Welcome back to the wantcast, the women against negative talk podcast lessons in moving forward, fearlessly and spreading the good word. I'm Katie Horwitch. I'm a writer, a speaker, a mindset coach. The founder of want women against negative talk and the author of Want Your Self, shift your self talk and unearth the strength in who you were all along. I am so happy. You're here. Let's begin.
If you're anything like me in these last few weeks and months, you might be asking yourself, it feels like we fought so hard. Where do we go from here? How do we move forward? How do we engage in a mindful and productive? And proactive way. And how do we not only do that, but not completely lose our minds or burnout as we do it. So if you're like me and you've been asking yourself those questions, today's conversation will provide you with some action steps, some insight. Some energy.
And hopefully some hope. Today on the want cast, we have the immense honor and privilege of spending the next hour with a true icon in the human rights movement. Loretta J Ross. Loretta Ross is an activist professor and public intellectual in her five decades in the human rights movement.
She's deprogrammed white supremacists taught convicted rapist, the principles of feminism and organize the second largest March on Washington surpassed only by the 2017 women's March, a co-founder of the national center for human rights education and the sister song women of color reproductive justice collective. Her many accolades and honors include a 2022 MacArthur fellowship and a 2020 for induction into the national women's hall of fame.
Today loretta is an associate professor at Smith college in Massachusetts, and a partner with 14th strategies consultants with which she runs calling in training sessions at organizations around the country. Her newest book CALLING IN: how to start making change with those you'd rather cancel, is available today wherever books are sold. Calling In is at the same time, a handbook, a manifesto, and a memoir with stories from five remarkable decades in activism.
Loretta vividly illustrates why calling people in, which means inviting them into conversation instead of conflict, by focusing on your shared values instead of a desire for punishment. Is the more strategic choice. If you want to make real change.
And in this book, she shows you how to do so whether in the workplace on a college campus or in your living room, this is a framework that anyone can learn and use to transform frustrating and divisive conflicts that stand in the way of real connection with the people in your life. A heads up on this conversation. We do mention some sensitive subjects in this conversation, specifically mention of rape. So, if you need to come back to this episode later, We are holding your heart and promise.
We will be here for you. We also encountered a few sound issues. But this conversation is so important. There is no way that we are letting technology stand in the way. So I am uploading the transcript. To this interview to the podcast platform. So wherever you're listening, there is a transcript available. If you're not able to find it, you can send me an email, [email protected] and I would be more than happy to share it with you.
I could not be more grateful to get to learn from Loretta and her work with you. So let's begin. We have a wealth of treasures and gems ahead of us in this conversation, but I want to come back to what you literally just said before I pressed record. And you said that living into your moral center and living out that courage, you used a word you said, it's so fun.
And I love that so much because I think a lot of people, when they think about staying true to their values, staying with an integrity, being courageous, being bold, I don't know if fun is the first word that comes to mind for people, you know? So I would love to hear you talk a little bit about what you find so, so fun about that.
Well, calling in, is always about living up to your best opinion of yourself. And when we hit that sweet spot, it is fun. It is as good as you feel about yourself when the cashier gives you too much change in your corrector and give it back. You feel good about yourself because you did it the right thing. Even though you could have easily taken advantage of the situation. Calling in, is always about burnishing up your integrity.
Making sure that you're intentional about how you show up in the world. And delighting in your resilience and ability to do that. To me, that's fun. Because I do understand the pain of disappointing myself. Of taking advantage of somebody and not feeling good about myself after I've done it. I understand that pain all too well. And so when I can intentionally do something that makes me feel good about being Loretta Ross, That's the best that life offers.
Yeah. You are filling your own cup of yourself. It's like, I think it was Oprah said, I, I want to stay full of myself because when I am full, I get so full, I'm overflowing. And it's only when I'm overflowing, can I give to other people. Right?
Exactly. Because the greatest gift you can give is to call yourself in and be in alignment withh your integrity, with your compassion, with your ability to take everyone's suffering seriously as you took your own, but not flatten people out to stereotypes or labels, but really delight in the complexity of humanity and how fun it is to find that the people you expected the least of, you actually can find very surprising depths to them and delight in how much fun it is to
look at how beautiful people can be, even in the midst of some awful stuff. Victor Frankl, who's a Holocaust survivor that I quote in my book, spoke about how the people who kept hope in those concentration camps, the people who never lost purpose and meaning were the ones who were most likely to survive, and that is a very important message to me. This is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
I, it, I mean, it's so ironic, right? That so much is going on right now in the world, but in our country in particular. And it was just MLK Day, Holocaust Remembrance Day. That's about to be Black History Month. Then it's going to be Women's History Month. Like, there's all of these reminders that we do get over and over of humanity.
And it's very important right now. And so I like thinking about how wonderful people can be in the face of incalculable suffering. It's not that I ever expected to have a smooth and easy life. I was never afforded that opportunity, but I liked the fact that I'd never let it go to my heart. I like the fact that I always I believed in the goodness of humanity when I was too scared to believe in my own goodness, my own strength.
And so I love offering those hard won experiences to other people who may feel hopeless or despairing or not good enough or think they don't know enough. Because I felt and continue to feel all those things. But I kind of like the fact that I don't let none of that hold me back. Most times. I'm not perfect, but Most times. I can figure out how I can become a better Loretta.
And, I mean, I think it was Franklin Roosevelt who said, "Smooth seas don't make a good sailor." It's the turbulence of my life. That makes me stronger. And I know there's a lot of question over the word resilient, because we can be proud that we have that inner strength and trying to overcome odds and also be pissed off that we have to.
Right. And sometimes the most resilient people, those are the people who need the most care, who need the most restoration, who need the most community around them, because it's exhausting to be resilient.
Yeah. But at the same time, it's so rewarding. Because I'm old enough to have constant memory of the people who didn't make it. Because all that happened to them made them become addicted to drugs or alcohol or I'm able to take care of their friends and their families, or even to have people in their lives that cared about them. I'm really happy that my gift from the universe was to have this dream.
I mean, I would have rather not been homeless, but I'm glad that I'm not attached to possessions right now that I know I can survive it and still be me and not have my opinion of myself lowered because I don't own a lot of things. I mean, these are the lessons that living a challenging life gifts us with.
I think what is most inspiring and, dare I say, empowering is not just the things that you've been through, but how you've moved through them. I mean, even as you were talking about your outlook on resilience and joy and being able to look back and see the people who haven't made it and who aren't in the position that maybe you're in right now. Can you pinpoint a specific instance where you started to develop that sort of outlook or do you think it was something you were born with?
Sort of like if you had a turning point in your story, where would you say that was?
I don't actually know where it came from, but I do know my mother was smart enough to observe it in me. I'm one of eight kids, number six, pretty much an invisible child growing up, because I was the little girl, number six, very studious, didn't really stand out in any particular way. But when my mother put me on that Greyhound bus to send me to college at sixteen, she said something really profound to me. She said that she admired me because I don't let success go to my head.
Which I kind of like, "oh Ma, yeah, right, I read the same Readers Digest you read, yeah, right." She says, "shut up, Loretta", cause she knew my mouth. She said, "you don't let success go to your head, but most importantly, you never let failure go to your heart." And my mother called it. I had no idea what she meant at age 16.
I still thought my mother was being, you know, apologetic because I couldn't catch a plane to go from Texas to Washington, D. C. I had to catch a bus, you know, that kind of thing. But she really had peeped my resilience. And that was the highest praise that she could give me. And it took me decades to realize how wonderfully my mother read me. And probably read all of her eight kids in some particular way. But that was a gift that she offered me. I have no idea where it comes from.
It could come from the rootedness in my family. I mean, I'm lucky enough to have been a Black, part of a Black family, who knows our genealogy back to 1844, where we were slaves on a peanut plantation outside of Selma, Alabama. And we moved to Texas right after the Civil War. And many of my family still live on that farmland in Central Texas to this day.
So I'm proud of coming from that sharecropper history, that peasant history, first gen college history and it's given me a sense of security and safety that I don't think a lot of Black families got to enjoy. Because if they could recount going back two generations, they're doing good. And the fact that my son and other relatives do that genealogical research to take us back to 1844 gives me a sense of security at my place in the universe. that maybe a lot of other Black families don't enjoy.
That's the advantage I have. I call that a privilege to know your roots.
It's the quote of being your ancestor's wildest dreams. I, I'm forgetting who exactly said that now. You probably know it.
Ooh, I don't, but I've heard it before.
I feel like you are, the quotes in this book, because I'm a quote person, the quotes in this book, I was like, she is a quote Rolodex. Like, these are, these are some bangers here. But, you know, being, being your ancestor's wildest dreams. When you're able to flesh out that story for yourself of where you've come from, there's a sense of, oh, they went somewhere, and now I'm going somewhere too. Like, the line keeps going, you know?
Well, the thing that I tell young people that I teach at Smith College, particularly young Black people, they're exhausted by the need to continue to fight white supremacy. They're pained that they still have to conduct that fight. And I understand that pain. But I also remind them that they have the privilege to say to white people, things that would have gotten their grandmothers lynched.
And so, you can choose not to have those hard conversations with the racially challenged or racially illiterate, but don't deny that it's a privilege to be able to do so.
Mm.
And there's this old civil rights saying that I did quote in the book. It says stop imagining that you're the entire chain of freedom because you're not. The chain of freedom stretches back towards your ancestors and stretches forward towards your descendants. And your only job is to make sure that chain doesn't break at your link. So don't give into despair or hopelessness or cynicism. Understand that you always have choices on whether or not you're going to stroke the link or weaken it.
But you always have that choice.
Yeah. Even the imagery, if you think of a chain and it is a bunch of links together. We're recording this conversation in January of 2025 and the way that our society is, the way that social media is, I mean, you are a professor and you're with young people all of the time. It can be very easy to think that everything sort of begins and ends with you and not in a high and mighty egocentric way, almost in a scary egocentric way, you know?
Yeah, that's what a lot of young Black people feel. They're trying to deal with the burden of Blackness. And not that being Black is bad, but we live in a white supremacist society in which just having a Black identity is seen as an existential threat by certain white people of a different, of a certain mindset. Now obviously not all white people are white supremacists and sadly not all white supremacists are white.
And we do know those we wouldn't invite to the picnic and it can feel burdensome. and overwhelming about always having to calibrate how threatened you are by people who see your mere existence as a threat. So that's where we get the Karens and the Proud boys and the FBI claiming that the Black Lives Matter movement is a ex like extremist terrorist group, but they can't seem find the white terrorist. And then Trump is out pardoning the white terrorists that we see with our own eyes.
And so it can feel very overwhelming, particularly as a young person. I became an activist when I was 16. And so I remember those feelings of thinking that I kind of knew it all and understood how the world worked. And thank God people didn't give up on insufferable me back then. Because I really was obnoxious and I'm just lucky to be around because people saw something in me that they wanted to nurture. Even as I made them mad, and I'm just here to pay it forward and pass it on.
At the very beginning of your book, you talk about a story about going into a prison when you were pretty young, like relatively speaking, early on in your journey. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah. I was the newly minted director of the DC Rape Crisis Center, which was the first rape crisis in early country. And this was 1979, and we got a letter at the center from a man named William Fuller, who was incarcerated for raping and murdering a Black woman just like me. And basically his letter said, Outside I rape women. Inside I rape men, I'd like not to be a rapist anymore, and will you help me? When I first got that letter, I was pissed off.
We don't have enough resources to help victims, how dare a perpetrator call us for help? And I think I reflected the feelings of the staff and volunteers at the center at the time. And I really wanted to write him my own letter of outrage and call him out for even daring to ask for help. But I buried the letter underneath the paperwork on my desk for a while, and I couldn't put it out of my mind. And so, eventually I wrote him back.
Just trying to find out more what he wanted, and it turns out that he wanted us to teach him about Black feminism, about religion, about Black history, and all of those things. And so eventually I agreed to go down to Lorton, which was the prison outside of D. C., to meet with him, but I actually still think I went down there to curse him out.
I just said, well, I can't get at the man who wrote me, so I'm going to get at him for everything that's happened to him, he deserved it anyway because he raped and murdered a Black woman just like me. And so I went down there, and I was scared because I didn't have any plan. And like I said, I'm in my mid twenties. I don't have any formal training for none of this. All I know is I'm a rape survivor, and I want to stop Black men from raping Black women. That's all I knew.
And fortunately,, he didn't even stop at my confusion. As a matter of fact, it wasn't just that one guy I met. He had assembled six Black men, who are all convicted of raping women. And when they started telling their stories about how they had become violators, Somehow, I was able to tell my story about what happened to me. And the deeper that I went into their stories, the deeper I went into my story.
And somehow in the middle of that conversation, I was like, Oh, okay, we're all victimized violators. We've had somebody mess with us. And out of that pain and hurt, we mess with other people. . That whole victim, perpetrator, binary was eased a little bit. It wasn't totally gone, but it was eased a little bit. And so for the next three years, I taught Black history and Black feminism to these incarcerated men who were trying to reclaim their humanity. Who, they were the prison's Predators.
As a matter of fact, when I first walked into the room, they were so big and buff they looked like pro wrestlers, right? And it took me years later to realize, That they were the prison's predators. They had buffed up their bodies to keep from being the victims because because many of them had entered Lorton as teenagers themselves, children themselves. But they were in their 30s by the time I'm meeting them, serving you know, ten, fifteen years into their sentences.
And so they looked at themselves and decided I was a victim, now I'm a violator, and I don't want to be any of those things anymore. And it was so powerful for me to realize that they had recaptured their own humanity long before they met me. The fact that they wanted to recapture their humanity, that's why they wrote that letter to me. So that was my first calling in experience because the first person I had to call in was myself.
whew.
And not stereotype these incarcerated men as disposable human beings that I should not offer any compassion to. And they were my nightmares. And it was my first experience at going to meeting where I'm trying to help. People who represented my nightmare.
Yeah, that story just was, it was incredible. Thank you so much for sharing it. For people who are not familiar with this term, can you define calling in? for people versus what people probably know, they probably know calling out and canceling. But you talk about actually a whole ecosystem of C's beyond those two.
You know, when I first started studying the phenomenon called calling out culture, I realized that there was a continuum, that we're all familiar with calling people out, which is publicly shaming people for something we think they've done wrong, for which we want to hold them accountable. But we also go a step further, and want to cancel somebody. That means we don't ever want to hear from you again.
In other words, we're going to hurt your reputation or at least cost you your job or your platform. Now, calling in is actually an accountability process too. But instead of using the angered blaming or shaming of the call out culture or the cancel culture, We're using love and respect as our strategies. And so, really, a call in, is a call out, but it's done with love instead, instead of anger. Because you still want to hold people accountable for something they've done wrong.
But instead of saying, I can't believe you said that, we should cancel you. But it's more like," it's an interesting perspective that you have. Do you mind if we talk more about that? " So it's an invitation into a conversation, instead of an invitation into a fight. Now, sometimes you don't want to make the investment of your time and attention into someone else's world. And that's when Sonya Renee Taylor created the concept of calling on.
That's when you just want people to do better when you really want them to talk to the hand. It's like, "I don't know what's going on with you right now, all
Are you okay? Because right now you're showing me that you ain't okay, you need to get out of my face with that stuff, I don't know why you thought that racist sexist whatever joke would land well on me, but you need to check yourself." And I don't think, particularly on social media, we use the fifth C enough and that's calling it off. We have no obligation to engage in unproductive conversations with people who are trolling us, lying to us, gaslighting us, and that's in person or online.
We don't have an obligation to waste our time with people like that. But I think our egos make us think that we can just make them change if we just find the right magic words. And that's on the ego's talking.
Yeah.
You know, you can't even change the person that most loves you with magic words, much less strangers on the internet or in person. And so I created the 5C continuum, calling out, cancel, calling in, calling on, and calling it off as a way of recognizing the patterns of our conflicts and interaction. And once you recognize the patterns, then you can choose the response to that pattern that most emotionally suits you at the time. Cause you have no obligation to do any of those things.
You can always call it off. But if you choose to want to pursue accountability, you have a lot of options instead of just getting into this blow-out fight, calling people names, accusing them of being caricatures and things like that. And you'll find that the more you calling yourself in to call others in, the much better you'll feel about yourself.
So when the person at the driver's license bureau gets on with last nerve, instead of having a blowout with them about how they're treating you, why not see how difficult that job must be for her and call yourself in and offer grace, humor, compassion, and you will feel so much better about yourself than if you just let loose.
Yeah. And it sounds like you can actually accomplish or, or take steps to accomplish. what it truly is that you want to accomplish instead of making that reactive response of the ego of the moment.
I love that it's a continuum too because a lot of people think that they either call someone out or they don't say anything and then they'll feel guilty about not saying anything because they should have helped, they should have done something and then they're worried that someone else is going to call them out for not saying something so it can be this very destructive loop, but with this continuum gives people choice and also it sounds like you can choose many in sequence.
So maybe you call someone in and then you're like, I'm calling it off, right?
Exactly. The point that I like with learning calling in practice is that they're not niceness lessons. You're not giving people a pass on injustice . You are in control of how you show up. I love the fact that we can always say what we mean and mean what we say, but we don't have to say it mean, that's a choice, and never pretend that it's not.
What do you say to people who might push back and say, well, they had their chance, and you know, I want to tell them what's up, there's no more playing nice. What do you say to people who Push back if you've ever gotten pushed back on the idea of calling in or maybe those other C options besides calling out and canceling that help them recognize that this is an important part of this change ecosystem.
Oh, in my book, I talk about the appropriate uses of call outs. Well, it's not like I'm taking it off the table as a tactic that never should be used when people are abusing that power or others. When they've had opportunities to change and they've chosen not to, when they're at risk of causing real harm to real people, of course, we have to still have call outs in our arsenal.
But the point is that we should reserve it for very limited occasions, like one of those Break Glass In Case Of Fire moments, not really use and overuse it for people with whom we have conflicts, disagreements. There's so many other ways to create not only productive conversation, but my ultimate goal is to build a strong human rights movement. And I have to honestly say, I did my book as a political project. I am actually not that interested in people as, you know, I'm an introvert.
I get mad when people call me because that takes my head out of my books. It's not that I'm trying to Kumbaya with a whole lot of humanity. But I do believe that as a human rights movement, if we do not learn how to be More effective and stronger together, we will be susceptible to the divisiveness of fascism. And we're in this political moment where predominant people in our society are telling everybody to hate each other, who doesn't agree with them. And we gotta get rid of our inner Trumps.
You know, we can't just go around practicing these cutthroat politics on each other and then expecting that we're going to be able to build the power to stop human rights violations that are palpably happening right now. They're already rounding up vulnerable immigrants. They're already dehumanizing trans people. Attacking all the civil rights and the women's rights we've fought prayed and died for.
And so, I believe that the people we're opposing, those who are opposed to human rights, only have two advantages. Lies and violence. That's all they got going for them. And they have to lie to their followers and intimidate the rest of us with violence. But I'm like, well look what we got on our side. We've got the truth. We've got history. We've got history.
If you think like you can make us forget the whole 19th and 20th century happened and you're just going to wish it away because it's inconvenient history for you, we got the evidence. We got the receipts of who you are and who we are. And best of all, we got time. Because these people are an endangered species. You want to talk about the use of that term? White supremacy is on its last legs. Cause even the young white people don't want it to continue. Look at how they voted.
And so we got their kids with our music, with our cool, and we got them at the ballot box. So they are demographically doomed. And my biggest fear is that despite holding a winning hand with truth, time, evidence, and history on our side, we'll blow it with the call out
by turning on each other and cannibalizing each other with our attempt to be politically pure, while we are remarkably ineffective in building power.
Mm. How does someone orient themselves toward calling in and bringing people in and that winning hand when their impulse is to call someone out because it's in the air that they're breathing? It's in the ecosystem. Like, how do you build a muscle of calling in when it can seem easier or more psychologically and ego short term satisfying to call someone out?
Well, I don't have a formula for everybody, but I do know that my first call out response was triggered by my trauma. I'm a call out queen, by the way, I love telling people off, so it's not like I'm some saint trying to tell everybody else how to be a saint. No, I love telling people off, but I find that that impulse is my trauma response. It's when I put myself on pause. And give myself a chance to think about what I really want the effect of my words to be.
That I actually say things that reinforce my compassion and my integrity. And so I try to swallow that first response. To give my emotional intelligence and my integrity intelligence a chance to catch up to my mouth. And then, I say the second thing. And if you've ever parented children, you got that instinctively. Cause if you blurt out the first thing that comes to your head, when your children are getting on their last nerve, they'll be in therapy for life. So we know a lot of swallow.
That first response will never be compassionate, caring parents. And it can work for all aspects of our lives to not be trauma driven, but be trauma informed. Understand how you need to work on yourself so that trauma is not driving your relationships with other people. Because it is true, hurt people hurt people. And if you are not attending to the soul wounds that you've experienced, then all you're gonna do is bleed all over everybody.
Whether you're trying to call them in, call them out, or even just try to establish a good relationship with them. I mean, a lot of traumatized people can't even establish great love relationships because the trauma shows up in all those relationships. And so it's really important to learn that we're always going to be more than what happened to us. And it's a choice to stay in that victim space or to move to that survivor space, and overcome what happened to you.
You mentioning anyone who has parented children or been around children, practically speaking, it sounds like calling in and the practice and the muscle of calling in on a very, very like day to day level could be saying, Well, what would I say to this person if they were a four year old? If they were my four year old nephew, what would I say to them?
That's a good way of framing it. Another way I'd put it was that you treat people as if they're holding their heart in your hand and you don't want to squeeze it too tight. Because if someone was holding their heart, would you let them squeeze it with their power, with their indifference, with their trauma? No, you wouldn't want somebody to treat your heart like that. And so learn the practice of acting like we'll have the power to not squeeze somebody's heart and make them go, ouch.
Something that I've heard from a lot of people who listen to this podcast because they want to do this work so badly and they're like, "but these people make me so mad and they piss me off so much and how could they think that way?" Something that you mentioned that I think is freaking brilliant and has already changed my life is you describe the difference between someone who can't be changed and someone who is three versions of an ally.
So I think you say a proven potential and a problematic ally. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah. I find that a lot of the call out culture is because people don't do good threat assessments. Now, they have trouble distinguishing between people who are outright enemies, who are opposed to human rights, who are opposed to justice and fairness and compassion, - and everybody else who's just muddling along through life, right?
And I get this a lot when people want to use words like "performative" when the describer of what they think are inadequate social justice responses or work by other people. Like if a white person puts up a Black Lives Matter sign or a straight person hangs a rainbow flag or whatever, I try to get them to do a better threat assessment and say, okay, we know we've got fascists out here.
We know we have people who benefit and profit from hate and it's impossible to get someone to understand justice if their whole economic model depends on injustice. But for the rest of the people, you've got your proven allies, the people you can ride and die with. Because you've been through stuff together. You know who those are. And then you've got your problematic allies, people with whom you agree on a lot of stuff, but they may focus on climate change while you focus on women's rights.
They may be racially challenged or racially under-developed so they don't know how to stop saying "you people" or "colored people" or whatever. But you'll never agree on most things because they were problematic allies. then you've got then larger set of people, as was proven in the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, are your potential allies.
There were 11, 000 demonstrations in 2020, most led by white people, by the way, and most of them were displaying Black Lives Matter signs, or some kind of indication, like right after the election, the blue bracelet people, for example. And I'm saying, you already know the number one thing we need to know about all those potential allies. And you know what that is?
They not in the Ku Klux Klan, cause no Klansman has ever put up a Black Lives Matter sign, and no Trump supporter ever wore a blue bracelet, and put up a rainbow flag. So your job is to sophisticate your analysis so that you can figure out the strategy to work with potential, proven, And problematic allies, because the most important thread is that they're all allies. You cannot define them as enemies because you're incompetent at doing a threat assessment.
Oh, that's so good. And that almost makes it like, okay, there's potential here. There's opportunity. Let's find the potential. Let's find the opportunity. Like, how do we maximize this moment and this conversation?
And we do it with kindness and accepting that other people are gonna be as complicated as you. So there's gonna be things that they're strong on and weak on and there's things that you're strong on and weak on. People ask me all the time why I don't throw around the word racist. Well I say because the way I see the white people that I have to analyze and or work with or call out, is that I tend to reserve that word for the people who are intentional about their bigotry.
And there are a plethora of them to talk about. I got that. But most of them are either racially challenged or racially illiterate. And I'm not going to have a negative conversation with them no more than I would criticize someone who comes to the United States and can't speak the English I prefer. I don't need to use my power as a way of dissing people who have been intentionally made to be ignorant. Look at this attack on knowledge and evidence of truth that we're dealing with.
We're living in a country of white people who were not only not taught a correct history of what's true of how the world works. But were rewarded for their ignorance, right? Well, if somebody was paying you an advantage for being ignorant, you'd turn a blind eye to it, too. That's just human. And so I take the lot of fun from saying very painful things to white people with love, you know?
Most of them that listen are willing to learn as little as long as I don't shame and blame them in the process. Make it appear like it's their fault that they don't know. I don't make it their fault they don't understand how to dissect patriarchy. I only talk about them being responsible for it lets them know that they're enmeshed in that culture.
Is there a way, and I know every single person is different, but in your vision of how in an ideal world this would work, how do you get where it feels like, okay, I'm making some change?
First of all, it starts with your expectations of them. Don't think you're gonna again, find those magic words that immediately causes somebody to re-evaluate their life, their choices, their lived experiences, and suddenly give you the change that you hope that they see.. It ain't gonna happen that way. From my perspective, I'm always gonna be proud that I made the chance for 'em.
I gave them the room to grow without taking responsibility for their inability to take advantage of the opportunity. But Generally, it's a cumulative effect. The first time you call somebody in, it may not change anything, but as we create this calling in culture, other people are going to say that, you know, "I think you're a good person. I love the compassion you have. So why is there this weird area that you talk badly about strangers you don't even know?
I mean, what's going on with you? Can I help you? Can I, can we talk about the good part of you that I admire and the troubling part that I'm trying to figure out why you want to be that way?" I mean, it was kind of like most human beings don't wanna walk around consciously hurting people. So the question is why would you want to? What's going on in her soul that makes you indifferent to the suffering that you're causing? That's really the most important question we can ask each other.
And so, you're constantly going to be offered chances to offer people grace, forgiveness, respect, and their human rights. And you can't think you failed simply because of their inability to grow in the moment. I mean, I got a hard head. Some things have to be said to me many times before I got it, and we're all kind of like that because we don't like to be told what to think. We don't like somebody to assume that we don't know something or that we're incapable of learning and growing and stuff.
So that first feeling when we try to call somebody in and out, it's actually going to be shame. They're going to feel shame. They're going to feel like they've been put on the spot. They're going to feel like they've been accused of not knowing enough or not being enough. So calibrate your response to that. That's the normal human condition. And so they're not bad people for feeling like every human being would feel under those circumstances.
Right. Right. They're feeling like humans feel because they're humans, not robots. And thank goodness, because that means that there is opportunity there force shifting because of their humanity,
but you have to assure them that you believe in them, that you take their suffering seriously, that you recognize that their lived experiences got them to do certain things that really were lived experiences, got you to do certain things. They're strangely enough, their experiences are as valid as yours. And so, keeping that complexity in mind, you offer people grace and space. So, just like we all know that it's not politically correct anymore to say the
word [censored] . Well, what happened when the first time we used that word and somebody called us out for using it? They could have shamed us and punished us for using it, or they could have given us the space to grow. for learning, oh, now we say differently abled, or neurodivergent, or any other number of words that don't dehumanize people with different abilities. So we all have opportunities to learn and grow.
And if we can always keep in mind, like Malcolm X says, when we didn't know something that we'll always have grace for others who maybe don't know what we think we know.
This has been such an incredible conversation and I know it's going to be so, so nourishing and so energizing for so many people who are listening right now. So as we're wrapping up and we're wrapping up in January of 2025 with everything that's going on in January 2025. What can you say to people who are listening, who are feeling scared and their hope is dwindling and they're also holding the duality of feeling hope and feeling energized and feeling that sort of vision?
What is something that you would love to say to those people?
Well, this may sound like a commercial, but I would urge them to Use my name to get to my website and join calling in classes. We've got another one starting in March and it's hundreds of people learning the techniques of how to showcase their integrity by practicing calling in with their friends, their families, their communities, their fellow students, their co workers, all of this. As so, I would urge people to join our $5 classes because it's only $5.
The cheapest consciousness raising you'll ever find on the internet. So that's what I would say, that we're building a human rights movement with human rights as our goal and calling in as our practices. Cause I believe that calling in is going to be as important to the human rights movement in the 21st century as non violence was to the civil rights movement in the 20th. A statement of our compassion and how we care for even those we would call our enemies.
As we're wrapping up, there are three questions that I ask people. Before we sign off, there's no correct way to answer it. The right way is your way. The first question is, positivity is defined differently by everybody. So how do you define positivity?
I define positivity as a necessary ingredient in believing in your ability to change and grow. Because if you've given up, on believing you can change and grow. Then you're not going to be very positive about yourself or the future. So it's very important to have that growth mindset, not that fixed mindset. Where you actually do believe that at any age you can learn something new and you can grow. And that to me is positivity.
Positivity is also making sure that the fingerprint you leave on other people is one of love and not hate. That's also positivity for me.
I love that. All right. Second question is, when do you feel the most like yourself?
Oh, I feel the most like myself when I'm doing my hard partying. I was told as a teenager that I needed to party as hard as I work. Now, obviously in my seventies, I'm not going to the nightclubs or anything like that, because I don't have a Peter Pan complex. I play competitive Pinochle with my octogenarian friends, and we compete in tournaments around the country. And you know, we're all our walkers and our canes and our wheelchairs.
We are having so much delight in being with each other and still being alive to share this camaraderie and know that no matter what we've been through in life, we can manage to have exquisite fun together and compassion for each other. I mean, we read as funeral programs as we do Hamilton playbills. You know, we are living out loud 'til the end of our lives and I love that.
Oh, I love that so much. I like want to catapult myself into the future and live out that life. Okay. The last question. I define fearlessness as not feeling the fear and doing it anyway, but when the fear you have of a situation, thing, whatever it is, is less than the faith you have in yourself. So an equation fearless is when you fear is less than the faith. Given that definition, Loretta Ross, what makes you feel fearless?
What has made me feel fearless is the certain knowledge that I've handled everything that's been thrown my way. I mean, at 11 years old, I was kidnapped and raped. I had a child through incest. I got shot at three years old in Mississippi. Even as an adult, my picture has appeared in Klan newspapers. And so I've had to decide at many points of my life that I wasn't going to let what happened to me determine who Loretta Ross would become. And I have to honestly say, I'm scared all the time.
I don't think courage is the absence of fear. Courage is doing the right thing. And so I don't try to get people to not be afraid. Like, I haven't achieved that myself. I have achieved a determination to make sure that the Loretta who shows up. It's the one that shows her vulnerability and strength. That is not something to be ashamed of.
I am just so, so deeply grateful for you and your work and I cannot thank you enough. This book and your work is right on time and is going to move mountains this year, in this moment and way beyond. ~ That was Loretta Ross. If you would like to learn more about Loretta's incredible life-changing work, sign up for a calling in course, get her book or dig into any of the numerous resources that she provides.
You can head on over to the show notes where all of the links are or head over to women against negative talk.com to find them there. If you liked this episode, make sure that you are subscribed where ever you listen to podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, I heart radio we're in all of the places. Make sure that you're subscribed. And that you review the podcast, telling people why they should be listening and join our community.
The best thing that you can do as a listener to help us grow is to share an episode with a friend, share an episode that you love that has helped you. And maybe it can support them. I also wanted to mention that we will be hosting a giveaway for Loretta's book calling in over on social media. So you can follow me on Instagram at Katie Horwitch, and you can find me on sub stack at women against negative talk. That wraps it up for today.
Thank you so much for spending the last hour or so with me and with Loretta. I know your time is valuable and I am just so grateful that you choose to spend it here with us on the wantcast as always move forward, fearlessly, spread the good word and be the you, you know, you're meant to be. I'll see you in two weeks. Take care. Bye bye.