Calling In The People You'd Rather Cancel: TALKING SHIFT with Loretta J. Ross

A human rights legend on how to reevaluate our communication strategies going forward into this unknown chapter of our story. (plus: a book giveaway!)

Hi friends —

If your self-talk has been anything like mine has over the last few weeks/months, you might find that you’ve been asking yourself a lot of rhetorical questions lately. Questions like:

It feels like we’ve already fought so hard — where do we go from here?
How do we move forward?
How can we possibly do things differently when it feels like we’ve done all we can?

The thing with rhetorical questions is that if you ask them seriously and non-rhetorically, you’ll start to find answers.

They might not be easy answers…and you might not even like the answers you find…but you’ll start to find them.

Last summer, I got an email about a new book coming out in early 2025 by human rights icon Loretta J. Ross called CALLING IN: How To Start Making Change With Those You’d Rather Cancel. Would I like to read an advance copy, the email asked, and consider hosting Loretta on the WANTcast? (the answer, of course, was UM ABSOLUTELY YES HOLY CRAP) We talked about circling back around at the end of the year closer to Pub Day to schedule a date. This was back in August, so also, the DNC was in full swing. Things felt electrically hopeful. This book and conversation, I suspected, could be excellent tools to have in our collective toolkit post-election.

I wish I hadn’t been as right as I’d been. But here we are. And thank goodness for Loretta’s work, and the spark of hope this book reignites.

Loretta Ross is an activist, professor, and public intellectual. In her five decades in the human rights movement, she's deprogrammed white supremacists, taught convicted rapists the principles of feminism, and organized the second largest March on Washington (surpassed only by the 2017 Women's March). A co-founder of the National Center For Human Rights Education and the SisterSong Women Of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, her many accolades and honors include a 2022 MacArthur fellowship and a 2020 for induction into the National Women's Hall Of Fame. Today Loretta is an associate professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, and a partner with 14th Strategies Consultants with which she runs calling in training sessions at organizations around the country.

In her new book CALLING IN, Loretta vividly illustrates why calling people in — which means inviting them into conversation instead of conflict by focusing on your shared values instead of a desire for punishment — is a vital and strategic choice if you want to make real change.

If you’ve been here for awhile, you know we are NOT about making allowances for harmful behavior, and we definitely aren’t about plastering a positive spin onto something because it’s more palatable. As Loretta says clearly in our conversation below: “calling in practices” are NOT niceness lessons. They’re so much more, so much deeper, and so much more strategic than some surface-level binary of options. Not to mention, so much more productive.

I got to chat with Loretta right after Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the week before her book was published. Before we dove in, I asked her how she was feeling pre-launch. She said she’d been doing speaking engagements all week for MLK Jr. Day, and said the week of speaking about CALLING IN had made her double down on practicing what she preaches — even while being enraged about the daily, sometimes hourly, news. She didn’t sugarcoat it (as you’ll read below), but she also said something that surprised me: that she found it fun.

So with that, I could not be more grateful to get to learn from Loretta and her work alongside you.

Buckle up and settle in. This is a good one.

Here is our conversation.

---

(**this interview has been edited for brevity. for the full interview, download the latest episode of THE WANTCAST on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. CW: mention of rape.)

(**heads up!! i asked simon & schuster if they would be open to gifting a couple copies to WANT subscribers and they said yes! so we’re doing our first giveaway here. read ‘til the end of the post for details on how to enter :))

credit: lorettajross.com

CALLING IN WITH LORETTA J. ROSS

KATIE HORWITCH: You just told me that living into your moral center, and living out that courage…you used a word that surprised me. You said, “it's so FUN.” I love that, because I don't know if “fun” is the first word that comes to mind for people when they think about staying true to their values, staying within integrity, being courageous, or being bold, you know? So to kick things off: I would love to hear what you find so fun about that.

LORETTA J. ROSS: Calling in is always about living up to your best opinion of yourself. And when you hit that sweet spot, it is FUN. It feels as good as when the cashier gives you too much change, and you correct her and give it back. You feel good about yourself because you did it the right thing — even though you could have easily taken advantage of the situation.

Calling in is always about burnishing up your integrity: making sure that you're intentional about how you show up in the world, and delighting in your resilience and ability to do that. To me, that's fun! Because I understand the pain of disappointing myself; of taking advantage of somebody and not feeling good about myself after I've done it. I understand that pain all too well. And so when I can intentionally do something that makes me feel good about being Loretta Ross? That's the best that life offers.

KH: Ah. You’re filling your own cup — but of your SELF. It's like Oprah said: “I want to stay full of myself because when I am full, I get so full, I'm overflowing. And it's only when I'm overflowing, can I give to other people.”

LJR: Exactly. Because the greatest gift you can give is to call YOURSELF in, and be in alignment with your integrity, with your compassion, and with your ability to take everyone's suffering seriously as you took your own — not flatten people out to stereotypes or labels, but really delight in the complexity of humanity. And how fun it is to find that the people you expected the least of, you actually can find very surprising depths to them. And delight in how much fun it is to look at how beautiful people can be, even in the midst of some awful stuff.

Victor Frankl, who's a Holocaust survivor that I quote in my book, spoke about how the people who kept hope in those concentration camps — the people who never lost purpose and meaning — were the ones who were most likely to survive. That is a very important message to me. And it's very important right now. I like thinking about how wonderful people can be in the face of incalculable suffering. It's not that I ever expected to have a smooth and easy life — I was never afforded that opportunity — but I like the fact that I never let it go to my heart. I like the fact that I always I believed in the goodness of humanity when I was too scared to believe in my own goodness and my own strength.

And so I love offering those hard won experiences to other people who may feel hopeless or despairing or not good enough or who might think they don't know enough. Because I felt, and continue to feel, all those things. But I like the fact that I don't let none of that hold me back. I'm not perfect, but most times, I can figure out how I can become a better Loretta. I think it was Franklin Roosevelt who said, “Smooth seas don't make a good sailor.” It's the turbulence of my life that makes me stronger.

I know there's also a lot of questions over the word “resilient.” Because we can be proud that we have that inner strength to try to overcome odds — and also be pissed off that we have to.

KH: I think what is most inspiring and, dare I say, empowering is not just the things that you've been through, but HOW you've moved through them. Can you pinpoint a specific instance where you started to develop your outlook on life, or do you think it was something you were born with?

LJR: I don't actually know where it came from, but I do know my mother was smart enough to observe it in me. I'm one of eight kids — number six, pretty much an invisible child growing up, because I was the little girl, very studious, didn't really stand out in any particular way. But when my mother put me on that Greyhound bus to send me to college at sixteen, she said something really profound to me.

She said that she admired me because I don't let success go to my head. She said, “You don't let success go to your head, but most importantly, you never let failure go to your heart.”

I had no idea what she meant at age 16. I thought my mother was being, you know, apologetic, because I couldn't catch a plane to go from Texas to Washington, D.C. and I had to catch a bus instead. That kind of thing. But she really had peeped my resilience. And that was the highest praise that she could give me. It took me decades to realize how wonderfully my mother read me. And probably read all of her eight kids in some particular way. But that was a gift that she offered me.

I have no idea where it comes from. It could come from the rootedness in my family. I'm lucky enough to have been part of a Black family who knows our genealogy back to 1844, when we were slaves on a peanut plantation outside of Selma, Alabama. We moved to Texas right after the Civil War, and many of my family still live on that farmland in Central Texas to this day. I'm proud of coming from that history, and it's given me a sense of security and safety that I don't think a lot of Black families got to enjoy. Because if they could recount going back TWO generations, they're doing good. And the fact that my son and other relatives did that genealogical research to take us back to 1844 gives me a sense of security at my place in the universe that maybe a lot of other Black families don't enjoy. That's the advantage I have. I call it a privilege to know your roots.

The young people that I teach at Smith College, particularly the young Black people, they're exhausted by the need to continue to fight white supremacy. They're pained that they still have to conduct that fight. And I understand that pain. But I also remind them that they have the privilege to say to white people things that would have gotten their grandmothers lynched. You can choose not to have those hard conversations with the racially challenged or racially illiterate, but don't deny that it's a privilege to be able to do so.

There's this old civil rights saying that I quoted in the book. It says: “Stop imagining that you're the entire chain of freedom because you're not. The chain of freedom stretches back towards your ancestors and stretches forward towards your descendants. And your only job is to make sure that chain doesn't break at your link.”

So don't give into despair or hopelessness or cynicism. Understand that you always have choices on whether or not you're going to strengthen the link or weaken it. But you always have that choice.

KH: We’re having this conversation in early 2025. With the way that our society is (and the way that social media is), it can be very easy for someone to think that that chain you described begins and ends with them. And not in a high-and-mighty egocentric way…almost in a scary egocentric way, you know?

LJR: Yeah, that's what a lot of young Black people feel. They're trying to deal with the burden of Blackness. And not that being Black is bad, but we live in a white supremacist society in which just having a Black identity is seen as an existential threat by certain white people of a certain mindset.

Now obviously not all white people are white supremacists, and sadly not all white supremacists are white. We do know those we wouldn't invite to the picnic. It can feel burdensome and overwhelming always having to calibrate how threatened you are by people who see your mere existence as a threat. That's where we get the Karens and the Proud Boys and the FBI claiming that the Black Lives Matter movement is an extremist terrorist group, but they can't seem find the white terrorists, and then Trump is out pardoning the white terrorists that we see with our own eyes. And so it can feel very overwhelming, particularly as a young person.

I became an activist when I was 16. And so I remember those feelings of thinking that I kind of knew it all and understood how the world worked. And thank God people didn't give up on insufferable me back then. Because I really was obnoxious [laughs]. I'm just lucky to be around. People saw something in me that they wanted to nurture even as I made them mad — and I'm just here to pay it forward and pass it on.

a young Loretta, via The Washington Post

KH: At the very beginning of your book, you tell a story about going into a prison when you were pretty young, early on in your journey. Can you talk a little bit about that?

LJR: I was the newly minted director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, which was the first rape crisis in early country. This was 1979. We got a letter at the center from a man named William Fuller, who was incarcerated for raping and murdering a Black woman just like me.

Basically, his letter said: Outside I rape women. Inside I rape men. I'd like not to be a rapist anymore. Will you help me?

When I first got that letter, I was pissed off. I was like — We don't have enough resources to help victims, how dare a perpetrator call us for help?! And I really wanted to write him my own letter of outrage and call him out for even daring to ask for help.

I buried the letter underneath the paperwork on my desk for a while, but I couldn't put it out of my mind. And so eventually I wrote him back, just trying to find out more what he wanted.

It turns out that he wanted us to teach him about Black feminism, about religion, about Black history, all of those things. Eventually I agreed to go down to Lorton, which was the prison outside of D.C., to meet with him…but I actually still think I went down there to curse him out. I just said, “Well, I can't get at the man who raped me, so I'm going to get at him for everything that's happened to HIM. He deserved it anyway because he raped and murdered a Black woman just like me.”

And so I went down there, and I was scared because I didn't have any plan. I was in my mid twenties. I didn’t have any formal training. All I knew was: I'm a rape survivor, and I want to stop Black men from raping Black women.

Fortunately, he didn't even stop at my confusion. As a matter of fact, it wasn't just that one guy I met. He had assembled six Black men, who were all convicted of raping women. And when they started telling their stories about how they had become violators, somehow I was able to tell my story about what happened to me. And the deeper that I went into their stories, the deeper I went into my story.

Somehow in the middle of that conversation, I was like, Oh, okay, we're all victimized violators. We've all had somebody mess with us. And out of that pain and hurt, we mess with other people. That whole victim/perpetrator binary was eased a little bit. It wasn't totally gone — but it was eased a little bit.

And so for the next three years, I taught Black history and Black feminism to these incarcerated men who were trying to reclaim their humanity. They were the prison's predators. As a matter of fact, when I first walked into the room, they were so big and buff they looked like pro-wrestlers. And it took me years later to realize that they had buffed up their bodies to keep from being the victims. Many of them had entered Lorton as teenagers themselves. Children! But they were in their 30s by the time I was meeting them, serving 10, 15 years into their sentences. They looked at themselves and decided: I was a victim, now I'm a violator, and I don't want to be any of those things anymore.

It was so powerful for me to realize that they had recaptured their own humanity long before they met me. The fact that they wanted to recapture their humanity, that's why they wrote that letter to me.

So that was my first calling in experience — because the first person I had to call in was myself. Not stereotype these incarcerated men as disposable human beings that I should not offer any compassion to.

They were my nightmares — and it was my first experience at going to a meeting where I was trying to help people who represented my nightmare.

KH: For people who are not familiar with this term, can you define “calling in”? People probably know “calling out” and “canceling,” but you actually talk about a whole ecosystem of C's beyond those two.

LJR: You know, when I first started studying the phenomenon called “call-out culture,” I realized that there was a continuum:

We're all familiar with calling people out, which is publicly shaming people for something we think they've done wrong, for which we want to hold them accountable.

But we also go a step further, and want to cancel somebody. That means, “we don't ever want to hear from you again.” In other words, we're going to hurt your reputation, or at least cost you your job or your platform.

Now, calling in is an accountability process too. But instead of using the angered blaming or shaming of the call-out culture or the cancel culture, we're using love and respect as our strategies. A call in is a call out done with love instead of anger. You still want to hold people accountable for something they've done wrong, but instead of saying, “I can't believe you said that, we should cancel you,” it's more like, “that’s an interesting perspective that you have. Do you mind if we talk more about that?” It's an invitation into a conversation instead of an invitation into a fight.

Now, sometimes you don't want to make the investment of your time and attention into someone else's world. And that's why Sonya Renee Taylor created the concept of calling on. That's when you just want people to do better — but what you really want is for them to talk to the hand. It's like: “I don't know what's going on with you right now, all I want to know is: Are you okay? Because right now you're showing me that you ain't okay. You need to get out of my face with that stuff, I don't know why you thought that racist sexist whatever joke would land well on me, but you need to check yourself.”

And I don't think, particularly on social media, we use the fifth C enough — and that's calling it off. We have no obligation to engage in unproductive conversations with people who are trolling us, lying to us, or gaslighting us, and that's in-person or online. We don't have an obligation to waste our time with people like that. But I think our egos make us think that we can make them change if we just find the right magic words. And that's the ego's talking, you know? You can't even change the person that most loves you with magic words, much less strangers!

And so I created the 5C continuum — calling out, cancel, calling in, calling on, and calling it off — as a way of recognizing the patterns of our conflicts and interaction. And once you recognize a pattern, then you can choose the response to that pattern that most emotionally suits you at the time. Beause you have no obligation to do any of those things. You can always call it off. But if you choose to want to pursue accountability, you have a lot of options instead of just getting into this blow-out fight, calling people names, accusing them of being caricatures, and things like that.

You'll find that the more you call yourself in to call others in, the much better you'll feel about yourself. So when the person at the driver's license bureau gets on your last nerve, instead of having a blowout with them about how they're treating you, why not see how difficult that job must be for them? Call yourself in and offer grace, humor, compassion, and you will feel so much better about yourself than if you just let loose.

KH: I love that it's a continuum, because a lot of people think that they either call someone out, or they don't say anything — and then they feel guilty about not saying anything, and then they're worried someone else is going to call them out for not saying anything. It can be this very destructive loop. But this continuum gives people choice. And also, it sounds like you can choose many in sequence. So maybe you call someone in and then you're like, I'm calling it off, right?

LJR: Exactly. The point that I make with learning calling in practices is that they're not niceness lessons. You're not giving people a pass on injustice. You are in control of how YOU show up. I love the fact that we can always say what we mean and mean what we say, but we don't have to say it mean. That's a choice, and never pretend that it's not.

KH: What do you say to people who might push back and say, “well, they had their chance, and I want to tell them what's up, there's no more playing nice”? What do you say to people who push back that helps them recognize that this is an important part of this change ecosystem?

LJR: Oh, in my book, I talk about the appropriate uses of call outs! It's not like I'm taking it off the table as a tactic that never should be used when people are abusing their power over others. When they've had opportunities to change and they've chosen not to, and when they're at risk of causing real harm to real people, of course we have to still have call outs in our arsenal.

But the point is that we should reserve call outs for very limited occasions, like one of those Break Glass In Case Of Fire moments — and not use/overuse them on people with whom we have conflicts and disagreements. There are so many other ways to create not only productive conversation, but build a strong human right movement. That’s my ultimate goal.

I have to honestly say: I did my book as a political project. I am actually not that interested in people. I'm an introvert. I get mad when people call me because that takes my head out of my books. It's not that I'm trying to Kumbaya with a whole lot of humanity. But I DO believe that as a human rights movement, if we do not learn how to be more effective and stronger together, we will be susceptible to the divisiveness of fascism. And we're in this political moment where predominant people in our society are telling everybody to hate each other who doesn't agree with them. We gotta get rid of our Inner Trumps, you know? We can't just go around practicing these cutthroat politics on each other and then expect that we're going to be able to build the power to stop human rights violations that are palpably happening right now. They're already rounding up vulnerable immigrants. They're already dehumanizing trans people, and attacking all the civil rights and the women's rights we've fought prayed and died for.

I believe that the people we're opposing — those who are opposed to human rights — only have two advantages. Lies and violence. That's all they got going for them. And they have to lie to their followers and intimidate the rest of us with violence.

But I'm like— well look what we got on our side! We've got the truth. We've got history. You think you can just make us forget the whole 19th and 20th century happened and that you're just going to wash it away because it's inconvenient history for you? We got the evidence. We got the receipts of who you are, and who we are.

And best of all, we got time. Because these people are an endangered species. You want to talk about the use of that term? White supremacy is on its last legs. ‘Cause even the young white people don't want it to continue. Look at how they voted. And so we got their kids with our music, we got them with our cool, and we got them at the ballot box. So they are demographically doomed.

My biggest fear is that despite holding a winning hand with truth, time, evidence, and history on our side, we'll blow it with the call out culture — by turning on each other and cannibalizing each other with our attempt to be politically pure, while we are remarkably ineffective in building power.

Loretta’s TED Talk

KH: How does someone orient themselves toward calling in and toward that winning hand when their impulse is to call someone out because it's in the air that they're breathing? How do you build a muscle of calling in when it can seem easier or more short-term psychologically satisfying to call someone out?

LJR: Well, I don't have a formula for everybody, but I do know that my first call out response is triggered by my trauma. I'm a call out queen, by the way! I LOVE telling people off! So it's not like I'm some saint trying to tell everybody else how to be a saint. No — I love telling people off. But I find that that impulse is my trauma response.

It's when I put myself on pause, and give myself a chance to think about what I really want the effect of my words to be, that I actually say things that reinforce my compassion and my integrity. And so I try to swallow that first response to give my emotional intelligence and my integrity intelligence a chance to catch up to my mouth. And then I say the second thing.

And if you've ever parented children, you got that instinctively. Cause if you blurt out the first thing that comes to your head when your children are getting on your last nerve, they'll be in therapy for life. So we know if we don’t swallow that first response we’ll never be compassionate, caring parents.

It can work for all aspects of our lives to not be trauma driven, but be trauma informed. Understand how you need to work on yourself, so that trauma is not driving your relationships with other people. Because it is true: hurt people hurt people. And if you are not tending to the soul wounds that you've experienced, then all you're gonna do is bleed all over everybody. Whether you're trying to call them in, call them out, or even just try to establish a good relationship with them. I mean, a lot of traumatized people can't even establish great love relationships because the trauma shows up in all those relationships. And so it's really important to learn that we're always going to be more than what happened to us. And it's a choice to stay in that victim space or to move to that survivor space, and overcome what happened to you.

KH: Practically speaking, it sounds like building the muscle of calling in on a day-to-day level could be saying, “Well, what would I say to this person if they were a four year old? Like, if they were my four year old nephew, what would I say to them?”

LJR: That's a good way of framing it. Another way I'd put it was that you treat people as if you’re holding their heart in your hand and you don't want to squeeze it too tight. Because if someone was holding your heart, would you want them to squeeze it with their power, with their indifference, with their trauma? No, you wouldn't want somebody to treat your heart like that. And so learn the practice of acting like you have the power to NOT squeeze somebody's heart and make them go “ouch.”

KH: Something that you mention in the book that has already changed my life is you describe the difference between someone who can't be changed vs. someone who is three versions of an ally: a proven, potential, and a problematic ally. Can you talk a little bit about that?

LJR: Yes. I find that a lot of the call-out culture is because people don't do good threat assessments. They have trouble distinguishing between people who are outright enemies — who are opposed to human rights, who are opposed to justice and fairness and compassion — and everybody else who's just muddling along through life, right?

I get this a lot when people want to use words like ~performative~ when they describe what they think are inadequate social justice responses/work by other people. Like if a white person puts up a Black Lives Matter sign or a straight person hangs a rainbow flag or whatever. I try to get them to do a better threat assessment and say: Okay, we know we've got fascists out here. We know we have people who benefit and profit from hate, and it's impossible to get someone to understand justice if their whole economic model depends on injustice.

But for the rest of the people…

You've got your proven allies, the people you can ride and die with. Because you've been through stuff together. You know who those are.

Then you've got your problematic allies, people with whom you agree on a lot of stuff, but they may focus on climate change while you focus on women's rights. They may be racially challenged or racially under-developed, so they don't know how to stop saying “you people” or “colored people” or whatever. And you'll never agree on most things, because they’re your problematic allies.

Then you've got then larger set of people, as was proven in the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, that are your potential allies. There were 11,000 demonstrations in 2020 — most led by white people, by the way — and most of them were displaying Black Lives Matter signs, or some kind of indication [of supporting BLM and human rights]. Like right after the election, the blue bracelet people, for example. You already know the number one thing you need to know about all those potential allies. And you know what that is? They’re not in the Ku Klux Klan. Cause no Klansman has ever put up a Black Lives Matter sign. No MAGA Trumper ever wore a blue bracelet or put up a rainbow flag.

So your job is to sophisticate your analysis so that you can figure out the strategy to work with potential, proven, and problematic allies. Because the most important thread is that they're ALL ALLIES. You cannot define them as enemies because of your own incompetence at doing a threat assessment.

KH: Ooh, that's so good. And that almost makes it like, okay, there's potential here. There's opportunity! How do we maximize this moment and this conversation?

LJR: And we do it with kindness, and accepting that other people are gonna be as complicated as you. There's gonna be things that they're strong on and weak on, and there's things that you're strong on and weak on.

People ask me all the time why I don't throw around the word “racist.” I say, I tend to reserve that word for the people who are intentional about their bigotry. And there are a plethora of them to talk about, I got that. But the way I see the white people that I have to analyze and/or work with or call in or out? Most are either racially challenged or racially illiterate. And I'm not going to have a negative conversation with them no more than I would criticize someone who comes to the United States and can't speak the English I prefer. I don't need to use my power as a way of dissing people who have been intentionally made to be ignorant. I mean, look at this attack on knowledge and evidence of truth that we're dealing with. We're living in a country of white people who were not only NOT taught a correct history of what's true and how the world works, but were rewarded for their ignorance — right? Well if somebody was paying you an advantage for being ignorant, you'd turn a blind eye to it too. That's just human.

And so, I take the lot of fun in saying very painful things to white people with love — you know? Most of them that listen are willing to learn, as long as I don't shame and blame them in the process. Or make it appear like it's their fault that they don't know. I don't make it their fault they don't understand how to dissect patriarchy. I only talk about that them being responsible for it lets them know that they're enmeshed in that culture.

KH: I know every single person is different, but in your vision of how in an ideal world this would work, how do you get where it feels like, okay, I'm making some change with someone?

LJR: First of all, it starts with your expectations of them. Again, don't think you're gonna find those magic words that immediately cause somebody to re-evaluate their life, their choices, their lived experiences, and suddenly give you the change that you hope to see. It ain't gonna happen that way.

From my perspective, I'm always gonna be proud that I made the chance for them. I gave them the room to grow without taking responsibility for their inability to take advantage of the opportunity. But generally, it's a cumulative effect. The first time you call somebody in, it may not change anything — but as we create this calling-in culture, other people are going to say, you know, “I think you're a good person. I love the compassion you have. So why is there this weird area where you talk badly about strangers you don't even know? I mean, what's going on with you? Can I help you? Can we talk about the good part of you that I admire and the troubling part that I'm trying to figure out why you want to be that way?” I mean, most human beings don't wanna walk around consciously hurting people. So the question is: why would you want to? What's going on in your soul that makes you indifferent to the suffering that you're causing? That's really the most important question we can ask each other.

You're constantly going to be offered chances to offer people grace, forgiveness, respect, and their human rights. And you can't think you failed simply because of their inability to grow in the moment. I mean, I got a hard head. Some things have to be said to me many times before I got it. And we're all kind of like that, because we don't like to be told what to think. We don't like somebody assuming that we don't know something, or that we're incapable of learning and growing. And so that first feeling they feel when we try to call somebody in or out, it's actually going to be shame. They're going to feel like they've been put on the spot. They're going to feel like they've been accused of not knowing enough or not being enough. So calibrate your response to that. That's the normal human condition. And they're not bad people for feeling like every human being would feel under those circumstances.

But you have to assure them that you believe in them, that you take their suffering seriously, that you recognize that their lived experiences got them to do certain things the way YOUR lived experiences got YOU to do certain things. That strangely enough, their experiences are as valid as yours.

And so, keeping that complexity in mind, you offer people grace and space. For example, we all know that it's not politically correct anymore to say [the r-word]. Well, what happened the first time we used that word and somebody called us out for using it? They could have shamed us and punished us for using it, or they could have given us the space to grow — to learn that now we say differently abled, or neurodivergent, or any other number of words that don't dehumanize people with different abilities.

We all have opportunities to learn and grow. And we can always keep in mind, like Malcolm X says, that when we didn't know something, we'll always have grace for others who maybe don't know what we think we know.

KH: What can you say to people at this moment in time who are feeling scared and their hope is dwindling AND they're also holding the duality of feeling hope and feeling energized and having vision? What is something that you would love to say to those people?

LJR: Well, this may sound like a commercial, but I would urge them to use my name to get to my website and join Calling In classes. We've got another one starting in March, and it's hundreds of people learning the techniques of how to showcase their integrity by practicing calling in with their friends, their families, their communities, their fellow students, their co workers. And so I would urge people to join our $5 classes…because it's only $5. The cheapest consciousness raising you'll ever find on the internet!

We're building a human rights movement, with human rights as our goal and calling in as our practices. I believe that calling in is going to be as important to the human rights movement in the 21st century as non violence was to the civil rights movement in the 20th. A statement of our compassion, and how we care for even those we would call our enemies.

---

You can learn more about Loretta J. Ross here, and more about CALLING IN here. Sign up for her emails to get notified about upcoming workshops, classes, and events.

Subscribe to the WANTcast here on iTunes or here on Spotify. And make sure you share with a friend who might love the kinds of conversations we have here in the WANT community. Digital is delightful but the best word is and will always be word-of-mouth!

---

CALLING IN GIVEAWAY!

I’m so excited to be giving away not one, but TWO copies of CALLING IN to you, WANT readers! Thank you Simon and Schuster for being so generous and gifting these copies to our community.

All you need to do is leave a comment below telling me one takeaway you got from this interview and/or why you want to read this book.

Extending this giveaway: Two winners will be chosen at random on Friday, February 14th at 9am Eastern Time. (Valentines Day!) Crossing my fingers for you!