 Thank you so welcome today to our webinar calling in the calling out culture. We have Professor Ross here today I'll give you a very abbreviated at her direction a very abbreviated version of her. She is a visiting professor at Smith College in the program for the study of women and gender. She's an activist, a public intellect, as well as a scholar and an author. Her most recent books are reproductive justice and introduction and radical reproductive justice foundations theory practice. Our forthcoming book, which we're so excited about is calling in the calling out culture detoxing our movement, and that will come out this year in 2021 we had some very exciting news about that so we're very happy. I will say that she's been featured on CNN. Good morning America the Donahue show, the Charlie Ross show and New York Times Time Magazine. Los Angeles Times and Washington Post so we're so privileged and honored to have her with us here today. I will say one other thing and I was able and privileged to be in Professor Ross's class white supremacy in the age of Trump. And she offers these courses that you can take for $5 a class open to everyone, and I will put that link in the chat. It was a phenomenal class full of information, and you can buy the recordings for that out and you'll see how to do that in the chat as well. But the good news is she has the course calling in the calling out class with the black community, starting April 21. So that's phenomenal and then she does it again for all community, June 1. I will highly recommend those classes. Okay, no further ado, I will welcome to you Loretta Ross. Well thank you. I'm so honored to be here. Can you hear me. Yes. I have to blame the fact that I wrote a book on calling in the calling out culture on my grandson. And I've, I guess I have to say a $5 class led to a $1.25 million contract from Simon and Schuster a couple of weeks ago because they're going to publish my book and I'm so excited because I feel like Cinderella. I'm so excited. I'm sorry, I'm going to I'm going to mute, but I'm so excited about that. Anyway, but I'm blaming my grandson on this, because when he was about 12 years old. Apparently he found it very difficult to answer his cell phone, like any other cleaner he was like this all the time, but wouldn't pick up the phone so I went to voicemail and finally said well grandma if you want to talk to me. Just get on Facebook. Within weeks he got off because he said it was for old fogies, old people. Well I didn't follow him to Instagram or Snapchat or wherever he went, but I stayed on Facebook. And that's when I noticed how mean people were to each other. I mean just routinely would say things to each other online. Well they wasn't saying in person. Strangers just jumping down each other's throat. And so I asked another young person I was working with. What is this, I mean, what is going on online. And she said, Oh you mean the call out culture. And I said, you named it. And she said, yeah. That's well what are y'all doing about it. I kind of shrugged and walked away. And that started me thinking about six years ago that I'd had a body of experiences where I had to call in a whole lot of people I didn't can't necessarily want to bring home for dinner. Because when I was 25 years old I became the executive director of the DC rape crisis center which was the country's first rape crisis center and I was this third executive director. But we started a program called prisoners against rape. And as a rape survivor. Part of our program was to teach black feminist theory to men who are incarcerated for raping and murdering women. I didn't think that as a rape survivor that I had the capacity to call people in particularly when I walked into that prison and I saw all these big buff black men standing up there. And it took me years to realize that they were so big and buff looking like MMA fighters, because they were the predators of the prison. Because the one who wrote me said outside I raped women. And inside I raped men. And I'd like not to be a rapist anymore. And so that intrigued us and so we went and started this black feminist educational course at Lord and reformatory which was the prison outside of Washington DC. But I was scared when I first walked in there and there's all these six foot something guys, looking like, you know, OK, this is what that means. But I was able to do it I was over to able to overcome my trauma as a rape and incest survivor and teach them black feminist theory. Then in the 1990s. I took a job at the national anti plan network was just which was renamed the Center for Democratic renewal. And there I had the honor of working with Reverend CT Vivian, who was a field director for Dr Martin Luther King that the Reverend Vivian died last July, the same day the Congressman john Lewis died, but living in Atlanta I had the opportunity to really learn from these civil rights legends that we honor and read about nowadays. And Reverend Vivian used to talk about how as civil rights leaders they fought furiously behind closed doors, but they knew how to strategically unite in the face of bull Connor and white supremacy. They didn't bring their fights outside because they knew that they were stronger together. But another thing that Reverend Vivian said to me that was very important. He said that if you ask people to give up hate, then you need to be there for them when they do. And when he first said that I went oh shoot, but I couldn't say what I really said I didn't swallow it because I was talking to a minister and you can curse in front of a minister. But I didn't understand what he meant until it became my job to deep program people who've been in the white supremacist movement. And when that became my responsibility and I got to meet people who had left the KKK or the area nations or the patriot militia movements and stuff. Then once I found that I met them. I couldn't hate them anymore, because they were humanized for me. So even though they belong to movements that dehumanize me, and I thought it was okay to hate them. But once I met them, the hate was not sustainable. And Reverend Vivian had also said, you've got to do this work from love, not anger and not hatred. And I didn't understand what he meant until then. So I learned to call in even white supremacist which of course preconditioned me to learn to call in Trump supporters. And so, as a feminist in the women's movement, particularly as a black feminist within the women's movement, I kind of define all white women as my problematic allies. That doesn't make up my enemies. They're just my allies with issues, like I'm an ally with issues. And so those three bodies of work, the rapist, the white supremacist and the women's movement, made me think that I had something to contribute to this call out culture conversation. And so that's why I started writing my book six years ago. And that's the training that I'm going to offer you all today. And that's what I offer online for $5 a lesson. Like I said, who knows that $5 lessons would lead to a million dollar contract, but that's what happened. Because the reality is that when you serve your people with love and respect, every blessing you ever wanted in the world will come to you. And that got proven out. So if you don't mind, I'm going to speak for about an hour, and then we're going to save a half hour for your Q&A. So be prepared to ask your questions in the Q&A time. I believe that there's a Q&A button at the bottom of the screen, and someone will facilitate your questions, direct them towards me. And I'm willing to stay with y'all as long as it takes to get all your questions satisfactorily answered. But if I don't get a chance to ask your question, answer your questions. Remember that I do teach these classes online, $5, $5 is the cost of a chicken sandwich, $5. And you can find that on LorettaJRoss.com. First, let me start the screen sharing. And I do need someone to speak up and tell me that they can see that. We can see it. Good. I got decent Zoom skills, but sometimes, you know, a boomer like me doesn't always get it right. My avatar name is Dread Feminist because not only do I have these dreadlocks, as you can see cascading down my shoulders, but I started them in 1980, long before a lot of people knew what dreadlocks were. And I noticed that the women's symbol had never been dreaded up. And so I call myself Dread Feminist, but I also fell in dread the way that Dread Scott's name was spelled. Because Dread Scott was the blaze who in 1857 sued for his right to be seen as a citizen in the United States and the Supreme Court in 1857 denied him that right, and instead said that black people in the United States need to be treated as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of the census so that they could decide a portion of congressional representatives, but did not have the human rights that white citizens had. And so I want to honor Dread Scott and honor my feminist background. And together, that's who I am. I'm basically a raunchy girl. I call her the raunchy grandmother with some radical politics. And I am a member of the human rights movement because one other thing that Reverend Vivian told me was that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not intend to only lead the civil rights movement, but he, in his last Sunday sermon on March 31, 1968, called on us in the United States to build a U.S.-based human rights movement that focused on the human rights violations that our country commits both domestically and abroad. And when I first heard this from Reverend Vivian, I was shocked because everybody told me Dr. King had a dream. And nobody told me Dr. King had a plan. And so that's why I've been calling myself a human rights activist ever since I found out about that. But of course, because I believe in women's rights, I'm part of the women's rights wing of the human rights movement. But I believe in racial justice, so I'm also part of the civil rights sector of the human rights movement. I'm elderly and I'm disabled, so I'm part of the disability rights wing of the human rights movement. Now, I don't have enough space on this graphic to put all the arrows up there, but I'm inviting you to think about how many issues you care about simultaneously that belong under the umbrella of human rights, because there's trans rights as part of the human rights framework or environmental justice as part of the human rights framework or indigenous rights, and on and on and on. So we're all part of the same human rights movement, yet we focus on different things at different times. And I think the calling in processes are so vital for our ability to work together. And so that's what I'm going to be talking about today. But before I get to the subject of my speech, I want to talk about why it's so necessary, why it is so urgent. I heard I teach a course called white supremacy in the age of Trump that I've been teaching for five years, because the minute Trump came down that golden escalator. I knew that my work doing my history and doing anti fascist work would be the moment that we need right I usually could have taught a course on reproductive justice I've co written three books on that, but I knew that my work with Reverend Vivian and John Lewis and Ralph David Abernathy, fighting the hate movement would be what we needed. When Trump came down that escalator. And so we saw, of course, the insurrection against the capital. There are basically white folks feeling that they're being replaced by the growing diversity of our country decided to commit an insurrection. And they weren't protesting the killing of white men or they weren't protesting the fact that the white votes didn't get counted. They were protesting that the black votes did get counted. And that's why they were trying to overturn the election results. And they were really upset because something astonishing happened in the November election. Every white demographic voted for X President Trump, because that's the way it is historically always been in the United States. It's astonishing wasn't the number of black people who showed up and voted, which of course is what we always do trying to save democracy. But the fact that for the first time in history, young white voters between the ages of 18 and 29 broke with every generation older than them, and voted for Biden and Harris. It was the first generation of white people who broke with their elders to vote against white supremacy and for diversity, plurality and democracy. And that was astonishing, which is why I think the fears of all the white people who voted for Trump older than them are being stirred because it's not just that people of color and women. And LGBT folks and immigrants and stuff threatened to replace them. But the reality is that with our intersectional pro democracy pro freedom movement, we've got their kids, and that scares them. Some people have often said that the worst thing you can do to an opponent is capture what they've created. And we've got their kids to start it with our music is started with our fullness is started with our culture. But now it's starting with our belief in democracy. And so we're, instead of calling it the second civil war, I tend to call it America's unfinished civil war, but I'm not alone in that. Because Ulysses S Grant was the president elected four years after Lincoln was assassinated, and he faced a lot of insurrections by Confederates from the south, doing his presidency. On the other side this war. If we're to have another civil war. I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition ambition and ignorance on the other. So what we're looking at today, people who are trying to defend democracy as patriots and use evidence facts and intelligence on the one side, and Q an on people using superstition. And so we've had over 100 years to prepare for this moment, but I would also argue that if our country had dealt with the insurrectionist. The traders really of 1865 and not just gently readmitted them into the Union so that the South could win the war even though they lost the battle. We wouldn't see the Confederate flag flying in the US capital in 2021. If you do not hold people accountable for treason. We're at risk of continuing this civil war, because the question always become is America going to be devoted to liberty, or the legacy of slavery, we have not defined that question yet, and answered it, you know, in a way that people cannot mistake what we are united around. But this is also predictable by someone even later called popper was an Austrian philosopher science. And he wrote that in 1945 that ignorance is not a simple lack of knowledge, but an active aversion to knowledge. It's a puzzle to know issuing from cowardice pride or laziness of mind, and no rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude. We have seen this coming. And I understand the anxiety of so many people who don't know what to do after the murder of George Floyd whether or not Derek Chauvin is convicted because they know what that means for our country to basically decide whether or not black lives matter or not. But at the same time, I understand that anxiety, because as far as white folks go y'all have 400 years to study for a test. That's happening tomorrow. I feel a lot of anxiety trying to cram it all in right now and I feel for you, but I can't help but recognize that we've had a long time to learn this, and we chose not to do I'm going to do all I can in my power to help you. But I'm not going to do it without acknowledging that this is a memo that Native Americans wrote 500 years ago black folks wrote 400 years ago Mexican Americans wrote 300 years ago. Asian Americans wrote in the 18 with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. We've been calling this question for a long time. And finally, with the twin pandemic of black death through George Floyd and COVID. We finally have been called on whether or not we're going to defend our democracy and recognize our human interdependence with each other. We're going to be atomized into competing tribal factions, risking the imposition of our entire society, and causing a lot of pain suffering and death in that tribalistic fight. To do this, I think we need to understand the difference between blame versus responsibility, because no one's alive who created the system of white supremacy that we are grappling with. It's their responsibility for ending it. And I like to use a metaphor that will, Isabel Wilkerson had in her book cast where she talked about becoming the proud owner of a house. And you're so proud that you're going to have a housewarming party and invite all your friends and family and neighbors to celebrate with you. But there's a problem with that house. It has bad plumbing. You're not to be blamed for the bad plumbing because you didn't neglect the plumbing for the decades that it took to go bad you didn't build the house. So you're not to be blamed for the bad plumbing, but you do have a responsibility for fixing it. If you're going to enjoy the privileges of living in that house. Well America is that house we all have the privilege of living in. We all have the responsibility for fixing these problems that have been neglected entirely to law, because they're in the foundation of our country. And so blame is an unhealthy response. I'm not into casting blame, but I am into holding people responsible and accountable. So the calling in continuum is actually three phases it's actually not a binary but a continuum. I think we all know what calling out is and I'll be describing that in some detail but it's basically publicly shaming people with things that they believe or things that you think they should be doing differently or what they look like or what they say. And so we all know that it's a process and an attempt to seek accountability, but you do it very publicly by calling people out by bringing up something they said a decade ago and holding it against them those kinds of things. Calling on is an intermediate step. You're not going to call anybody out, but you're also not going to do the emotional investment of calling them in. Calling on is simply demanding that people do better become a human being. My favorite calling on sentence is to just look a person in the eye who has said something problematic, and I look them in the eye and just say, I beg your pardon. And I just let that lay there. Why they rethink in their own head, those words coming out of their mouths. Literally speaking, if you just look there and look at them, they will rethink and re-edit what they just said. And you can either determine whether you're going to call them out if they want to double down and defend those problematic things, or if they're willing to say, oh, that didn't land the way I wanted it to. So you may consider whether you want to invest in them and call them in. Again, it's a choice that you get to make. And then mostly I'm going to be talking about calling in is the process of seeking accountability for the harm that people do, but you're doing so instead of with anger and public humiliation. You're choosing to seek accountability through love and respect. So in this lecture, I'm going to give you some techniques for calling people in and to recognize the difference between when you should call somebody out and when you should call somebody in. Or sometimes you just want to stand there and say, talk to the hand. I'm calling on you to be a better person. So calling out is publicly criticizing somebody else's social justice practices or words or beliefs. Generally speaking, there's a bit of hypocrisy attacks calling out, because you're so busy jumping on how other people are walking through the world. You're not usually paying a lot of attention to how your own social justice practices may need some work to. One of my favorite things I say to young people is that you don't have to criticize how other people are doing their human rights work, because there's enough oppression to go around you ain't gonna run out of oppression anytime soon. So you working on how you need to work on it and let them work on it how they need to work on it we don't all have to be aligned that way. I've learned that a lot of people, particularly young people will learn something very recently and then weaponize it against each somebody else. Well, you know, we don't use that word lane in anymore. We use this able are differently able. And I can't believe you call that you're blind because that's such an ableist kind of thing. The language conventions are so rapidly rapidly changing. There's no way anybody can keep up with the wokest of language unless that's all you ever do in life. And so to weaponize your knowledge against somebody else. Basically, the fact that you feel you need to call somebody out, because you think that's the way to be woke, really signals to a seasoned activists like me that you're not nearly as woke as you think you are. Truly woke, you wouldn't need to call them out. So every time you call somebody out and still a bit reflecting on who you called out, you're actually revealing your own lack of political maturity. But there are times you do need to use call outs and I'll be talking about that. But we do want to banish people because they're not woke enough. And sometimes I think call outs are driven because people want to boost their standing in a community, prove how woke they are and we call that virtue signaling. And a lot of people mistakenly be believed that the way you do human rights and social justice work is to bully people into agreeing with you that's ideologically align each other with political purity. And shame people who aren't but that really again is a characteristic of political immaturity. When a human rights movement is comprised of many different people thinking many different thoughts, but they move in the same direction. But when many different people think the same thought, and they move in the same direction. That's a cult. And we're building a human rights movement. We're not building a human rights cult. So the fact that you may believe that we all have to have group think in order to do to do this work really reveals how much one needs to learn. And China has the coats actually points out why calling out is getting criticized so bitterly now by the right. Any sober assessment of this history must conclude that the present objections to cancel culture are not so much concerned with the weapon as the kind of people who now seek to wield it. Recently, cancellation flowed exclusively downward from the powerful to the powerless. But now, in this era of fallen gatekeepers, which of course you can definitely define the mainstream media is falling gatekeepers who used to control all the information we got. In this era of falling gatekeepers, where anyone with a Twitter handle or Facebook account can be a publisher, management has been ostensibly democratized. And so as corporate America is learning as our colleges and universities are learning as our nonprofits are learning, anybody with a keyboard can blow your organization up if you ain't walking injustice. So there are appropriate uses of call outs. I think it's very useful to call people out and there are power disparities and they're inaccessible. When you try to correct them or offer them a chance to do better and they won't Maybe the call out is the best strategy to reach them if they're capable of feeling public shame. Sometimes you want to use calling out to avoid increasing harm, sometimes privately sometimes publicly. You build community with call outs to prevent future harms by finding others experiencing those same kind of injustices, and you build that community by spreading information about those unseen unmarked harms that exist within your community your surroundings your educational institution or your corporation. Those are the unmarked or hidden structures of privileges what we call institutional racism or institutional transphobia or sexism or homophobia or xenophobia. And sometimes called out so you used to lift up the voices of those who have been historically silent. It releases that pent up outrage so instead of internalizing your anger, you turn it outward towards the people who are creating harm. And there are sometimes when public shaming actually works though we found that we have an ex president who wasn't capable of feeling So the right is, of course, trying to very opportunistically claim that they're the principal victims of call out culture, or cancel culture as they call it when they had the Democratic and their Republican National Convention last year they said it was going to be their one priority. And without any sense of irony they're proclaiming that they're the victims of a new witch hunt. I seem to recall the rich and being started by the Puritans, who were not only canceling people but burning them at the stake. Or they don't even remember how gladly they supported Joe McCarthy when he was in the Senate, and he was getting people canceled for being leftists or communist supervisors, sympathizers are read as private and Trump supporters they think that they're that we are fairly attacking them we're not attacking your personality or your person we're attacking the noxious ideas that are threatening our democracy, but some people see attacking their ideas as attacking their moral character. I must say sometimes the ideas you have tell a whole lot about your moral character but that's another conversation. And that they are claiming that the academic freedom of conservatives is really what's on attack on these college campuses and that's why we have this wholesale assault on liberal education, particularly liberal education that teaches the truth about the history both the good and the bad, like things like critical race theory or diversity, equity and inclusion because they just saying we're just being too sensitive where we're snowflakes and can't take a little political conflict, when in fact, they are really the ones willing to use government power to slash the budgets of left wing colleges, for example, Boise State University, the Idaho State Legislature just slash $409,000 out of their budget because they're teaching critical race theory. Of course, they believe that we should ignore all the historical and contemporary hierarchical power structures. They shouldn't matter because anybody should have the right to say whatever they want without any consequences. And people shouldn't be punished for saying racist homophobic sexist transphobic or xenophobic comments or jokes and less discussion not be so thin skinned when they can just say whatever they want to say I can use the n word and I can't you take a joke kind of thing. This claim like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and other minions of the right are saying well white men are the ones getting replaced and getting canceled. And, you know, we're the ones most vulnerable to this outrage, and they should have the freedom to discriminate against people because of their political or religious beliefs, like hobby lobby, winning in the Supreme Court by saying that the owners of hobby lobby are in birth control, and therefore they don't have to provide birth control coverage in their health care plan that they offer to their employees. But I want to ask a basic question. Why is my employer in my bedroom. Employment contract kind of stopped at my personal life. But, or the county clerk Kimberly Davis, who refused to provide a marriage license to a same sex couple couple in Kentucky in 2015. And I so dearly wanted to ask Kimberly, did they ask to marry you. You're not getting married to any of those gay couples. Why are you in their business. Of course we are criticized as leftist when we criticize any US ally or US corporation, even though we visually fight anti Semitism that's like we fight racism and homophobia and transphobia. If we offer critique of Israel or Saudi Arabia, even though we fight Islamophobia or corporate human rights violators, we're accused of trying to cancel them. Tonight doesn't all is not the only group that has a critique of fallout culture and a support for it as well, because we do on the left. Of course we remember the actual goals of the McCarthy with chance, when he was a senator in the 1950s, that led to the cancellation of many people in Hollywood their careers and it even cost some people their lives like the Rosenbergs who were executed by the president for quote being communist. And that left wing criticisms of call out culture really started taking off as a format when Angela Davis was fired from UCLA in 1970. And we're very much aware of the continuing campaign to attack liberal universities of professors and professors who get even fired from tenure positions for challenging white supremacy, the white genocide theory that they're trying to claim that dangerous species, and we're accused of anti white bigotry just by saying the word white supremacy. I mean, that's kind of like being saying, Well, we're against cancer because we named cancer. I mean, really, well, yeah, we're against cancer but that don't mean we can't name it if you can't name a disease you can't cure these things. And because we are for marriage me with their longstanding campaigns against culture where there was protesting the passion of price or the Chronicles of Narnia, which I'm really upset about because I wanted to see what that bear did, or even the Harry Potter series. That's an expression of Christian nationalism, which is a component of white supremacy, where anything that they think offends their Christian values only their particular Christian values, they don't want to allow other Christians to have different Christian values should be canceled. And of course, things like jazz rock and roll and rap music or hip hop are always targeted for cancellation and censorship by the right wing, sometimes with legal punishments threatening to jail people for singing song. We find that using public shaming is best and often the only way to reach inaccessible people who violate human rights. We do believe that free speech should not be consequence free speech, you should be held accountable for the things that you say, and there's a concept that we promote called democratic speech environment. And Google that if you want to find out more about it that consider the power imbalances because we believe that the best use of free speech is to seek justice and end human rights violations. These call us only criticized by the right as time I had she said, when the previous victims of oppression protests against the powerful by punching up, because they exclusively want the power to punch down. And we believe that these attacks on critical race theory, DEI, trans rights, gay rights, you know, immigrant rights and stuff are really just about a power to hold on to white supremacist power in our countries and maintain this unjust hierarchy. And if you speak up on certain issues like supporting Palestinians or criticizing Trump family members. Oh, they really are ready to bring out the cancellation culture. So, one of the things that I think it's important to understand is, who can you influence and why should you try. Also very cynically call this my don't waste your time strategy. I love the way that Lily Conlon says, no matter how cynical I become I can't keep up. And sometimes I feel that way. But most of us on this webinar, or what I call the 90% or not that we're 90% of the population, not even 90% of the people that rack and grab during school. So 90% is because there's a high degree of unity we have. We certainly believe in ending oppression. And we have a lot of buzzwords that we use to end this oppression with, like racism, sexism, transphobia homophobia xenophobia anti-semitism anti capitalism neoliberal capitalism, all of those kinds of buzzwords that we use amongst ourselves. Now our problem is 90% is that we spend entirely too much time trying to turn 90% into zero percenters. And that's where I'm saying we're doing it wrong. Why should I not be able to work on women's rights without you criticizing me for not working on economic justice, even though those two things are intersectional and related. We don't all have to work on the same thing in the same way. And I think trying to turn 90% into 100% is why we're often called a circular firing squad. I think EJ Dion in the Washington Post wrote a line that I'm going to paraphrase when he said, you know, Republicans organize for power, Democrats organize for fighting each other. We act very much like that circular firing squad. Outside of us are the people I'd call the 75%ers. These are people whose worldviews overlap sufficiently with our 90% worldview that we should see them as allies, maybe allies with issues or problems, but allies with the less for me as a feminist and abortion right activist as I am a 75%er for me might be the Girl Scouts. They're not going to lead troops into doing clinic defense like I wish they would. But at the same time, they believe in girls and women's empowerment. So that means that I support their agenda, and I could persuade them to support my agenda. If I stopped battering them with my elite language of all the isms and why don't you know this and you should be, you know, on it and use it this way and see the way I would as a 90%er. We need to get over ourselves, because we don't know how to talk outside of our high unity bubbles in a way that is effective with 75%ers and many of those 75%ers are in our own family and we think they're going to use our leftist jargon outside of the 75%ers or the 50%ers people like my parents. My father was a 26 year veteran of the army hyper patriotic belong to the National Rifle Association was fairly conservative for a black man. I think he always voted Democrat but I can't promise that because I don't know how he voted before if he vote was able to vote between the before the Voting Rights Act that Lyndon Johnson signed in 1965. But anyway, my mother was a southern evangelical Christian woman who believed birth control was a Bible hell between the knees. And so my mom and dad and I rarely had political conversations as I always assumed that we were on too far apart to really talk about much politics, maybe a little bit around race but not a whole lot about around gender is definitely. So I heard my mother one day over on the phone talking about, well, I have a son that's an architect, and I have another son that's a pharmacist and then Loretta. Well Loretta just doesn't go to jail too often. I had to laugh as I heard her describe what a human rights activist did because she just didn't understand. So when she got off the phone I went to I said mom, do you remember when we were in the Girl Scouts. And my mom has started a Girl Scout troop for black girls in San Antonio my hometown, because we weren't allowed to join the white girl scout troops in the 50s and the 60s, but she had to start a troop for black girl. I said when we were in the Girl Scouts do you remember how a week is you would make us cook food to feed the homeless people and the hungry people. And of course she remembered that she said yes. Well mom, the difference between me and you is that you feed the hungry. And I asked why they're hungry in the first place. I'm living out your values mom, but in a different way. And all of a sudden my mother got it, because I stopped trying to use my big words against her and criticize her politics or her point of view or her conservatism. That's it I showed her how her values were living out in me. So by speaking to her values, you can always almost always talk to people. If you can put their words in a parking lot of your brain and pay attention to their humanity and their values. I tend to call this my Uncle Frank strategy, because we all have an Uncle Frank, who comes to the dinner table, and says something that blows up the whole conversation, whether it's racist sexist transphobic or whatever. And so, generally our usual response to Uncle Frank is to just jump down his throat and start arguing with them. And we start arguing with Uncle Frank while the rest of the family buries their head and their plate and try not to pay attention to this predictable fight. But I'm suggesting an Uncle Frank strategy, so instead of fighting with Uncle Frank, why don't you turn to him and say, Uncle Frank, you know I love you, you're one of my favorite relatives, you might be lying to say it. And as someone who loves and respects you. What I happen to know about you Uncle Frank is that you'd run into a burning building and save somebody if you could from a fire. You wouldn't even care what race they were, whether they were documented immigrants or nothing, you wouldn't care if they were gay or straight, you wouldn't care Uncle Frank, because you're that kind of good, kind man that I love and respect Uncle Frank. So, Uncle Frank, help me understand how someone I know who's good and kind like you are can be reconciled with the words that just came out of your mouth. You have not called Uncle Frank in, you have not called Uncle Frank out, you called on Uncle Frank to decide whether or not he wants to be the Uncle Frank that you admire love and respect. Or the Uncle Frank who wants to be known by the hate that comes out of his mouth. He is a chance to address his own cognitive dissonance without you calling him in or out that's a calling on strategy. Trust me, it actually works a lot. When people hear you take their kindness and their inner kindness seriously, even as you asked them why their outer behaviors don't match that inner kindness. Outside of the 50% of the 25%. These are the people that I mostly associated with being Trump supporters. I don't think as a 90%. I have a lot in common with them except that we both are affected by gravity, but their definition of freedom is the freedom not to wear a mask and my definition of freedom is the freedom to wear a mask. So we don't have a lot in common. And so I want to respect them but I don't think I'm going to have a good chance of calling them in, because we don't have enough shared worldview to make that possible in many different ways. It is possible. If you're trained to do it like I am. Like I said, I've talked to the KKK, but most of us don't encounter card carrying members of the clan in our lives, nor are we trained to deal with them. And outside of the 25% of the 0%. These are the openly avowed racist fascist white supremacists, the proud boys, the three percenters, the blue blue boys, the patriot molesters, the KKK. These are the people who led the insurrection on January 26 by manipulating a whole lot of 25% into supporting them. Now our problem as 90% is that we think we're going to somehow reach into the 25 and a 0% and flip them. But our real and best strategy is for us 90% to work with the 75% and a 75% to work with the 50% and it's very possible that people like my mom and dad can have an influence on people in the American Legion where my dad used to hang out or the churches that my mom used to go to and have an impact on 25%. And sometimes 25% are going to have an impact on the zeros. But what's not going to happen is that the 90% of them successfully leap over those other layers and reach and flip a 25 or a 0. But the problem in the last 70 years since the Brown v. Board of Education decision basically is that the influence has been going the other way. The ideas that were worse once only on the far right with the KKK around black people and immigrants and queer people and feminists and stuff. They marched from the margins to the center of our public policy, because whatever the right is, they're not unstrategic, generally. And they knew that they could appear to speak to people's values and suffering, and then move their ideas from the margins of our society into the White House and that's what they did. And so we've got to learn to work smarter if we want to build the power to end human rights violations. So to work from that 90 to 50% influence, you've got to first not overstate the harm that they're causing, particularly for the 75 and the first season, they don't agree with you on in a 90% way. Don't say that they're fascist is because they don't agree with you kind of thing you do have to take their suffering seriously. There are good reasons why they think that that that public safety would be threatened if we demand to defund the police, or that schools would be not willing to work run and manage if they were to teach children to do prayers and stuff like that. They're underlying belief systems and values that underlie the bad strategies or the bad solutions that they think are the answers to their concerns. They don't need to read underneath their words and ask them why, or sometimes just say, tell me more. I find that very few people resist the impulse when they're invited to tell, tell you more about themselves. And sometimes you can challenge a narrative that's viewed only through a trauma victim lens, like, I know you think that, you know, white people are under assault by all these black people but do you know that most crime against white people is committed by other white people? Kind of thing. So sometimes facts can make a difference, not always and not all the time, but they can. But one thing you have to do as a precondition to having these difficult conversations is normalizing a calling to a soldier, assure them that they're not going to have someone jump down their throat just because they have a good personal opinion with you, because once somebody feels like they're under attack, they're going to become defensive. And actually you can create a sense of joy and happiness by belonging to the human rights movement. Show them how fighting injustice can be fun. I used to say, fighting Nazis should be fun is being a Nazi that's up. And if you don't aren't having fun doing human rights work and you're doing something wrong, because it should be fun. And like I did with my mom I use an example that resonated with her lived experiences that reinforce her positive values to call her in to understanding what being a human rights activist meant. But that of course avoid, you have to avoid name calling a calling out tactics by weaponizing our knowledge in our language against people. So you can all determine what your 75 to 50% of fear rinse balance is, who works on issues that are close to what you care about. Who do you have relationships with that you love and respect who don't share your precise political views, who's necessary to what you want to achieve. It may be that if you want to change educational policy, the person that has the power to make that 50% circle, but approaching them with a call out probably ain't going to get you the results you want. And so you need to have a strategy for developing and identifying your potential allies and see who you want to develop relationships with. How many opportunities really exists for calling people in and sometimes figure out when this is your responsibility to call somebody in because you're in a position to offer grace for and forgiveness. For example, I'm really good at calling in people who commit sexual violence because my own experience of sexual violence was close to five decades ago. But if someone has been recently traumatized and they have not done attended to their healing, then they're not going to be in a position to want to offer any kind of grace or forgiveness, or prioritize someone else's healing over their own. But there are people who share our values but we're thought of in a different way, like my mom. So when you be thinking calling out you've got to avoid this us versus their mentality the world is not a binary. You've got to focus on why you're doing it. What motivates you to want to call somebody in or out make sure you're doing it for the right reasons, not selfish reasons, and make sure you're doing in a way that doesn't contradict your own strategy and sabotage the outcomes that you want, because you need collaborations with people and to build these collaborations you've got to avoid shame and ousting people and value the relationships that you have so you can build power together. And so when you want to learn a gross mindset through calling in, you first got to understand what calling in is. Calling in is a calling out done with radical love, just to achieve accountability as I said in the beginning, it's all about accountability whether it's a calling out calling on or calling in, but this is the choice to do it through radical love by giving the benefit of the doubt and working to acknowledge that different people can be on the same team and have different roles, even as they're supposed to have differences of opinion. And I believe we need to give each other the benefit of the doubt by remembering the broader context. I really regret that that young teen editor or editor of Teen Vogue, Alexis McCommon, the command I guess, was fired for a tweet that she sent out when she was 17 years old because that's one of those got your moment, because we all did stupid things we were when we were teenagers, and most of us are damn lucky that nobody was around with the cell phones to record us in our stupidest moment. And so this culture of unforgivability is what got her. And then it turns out that the woman who led the attack against her herself had been 1012 years ago, tweeting out the inward with impunity. So it really is a culture that you don't want to participate in, unless you lived a perfectly blameless life. And it does require using active loving listening practices and being grateful for the opportunity to be better together. So it begins with self assessment you have to start with first checking in with yourself on how you feel and why you want to call in. If you're willing to invest in somebody else's growth. If you can put your own need for attention in the parking lot. Then you can call people in but if you're not in the heels enough space for a difficult conversation, because everybody who's traumatized, they do have the right to make healing their trauma their top priority. But if you are in that space, then you can become someone good at calling in. But you do have to accept that you don't have that magical power to actually change somebody else because you call them in. What you can do is make the offer with grace and respect. You have no ability to make people automatically change because you think they should. If you had that magical power couples wouldn't fight families wouldn't fight friends wouldn't fight you don't have the one where you can just say something and wave it at them and somebody's going to automatically change, but they do have the right to their own opinions, and you sometimes just have to agree to disagree. I find that the basic mistake most people think when they, when they make when they're calling people out is that they don't know how to practice self forgiveness. And I invite all of you in this audience to think about when you were a child. How your mistakes were handled when you were a child. Because if you were severely punished for making a mistake. If you were shamed for making a mistake, then chances are you think is normal to shame and punish others for making a mistake as an adult. But if when you were a child, someone taught you how to learn from your mistakes and forgave you for your mistakes, then you're going to be predisposed to learn to forgive other people for their mistakes. It was amazing how those patterns we established and learned in our childhood, end up affecting the choices we make today. And so in my calling in classes I invite people to examine those imprinted patterns, and decide, do you want to walk through life, responding to other people's mistakes as a child, or do you want to walk through life responding to your own and other people's mistakes as an adult. There is a magnification to the call out culture and I know I'm going to run a little bit over time. So I'm probably going to shut this down as quickly as I can to provide ample time for Q&A. There's a magnification for calling out counsel culture that Natalie Nguyen talks about. She's a trans activist, a trans woman who has a podcast, ContraPoint is called. Anyway, she's done this taxonomy of the call out culture. First of all, there's still a presumption of innocence, there's a presumption of guilt. So it may start off with something that Joe said something that was racist. So nobody even questions whether or not your definition of racism is appropriate, or whether what Joe said was really racist. There's a presumption that because somebody said Joe said something was racist it had to be racist. And before Joe knows what's hidden hits him, then it's abstracted, because no one actually identified what Joe said, they just heard that it was racist. So it quickly becomes an essentialist kind of definition that morphs from Joe said something was racist to Joe is a racist. It's attached to his moral character. And of course we have the right to say Joe is a racist because I am morally superior to Joe, I know what racism is when I see it. And I've read Abram Kendi and I know this stuff kind of thing so there's a pseudo moralism and a pseudo intellectualism attached to the fallout culture. We're relying on the false binaries of good evil, straight gay wrong right, so all, you know, all the things that we know to fight in terms of these absolutes. And not only is there a culture of unforgivability because even if Joe doesn't think he says something racist, and he tries to apologize to own the harm that someone thinks he does. Well, the fact that he's trying to apologize won't be accepted because it's going to be read as insincere he's trying to gain the system, his critics will say he doesn't really mean it. But then if Joe says well I'm going to just be silent and suffer in silence and not apologize, then everybody could say well he's not even trying to be held accountable for it look at him he ain't even saying that he ain't trying to offer an apology. Well he's damned if he does and he damned if he doesn't. And then anybody seen talking to Joe or agreeing with Joe or quoting Joe in their footnotes must be racist like Joe is because Joe now has the political cooties. And there's a contamination infection aspect with it. So this is how it can go from someone believing that Joe says something was racist to believing that everybody who admits that they know Joe is racist. And that's where the shunning and the ostracism and all of that takes place. So it becomes very toxic, because it contradictorily replicates the very prison industrial complex that we say that we're fighting. It discourages people from becoming activists because who wants to join a Debbie Downer mob that's going to make you feel worse when you join them than you were before you came. That's why I think a lot of DEI training fails, because people feel worse after the training and more resentful after the training than before they change. And it's not fighting people into not speaking up to tell their truth for fear of being jumped on themselves, and it drives people away from the movement, and it disguises a lot of privilege, pretty inadequately because usually when you're using a privilege to call somebody out. Everybody can see through that is paying attention. And like with poor Joe is going to even make accountability different difficult, because why would anybody confess that they've done something wrong. They're going to end up like poor Joe. I mean, mostly, when you feel like that's going to happen, you're going to lie and pretend it didn't happen or something. And if you can't stop the harm, then it's going to increase the harm rather than provide a place for healing. When Joe tries to say, well, my background led me to believe this, then he's going to get gaslighted because his lived experiences can't be real because you already find him as harmful by virtue of who Joe is. And so this ends up isolating people rather than uniting them. And it makes people cynical and feel very hopeless about the power to change. I think people call out because they want to end harm or abuse or respond to harm or draw attention to stuff that's invisible or hidden, show off knowledge, establish their superior over people to get positive attention. They act like the mean girls who's the in crowd versus the out crowd because they're competing for power and respect, often by hiding their own shortcomings. And they don't know how to give constructive criticism. So, so they're just going to just do call outs and some of that is we train people in that in the academic world. And they sometimes sadly seek affirmations from strangers online that they actually lack in their real life, and that it's an immature way to offer criticism or to make people follow the rules that you established that they may not know about. And a lot of call outs or projection is you accuse other people of doing what you do, but you're trying to hide that you're doing it. And sadly, a lot of young people think that that's the way, correct way to do social justice work because that's what they think they are doing when they're doing it over internet that they're trying to do the right thing, not realizing that they're doing the right thing the wrong way. And of course, sometimes it's just a preemptive strike. I want people to call you out before you can call me out. This is sometimes driven by toxic perfectionism by animating people with political purity or political correctness by assuming there's only the right one right way to do something or to believe something or are to say something. And sometimes people think that, well, I can be your advocate, I can be your savior, and save you from this racism because I'm a pounce on this, I'm white and I'm a pounce on this other white people person for being more racist than I am kind of stuff. That's part of the woke competition or the fear that you'll be thrown under the bus if you say the wrong thing by judging other people's activism while not judging your own. It demonstrates a unsurprising inability to listen to people with other viewpoints, and sometimes it's driven by what they call doom scrolling. They're sinking into the toxic online communities that reinforce your negative opinions about the movement, the world and yourself. And I keep asking young people, if you're not getting any joy from this stuff. Why are you choosing to do it because it is not how you're supposed to do the work. So there's something masochistic about your, your doom scrolling, do you realize that. And you're choosing to sabotage your own happiness with this anger that isn't even productive. And we've got choices about whether we want to make the world cooler than it needs to be. And then we get into this all of this performative outrage because people aren't perfect. Well, she only put a black lives matter sign on her yard and we don't know if you know that's that's just performativity she should have done more. And we have not taken the least amount of investment into finding out what actually is going on in that person's life to see if that's all they could do, or all that they wanted to do. And the reality is, is so short sighted. She could be in that 75 or 50% crowd. And you're not appreciating her as allies, you're actually defining her as an opponent because opponent because she's not living up to your standards. But the one thing you already know about her with that black lives matter sign. It's that she ain't in the 25 and a zero percent she's not an opponent. But you're not giving her the benefit of the doubt. We have a tendency to give breaks to our friends but not to others that we don't know. And when people are called out they feel very defensive. Very shut down like they're getting mobbed and angry and isolated, heard and unheard, dismissed as being unimportant. They sometimes turn around and attack other people. A lot of people tell me they feel numb, frozen like a deer in headlights when when an attack happens. See whether they're called in or out of the emotions are going to be the same. They start denying that they deserve to be called out or they want to deflect to other issues. Sometimes the attack your personal fall at hominem attacks, or they turn around and attack somebody else but they're called out. They feel dismissed or they start dismissing the critique. They double down the harm or they'll say, well, I don't know why you think America has problems. Look at China. That's a false equivalent. I don't have a definition of white female tears. I don't need to go on about that because a lot of people have written about that, or they'll sabotage the group. I'm going to turn the chess table over if I'm not winning the game, and they have a lot of outrage. So if you're called out, recognize that time's going to feel like forever when you're shocked, and recognize that when you say you're hurting you're not going to be believed often. So I'm called out to justify, but not all, but you can still stop and say, thank you for calling that to my attention, and then do your calculation and your own private space to see whether you did do deserve it or not. You don't have to accept somebody else's opinion, but you can be grateful that they offered it to you. That means they paid attention to you, and then you get to judge whether or not it was deserved or not. And that's why how and when they happen matters. If it's publicly, you're going to feel very different than if somebody says, can we meet from coffee and, you know, discuss something you said in the meeting today. It also can be used as a chance to call the other person in, because you can say, you know, when you call me out in the meeting today, I didn't quite understand what I did that was wrong. Do you mind having coffee with me to talk about it? And if you're going to offer an apology, remember you've got accept responsibility, offer remediation by repairing the harm you did, taking responsibility, as I said, and changing your behavior in the future. It really is important to learn the art of bread assessments because just somebody missed, just because somebody misgenders you doesn't mean that they're going to commit a transphobic hate crime against you. So you can't treat people with the same kind of approach, because they didn't know what your preferred gender pronoun is. And yet you're going to treat them like they're a card carrying number of the KKK. It's really important to be honest and really remember how it feels before you call somebody out. So, you know, when you want to interrupt a call out, you can center yourself in your love practices so that you can remain calm, you can speak up through your discomfort, and stop and remind people of their human rights values and how we need each other that were interdependent. You could actually check the emotional temperature of the room to enlist others to build joy and love for you with you. And then sometimes it's necessary to read it, direct the conversation back to the agenda. You can individualize conversations with people who are called out or calling them in, but I do believe in speaking up publicly and someone has called out publicly if you're going to do an intervention do it publicly. It is so useless to come up to them after they've been publicly shamed. Well, you know, I didn't really agree with that, but I didn't want to speak up. You're kind of like too little too late at that point. You can help people identify their problematic behaviors, and you can make a plan for future conversations. So in closing, I want to quote Toni Morrison. What is now known is not all that you are capable of knowing your, you are your own stories, and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human without wealth. What it feels like to be human without domination over others without reckless arrogance without fear of others unlike you without rotating rehearsing and reinventing the hatred you learned in the sandbox. We can all call each other in instead of calling each other out. Thank you. I'm sorry I went over time, but I wanted to give you all a complete deck and not a truncated version. So I kept on till it was complete. And of course, this is recorded for future years. I hope there's questions in the chat or in the Q&A. Again, thank you. We have one question. And everyone else please ask your question in the chat or raise your hand and let us know you'd like to ask a question. Well, the one question we have, Professor Ross is how do you deal with family members who are 25% if you feel you are a 75 or 90% or do you need training to help continue that relationship, or do you just grieve that you may have lost that person. We've gone to such deep polarization in our society that over the since the 1994 Newt Gingrich contract on America is kind of is seen as a moral failing to even admit the humanity of your political opponent. We've been where we've been headed for a long, long time. But the magical word in that question is their family. So you actually know, these are not strangers. So for that you could possibly use my Uncle Frank strategy. You can parking lot what they normally say that you normally react to and say, you know, okay. I'm Emma. I'm so glad that you're willing to help babysit my children or take care from take care of my dog when I'm out of town or you showed up for mom when she was sick. I'm Emma. I know you're a wonderful person. So help me understand how wonderful person like you could support somebody like Trump, who wouldn't do any good those kinds of things for our family, because you know he's not a kind man, you can see it every day. You know, and then you're not calling on him in or out you're asking her to reconcile what usually is an interior good opinion of themselves with what their outer behavior voting patterns are. I since I teach this online to like 4500 700 people, I get letters in the feedback that I get because I do evaluations and stuff. And I have people write me that, you know, I've had the first real conversation with my mother in law and the 15 years I've been married to her son, because I kept, I stopped responding to her being a Trump supporter or Republican, and I started asking her about her life and what made her have the belief she's has and what they're the things going on with her life. I like everything magically is cured, but you're creating the process for continuing to get to know each other outside of the barriers. I also call that my Kissinger strategy, even though I did not admire Henry Kissinger because I didn't like his politics. But Henry Kissinger was known as a master negotiator in conflicts, because he would reverse the agenda on people when he would bring warring parties together. He made a rule. The first day we meet we're only going to talk about what we agree upon. And not until we exhaust that, then we'll get to what we disagree upon. And so he plowed the ground for them to see each other as humans before they saw each other as opponents. And so you might use a Kissinger strategy or on Emma or Uncle Frank strategy, but it does require having mastery enough over yourself. Your reactions that are normal and usual for you in a parking lot, while you give them loving respectful attention and take their concerns as seriously as you take your own. Because you have to realize that this Trump supporting relative is as complicated as you are. So you've got to give them that they're going to have the same kind of complicated stuff that's going on in you. That's a good question that's been up voted any suggestions for attempting to interrupt a call out in process. Yeah, I talk about that a lot in my books and in my trainings I don't have the bandwidth. You can use sentences like, you know, suddenly the temperature in this room change, can we stop and take a breath and see what happened when we were getting along and then all of a sudden this happened. Can we just chill for a minute. And one of the writers talks about, what is it, oops, whoa and out out and whoa. It's kind of like when you say something wrong you say oops, when someone says something that you think is harmful you say out, and then the conversation is getting into a call out frenzy, you say whoa, slow down kind of thing. And so those are some of the techniques I teach in my book about not only interrupting a call out when it's one on one. But how do you deal with it when it's in a group setting. How do you deal with it after the organization or group is already broken up. How do you call people back in. There's a big one of my fattest projects I didn't work on it but it happened before I knew about it was that there was a Atlanta lesbian writers group that broke apart because trans women wanted to be admitted. They could have worked that out. They didn't have to break up a 30 year old group, because they didn't know how to call each other in. You know, and that's a loss to the community. Any suggestions. Oh, I already said that. How can you self assess to understand whether you are healed enough to call someone in on a traumatic subject. I don't know how each person deals with it. But I'm a, you know, experienced counselor in terms of surviving my own rape and incest and, you know, I was shot at in Mississippi in a racial incident when I was 10 years old. You know, I kind of know about trauma. I know I need a professional help to get over my, because I couldn't do it by myself. Yeah, go get therapy and use the company of my sisters to help me heal when I feel weak and stuff. And so try to self feel probably you need some more help. You just can't get over the stuff in your head by yourself, because both those rucks of trauma are etched into our brains and our hearts, and you can't pull yourself out of those rucks by yourself, kind of like you can't pull yourself out of a ditch, a muddy ditch without someone towing you out, you know, you got to get some help. And so until you intentionally get that help for your trauma. I would suggest you don't try to be be the leader of calling in but see within the processes that I teach. There's a role for the person who calls people in is a role for the bystander. There's a role for the healer. There's a role for the witness. There's a role for the fact checker. I mean there's a lot of different roles you can play. Other than being on the front line of doing the calling in. Yeah, no I'm going to be to one of our I'm going to skip one question to try to stay on skills for for a moment. How do you speak to other activists who believe that this kind of compassionate approach is a portrayal of the cause. So she hears things like claiming that empathy means you're centering the wrong people and that she shouldn't care about what the enemy feels. Well, first of all, I'm going to problemize your definition of enemy, are they an enemy because you think you're right and everybody else is wrong. So she's a real short definition of a friend then because how do you define them as enemies. Well she's saying that other people like how do you speak to the activists who believe that this kind of compassionate approaches betrayal so the other people are saying you believe. You know I want to call you in because I would like to help you grow in in in working on on how we need to build this human rights movement together. Yeah. So you're not going to call them out. You're going to call them in. Thank you for caring so much about whether I'm selling out to the enemy can we have coffee and talk about more about why I feel it's important to call people in instead of calling him out. Basically you're calling me out. Well, let me, the way I teach it in my class is that I recall the people, the mother and manual murders at in Charleston South Carolina remember when Dylan roof came into that church and I think it was and murdered those nine parishioners most people remember that who are old enough. And Chris singleton mother was murdered in that church. And when he was later interviewed by the media, he said, Some people think forgiveness is weakness. And so they question why I forgave Dylan roof. He said I forgave him because I didn't want that man's fingerprint on my soul and dignity. I saw forgiving him as a reclamation of my power. You know I wasn't going to let him ruin the memory that I had of my mother. And so when you really look at grace and forgiveness as a statement of strength and a harm reduction strategy, as opposed to weakness strategy, you really get to see how powerful it can be in building you into the person who strong, despite the trauma that's happened to you, instead of, instead of letting other people's dirty fingerprints, define who you are. Okay. Another one practice, folks need practice in order to get more comfortable with calling in calling out or versus versus call wait calling in calling on versus calling out. The class or training offer practice guides more sample scripting and opportunities to model these actions. I know this answer but I'll allow you to. For the $5 classes because I keep calling $5. We offer solidarity groups that are separate sessions where you spend two hours practicing the techniques. Okay, and there's no additional charge for those they just come with the package. Okay, and so usually the solidarity groups happen on a weekday and a weekend day so you get to choose which one you want to come to. And then you sign up for a solidarity group and then train facilitators will help you practice the technique. So you have a lecture one night, and then a chance to practice that same week, whether it's a weekend or a weekday of your choosing. And so four lessons for practice sessions. Yeah, phenomenal process. So we're almost at time but I'll ask this question. What have been some of the most surprising transformations you've seen while working with people in the KKK or in prison, etc. One thing you're not, you've got to remember, when you do this kind of transformative work is that you don't change people. They change themselves and that's why they seek you out. So they have their epiphanies. But their epiphanies are often incomplete. Like one guy I handled, Floyd Cochran, he was the chief spokesman for the Aryan Nations, and his second son had been born with a cleft palate. And Floyd had been a Nazi since he was 14 years old and he was 35 now so for 21 years he'd been a Isle Hitler Nazi, till his second son was born with a genetic impairment. So his Nazi buddies told him that his kid needed to be called for the Aryan race. And then Floyd up. Oh my God, I'm hanging out with people who not just hating Jewish people and black people and queer people, they hate my child. And so Floyd reached out to me. And so we work with Floyd around him wanting to leave the Aryan nation for that and make him any less homophobic or susceptible to racism I did a training with women whose husbands are significant others were in the clan. In the training they called me a well spoken colored girl. And this was in the 1990s and stuff. And so they're inching their way into the consciousness that we cannot take for granted or weaponized against them. And I was going to be grateful that they're inching their way towards righteousness versus staying where they are, but you don't have to have magical power. You know, don't believe that the Hollywood movies that say, you know, Nazis fall in love with black girls and that's why they flip and stuff they didn't have it. You know, not in real life. Okay, so this final question, I think is important I was going to have that one be the final one but since you now offer a class for calling out calling in for the black community specifically. I think this question will be revealing and helpful. That is how do you suggest approaching call out and call in as an ally. Are there differences between what you would suggest for an ally versus someone in the community being hard. I mean, I didn't find out like, I mean if it's a white person I teach a class in my white supremacy courses you know call appropriate whiteness. It's how to reclaim your white identity and separate it from the ideology of white supremacy. And so how do you embrace white pride without white supremacy, which I think needs to be taught everywhere in America, because you should not be made to be ashamed of characteristics that you have no control over. But you want to use those characteristics against white supremacy. And that can be taught. So if it's a white ally. That was where I am. But within the black community we got our issues to whether we is about respectability politics or homophobia or transphobia, or who's churched and who's not churched and who, who says the inward and who doesn't say the inward and who got money. I mean, look at how they're jumping all down for trees color stroke because she bought a million dollar house. Now this job and paid her dues, right. And we hate no longer, because we ain't got a million dollar house to, you know, how dare you, how dare you when you can't be in the stroke you must have stolen that from black lives matter, because you should be not like I'm living well you have the brilliance to create black lives matter. Maybe if you had done that, you'd be getting the presence that she's getting. So there's a lot of hate oration in our community. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, Loretta, I'm gonna in here but I totally appreciate this I encourage everyone to take the class you have four weeks. And like she said you also have the solidarity groups. It's really really transformational for a lot of people and very helpful for me. I do want to read you one comment and I'll send you all of the comments that the thank you that they sent because they're phenomenal but this one I love it says Loretta, you make the crazy feel calmer and more peaceful in my mind. My patients and hope shine brighter due to your shared insight. Thank you. Well, thank you whoever said that I learned that if you can't hate the clan and you can't hate the rapist your hate list is really short. Okay, absolutely. So thank you thank you for being here with us today thank you for your compassion and just your work and your struggle I mean it's it's really helpful and I'll send many people to the class as possible. Or to see I'm having fun doing this work if you ain't having fun, you're doing something wrong. Right, and I will say when we come in on your class you got all kinds of music playing and party party as hard as you work. Right. All right, thank you so much. Thank you for everyone. Have a good day.