S3 Ep16: (Rerun) Loretta Ross: Calling In, Building Sustainable Activism, and Changing Minds

Rather than taking the summer entirely off, I’m reducing my podcasting frequency to every other week, and posting reruns of some of my favorite episodes during the off weeks. I’ll be back to full-time in the fall. In the meantime, I’ve made no secret that this one of my all-time favorite episodes, and that interviewing Loretta Ross is one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever done. I hope you love this episode; it’s so important for us to cultivate the skills Loretta teaches.

Today we are going to be learning from the legendary reproductive justice activist Loretta Ross. Loretta is my feminist hero and role model, and I feel so lucky that she was willing to share some time with me.

How is it that a human rights movement rooted in the shared value and worth of every human being so often devolves into a toxic stew of abuse and hurt feelings? Anyone who participates in leftist political movements has seen small disagreements spiral into mutual attacks, psychological brutality, and worst of all, fractured and less powerful movements.

Lasting change requires us to build solidarity across difference. At the very least, we must be able to resolve small disagreements. Ideally, though, we have to bring more people into the fold—including people we really don’t like, including people with whom we have very significant moral disagreements.

I’ve often noted that the anti-choice movement succeeded by standing in lockstep with one another, no matter how much they hated each other. They built a movement for 50 years, and they succeeded. We can learn a lot from them. But leftist coalitions are diverse and highly principled. These are good things, but they can make it challenging to work together.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can do this. And then I found Loretta Ross’s book, Calling In. It has helped me to consider my own role in toxic call-out culture, and to seize opportunities to build consensus and coalitions rather than elevating myself and my ego. This, I think, is the only way we move forward.

There’s lots of advice about how to be a better activist, what this moment means, and how to deal with people who disagree with us. I think the most useful advice comes from people who have actually succeeded at sustaining a lifetime of activism. Loretta has changed hearts and minds over and over, working with people many of us would never even want to talk to. She has done the work that progress demands, and now she’s here to teach us how to do it, too.

You’ll recognize some of what we discuss from my earlier episode about sustaining hope as an activist. I cannot over-emphasize how much Loretta’s work has shifted my consciousness and influenced my own work, and I hope you find her wisdom as valuable as I do.

Some of the topics we cover in this conversation include:

Toxic call-out culture, and how it is destroying individual well-being as well as activist movements.

How childhood wounds create toxic shame that we then foist onto our activist colleagues.

How we build resilience and capacity to work across difference.