, particularly those of women of color. In 1994, she co-created the Theory of Reproductive Justice with SisterSong, an organization focused on addressing the health, economic, and social needs of women of color. She founded the National Center for Human Rights Education to combat racism, anti-Semitism, and white supremacy through education and training. She’s known for bringing together diverse groups, including deprogramming white supremacists and teaching convicted rapists the principles of feminism. Her many accolades and honors include a 2022 MacArthur Fellowship and a 2024 induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
I am so profoundly grateful to welcome Professor Loretta Ross onto the Leaders Way podcast.
Welcome to the Leaders Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We convene sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who explore the creative vision needed to lead change in our aching world. I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, Lecturer at Yale Divinity School and Executive Director of the Office of Transforming Leaders at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. I’m so glad you’re here.
Professor Loretta Ross, it’s such an honor to have you on the Leaders Way podcast. Thank you for making space amid your busy schedule.
Loretta: Well, thanks for inviting me.
B: One of the great blessings of the podcast is the ability to ask people about their journey a little bit. And I’d love to ask people how they got to the work that they find themselves doing, and especially if there’s any spiritual or religious context to that journey, either in childhood or along. So would you tell us a bit of your story and how you came to do this important work in the world?
L: Well, I tend to call myself an accidental feminist because I did not intend to make a career in social justice activism. I actually majored in chemistry and physics when I first went to college because I’m very much a STEM girl. But a funny thing kept happening on the way to my career in a laboratory, and that is my plumbing kept getting in the way. I was raped and incested at age 14 by a cousin. Since that was 1968, abortion was not an option when I became pregnant.
And so my plan was to give my son that I eventually had up for adoption, and continue my progress towards that chemistry laboratory.
But a strange thing happened when my son was born. The nurses bought him to me the day after his birth, which they were supposed to do. I had already signed the adoption papers, so they had what was supposed to just whisk him away. But they didn’t. And something strange, I think it’s just that biological mother bonding thing happened. And so instantly I made the decision to keep my son instead of giving him up for adoption. And in that moment I went from being a very scared teenager to a mother. I mean, just that quickly. I hadn’t even chosen a name for him because I hadn’t planned on keeping him.
And so everything changed after that. So I could say that my plumbing was responsible for my detour. Because then, because I wasn’t self-determining over if and when I’d have sex, if and when I’d have a baby, if and when I’d have an abortion, it kind of got my attention. And so that’s the background that led me to my work.
B: I’ve heard you talk about your mother’s spiritual life a little bit and how that played a role in your childhood. And I noticed that the very last chapter of this amazing book calling in is entitled Redemption. And so I wonder, are there implicit or sometimes explicit religious stirrings in your life that led to this in any way?
L: Well, my mother was a devout evangelical Christian, but she was pretty liberal in that she didn’t care which church we went to as long as we went to church. So she wasn’t that doctrinaire in terms of where her children worshipped. I generally tended to follow mom around wherever she was going. But I have to confess that I flunked Sunday school. My curiosity led me to ask very awkward questions of the minister. For example, they taught us the chapter in Genesis. And somewhere in the teaching, they taught us about Adam and Eve, and then they taught us about Cain and Abel. And then they told us that Cain and Abel had wives.
Fine.
Except that I didn’t know where those extra women came from, because they had never talked about other women being born. And so I innocently, I was like eight years old at the time, asked the minister when I next encountered him, “Did Cain and Abel sleep with their mother?”
Because she’s the only woman I’ve read about so far. Well, the minister thought I was being smart-mouthed, implying incest, which I knew nothing about. I just wanted to know where the other women came from.
And he kept pushing at me, and I kept pushing the question at him. And then he said, “You need to go talk to your mother, because I don’t like how you’re being. You’re being rude” kind of thing. I’ve forgotten his exact words, but he did send me off to my mom, who I asked the same question of, and she didn’t have an answer. In fact, I’ve asked that question for 70 years, and nobody’s ever had an answer.
So I consider that my flunking of Sunday school.
B: Oh my gosh. That’s amazing. And of course, it’s what every, gosh, it’s what all of our students long for, is that student in front of them in church or in a classroom who’s so curious and curious. And wants to know, right? I’m sure you notice this in your own students, that flame to know. And the flame to break through that kind of conventional understanding of things, right? Gosh, I want to understand why things are the way we are, why we understand them this way, and is there a deeper way of understanding things? And I see that as certainly a thread in your work, and I want to just go right to calling in this amazing book, which is just, it sat on my bedside table for a couple of months now. It’s just radiating such light. We’re having a conversation today amid a government shutdown in a moment when everybody’s calling everybody out and everyone’s canceling each other. And our progressive democratic friends are often in a kind of circular firing squad, just shooting at each other. So your work is needed more than ever. And I wonder if you can tell the story of how this book came to be. Was there a singular moment where you thought, people, we can do better than this?
L: Well, not at the outset. I guess I do a lot of things by accident. But it started with my grandson, who about 10 years ago decided that he didn’t have to pick up the phone when grandma called. And it was just go to voicemail. And that irritated me. So when I finally got a hold of him, I told him, you know, baby, you’re like my only heir. And you may want to put a ringtone on that phone for grandma because I care about a whole lot of causes. And he said, oh, grandma, if you want to reach me, just get on Facebook. I’m always on Facebook.
But of course, the minute I got on Facebook, he got off because then he said it was for old folks.
B: So old people are on Facebook.
L: And he’s right. But that was my introduction to social media. And that’s what I noticed how unbelievably cruel people were to each other. And so I asked another young person what was going on. I mean, I was convinced that people were saying things on Facebook that they didn’t have the courage to say in real life. And she named it the “call out culture.” And when I asked what they were doing about it, she had no answer. She kind of shrugged and walked away. So that was the spark because I started processing all that I had lived through and realized how many times I had had conversations with the most improbable people because they were necessary to the social justice human rights work that I was doing.
And so that led me to suspect that I had something that could be added to the conversation on call-out cancel culture.
B: Yeah, I’d love to hear if you’d feel comfortable sharing a story or two about some of those unlikely conversations because they’re they’re amazing to think … to think about. And we’re in a moment where we talk a lot about boundaries and a lot about safety and incredibly important things to talk about. And sometimes I wonder though, if we use these categories like boundaries, for example, as a way of limiting ourselves from real human conversations that need to happen in our world. If the kind of healing and justice and the beloved community that we imagine is ever going to take shape.
L: Well, I happen to like boundaries, but it’s how you use them because boundaries without kindness can become concrete. Wander–you know, walling people out. And so there’s not a problem with boundaries. It’s a question of how they’re used. Kindness without boundaries becomes expectation. So boundaries themselves are not the problem. It’s how we put them to use, in my opinion.
But one of the more improbable conversations with which I started the book with was while I was director of the DC rape crisis center in the 1970s. I got a letter from a man who had been incarcerated for raping and murdering a black woman, named William Fuller. And Fuller wrote, “Outside I raped women, inside I’m raping men. I’d like not to be a rapist anymore.” It was a powerful letter, but it pissed me off because here I am running a center that barely has the resources to help rape victims. And here’s a perpetrator asking for help. And I was like, “Oh, hell no.” No, because I had never been able to hold the people who violated me accountable. And so it triggered in me a strong wave of anger against him and disgust. But that same curiosity that got me in trouble in Sunday school.
B: It’s a problem.
L: And a great source of healing. Right. I sat on my desk for months, but I never threw it away. And finally my curiosity got the best of me and I said, wrote him back and said, okay, let’s make an appointment to talk. And we did. And so I went to Lorton Reformatory, which was DC’s prison at the time, to actually I think I went down there to tell him off. You know, cause I couldn’t get it to people who mess with me, but I can get it him. And he’d open the door for me to come down there and tell him off. But a strange thing happened.
I went down there. The prison guards led me to a room and in it was not one person but six.
B: Wow.
L: And I was scared. I mean, not so scared because there was a guard right outside the door. So it wasn’t like I was physically afraid, but I was emotionally afraid. And it turns out that William had organized the top prison predators and it formed a group called Prisoners Against Rape. Long before he met me or any of that. And they were thirsty to learn about violence against women, rape culture. First time I’d ever heard a man use that term. What they could do to change. They had started changing before they even met me or called me.
And so that began the most improbable conversations I would ever have in life. Because here I was literally talking to my nightmares and learning not to be afraid of them. And learning about how complicated human beings are. And I was 27 at the time, I believe.
So that’s what kind of started me on this calling and journey. Because as I heard about the call-out cancel culture and realized that even as frightened as I was, that in my 20s I was able to have these conversations with six rapists as a rape survivor. That there were possibilities for others to have conversations with people they weren’t entirely comfortable with.
B: That’s extraordinary. Thank you for telling that story again. And you talk in the book about the power of showing up. And of course you’ve done this time and time again. What happens inside of you when you go from curiosity to showing up? You mention fear. What supports you? What’s the energy source? What keeps you showing up time and time again, even amid the very real fear and resistance that you described facing?
L: Well, I think every human being handles fear in a different way because we’re all afraid of different things. I have a fear of heights, so I can never imagine myself fudging jumping anywhere. That would just be like never going to happen.
B: It’s my nightmare. I get it.
L: But at the same time, I’m less afraid of having difficult conversations with people. That could be someone else’s nightmare. I’m not afraid of doing public speaking, which could be someone else’s nightmare. So we all have our own little package of fears that we try to manage as best that we can. I’m very fortunate that I’ve learned the discipline of not letting my fear keep me from doing the right thing. And that serves me very, very well because I’ve never learned how not to be afraid. But I’ve also learned that fear is a break, but it’s not stopping me. It can slow me down. It can make me be a little more cautious. It can serve as a wonderful warning.
But it doesn’t have to determine what I choose to do.
B: So I think what’s really powerful in the book is you lay out some options for us besides this reflex to cancel and call out. And I’m always energized when I learn, oh, wait a minute, there’s some more options than I thought. I thought I just had one. I’m heartened to have two, but you actually lay out several. You call them the five Cs, the calling out, canceling, calling in, calling on, calling off. I mean, can you help us to expand our idea of the options at our disposal here? And maybe you can lay out a little bit about what each of those mean.
L: Well, I started thinking about those options when I realized that we’re a world thirsty for accountability because without accountability there can be no justice. Actually, I came to that realization in the mid-1990s when I was monitoring the elections in South Africa. And they set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission without that missing stage of accountability. And so I started thinking about accountability in a more complex way and how necessary it was to achieve justice. So when I started analyzing the call out culture and the cancellation impulse, I realized that those were attempts at accountability. So the question isn’t forsaking accountability. The question is, how do you choose to pursue it?
Calling out, of course, is one way where you publicly shame and humiliate people for doing something you think they need to be held accountable for. Canceling them is when you want them to really pay a heavy price like losing a job or something like that. But I thought that calling on might actually be a more effective strategy for accountability because instead of using anger and blaming and shaming as your path or your method, that you would use love and accountability like love for accountability, like respect and grace.
And I find that human beings are pretty consistent, because if someone shames and embarrasses us, we are much less likely to listen to them and want to change as opposed to them offering us love and respect and taking our complex lives seriously as they take their own. And so I find that calling in is a better accountability process.
The New York Times had done an article about me and this calling in process. And one of my friends, Sonia Renee Taylor, was back. When she said, “Well Loretta, whether you call somebody in or out, that means you’re investing your time and attention into them. And what if you just want to tell them to talk to the hand, that you don’t want to give them your time and attention?” And so she suggested the concept of calling on people to do better.
And I love the way young people deploy that all the time. Even though they don’t realize that’s what they’re doing. They’ll look you dead in the eye and they’ll say, “Are you okay?” And they are not asking about your health. They’re saying you need to back off. You came at me the wrong way. You need to get your stuff together. And I’m not investing my time and attention to help you. All of that in three words. A calling on is a powerful option because you’re asking people to reconcile their inner good opinion of themselves with their outer behaviors. Don’t go around thinking that you’re a nice person when you are endorsing things that harm people. I’m calling on you to do better.
It doesn’t do you any good for you to tell yourself how great you are and how kind you are when you then support things that harm people. And so that’s what calling on is for. And then calling it off is your disengagement strategy. Don’t invest your precious time and attention into someone who’s trolling you, lying to you, gaslighting you, manipulating you for power. Those kinds of things. And that’s either in person or online. Understand that people will not grow who do not want to grow. You can provide them an opportunity, but that don’t mean they’ll avail themselves of it. I love the way a pundit once wrote, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him think.”
B: Well, amen to that. And there are your healthy boundaries there that you were describing before. And there are moments, right, for a variety of reasons when that kind of calling it off is called for. You mentioned accountability. This has come up in so many different contexts lately. I feel like there are conversations that want to happen around accountability.
And I wonder sometimes if the call for justice sometimes is really just kind of revenge that’s been weaponized. And how do you distinguish between true calls for justice and an impulse to revenge? Help us make that distinction between justice and revenge.
L: I think the real difference is the question of radical forgiveness. Because I read an account of Chris Singleton, whose mother had been killed in that church massacre down in Charleston. And he wrote, or at least in the interview he said, that I want to forgive that man who killed my mother because I don’t want to have his picture, his face contaminate my memory of my mother. So for that to happen, I have to forgive him instead of giving him a permanent place in my heart where my mother should be.
And I thought that was such a profound example of the difference between justice and revenge. It wasn’t that he didn’t want the assassin to be held accountable, but he was not going to seek revenge to make his soul. And he was going to reclaim his dignity to his own harm reduction so that he wasn’t carrying around this assassin rent free in his head or his body or whatever.
And I interpret from that, if this man, who doesn’t seem to be political at all, can make the choice to forgive the man who killed his mother, what’s our excuse? Because few of us have experienced that deep level pain. And most of society would be on the side of punishment and revenge. And as a matter of fact, he got called out for offering the forgiveness.
Well, you know, “black people are always asked to forgive the whites who murder us. How dare you feed into that narrative” kind of thing. And for him, it was much more profound. It was a way of doing his own harm reduction. It was a way of reclaiming his own dignity and not let what happened to him define who he was.
B: You talk in the book about creating a culture of forgivability. And ever since I read that line, that’s the line I’ve been thinking about that’s been sort of haunting me. I want to give myself and my life’s work to thinking about this and to being a part of that culture. Can you name some elements of this culture of forgivability for us?
L: Well, I kind of lay it out in my book because the first person you have to call in is yourself.
B: Damn. I’ve got to start with me.
L: Actually, that’s that explains my book cover because there’s a circle coming back at you pointing the finger back at yourself. But it really does start in our childhoods. When we made mistakes and if we were severely punished and humiliated for making those mistakes, then we find that that’s the natural way we’re going to handle other people’s mistakes on our own. And what we have failed to learn in that kind of upbringing is the power of forgiveness for ourselves and for others.
On the other hand, when you made a mistake in a culture of forgiveness and were assured that you were loved by your parents despite the mistake that you made, then you’re going to be predisposed to offer that forgiveness to others and practice self -forgiveness on yourself. And so our choice as adults now is whether we want to continue the toxic patterns of our childhood. Or do we want to make different choices about how we self-forgive by not expecting ourselves to be perfect, to not make mistakes, to not see mistakes as fatal, to see vulnerability as a strength to be able to say I made a mistake and own it and commit to do better in the future.
So all of that is about forgiveness. And I find that my life is richer and more fulfilled when I stopped expecting my need to be perfect. When I understand that I’m bringing my imperfect self to a perfect movement, which is the human rights cause.
B: Thank you for naming that. I mean, it’s so much a part of supremacy culture, so much a part of whiteness, this perfection, a part of capitalism, right? Produce, be efficient, it carries a kind of perfectionist connotation, especially sometimes here in Ivy League culture, which is about a kind of perfectionism. And of course, if we’re living in these cycles of canceling and retribution, who would ever be brave enough to admit their imperfections and their fault and ask for forgiveness? What a dehumanizing sort of cycle. And even if I wanted to ask for forgiveness and admit my imperfection, gosh, I might lose my whole career, for example, I lose my reputation. So you’re inviting us into a much more human, tender, you use the word vulnerable, space; and it feels like a relief, honestly, as tender as that invitation is. It’s also one that’s sort of a relief. Like I could be–we can all just be human together.
L: But also let’s pull the camera back and look at the larger framework. We are seeing daily what it looks like to be a person with immense power without humility, without the ability to admit to a mistake, without the ability to show empathy towards others, without the ability to self-correct and do better. We see what that looks like every day in the front pages of our newspapers. And most of us would not want to replicate that narcissistic behavior.
B: Thank you for naming it and saying it for what it is, Professor Ross. And I wonder about the downstream impacts of this when a leader, many of our leaders, seek to emulate this kind of hyper-arrogant, toxically masculine, power-hungry, greedy approach to worship. How many others will walk in these footsteps thinking this is dignity, thinking this is what leadership is, thinking this is worthy of emulation? So I think it’s really important for a counter narrative for other voices to be speaking with conviction right now. Your voice has been so helpful. So can you help our clergy leaders? What do you want them to know? How do you want them to show up in this space, given some of the leadership lessons we’re hearing from the top levels of government? Because I think sometimes what happens is our beloved clergy leaders, well, they want to find the conviction to say what they know needs to be said, but they’re scared. They’re scared that they’re going to be called out. They’re scared that they’re going to be canceled and they have sometimes a purple constituency that they need to make happy. So give us a charge. Give us some words of encouragement so that we might find our voice around some of these issues as well. And that’s a tall order, I realize, but if anyone can do it, it’s you, Professor Ross.
L: I don’t know if I can do it satisfactorily. But I do know after having served as the leader of nonprofits for 50 years, that leadership is not a throne. It’s an opportunity to serve. And you may not always be popular with the people that you serve, and they may not always be grateful in how you serve them. But if you center the needs of your people over your own needs, you’re doing most of the job right.
So there’s that. And so you have to tell the truth to shame the devil kind of thing that they used to teach us in church. But you don’t have to tell it in a harsh way. One of the things I say in my book is that you can say what you mean and mean what you say, but you don’t have to say it mean. That’s always a choice. So don’t be the scolding person, be the calling in person kind of thing. So I see that as important.
But my opinion about all religions is that their purpose is to make people’s lives better and not cause harm. If your religion causes people harm, shields those who cause people harm, is more about power than justice, then I’m a harsh critic of your religion. I just don’t believe that religions should be about who you call out and excommunicate. It’s who you invite in and embrace. And so one of the things I like about the black church named large, obviously there’s a lot of differences and stuff, is that it is historically always been focused on ending oppression.
What I tend to see about the white Christian church as writ large, again, there’s a lot of differences, is that it seems to be obsessed with sex. And I’m like, really? Out of all the things we can dedicate our lives to–growth and harmony and being at peace, reconciling our inner morality with our outer behaviors. Why did you land on sex? As your moral compass?
Now one religion that I know very little about, but one of my mentors, Shula Mythkurdik, told me this Talmudic saying, she said that in the Talmud it says that my neighbor’s material needs are my spiritual needs. I can’t be right with God and God will not accept me if I’m not right with my community. That is evidence of my rightness in the eyes of God. I think that is the most beautiful saying around human interdependence and interconnection. I would rather worship a God of that value system. Make things right where you are. Don’t just worry about your relationship with me because your relationship with me is going to be determined by your relationship with your fellow human beings.
B: And of course, this is what Dr. King reminded us over and over. This is what our colleague, Rev. William Barber, has been reminding us over and over. He’s been a great gift to our faculty in that way to just continually remind us where our center should be and to inspire us to be more courageous and bold and are speaking out. And you were so bold way back in 2017 to teach a class on white supremacy in the age of Donald Trump. And I wonder if you can share some insights about what you were learning in your own research and what your students were saying. What did you learn in teaching that course? And then I wonder if, you know, as you look back at it, so many years ago, what you might need to adjust and do differently based on maybe what we’re learning at the current moment with Trump 2.0.
L: I’m actually still teaching the same course.
B: You’re still teaching it!
L: Yeah, all these decades, all these years later. But the reason I chose to teach that course was in the 1990s, I was the only black person and the only woman who ran an opposition research center on the far right at the Center for Democratic Renewal National Adjutant Clan Network. And when Trump came down that golden escalator and I was asked to teach at the same time and choose whichever topic I wanted to teach on, I decided that I wanted to teach about fascism because I felt that I was dealing with an American public that did not understand the threat that he represented. He was an avatar of white supremacy, though people didn’t know much about him other than his celebrity status. Well, I happened to monitor ideas of the far right and how they permeate all of our society and stuff.
And so I’ve dedicated myself to teaching about how to resist white supremacy using human rights. The fundamental lesson that I teach students is that you have to separate the ideas of white supremacy or white supremacist ideology from the identity of whiteness. Because those are two separate things.
B: Oh, can you say more here? Because this is where I see so many folks getting stuck.
L: Well, obviously not all white people are white supremacists. And sadly, not all white supremacists are white because anybody can buy into a white supremacist ideology or racial hierarchy. That’s why you end up with so many people of color wishing they were white, acting out ideas of white supremacy for acceptance, for inclusion. But just as important, I’m witnessing a lot of white people resisting the ideas of white supremacy and wanting to be seen as human, not as a representative of a racial hierarchy. That’s where people say, well, I want to be colorblind. That actually is a sincere wish, even though it sounds racially tone deaf, but there’s something in that. Where people do want to be seen for their humanity and not for them, for their sliding in on the racial hierarchy. And so that’s the foundational lesson I teach.
The other part of the lesson that I teach is, OK, if you want to embrace resistance to white supremacy, how can you be appropriately white? And the students really enjoy that lesson. And I use as an example something out of the headlines, for example, you may remember the two black men who were racially profiled at that Starbucks in Philadelphia and arrested. We know the details of why they were sitting there working, waiting for a work colleague. Somebody decided that they were a menace and called the police on them. Probably a Karen.
“Oh, these black men are threatening me because they’re sitting at a table.” Right. But do you know why we know that story? We know that story because a white woman understanding that her white privilege meant that she was not going to be targeted and arrested, pulled out her cell phone and documented it and shared it with the world.
That’s an example of appropriate whiteness. You’re not responsible for the racial hierarchy, but you can take actions to subvert it.
B: What a powerful story and bearing witness and your willingness to see to see what’s right there is such an important piece of eventually holding folks to account, of taking action.
What’s the conversation like now in your class without betraying anything?
L” Well, we can’t keep up with the news. No problem. You need more time every week, I bet. I’m going to say every day I teach, I open up, okay, what’s the news of the weird today? And the students read, you know, I’m encouraging the students to read and stay engaged with the news through this technique. And so they always got something new to report because Trump is the gift that keeps on giving. There’s always something weird that he’s done that’s in the news that affects people’s lives because he’s a powerful person. And he has all of these acolytes around him that are implementing these white supremacist ideas like hexman talking to the military the other day and telling them, you know, that women don’t belong in combat positions and we don’t want bearded people or, you know, or fat people are trans people. I mean, he just goes on to identify who you should safely hate. Right.
My students enjoy learning what’s been denied to them for the most part because whether they come from public schools and private schools or homeschooling, they’ve been denied the tools of understanding how white supremacy distorts everything in our society. And I’m not just talking about racism. I’m talking about, you know, sexism and Christian nationalism and anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and ableism and biological determinism. All of those are part of that totalizing worldview called white supremacy. So you can’t just say an attack on abortion is just about gender. It’s about who should be encouraged to reproduce who should be discouraged. You can’t just say an attack on trans people is just about gender identity. It’s about defining who belongs and who we should care for and who should be excluded.
B: Oh, thank you for naming that. You have the totalizing impact of white supremacy, how it crushes everyone in its path and dehumanizes and values some bodies over other bodies. And so for listeners who feel like they want to take some action and begin in their own lives, because on the one hand, what you’ve just described is vast. It’s the water we’re all swimming in and it can feel completely overwhelming. Can you bring this down to the personal level for folks who want to take courage, who want to take action, and what can we begin to do in daily life?
L: Well, we have a saying from the civil rights movement that says that when the world looks like a mess, just start cleaning where you are. You’re not responsible for cleaning up the whole world, but you can make a difference in talking to your neighbors with kindness. Even if they’re flying a Trump flag, there are things that are good about that person and there are things about that person that you may not like. But with the calling-in strategy, what I encourage you to remember, what Adrienne Marie Brown says so wonderfully, “What you pay attention to grows.”
So when I’m talking to my neighbor with the Trump flag, I’m going to point out and focus on what’s good about them and encourage more of that. Rather than enjoying the cacophony of people and telling them why they’re bad, why I’m flying the truck flag, they’ve heard that already. That isn’t going to encourage them to grow in the way that I want them to grow. You know how you have a house plant and it grows towards the light? So, you know, that’s what I want people to do, to turn themselves so they are always growing towards the light.
Don’t be overwhelmed. Start cleaning where you are. Start having those conversations with friends and family and acquaintances and your bridge club or your church club or whatever.
By focusing on what’s good about them and helping them grow that. Because even the person I probably most disagree with politically has somewhere, unless they’re a total sociopath, where they’re kind to their family or their pets or to the people they are concerned about.
And another way of understanding it, when a natural disaster strikes, we rush to help people. We don’t care about their race, their citizenship, who they’re sleeping with. We don’t care about any of that. We only have two questions for them. Do you need help and can I help? That’s it. I just want us to have that same effortless compassion for man-made disasters too. Like racism, poverty, nativism, you know? Because it’s already in us. Just act like this man-made disaster is a natural disaster, and show up the same way.
B: And you describe, I think in the very last chapter of the book, your belief that we have more love and strength in us than sometimes we even give ourselves credit for. And so is there a kind of call to trust that there’s something bigger in us, that there’s a greater reservoir at our disposal than we’re sometimes willing to believe?
L: Oh yeah. One of the things that was so hard about writing my book is that I had to intentionally parade some of my biggest mistakes in order to show what I’d learned from them so that I could then make the case that we can all learn from our mistakes and emerge better for them. And that’s what I felt I’ve tried to do, and I wanted to show people through my life story how they could do it too. I didn’t want to tell people what to do. I just want to tell people what I did with the things that had happened to me. And so redemption is the final chapter of the book because the larger your platform, the more visible your mistakes are.
Sometimes you make a mistake and nobody knows about it. Sometimes you make a mistake and it ends up on the front pages of the Washington Post. And so how do you recover when those things happen to you? How do you call yourself in? How do you forgive yourself for making those mistakes? Now fortunately for me, I’ve always been surrounded by kind, older black women who never gave up on me no matter how obnoxious I was, how self-righteous I was, and how mistake-ridden I was. They had learned the power of calling in and forgiveness, though they wouldn’t have named it that. And so they kept investing in me even as I made those huge mistakes that I made in my life.
And so, it’s now my opportunity as an elder to offer that same kind of radical forgiveness to everyone else. And so it’s very important to understand that what you’ve been through does not dictate who you become. It can inform who you become. But I spent a lot of time in the book talking about instead of being trauma-driven, what about being trauma-informed? So you never can forget the trauma. But does the trauma have to control you instead of you controlling it?
B: My last question is, is what keeps you going when your inner critic or other forces try to convince you to give up? Or is it time to throw in the towel? Or gosh, you know, isn’t it time? Haven’t you done enough? Does your inner critic speak like that? And what keeps you going in those moments of self-criticism?
L: Well, young people, for one thing. I chose to teach, you know, seven or eight years ago, because I get such an infusion of energy and hope from young people. They’re like sticking my finger into a light socket and getting *!*. You know, I love that feeling from young people. So there’s that.
But it’s also … another lesson I learned from the Civil Rights Movement. I’m lucky to have done a lot of activism in Atlanta. So I’m surrounded by these icons who are mostly have all passed now, of the Civil Rights Movement. And probably my most important mentor was Reverend C.T. Vivian, who had been an aide to Dr. King. But also I talk about Shula Muth-Kernick in my book. I talk about a lot of people I love who helped me out significantly. But in the Civil Rights Movement, we have a saying about the chain of freedom. And that is, don’t imagine that you’re the entire chain of freedom because the chain of freedom stretches back towards your ancestors and forward towards your descendants. And so your only responsibility is that the chain of freedom doesn’t break at your link. Through apathy, despair, negligence, you know, arrogance, whatever it is, don’t break the chain at your link. And when I heard that, I felt a huge sense of relief. Because up until then, I was so self-obsessed thinking that everything rested on me doing everything right perfectly or the struggle was going to end and the people weren’t going to fail and I would have been a bad person.
Hearing that from my elders in the Civil Rights Movement said, wow. And now I can feel those ancestors channeling through me and I can see that I can do things that make my descendants proud of me. And I can make mistakes and it’ll be all right. Because like I said, I can bring my imperfect self to a perfect movement. And it just feels so good. So that gives me hope that I don’t have to obsess about getting everything right or perfect. And then I give myself permission to step back. I have a consciousness toggle switch that when I’m feeling overwhelmed, I just turn my consciousness off and go watch Barbie without a critical feminist analysis.
And I’m addicted to bloody context sports, sports like football and basketball and boxing and, you know, all of that.
B: Oh my gosh. Are you willing to say who your team is, Professor Ross? Oh, there’s no mystery of that. I was born in Texas. So you take a guess. Dallas Cowboys. Right. That passion for sports led to my first nonprofit job, which is at the National Football League Players Association. I work for the union that represent the players. They were looking for their first black employee. I was 22 years old and I happened to be a woman, and knew a whole lot about football because I grew up with five brothers and a dad that love football. So I fit the bill.
B: Professor Loretta Ross, it is such an honor. This conversation has been sacred and know that it is just a lifetime’s privilege to be chatting with you. We’re going to hold you and your work in our hearts. And if there’s anything that we can do to help to support you and the work that you do on a daily basis, you’ve got some friends here in New Haven who want to lend a hand.
L: Thank you for having me on your show.
B: Thank you for joining us today on the Leader’s Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We hope you found the episode expansive and nourishing. If you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on your favorite platform. Your support helps us to continue bringing you sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who are dedicated to transforming our world.
For more information about our guests and to catch up on past episodes, visit our website at berkeley.divinity.yale.edu. Follow the show on Instagram at theleadersway.podcast to stay updated on future episodes and events. Until next time, I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, walking with you as you lead with courage, wisdom, and compassion.