Intro: Before we dive into this episode, we wanted to share a few thoughts. This episode was recorded prior to the murder of George Floyd and the current protest movements happening now in Pennsylvania and across the country. PCAR stands together with all voices affirming Black humanity and dignity, and we share in the global grief following the murders and many acts of racist violence perpetrated against Black people over centuries. We know that racial justice is critical to our work and all efforts to address and end sexual harassment, abuse, and assault. 
Racism, and all forms of oppression, is among the root causes of sexual violence. Fighting against racism is the only way we can build safe communities for all people. We are committed to dismantling racist policies and institutions. We are also committed to looking critically at our organization’s history and ongoing work and the ways we have been consciously and unconsciously complicit in white supremacy. 
We know that folks are looking for information on racial justice and being anti-racist, and we believe this episode and the book featured in this episode, Uprooting Racism, can be a part of ongoing learning. To quote an excerpt from the book, Paul Kivel says, “I believe racial justice work must be based on our understanding of mutual interest – we all have a tremendous stake in building a society based on inclusion, equity, caring, and justice.” And as an anti-violence organization, these are the same values we strive for every day. 
We are currently planning a bonus episode that will discuss our efforts to be an antiracist organization and what we have learned along the way.

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Jackie Strohm: Welcome to PA-centered, a podcast designed to help listeners be a part of the solution to end sexual harassment, abuse, and assault. Each episode we will take on a topic or current event to help spark conversation and break down barriers to building communities free from sexual violence.

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JS: Hi, I'm Jackie Strohm the Prevention and Resource Coordinator at PCAR. On today's episode, we will be talking about the book Uprooting Racism. We are so grateful to be joined by two amazing authors and activists today, Loretta Ross and Paul Kivel who was the author of Uprooting Racism. So, Paul, do you wanna start and just tell us a little bit about yourself? 

Paul Kivel: I'm an educator, activist, and writer. I live on Chochenyo Ohlone land, and what is also known as Oakland, California. I've been an activist since the late '60s when I was involved with work to end the US war against Vietnam, with some racial justice work on my college campus. And in 1979, a group of us who were men in the San Francisco Bay area, put together a group called the Oakland Men's Project to respond to women's requests that men step up in the fight against male violence. The tagline of the Oakland's men's project was "men's work to stop male violence". And I also was one of the co-founders of SUR, showing up for racial justice, which is a national organization that works to educate and mobilize white people to work in multi-racial alliance with people of color for racial justice.

JS: Thanks Paul. Loretta would you like to introduce yourself a bit? 

Loretta Ross: My name is Loretta Ross. I've been a social justice activist, Human Rights warrior for 50 years. Currently, I teach a course at Smith College called White Supremacy in the Age of Trump." And I use Paul's work in my course because I've done feminist work, anti-racist work, antifascist work all towards building a human rights movement, and it's a joy to be on this podcast with Paul. Great to see you again.

JS: We're so excited to have you both here. My first question is for you, Paul. So the first edition of this book was in 1996, I believe. So what made you write this book, and how has it evolved as the years have gone on? 

PK: I kind of backed into writing the book. I had been doing workshops and trainings and talks on racial justice, and gender, and class, and other issues for a while. And workshops and talks can be useful, but they're a limited format for helping people transform themselves around these issues and become activists. And I wanted to leave them with or refer them to a book, a resource that had a lot more information, a lot more tools for getting involved, etcetera. And so I kept waiting for somebody else to write this book because I didn't feel qualified. I didn't think I could do it right. I feared I'd make mistakes And then I realized that a lot of the reasons I was giving for not writing the book, were the reasons that as white people, we often give for not being more involved with racial justice work.

PK: And really, this was on me to take the risk to reach out there and to put together at least my resources, what I had learned from people of color doing this work for so long. And that gave me then [04:11] ____ leave people with after the initial contact with them. White supremacy changes historically period by period in light a different ruling class for strategies to divide us, people of color and white people and to confuse us and to exploit people of color. And so there's now been four editions of the book because each period, each few years, the strategies used by the ruling class they're always about dividing us. They're always about the exploitation of people of color, but they're constantly shifting in terms of how they justify it, how they present it, how they manipulate us around it. So it's been important to keep it up-to-date to make it useful as possible for white people who wanna get involved, who are worried, or upset, or angry, or scared, or confused about what's going on in our country.

JS: And the next question is, Why should advocates at rape crisis centers read this book? And either of you could chime in 'cause you both have some knowledge and history on why that could be useful.

LR: Go Paul.

PK: I was just gonna say, you've had so many years of experience with assault and movement in the domestic violence movement. Go ahead. I really value your insights.

LR: Well, I started my feminist activism at the DC Rape Crisis Center in the 1970s, and I was lucky enough that the rape crisis center was run by black women. And so we always had an intersectional analysis, even before the term intersectionality was created because we were not only responding to what was called now, inter-personal violence, but state violence, racial violence, immigration violence, anti-queer violence, on and on. So we talked about the violences that we had to respond to as a rape crisis center, but we couldn't get a lot of purchase from people who thought that we should only focus on gender-based violence. They thought that we were drifting from our mission when we talked about the Anti-Apartheid movements or the gentrification of Washington D-C.

LR: I find that some of that resistive was probably lodged in racial resentment and white supremacy on the left as they try to dictate to people of color how we should configure the compounded oppressions that we have to face with. And there are some that they are more comfortable with us fighting, and then there's some that make them uncomfortable. So they offer resistance even though they are our allies. And so I think everyone should read this book, who does anti-violence work, but also just everyone should read the book because Uprooting Racism is so vital to not only reclaiming our pursuit of democracy, but in my mind, reclaiming white people souls. White people are remarkably illiterate when it comes to understanding white supremacy, and white supremacy is not a race of people, it's a body of ideas and attitudes that signifies that white people are superior, even if you don't use gutter epithets, and actually see yourself as part of the formal white supremacist movement.

LR: And so I encourage white people to live whiteness differently, not to disown whiteness 'cause I know there's a school of thought that tries to pretend that whiteness can just be disowned, covered up, wished away. That's not the point. I never wanna wish people away. I want people to live their best selves. And I think that looks like this, helping us to understand what an appropriate whiteness is, is vital to the anti-violence movement but to all our movements.

JS: Paul, do you have any other ideas; that was beautifully said, Loretta.

PK: Yeah, that said a lot of it. I guess I would just add that when the sexual assault and rape prevention movement doesn't pay attention to race, to white supremacy, it ends up making decisions which contribute to the exploitation and marginalization of women of color, which makes them more vulnerable to violence. And a good example of that is in the 90s, when under the Clinton administration, where the Violence Against Women Movement was really pushing for the Violence Against Women Act and funding for crisis centers and domestic violence centers, but at the same time the Omnibus Criminalization Bill, crime bill was passed and the Anti-Welfare Legislation was passed, which devastated the lives of women, and men, and young people, and queer and trans people of color. And so while there were some gains, particularly for white women in this movement and funding for predominantly white women's organizations, at the same time, there wasn't a fight to resist the attacks on communities of color, which was devastating. We're still dealing with the results of that period. So it's not that you can be neutral in this area; if you're not actively contributing to dismantling white supremacy then you're contributing to building up the structures of it, the institutions of it.

JS: Absolutely. So Loretta, you had mentioned working at rape crisis centers back in the '70s and '80s, and you were actually the executive director of the DC rape crisis center. So could you talk a little bit about what that was like? 

LR: Well, we were the rape crisis center that we like to think started it all. We have always said we were the first one in the country. I'm sure that's contested by others who may have different histories, but we wrote a book called How to Start a Rape Crisis Center, and so we became a model for other people who were starting anti-violence projects. And one of the things that was significantly different about the DC rape crisis center is that the white women who founded it, when we finally got funding, they decided that they wanted to hire people from the community to manage and run it. And so that ended up bringing in three or four consecutive African-American women as executive directors. And so it actually became a locus for developing black women's feminism in the anti-violence movement.

LR: And so I really wanna honor first of all, those white women who sought their whiteness differently, and they were working class women, who easily could have reserved the jobs for themselves, but they chose to make a prophetic decision and locate the jobs within the African-American community. Washington DC, at the time, was 80% black, and that was the largest base of our clients at the time. And so they did that and it was a transitional time; it was the growth of the neo-liberal philosophy. Ronald Reagan had been elected president, my second year on the job; we were seeing the transition from a social welfare state into cowboy capitalism that we're dealing with now, the deconstruction of all social welfare, Civil Rights legislation. We thought we were making great strides in terms of women's rights, and queer rights, and stuff, but at the same time we were dealing with a backlash against our progress of the '60s and '70s. And so being at the hub of an anti-rape movement meant that we couldn't just pay attention to how individuals violated each other, but how the system was violating whole communities and what the rationalization were for those violations. It was very hard to get people to talk about white supremacy, particularly in the late 1970s or 1980s because everybody thought with the Civil Rights Movement, it had been defeated.

JS: I hear a lot of people say, "Well, the Civil Right Act took care of all of that. Aren't we all just supposed to be nice to each other and that will solve what our problems are? It was the beginning of the color-blind ideology that was being pushed as a response to the continuing demands of the Civil Rights Movement, and so we were at that nexus trying to figure out how to do our activism in a complex, rapidly changing, political ideology that transitioned from taking care of each other to dog-eat-dog under neo-liberal capitalism. And we had a smiling face of Ronald Reagan putting a smooth cover over some very dangerous ideological developments that ripened under Trump.

JS: Yeah, it feels like we're repeating history sometimes.

LR: I don't know if we're repeating it. I think the people who are opposed to human rights just keep on incessantly trying to establish an apartheid-like system here in the United States, and we have to constantly fight that.

JS: Absolutely, that actually brings me... I pulled a quote from the book, and I'd love to hear both of your thoughts on it, 'cause I think it's a perfect segue. It says, "Determination is what it takes to confront racism. We need to keep going back and picking up the task no matter how uncomfortable, angry, or frustrated, we become in the process. Being an ally is like that. We keep learning, doing our best, leaving something out, making mistakes, doing it better next time. It is a practice not an an identity, and it is best done in collaboration with others."

LR: I love that, Paul, it's a practice, not an identity, which is what a lot of people have because a lot of people declare themselves allies when they're actually not doing the inner transformational work necessary to actually be an ally.

PK: Right, and it is sometimes the word "ally" can make it seem to individualized, but I think that it's that it's about breaking the silence, especially in white communities about racism; it's about doing the personal work, but it's also about the practice in the community, how we show up in our work places, in our schools, in our neighborhoods, in our family, wherever. So we have to keep coming back to that, that the practice is not just an individual practice but it's a collaborative practice addressing community-wide institutional wide systems of oppression and exploitation.

LR: And I think one of the things that your book offers insight on, Paul, is how we need to broaden the definition of what our community is. Because I do a lot of teaching about white supremacy to white kids who've grown up in these bubbles, in these white bubbles, where they've never been exposed to any substantive conversation on race and racism or white supremacy or Christian nationalism or homophobia or any of these components of white supremacy. And they've never been forced to define their community beyond their identity and their geographic location. And we really need to have broader conversations, particularly given the crisis that's facing us now with this Coronavirus, about our human interdependence and the need for a beloved community as Dr. King called for that's broader than one's individual location and definition.

PK: I think interdependence is the operative term here, that there's this illusion among white people that somehow our lives are unaffected by what's happening around us, whether it's to the natural world, or the people of color, or to recent immigrants, or to Muslims, or whoever, and we know that the virus doesn't have a geographical boundary, right? And we know that the destruction of the earth is impacting all of us, and we know that if I'm wearing clothes that are made through the exploitation of people of color in this country and in other countries, or if I'm eating food that's grown under exploited conditions that I am intimately interconnected to those people. Our lives are interdependent, and it damages our physical lives but it also damages our moral integrity to be living lives based on the exploitation of other people. And it damages our spiritual wholeness to be living in a world in which some of us are benefiting at the expense of other people. So just on multiple levels we have to address that interdependence.

LR: For me, it's not even a matter of altruism or caring about others. I am dealing with 18,19, and 20-year-olds who have had almost the entirety of their school lives contoured my shooter drills, who are usually angry white men, angry white kids coming into their schools and assassinating, massacring them. And so if you can't understand the dangers of this proto-fascist gun culture, white supremacist moment in your own self-interest to protect your own children, to protect the safety of what you define as safety of your own communities, you don't need to see the other to understand that you have a stake in this; you really need to understand the self destructiveness, the high suicide rates, the opioid epidemic in white communities to be in solidarity with us. So I want us to move away from, we need to worry about and save the other cultures and save the other people, which is also part of our mandate.

LR: But understand that we need to redefine white self-interest beyond just simply assuming that it's a missionary drive to save the poor exploited other. Right now, white people's asses are on the line in a way that it's never been before, and it is so self-destructive not to interrogate whiteness and how we routinely practice white supremacy leading to this declining mortality rate among white men. How can the most privileged people in America have a declining mortality rate and no one pays attention to that and connect it to what's going on with our gun culture, with as I say, neo-liberal capitalism, with the brutality with which we're taught is normal, with which we treat each other.

PK: Which means so we have to look at the economic system and the ruling class, the elite in this country, the corporate and political elite that uses racism to distract us, to turn our attention away from the exploitation of our communities by corporations and towards blaming people of color, recent immigrants, Muslims, black people, indigenous people, so that we're divided from our natural allies and work inadvertently in collusion with the ruling class to maintain the current system. So our communities are being devastated, but it's not the people who we traditionally blame for that who are responsible for that. And so we have to also look at it... We often use the phrase racialized capitalism. That we have to look at economics and white supremacy together to understand how this works, and then we have to weave in our understanding of gender and gender oppression because women are often at the bottom of the system and often the most exploited people in the system. So it's not just a focus on white supremacy and/or white privilege, it's understanding how all of these systems work together to exploit all of us at different levels and to blind us to or to mislead us about who's really responsible for that.

LR: I don't wanna sound like someone who just stepped off the planet Mars. But while we talk about racialized capitalism, I've also witnessed racialized socialism, where we have not paid attention to the role of white supremacy in contouring every economic system. And China has tried. And so I don't want us to presume that we'll get to some racial utopia if we change the underlying economic system that we have. That is too easy an answer for those who privilege, who benefit from white privilege. I think that we have to get at the root of why we have a philosophy that's based on individualism and alienation, and why we can't take care of each other. We have to go back to some pre-European philosophies like a Ubunto or Confucianism as a way of understanding how we have to be truly connected to each other.

LR: I think railing against the type of economy we have just misses the mark because as I said, I have seen white supremacy under socialism. I've seen white supremacy under communism. I've seen white supremacy under capitalism. And neither of those three systems address the fundamental problem that privileging whiteness addresses, and the way it's compounded through patriotism, nationalism, Christianity, on and on.

JS: So with all of that, do you have any advice or ideas for rape crisis centers about how they can do better, how they can better work in community, given all of the brilliant things that you both just shared? 

LR: Well, I started off talking about the violences that rape crisis centers have to address. One of the reasons that I find myself in a lot of debates with people from the anti-violence movement is the tendency to silo the types of violences that people experience. I remember being in a big debate over the Federal Hate Crime Statistics Act that wanted to include violence against women as a hate crime which, of course, I'm not philosophically opposed to, but I am calling the question on why, if I have a person who's experiencing racial violence, I can't refer her to a domestic violence shelter because this is not the type of violence that shelter is prepared to deal with. Even if we talk about all of these things being connected, we have to connect our services, we have to connect how we see people as having very complicated lives because the person experiencing racial violence may also be experiencing domestic violence. But the point is we can't have a women's movement saying, "We're gonna work on this type of violence," and an anti-racist movement saying, "We're gonna work on this type," and a pro-immigrant movement working on this type. If we're going to end the prevalence of violences in people's lives, we have to connect our missions, our ideologies, and our services, so that we actually provide comprehensive care for communities.

PK: I think that's really important. One of the things that if you're a white person, one of the things about being an ally is having a racial justice lens, so that you learn to understand and see racism as it operates in every venue around you, in your own life and your family, in your school, and in your rape crisis center. And so part of the work, I think, in rape crisis centers is to help people develop, help white people in particularly develop a racial justice lens. So they're looking at the policies, they're looking at the structure of the organization, they're looking at the funding, they're looking at the services, they're constantly using a racial lens to analyze what's going on.

PK: And then they're looking at who's in leadership, most importantly because as Loretta said, at the DC rape crisis center that having women of color in leadership is absolutely crucial to making the changes that we wanna see in the movement. They're looking at whose voices are on the board of directors, whose voices are determining policies. Are they community members? Are the people who are in fact experiencing the kinds of violence that we're purporting to deal with? Once you have a racial lens, there's all kinds of questions... You start to notice things and then all kinds of questions come up. And that's the kind of conversation that should be the every day conversation within an organization or an institution, so that there's a constant evaluation of how are we doing, how are we responding, who's in charge, who's making decisions, what's the impact of what we're doing.

JS: Thank you for that. I think that's one of the reasons why we're trying to do podcasts and book circles like this with our rape crisis centers because we want them to see and value that connection and like Loretta said, not be working in silos as much. So I think we are all out of time right now for this episode, but I just wanna say how gracious I am that both of you were able to take the time to have this conversation. I encourage all of you listening to look up all of the great work that they've both done for this world, and they have lots of books, and websites, and great things that you can look at to learn more. Do either of you want to share your website or something that you're working on? 

PK: Mine is a paulkivel.com.

PK: And mine is lorettaross.com.

JS: And I wanna say thanks again so much for both of you for being here. I know I learned a lot, and we'll see you next time.

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JS: If you or a loved one needs help, a local sexual assault center is available 24/7. Call 1-888-772-7227 for more information or find your local center online at pcar.org. Together we can end sexual violence. Any views or opinions expressed on PA-centered by staff or their guests are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of PCAR or PCAR's funders.