Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Please welcome to the stage, Charles Blow.

[applause]

[Charles Blow, a Black man with a gray beard wearing a black suit, Host]

CHARLES BLOW: Welcome to Ideas at Ford, where we bring together some of the world’s best thinkers and activists to talk about some of the world’s biggest problems. Tonight we are tackling fairness and work safety and inclusion and accessibility in the world of fashion. Joining me are Lindsay Peoples, editor-in-chief of The Cut and co-founder of the Black in Fashion Council.

Also, Sinéad Burke, founder and CEO of Tilting the Lens. And last, Sara Ziff, founder and executive director of the Model Alliance. Thank you. Thank you all for joining. All right, Sinéad I’m going to start with you. So in 2017, you gave a TED talk that was wildly popular. It was called “Why Design Should Include Everyone.” But then, at the Business and Fashion Voices conference in 2021, you said, like, you reconsider some of the things you said because it wasn’t enough. It didn’t go far enough. How are you now thinking about accessibility, particularly in the world of fashion?

[Sinéad Burke, a white cisgender woman who identifies as queer and physically disabled and has dwarfism with brown shoulder length hair wearing a full length long sleeved white silk dress with gold detail, founder and CEO, Tilting the Lens]

SINÉAD BURKE: I did that Ted Talk in 2017, as you said, here in New York. If I’m being very honest, the conversation was rooted in my lived experience as a disabled queer woman. I have dwarfism. It’s been very much part of my own knowledge since the earliest of age, that I lived in a world that wasn’t designed for me, and that my disability came about because of that friction between my physiology and the way in which design is built, and the world is designed for so few. I think if you’d asked me at 2017, I felt truly confident that I had the answer, but I didn’t. I had questions. I had my own lived experiences, whether it was going through an airport, whether it was looking at retail design, whether it was going and ordering a coffee, and the idea

that the pastry counter was so high that nobody could see me, and the baristas getting frustrated because they keep saying, next, please. And the person behind me is trying to identify that I’m in the queue. But in terms of the work that I’m doing now, and to your point, that evolution: Lived experience is so important. But as we think about not just the “why,” we have to think about the “how.” So for me, when we think about accessibility, one of the great challenges that we have when we think about access is often through a lens of compliance.

I turned 35 in September. I tell you that only because I’m the same age as the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was always created to be a baseline standard. And the idea was that over time, we would iterate and continuously extend the notion of what accessibility is. And in many ways, that benchmark legislation informs so many other pieces of legislation, whether it’s the Disability Discrimination Act in the UK or the Equality Act in Ireland, where I’m from. But the reality is, we allowed compliance to be the ceiling, and it continues to exclude so many people. So when we think about accessibility is about explicitly designing solutions with marginalized communities to ensure that innovation can come about. It’s about prioritizing form and function, and it’s about ensuring that the methodology is co-designed with the people with lived experience, not just guiding the design process, but leading it. And the reality is, there’s no such thing as fully accessible. If the world was designed for me, it would be accessible for me, but inaccessible to about 97% of you all. But how can we create flexibility within the design process? How can we create multimodal solutions where people can adapt to what it is that they need that day? Because when we think about disability and access, for many people, it’s something you move in and out of in your life. So design needs to be flexible and informed and customizable.

CHARLES BLOW: You talk about people needing to view people with disabilities as colleagues and not customers. What do you mean by that?

SINÉAD BURKE: When we think about design solutions and when we think about what system change looks like, you know, fashion’s response to disability has been about creating capsule collections that are adaptive in a limited range and in the limited size of colors that are so dependable on the market being ready and there being a business case to be able to identify. In some parts of the world, 75% of disabled women are unemployed. So if we only ever think about the business case and the opportunity and capitalism is a system that we are all working within, but if we’re not simultaneously creating pipelines of talent where meaningful opportunities exist, and creating the conditions for disabled people to thrive, we only ever see disabled people as objects to exploit and the opportunity to create sales. Whereas actually, if we think of disabled people as innovators by design and leaders by nature, there is an opportunity, I think, to create wider system change. So it can’t just be customers, it has to be colleagues.

There’s an ease at which if we think about disabled people as customers, but we never value them as part of the whole holistic system.

CHARLES BLOW: Sara, you founded the Model Alliance, talk to us about your work to build a more equitable, safe environment for models in an industry that is exclusionary by its very nature. That is, on some level, maybe, kind of has some exploitation built into it.

[Sara Ziff, a 45 year-old white woman with should length light brown hair wearing an emerald green suit and black top, founder and executive director, Model Alliance]

SARA ZIFF: Sure. Well, first, thank you for having me. I’m really honored to be here alongside both of you. I founded the Model Alliance because I myself worked as a model for many years. And I was one of the lucky ones. I worked as a face of big brands. And I was relatively privileged compared to many of my peers who were immigrants, who, you know, English was not their first language. They were sending money back home to their families. But I also experienced the pitfalls of working in a largely unregulated industry. So I was regularly put in compromising situations. At 14, I was put on the spot to pose nude. I often had difficulty just getting paid the money that I was owed. When I was 19, I was raped. And I was sort of lured into a hotel room under the guise of a professional opportunity. And so many of the many of the sort of villains who the Me Too movement unmasked, whether it was Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Cosby, the list goes on. They were all preying on young women who worked or aspired to work in this industry. And that’s not a coincidence. And this is not how a $2 trillion industry that’s built on the backs of mostly young women and girls should operate. Models are workers who are deserving of the same rights and protections as anyone else who works for a living. So for me, this is, you know, personal and really comes out of my own experiences.

CHARLES BLOW: Lindsay, you know, you have a big journalism job.

LINDSAY PEOPLES: I’ve heard.

CHARLES BLOW: But you, but you also are, co-founder of the Black and Fashion Council. Talk to us about what the council does. And also how you balance your journalistic life with your advocacy and activism.

[Lindsay Peoples, a brown woman with brown eyes wearing a dark chocolate brown dress, editor-in-chief, The Cut and Co-Founder, Black in Fashion Council]

LINDSAY PEOPLES: I mean, it’s interesting to me only because I never really saw it as a choice, but I think that’s also because I’ve never seen myself as, really the perfect person to work in fashion. I never had the connections. I remember just being really, just, like, almost resentful about the fact that because I didn’t have these things and because I didn’t have wealth and all those things that, like, how was I ever going to make this change that I really felt passionate about. I knew that, you know, if I could do something, I always would do it. No matter what I was going to do in fashion.

For me, it was never the, you know, you get power and then you’ve changed. I mean, this is you get power and this is who you’ve always been, and it just amplifies what you’ve always really wanted to do or who you are. Who you’ve always been and at the core of my identity, it always has been. How can I be a ladder to help other people up? And how can I be a ladder to help women of color and people of color in general, just inclusive, being inclusive overall. And so

when I was at New York Magazine, the first time as an editor, I wrote a piece about what it’s like to be Black and in fashion, and I just stayed in contact with everyone. And during pandemic, there were a lot of conversations around, okay, so like, what can we do? How can we rally together, etc. And so I was, I mean, I’m happy to always use my connections and help. And if I can call someone and say, “Hey, do you know this buyer, this place, this Black designer needs help, etc.”

So we’ve done around ten, this past February was our 10th season and we just have a showroom. We had it at Spring Studios and we moved to WSA, to do a free showroom for Black designers and we help them get press and help them meet with buyers and connect to them with, you know, different production companies, etc. and just kind of try to give them the support that they need and the mentorship and guidance. And then we do a lot of just connecting of, you know, like Barbie came to us and said, “Hey, like we are looking to find some new designers for clothes.” I’m like, “Great, I know many designers, I know many creatives.” And yeah, I don’t take a salary for it. I do this because I think it’s important.

CHARLES BLOW: Fashion is global, right? So you have people working in all different countries, in the U.S. working in different states, cities. How do you, in this global fashion world, tackle the ideas of equity and try to make inclusion and access real for more people? Do you start at the bottom locally, in the states or a country, or do you try to craft some global set of standards, or at least aspirations that we should be working forward across all of fashion, no matter where it is?

SARA ZIFF: Yeah, well, we have a broad vision for labor solidarity. I think, you know, the fashion industry has always kind of been a backwater for workers rights and been camouflaged by this glamorous facade. But, you know, the creative side of the industry has really just started to organize. But for centuries, you know, garment workers have toiled away in, in obscurity. And in some ways, we sort of face a complementary crisis of recognition. You have, you know, models who are highly visible, but their work is not sort of culturally recognized as work. And their concerns are kind of treated as frivolous. And then on the other side of the industry, you have, you know, people who are literally sometimes risking their lives in unsafe factories. And, even though we’re working under different socioeconomic conditions, it’s an industry that’s mostly built on the backs of women and girls who—on both sides of the industry—are trying to have a voice in their work.

CHARLES BLOW: But one of the ways you’ve attacked is at the state level. I don’t want to say first, but at the start, at state level, with one piece of legislation, which is the Fashion Workers Act, which has been passed and signed and this year in New York State goes into effect.

When?

SARA ZIFF: June. It took three years of campaigning to get to this point. And it, you know, for the first time gives basic rights and protections to our workforce. We get to see our own contracts with our clients, which we previously weren’t privy to. We will have protections against harassment, discrimination, unsafe working conditions, like a safe place to go to report our

concerns. And we’ve run for years, over a decade now, the industry’s support line, where we’ve heard from thousands of people, about a range of issues, nonpayment, sexual abuse, and it’s felt honestly like putting a Band-Aid on a big gaping wound because, the law has not been on our side. And so now, for the first time, when people contact us, we’ll be able to say, “Yes, you do have rights. And here’s how to, you know, how to move forward.”

[applause]

CHARLES BLOW: Anybody want to chime in on that before we go move on?

LINDSAY PEOPLES: I remember, starting out, in just interning at different places in fashion and people would say like, “Oh, this person isn’t on brand.” And I’d be like, “What does that mean? Who is on brand? How did we get there? Like, who’s who is, who is the person that is on brand?” And so much of the work that we do at The Cut really starts with a question and a curiosity. It isn’t this definitive statement, and it isn’t trying to be aspirational. It really is about being approachable. And so I think that does lend itself to being a lot more diverse, in the way that you discuss things in the way that you want to develop an audience and just develop a relationship with people. So that’s what.

CHARLES BLOW: I’ll stay on there for one second, you know, what do you think the media’s responsibility is in creating a more equitable, accessible fashion world?

LINDSAY PEOPLES: I mean, it’s huge, but it’s one that people are very fearful around because it usually—it is very alienating. I think, any time that we’ve done a piece that, you know, I’m aware, is going to shake the table a little bit, people get very nervous. They’re like, well, “This photographer isn’t going to work with me, or this person isn’t going to want to hire me,” or “How will I do this?” Because so much of it is, especially in, I think, fashion and media. I would say a lot of the hiring is subjective, like people, yes, post roles, but it is often like, you know this writer from this place or you’ve worked with this model in this thing. So I do think that people are often very fearful of closed doors. And it just—it is a responsibility, but there are only a few.

SINÉAD BURKE: But one of the other things, to your point about media, I had the great privilege in 2019 to be on the cover of British Vogue and was the first little person to ever do so.

CHARLES BLOW: Can we?

[applause]

SINÉAD BURKE: She has a Guinness World Record. She does. But I’ll be very transparent. It was a really challenging set. There was no consideration for my access needs in advance, and I don’t think it was malicious. Just nobody thought of it. They knew that I was disabled. They knew that I was a little person, but hadn’t joined the dots. And to be very fair, I was afraid to say anything because I felt that I could or would be replaced. And I left that set that day thinking one of two things: One, it cannot exist that in terms of 2019, I am white, I am cisgendered. That is a

huge amount of privilege for us to be celebrating that as a milestone. So how do we create broader intersectional change? And two: One is not enough. How do we think about accessibility in its broadest possible form? So in May 2023, my company, Tilting the Lens, guest-edited British Vogue‘s “Reframing Fashion” issue. But one of the earliest challenges that we had was where are we going to shoot the issue? We had this big ambition that we would have, you know, five disabled people on covers, 19 disabled people inside, all of the articles written by disabled journalists.

But even when we began to think about the types of talent that we wanted as part of the issue, we immediately had to think about the accessibility on set. We reviewed every single set within the London infrastructure that could be used for a fashion shoot of that nature. Two of them fit our criteria for accessibility, and of those two, both of them were booked. We had to negotiate with the people who already had those bookings, who didn’t have the access needs for us to be able to prioritize it.

So when we think about the responsibility of media, I think there’s an ease at which we say it is their responsibility and in turn, their fault, without acknowledging so many of the systemic barriers that exist. And even if I think about when we did “Reframing Fashion,” I really wanted the issue to be made available in Braille. The editors at the time said, “Does anybody blind read Vogue?” And I said, “I don’t know. Shall we find out?” And Condé Nast as a publisher, didn’t have the infrastructure to create materials in Braille. It’s actually very difficult. So we partnered with the Royal National Institute of the Blind and made the issue available in Braille. And every issue continues to be made available in Braille.

[applause]

CHARLES BLOW: Lindsay, when we say the fashion industry, we think two categories: Designer. Model. Right? There’s a whole army of people that are the fashion industry, including the people who cover the fashion. How do we reframe this so that people see more of the unseen people in fashion. And we’re able to advocate for those people as well as the people that people see.

LINDSAY PEOPLES: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s twofold. We do a job fair for Black and Fashion Council every August to try to expose young people of color to all the different opportunities.

And I think, the exposure at a really young age is, is just something that most people of color aren’t allowed that privilege. Like you just you’re, to be able to know someone at this company or to be able to see this certain job. I think a lot of times there is just a lack of intention in the industry as far as the ways in which that we want to gatekeep. And that exclusivity is something that people really thrive on. And so it’s done on purpose. I want to make that clear. It’s not something that is on accident or just keeps happening. But I do think a lot of the work for all of us is really that we try to help kind of expose what are the opportunities for more people to come in the industry, but then also, exposing people who, where like they’re doing amazing work.

And I think, for me, it’s always that, you know, obviously in running a business, you look at—I look at traffic, I look at SEO—all of those things. Right. But there are some things that I will do, and I know people aren’t going to read it. And easiest example, we write about abortion every single day. And I know people aren’t going to read it every single day. I know it because they’re like, “There’s all these other things going on, you guys, what about you?” I see the comments. But it is important to me, and, you know, we have a directory where you can type in your ZIP code and find your nearest abortion clinic. We did a whole issue on it many times, and I think that there—it’s balancing that because for me, it’s like, I know that that’s not going to get a ton of traffic. People may not read it, but it’s really important resource for those who can have it. And especially the ones that are resources and where to get, they are not behind a paywall specifically so that I want people to subscribe or not. Like, I want you to be able to find help and support here. But I think it’s,it’s that kind of intentionality that has to kind of meet with, with a lot of the infrastructures that are in place to kind of gatekeep certain things that are already in place.

CHARLES BLOW: Sinéad, you founded Tilting the Lens. Tell us about Tilting the Lens.

SINÉAD BURKE: Sitting at home in Ireland in my parents’ spare room, I had a great idea. I’m going to start a business. I went to Cambridge Judge Business School and did a short term course and learned how business systems worked. It was very deliberately a business, and the reason why is because disability has been conflated with charity for too long. And while there are essential nonprofits that are doing really excellent work, they are reliant often on federal funding. Or also, it creates a mindset within society that disabled people are in need of charity and in turn only deserve charity.

When I think about the work that we do, so often in the early days of the business, people assumed we were a charity. They directed us to the ESG departments or to the foundations, which was lovely, but not necessary. I could take money from every department. And what I wanted to build with the mission of creating the conditions for disabled people to be successful was firstly, to create the environment entirely where we could hire disabled people globally and they could be successful. I started working in the fashion industry with the business. We worked with a number of global luxury brands to support them at the most senior leadership level, to implement what strategic change looks like in accessibility. So maybe to give you some examples, we worked with Gucci to support the employment of disabled people in luxury retail. One of the first things that we did was create a program where we hired deaf people as client advisers.Immediately the question I got was around headcount and around, “What does this mean as a cost to the business?” The individuals had full time British Sign Language interpreters with them in store to be able to support. In terms of the service, those client advisers were the highest selling client advisers in store. Now, I say that and I deliberately create the caveat to say disabled people do not have to be the highest selling client advisers in the store in order to be employed, in order to be part of the team.

And we have those who are exceptional at their job in every category of community and lived experience. But what it created was a market for different kinds of people to come to that store

and for the first time, be able to communicate in their language with dignity, and with creativity as part of that concept. So one of my colleagues, Orla McCann, who is here tonight—is our expert in the built environment. We’re currently developing an office in London that is hopefully going to change the way we think about accessibility within that environment.

There is and we were talking about this earlier, this great demand for everybody to return to the office, even though offices are not designed for people to be successful in so many ways. My big win in that office is that one of the things that we heard from the research that we did around disabled employees, is that what they wanted was automatic doors. Now, automatic doors is a very serious issue. It’s a serious issue because it’s not very sustainable, because if automatic doors are automatic, they open and they close and they allow wind and air through. Not very sustainable. The other deep challenge with automatic doors? They’re ugly. The button to press them, the way they move. But that’s a supply chain issue because when we design anything to be accessible, we design it to be ugly.

We design it through a lens of medical model because we design for disabled people, not with them. Next time, step inside an accessible bathroom, it is designed with very little aesthetic and beauty in mind. That is the limitation of universal design as a framework. There’s seven principles, not one of them around aesthetics. So our work is about, how do we bring form and function together, how do we bring accessibility and sustainability together.

You know how we got our automatic doors? Because we spoke to non-disabled people who do hot desking in that office and said that in central London they leave their bike downstairs, they have their helmet, they have their laptop, they have their cup of coffee, and guess what? They got no more limbs to open the door. We got our automatic doors, and I would love to sit here and say that it is enough when disabled people tell you that this is what they need, that the system changes, that is not yet the reality. So how do we make access by design as a universal opportunity, and think about the way in which it creates less friction in everybody’s lives. But we do work small-scale, large-scale, conditions for disabled people to thrive.

CHARLES BLOW: Sara, the Model Alliance played a critical role in the passage of the 2022 Adult Survivors Act, which let survivors of sexual assault file lawsuits past the statute of limitations. And we saw a flood of lawsuits. How has that helped or impacted models in the fashion industry?

SARA ZIFF: Yeah, well, I think our work on the Adult Survivors Act is a good example of how, by focusing on the concerns of our immediate community, we’ve actually been able to have a far reaching impact. So, you know, for me, myself as a survivor, it was incredibly important to be able to pursue justice, even though I was time barred. And we created this one year look back window to be able to file a civil lawsuit. A more sort of recent issue that we’ve been focused on that similarly, impacts our immediate community, but has far reaching implications is, the emergence of generative AI, to create imagery. And this is not something that just impacts models. But, you know, the whole creative team, you know, when your body is your business, having your image manipulated or used without your consent is a violation of your rights. But

we’ve been hearing from photographers, makeup artists, hairstylists and so on, who are really concerned about this kind of wonderful, creative, communal experience being threatened and people being replaced. And so, you know, the Fashion Workers Act is significant in part because it’s one of the first laws in the world that seeks to address the misuse of generative AI. And it’s certainly not a silver bullet. It’s just a first step. But this is something that I think is going to be more and more important as we look ahead to the future legislation.

CHARLES BLOW: Lindsay, you kind of burst my bubble in the, greenroom because I thought that, we were seeing more Black people in the fashion industry, more Black designers, that they were doing better. And you said the—act—the opposite is true.

LINDSAY PEOPLES: Correct.

CHARLES BLOW: Talk to us about the lay of the land for other people who might look at the fashion world. And we think we’re seeing more representation. We think we are seeing more opportunities for people of color. But what is the reality of what’s happening?

LINDSAY PEOPLES: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s always been this disconnect of how, you know, I think so much of what Sarah’s saying on that side is, is true on editorial as well. And working at magazines, it looks like you can see a lot of, I remember especially like during pandemic, there was a lot of publications talking about, you know, we put X amount of models on this cover, etc., the amount of, you know, just inclusivity is just incredibly gone down on magazine covers. I— when you look at the runway, there’s not size inclusivity, inclusivity at all anymore. People completely forgot that they got on that train three years ago. I don’t know where it went. And I think the, it has become very optional and only a thing that people do if they’re in fear of getting canceled, they don’t feel like they need to be diverse.

If you look at just the landscape of luxury brands, I, it’s very easy. Any any of them that you name, they’re all run by white men and all the designers are white men. You have your few exceptions, but it’s literally only three. It’s not that many. And I do think that, a lot of times people just get caught up in, well, “I like this brand and I want to work with them,” and all of that. Like, there are a million reasons, and I’m not. And I don’t say that out of judgment, but I do think that a lot of my work, both at The Cut and with Black and Fashion Council, is making sure that Black designers aren’t just emailed during Black History Month when somebody needs to put their brand in a round up or they’re like, oh, we need to have a Q&A, let’s hurry up, because “the Super Bowl, Kendrick, like we need—”

It’s like, guys—designers have been doing this, and then you pretend to care and give them a little bit, but then, you know, you never call it in. You never actually spend time to, to get to know the brand, etc. And I see a lot of I mean, fashion is so small also like we, we see each other a lot, we see each other at all these things.

And by the time, you know, I go to shows in Milan and Paris, I can count on one hand how many people of color there are at shows. It’s very, very small. And I think that there’s just a, it’s 100%

tokenism, but it also is just a, “Let us continue to check the box. If we feel like we haven’t, we haven’t done it. Or if someone said this on Twitter, X, whatever. Then then we’ll do it. But it’s not something that matters anymore.”

CHARLES BLOW: So I want to end by asking you what we ask all of our guests, which is what gives you hope in this space. Let’s start with you, Sarah.

SARA ZIFF: I think that just the fact that we are here, having this conversation gives me hope. When I started organizing my peers, I got eyerolls, and it was like something out of a Zoolander skit. And the fact that this is being taken seriously on this stage is incredibly meaningful.

SINÉAD BURKE: Much to what Lindsay was sharing earlier, the question that I used to get all of the time in fashion spaces was, “Where are all the disabled designers?” Which is an interesting and not interesting question, because one: What it assumes is that there were no disabled designers already, when the reality is there’s a complete lack of psychological safety in fashion.

But in most other industries, for people with non apparent disabilities to self-identify and identify as disabled, there are many disabled designers. There has to be, purely from a demographic perspective. But what is also missing is a critical path for the next generation of disabled designers to be designers. So when Doctor Ben Berry was appointed as Dean of Fashion at Parsons here in New York and he himself a disabled queer man, I DM’d him on Instagram and said, “Hey, you’re disabled, I’m disabled, we should do something.” And last year we created the Disabled Fashion Student Program at Parsons, and we currently have six—

[applause]

The first cohort was funded by H&M, the Ford Foundation, Carmen Busquets, and the next cohort is funded by Capri Holdings Foundation. But we have six people across the degree and the MFA fashion program. Three of them are here in the room tonight.

And it’s not just about funding their education. It’s also about making sure that they have accessible accommodation in the city. It’s about making sure that the program in and of itself is not just accessible, but anti-ableism. It’s about making sure that these students themselves have a pathway to internship and employment. And we see our job now as making the industry ready for them so that when the industry says, “Where are the disabled designers?” They’re right here, you guys.

LINDSAY PEOPLES: Any time that I find this work to be exhaustive, because it really can be when you feel like you’re fighting for something that should just be a basic human right, I think I really haven’t earned the right to give up yet.

CHARLES BLOW: Let’s give our panel a round of applause.

[applause]

Accessibility Statement

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Please welcome to the stage, Charles Blow.

[applause]

[Charles Blow, a Black man with a gray beard wearing a black suit, Host]

CHARLES BLOW: Hello. Tonight we will be discussing bringing advocacy to the big leagues about the role of player advocacy in professional sports. And I am joined by a stellar lineup. First, we have Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, Jessica Berman, commissioner of the National Women’s Soccer League, and Carl Nassib, a former NFL player, tech founder and philanthropist. So this episode is about players’ voices. So I’m going to start with you, Carl, because you were a player who played over 100 games in the NFL. What was one of the most impactful things in the vein of player advocacy or advocacy for players that you witnessed while you were in the league, either for yourself or for your other players?

[Carl Nassib, a tall man with blue eyes and a sandy brown hair, Former NFL player, tech founder, and philanthropist]

CARL NASSIB: Great question. Yeah. I’m Carl, I played seven years in the league. And I’m really happy to be on this panel with you guys. The thing that I really appreciated—that was kind of a combination of both players, the league, and fans—was the advocacy around brain health and concussions. When I was in college, in high school, people thought about it. They would chalk it up to like, oh, he just got, you know, the wind knocked out of him or something, you know, pretty innocuous. But as my football career progressed, the awareness around it really improved. I never had a concussion, but I’ve seen a lot of players get really banged up, and it’s frightening. So in my career, watching all the players, you know, advocate for themselves, you see, there’s no more targeting. And seeing that change, just in my career, was really, really good, and I think we’ll see the benefits of that for many years to come.

CHARLES BLOW: Liz, you spent your entire career working in worker advocacy. And, for a lot of the audience, they don’t even think of athletes as workers. Entertainment is different from work. But in 2022, the AFL-CIO founded the Sports Council, of which the NFL Players Association and the National Women’s Soccer League are founding members. What moved you to do that at the AFL-CIO, and what are some of the accomplishments that have come out of that?

[Elizabeth H. Shuler, a white woman with blond hair and blue eyes, President of the AFL-CIO]

LIZ SHULER: Absolutely. Well, it’s an honor to be on the stage with you, Charles, and of course, with Jessica and Carl. Just as a reminder, the AFL-CIO is an umbrella organization of 63 unions, nearly 15 million workers. And many of our members, of course, are employed in jobs all across the economy that you would think of. But some of them play sports. You know, the, establishing a sports council within the labor movement, there’s so much we have in common—no matter what kind of work you do—you want to show up and be safe and have, you know, safety and health protections. You want to have pay and decency and respect and a voice on the job. No matter if you’re, you know, a minor leaguer, that’s, that’s playing, or someone who gets paid a lot of money to play sports, or if you’re the security guard at the stadium, or someone who’s working behind the concession counter. It takes all of us to make that ecosystem work. And so we like to say, you know, work connects us all, really, because someone else’s work makes your work possible. And, you know, this notion of building a community within the labor movement to, you know, provide that space for athletes was really important because there is, you know, these universal issues that really connect people together.

But I think that the best thing that I’ve seen happen out of the Sports Council, the AFL-CIO, is really athletes standing up for, for workers who are struggling in other industries. And I’ll use one quick example: Super Bowl comes around. Everybody’s eyes are on that Super Bowl, right? And there was a group of bakery workers in Los Angeles a few years ago who were struggling with getting a contract. They were asked—they were making Carvel ice cream cakes.

CARL NASSIB: I love those.

LIZ SHULER: I do too. And they were asking for a dollar more an hour. And these were mainly women, women of color, who had been working at this company for nearly 20 years on average. The line I think was going so fast, they were speeding it up. And they said, if we’re going to be working harder, shouldn’t we be making a little more, right? They were in contract negotiations—Nowheresville. And so what we did is the NFLPA came together with the bakery workers, and we had an event with these ice cream cake workers and football players standing together to say, “There’s no justice here, right? You can do better.” And sure enough, after we left that event, the company called and they went back to the table and settled the contract like two days later. So that’s the power of solidarity.

CHARLES BLOW: I love any story that has an ice cream cake in it.

LIZ SHULER: Happy to provide it.

CHARLES BLOW: Jessica, because these players are workers, their relationship with the team, management, the league—really important. How do you help to facilitate that and make sure that that relationship, it works for everyone?

[JESSICA BERMAN, a white woman with light brown hair and brown eyes, wearing a brown jacket, Commissioner of the National Women’s Soccer League]

JESSICA BERMAN: Thank you. And I echo everyone’s sentiment. It’s a pleasure to be here with you all and to share the stage. Yeah. So I’m the commissioner of the National Women’s Soccer League. And interestingly, my background is that I’m actually a labor lawyer. I’ve always represented professional sports leagues. That’s literally the only thing I’ve ever done in collective bargaining. So, have negotiated collective bargaining agreements in the sports space, really since 2002, on behalf of the NFL, on behalf of Major League Baseball, the NBA, ultimately now, most recently on behalf of the National Women’s Soccer League with the NWSLPA, which is, a member of the AFL-CIO. You know, I think the sports industry, and I’m imagining most people in this room, aren’t necessarily in the sports industry, just for a minute of context: Our business, unlike so many other businesses, is really rooted in the relationship that exists between management and labor.

And in fact, we couldn’t do all of the things that everyone gets to enjoy as fans without the basic terms of a CBA being in place that is negotiated through these CBAs. The most important thing is actually that you can show up transparently, with integrity, be professional and respectful, try to understand each other’s perspectives and figure out what is the most important problem to solve for yourself and for your counterparty and craft solutions around that. And, and so yeah, that’s, that’s pretty much what I’ve done my, my entire career. And most recently I’ve had the good fortune of being able to do that on behalf of these incredible female athletes, which has has been the honor of my career.

CHARLES BLOW: Jess, staying on those athletes. You mentioned the collective bargaining agreement. You just established a historic win for the National Women’s Soccer League. Talk to us about what was part of that agreement and why that helped to make those players’ lives better.

JESSICA BERMAN: The most important thing that I could do in my role is, on behalf of these players, to make women’s sports and the National Women’s Soccer League in particular, a viable, thriving business. That is the most important thing that I can do. And luckily, we have an incredible partnership with the National Women’s Soccer League Players Association. For the most part, we have alignment around a long term vision to create a league that is really the best league in the world, as we say. Not the best women’s league, not the best women’s soccer league, but literally the best league in the world. And in order to—thank you—

[applause]

And in order to do that, we have to build it together. It has to be in partnership. We have to look at the pie as not finite. And that’s the spirit in which we approached our players association. And, we, we negotiated a really, a very player-centric agreement that has the best conditions for maternal health and for child care. We are, we like to say, like, supporting women and mothers is not a social impact issue for us. It’s literally our business. Our players are mothers, literally, our players are child bearing. And they need solutions to be able to continue to play during the years that their career matters most and be able to have children. Like, none of us have to want to make these choices, and certainly a lot easier for me to have children and continue to work than it is to be a professional athlete. That was a key priority for all of us. Raising our minimum salary, raising the salary cap to be able to grow in a revenue sharing function as our revenues grow. And probably the most meaningful one for those of you who follow sports, hopefully many of you follow women’s sports in the NWSL, but I’m sure you’re all familiar with the concept of a draft and an entry draft. And we are the first professional sports league in America to eliminate the draft and to make all of our players full free agents.

LIZ: That was amazing.

JESSICA BERMAN: And that really was centered around this idea of giving players agency, as we call it, lowercase “a” agency around where they play when they’re not under contract.

LIZ SHULER: Meghann Burke, who leads NWSLPA, Tori Huster, their president. They had a negotiating team, and a very engaged membership, a very strong union to be a partner, to sit across that table and negotiate with you. And I think that makes a big difference.

JESSICA BERMAN: We always want a formidable, smart leader at the union. It does not help us to be on the other side of the table as someone who isn’t smart or savvy, and we love when the constituents actually show up, because then you actually know that you’re negotiating with people who have authority to negotiate with you. So it makes it so much easier when you have that kind of buy-in on the union side. And, that was part of the key to us getting the deal done, for sure.

LIZ SHULER: It was groundbreaking.

CHARLES BLOW: Carl—your personal story. So you came out in 2021, two years before you retired. What was that experience like for you in the league and how did people respond?

CARL NASSIB: I tell people all the time, I was very lucky. I feel that I was a benefactor of a lot of people in the gay community that came before me and fought for our rights and really paved the way for people like me to do the job that they love. So my experience was great. I had the best reactions from my teammates, my friends, coaches, fans, everybody. It’s like the best thing. So I’m very, very thankful. And, you know, when I came out, I incorporated the Trevor Project into my announcement because I wanted to get them in front of—Oh, yeah, clap it up for Trevor Project. I wanted to get their mission in front of people who probably never heard of them. You know what I mean? In front of sports fans who probably haven’t heard of a LGBTQ organization that helps, you know, at-risk youth. These kids need people to advocate for them. They need to feel that they’re not “other.” And, you know, I joined the board of the Trevor Project late last year, which has been, you know, a really rewarding experience so far. And, you know, now more than ever, gay organizations do need a lot of support. Now more than ever, they need foundational support. They need individual contributions. And, so, yeah, it just kind of feels full, so full circle to be up here, talking about how lucky I am for people that have fought for employee rights, for gay rights, for all these different things. So I just want to be like, thank you. You know, and this is, this is very, very nice.

CHARLES BLOW: Did you recognize immediately there was some things about the league as, as an advocate for yourself and for other players that might need to change to be more inclusive of more identities in the NFL?

CARL NASSIB: I do think that there is an opportunity for improvement for high school sports and college sports. I do think that they—it’s not where people go to work. Right? So they don’t have employee rights. You know what I mean? And so it’s not where they go to earn their paycheck to feed their family. So they don’t—there isn’t that kind of respect. And I think that if we put a little more effort into that pipeline for not just male sports, but female sports, everything, then you’ll see a lot more, gay athletes in the future. And that’s something that I think would be super positive.

CHARLES BLOW: Liz, since the AFL-CIO represents so many workers, so many industries, what are some of the things that are super specific to sports and athletes that are not like other workers that you end up encountering?

LIZ SHULER: Yeah. And I was just thinking, as you know, you were talking about collective bargaining, I just wonder how many people even know these days what collective bargaining is, right? I think it’s, you know, people have a vague sense of unions and, and, employers sitting across the table negotiating a contract. But the notion of a collective bargaining agreement is that, that contract that gives you the freedom to do what you do best, which is your job, and to be able to thrive in that environment.

So whether you’re an athlete or, you know, someone who makes ice cream cakes, or you know, someone who’s in construction or, you know, as a professional scientist, or, you know, a scientist or a teacher, you know, we want to be able to have a seat at the table, a voice, to be able to raise things that might be going wrong on the job that you fear speaking out around because, you know, in this environment, mostly people get retaliated against.

And so having a union and a collective bargaining agreement provides a process for you to actually be your best self on the job. And so I think about that with players, because you think about things like player surfaces. I know that’s been a big issue across sports, and it is a safety issue. And it’s something that we take very seriously in terms of negotiating protections in the contract. Things like, you mentioned maternity leave. I think too about reporting protocols when the league went through its crisis with sexual harassment, you know, you think about players feeling like they had no where to turn, right? Well, now you’ve been able to negotiate something in your agreement that says, “You know what? Here’s what happens. Here’s what you do. Here’s who you talk to,” right? And, and how that gets adjudicated. And it’s very transparent. And then finally, I’ll just end on equal pay, because that’s really what started the Sports Council and the AFL-CIO is I saw the U.S. women’s national team out in front and, you know, the equal pay issue being so prevalent, and the athletes having such a powerful platform to talk about equal pay. But the labor movement have been fighting for equal pay since our inception. And so the ability for us to come together and uplift an issue that is so central to every working woman in this country.

[applause]

Yeah, you can clap for that, because we still aren’t paid equally in the year 2025. But we think collective bargaining can be a tool that could be more widespread and utilized across industries, because it ends up being a win win for the employers and the workers, because when you have workers who are showing up and able to be their best selves doing their jobs, they’re more productive, and the return on investment is higher. So we think that more unions, of course, is the answer. Yeah, yeah.

CHARLES BLOW: Carl, one of the things you’re passionate about is financial literacy for players. Why is that so important for you as a topic?

CARL NASSIB: I’ve been very passionate about this for a long time. I work with the nation’s leading provider of financial wellness tools to everyday Americans, Financial Finesse, understanding compounding and being a young investor and what that can do for your, you know, your career and your life and setting yourself up for generational wealth and generational opportunities. And, you know, when it comes to, you know, there’s a lot of talk about, you know, the bargaining, but really hurts the NFL players, over the years and just the history, is that most of the players were never in a financial position to sit out, you know what I mean? They were, they needed that new paycheck.

So that’s just like a very, you know, superficial layer that, you know, we were talking about earlier, but, it is very short-lived, the average NFL career. And the opportunity is so big. The onus is on the, is on the individual to get educated and make good decisions. Understand that life is long and retirement comes a lot quicker than you think.

CHARLES BLOW: On the other side of that, like, you know, how does the league deal with financial literacy and, and helping players to navigate the money that they’re getting and how they have a longer, life—not just a career which may be short, as Carl said—but a life that is supported by the money they make.

JESSICA BERMAN: Yeah. Well, actually really excited about a program that we rolled out in 2024 called Beyond the Field, where you take players who raise their hand and say, “Yes, we want to learn more about how to be more well-rounded while we are still playing; to seize this opportunity while we are in the limelight.” And as you know, once you retire, the opportunities that are thrown in front of you become things that you have to seek out. Not that they aren’t there anymore. But while you are an active player—and I advocated for so much of this with our NHL players when I was at the National Hockey League—which is to try to help players understand, yes, your bandwidth is limited because you are a professional athlete, and literally anyone in the world would take a meeting with you today. You could call the CEO of any company. You could meet with senators, you could meet with mayors, you could meet with governors. Take advantage of the opportunity you have.

But by the way, it also helps you while you are playing. It helps you speak to media. It helps you get endorsement deals from sponsors. It helps you in so many ways to develop your leadership skills in the locker room, to make you more resilient, to make you more confident. And so, we’ve taken these players and actually brought together all of our sponsors to say, “Hey, can you help us curate a curriculum that will basically enhance the lives of our players?”

And so one of our partners is a financial services partner, Ally Bank, is helping us and has delivered for those players a curriculum around investment, around how to manage your money. Finally, now our players actually have money to manage, which is exciting. Just four short years ago, I think, five years ago, I think our players were making like $5,000 a year, which is insane. And they all had side jobs and were very distracted. I’m sure you remember those days.

LIZ SHULER: No more side hustles.

JESSICA BERMAN: No more side hustles. Yeah, that was, that’s what I walked into. It was like, “Okay, we have some work to do here.” But yeah, I mean, I really think it’s just our responsibility, candidly, as a professional sports league to leverage the power of our partners to enhance the lives of our players while they are still playing. And because these resources did not exist five years ago, we’ve actually made an intentional effort to outreach to our former players who really built this league but didn’t have the opportunity to play in it while it was an actual business that generated revenue that could actually pay them a livable wage. And so we’re in the process of building that out and bringing our partners along on the journey.

CHARLES BLOW: Liz now that the NIL agreements are able to be entered into by people in college, even high school, what is the unionization prospects for people, for those, those groups of people, young people, possibly high school.

LIZ SHULER: Yeah. I think there is a conversation to be had about what a model looks like for the future that puts workers at the center, that they can end up having agency and, you know, some voice and control in that process. Because, I think, Carl said it was sort of like the Wild West. And we think, gosh, the model of collective bargaining could really apply here. You know, if you could have a consortium of players that really took the power into their own hands, right, and be able to, have their own voice and their own standing. I don’t know what that looks like for the future, right? And all I know is that being in a union gives you a place for collective action. We’re in the business of collective action. And I know the NFL Players Association has done an incredible job. You know, using that scale to negotiate better benefits for their players, and other athletes organizations do as well. But, you know, the labor movement has been in this collective action business a long time. You think about a hundred years ago when workers were trying to find training to access the skills that they needed in whatever industry they were in. The unions, the guilds, you know, professionalized that work and, and was a place where workers could go and they could trust that they weren’t, you know, in a predatory environment that someone was trying to play them.

You know, it was, it’s more like, no, these are workers, these—this is us. Right? So whether it’s training and upskilling, whether it’s collecting your, your pension moneys and amassing that and investing it at scale so that you can influence the economy. I think there’s just a limitless potential for the way new models could be created. You know, as these industries are evolving.

CHARLES BLOW: Carl, you are also in tech business. You founded Rayze, an app that connects nonprofits, businesses, donors and volunteers more efficiently. What inspired you in that space?

CARL NASSIB: Yeah. Rayze is the best. Rayze is my baby. And I was volunteering one day, and I realized that, you know, giving back to your community needs to be a lot more easy, and, and quick and without friction. And so when I was playing with the Buccaneers, I kind of first thought about the idea of—it was about five years ago. And then it kind of snowballed into this ecosystem to where I learned more about, the, you know, the philanthropy industry as a whole. I think for the nonprofit people in here, everyone understands that finding new donors, new volunteers, individuals, is, as you know, as difficult as it’s ever been. We really need to support our local nonprofits. And so I wanted to make that process as, you know, easy as possible. We now incorporate corporate giving—corporations only account for 6% of all donations to nonprofits. And so we need to get that number way—I know people think that it’s 75%. It’s actually only 6%. And, you know, you mentioned something about, like, after the, you know, after your, your sport career is over, I do feel very, you know, blessed that I do have a next chapter. And it’s been very, very exciting.

CHARLES BLOW: So if I have $100.

CARL NASSIB: Yeah.

CHARLES BLOW: I want to give it to, you know, somewhere we’ll make an impact. How does Rayze help me do that?

CARL NASSIB: Yeah. So what’s really good for the individual, we really put the individual first. On Rayze, you can donate to, I think, 1.8 million nonprofits. We have over 80,000 volunteering opportunities you can get. If your company is on board, you get them to match it. We just instituted, your own personal donor advised fund called the, the Rayze wallet, to where you can put money, let it grow, for all those, finance people out there. So the benefit of it is, for the individual, you make all your donations from one place. And then when tax season comes around, you can, you know, export all your donations in an email, send it to your, to your, you know, your accountant. There it is. And it makes it very, very easy to get involved quickly, but do it, you know, in a savvy way, financially.

CHARLES BLOW: I’m downloading Rayze.

CARL NASSIB: You guys go download it.

CHARLES BLOW: As I get off this stage. It is R-A-Y-Z-E.

CARL NASSIB: Yes. All right. Rayze, go volunteer. Okay. And also give to the Trevor Project.

CHARLES BLOW: Liz, I wanted to ask you how tech plays a role in your organizing. You know, I can imagine it. It plays a huge role. But tell us about that.

LIZ SHULER: Yeah, well, we use a lot of tech tools, ourselves, to actually organize them and really democratize the use of technology for people on the ground who want to form unions. I mean, just you and a coworker is all it takes, right? In your workplace. And, so we have a tool, called Action Builder that we use that’s mobilly driven, that enables people to, kind of, you know, map out their worksites and who their coworkers are that they can join together with.

Our laws are so broken now, our labor laws, it takes a real act of courage to form a union, because often people are fired when they try to form a union. It’s sometimes a very high risk proposition. And, so, you know, tech tools are enablers and technology can be used for good, but it can also be used for evil, right? This notion of, you know, algorithmic management that we’re seeing in some workplaces, to monitor every second, you know, of a worker’s environment or, predictive analytics that are actually, you know, instituting forms of discrimination. And so we think that tech needs guardrails and that unions can actually be, and our collective bargaining, be a vehicle for making sure workers have a voice in how technology is used in the workplace. But also we can use technology for good to enable and help lift up the power of workers to join together and form unions.

CHARLES BLOW: So, Jessica, your season is starting again. How has the league and, you know, player advocacy grown since you’ve been at the helm?

JESSICA BERMAN: I think for the first time, female athletes in this country—finally—can be supported the way men have been for so long, to be able to train and play in professional work environments and actually perform at their best, and imagine a world where that is the case for future generations. What we’re seeing today and what is now taking the world by storm with women’s hockey and women’s soccer and women’s basketball and women’s golf. This is the product of an entire generation of these athletes training and playing in environments that you wouldn’t send your children to go and train or play in, and they’re still that good. Imagine 10, 15 years from now where we finally now have the investment and the resources for these players to be able to thrive as professional athletes, the platform they will have if they choose to use it,

to be able to advocate for even more change beyond what they do just by kicking a ball is what I’m so excited about, and hopefully my children will get to enjoy.

CHARLES BLOW: Great. While we’re on that high note of what could happen in the future. Liz, Carl, do either of you have something that you see coming in the future that you’re really excited about in the world of player advocacy?

LIZ SHULER: I am excited about women’s sports, where it’s going, and the women athletes who have stepped up and taken enormous risks and shown such strength to make it succeed. And I just see the activism on the rise. They’re willing to speak out, and from a worker perspective, I think about the solidarity that women athletes have shown in particular, to workers all across the economy and nine in 10 young people under the age of 30 support unions. That’s recent polling. It’s a high of like, you know, 60 years. The popularity of unions is really surging. And so I see these women athletes, especially in the next generation, being strong union members, getting out there, speaking out, speaking their truth and, you know, doing it unabashedly and, and they’re unafraid. And so, I just, that gives me great hope.

CARL NASSIB: I mean to echo that, I’ve, you know, been somebody who’s been a beneficiary of immense allyship and I, you know, leaving the NFL, I, you know, saw the growth of women being employed at, you know, a major, major roles, right? It’s really, really important that women have allies and that that’s not just them fighting for their rights. It’s, you know, male coaches, players having respect for their careers, for, for their acumen and for their talents. So I that, that’s what really excites me.

CHARLES BLOW: Let’s give our guests a big round of applause.

[applause]

Accessibility Statement

Transcript

HILARY PENNINGTON: Hi. I’m Hilary Pennington. Thank you for joining us for “On What Matters.” I’m the executive vice president for programs at the Ford Foundation. I’m a white, middle-aged, small woman with short hair and a pink dress, and my pronouns are she/hers. Today I’ll be speaking with grantee and Ford Global Fellow and my friend, Teresa Njoroge, about her work to restore dignity and hope for people who have been involved in Kenya’s justice system. Welcome, Teresa.

TERESA NJOROGE: Thank you very much for having me, Hilary. I am so excited to have this conversation. My name is Teresa Njoroge: founder, CEO, Clean Start Solutions Limited, based in Kenya. We work with women, girls, and children who are impacted by the criminal justice system. My pronouns: she/her. I’m a tall black woman in her 40s.

HILARY PENNINGTON: I’m so excited for this conversation. Let’s get started. So my first question, Teresa: You do such brave and inspiring work, and you do it really to address and to fight how the criminal justice system ends up making it a crime to be poor. Can you tell us a little bit more about your work and how you do it?

TERESA NJOROGE: This work came out of the proximity with the very poor, the very marginalized. Those who are not included, but get such injustice when they get imprisoned, not because they are criminals, but because of their social economic status. Because they get into prison due to petty offenses. In Kenya, 90% of those behind bars are in due to petty offenses such as loitering, selling on the streets, making local liquor, you know, and it’s those who can’t or won’t pay bribes, or can’t afford the fines. And I got into this work due to the proximity with them when I personally got wrongfully and maliciously prosecuted and ended up being falsely incarcerated to serve a one-year sentence, a sentence that I served with my three-month-old daughter.

HILARY PENNINGTON: With your three-month-old daughter!

TERESA NJOROGE: Indeed. And it was such a difficult time. And in the course of that one year, meeting hundreds of children who had accompanied their mothers as well behind bars and hearing the cry of these women: “How can we get justice?”

HILARY PENNINGTON: Yeah.

TERESA NJOROGE: Why is it that I’m in prison because I’m poor?

HILARY PENNINGTON: Yes.

TERESA NJOROGE: What do I do when I leave prison to ensure that I don’t come right back? And so we’ve got to change the laws. These laws that criminalize poverty.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Yes.

TERESA NJOROGE: And these laws, unfortunately, are laws that we inherited when Kenya gained its independence from our colonialists, the British. And these laws continue to sit in Kenya’s penal code. Post my incarceration and post my exoneration, I formed Clean Start and one of the big pillars of our work is systemic change. To do away with the systemic barriers that criminalize the poor. And we have had such success because, for the first time, we’ve got a bill in Parliament that’s about to become law. And this will be such a huge win for Kenya because it will then delete all the petty offenses that are still in Kenya’s penal code. So that’s one of the greatest pillars and works of advocacy. And, you know, systemic change that Clean Start does.

HILARY PENNINGTON: So if that were all you had done, that would be amazing.

TERESA NJOROGE: Indeed.

HILARY PENNINGTON: But it isn’t.

TERESA NJOROGE: It isn’t.

HILARY PENNINGTON: And so you also have created an organization through Clean Start that helps put people back on their feet.

TERESA NJOROGE: Exactly.

HILARY PENNINGTON: And you chose to make it a social enterprise. So tell us a little bit about why you made that choice.

TERESA NJOROGE: So the social enterprise is to really give these women a soft landing and decent means of livelihood so they won’t go right back into the actions and activities that led them into prison in the first place. The social enterprise model sees to it that our constituents, our beneficiaries are not dependent. Because at the end of the day, they also want and need the dignity to provide for themselves, to work and provide for themselves, not just being given. And so we set up these businesses where these women find this decent means of livelihood and provide for themselves. And that’s the model that we have. So we turn the grants that we get and some of the capital that we get into the businesses that help these women have decent means of livelihood.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Which is amazing.

TERESA NJOROGE: Yeah.

HILARY PENNINGTON: And I know that as you do that, you also partner with government. Tell us a little bit about how you do that and why you do that.

TERESA NJOROGE: To be able to do any meaningful work that is scalable in the area of social justice, a huge responsibility falls on governments. You know, when you look at providing employment opportunities, ensuring that poverty rates are on the decline. Health care, you know, and access for all, education, being equal. And the supply being available for all. You know, these are responsibilities that truly fall on government and for the constituents that we work with, a majority of those who are behind bars, they didn’t get access to these opportunities. It’s the lack of education. It’s the lack of economic opportunities. It’s the lack of health care that’s available for all. And so at the end of the day, Clean Start is just coming in to support government filling this gap.

HILARY PENNINGTON: You’re filling a gap.

TERESA NJOROGE: We’re filling a gap that the government is not being able to provide to these millions of people who are at the bottom of the pyramid. And we partner with government to take proactive action to provide the services that they are meant to provide for these constituents. And so we are working with government, to ensure that we’ve got opportunities when it comes to employment. You know, 65% of the incarcerated are youth who had never had a first time job ever. And so Clean Start comes in to fill that gap to ensure that the youth are finding employment. These women, girls, and children are also finding constructive things to do. And besides working directly with government to take proactive action to fill in these gaps, we’re also working with government to see to it that, you know, these policies shift.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Yes.

TERESA NJOROGE: And we’re implementing these policies that we’re developing. And so those are the two main areas that Clean Start works with government, to see to it that this is long-term, it’s scalable, and it’s sustainable.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Well, I love that. I mean, you’re, you’re, you have a model that shines the light on how government can work better. And that’s amazing. So let’s talk a little bit about what role philanthropy has played in your work. You talk about the importance of not being dependent. What role has philanthropy played in your work? Where has it been helpful? Where has it been harmful?

TERESA NJOROGE: Philanthropy is such a critical piece of this work. Clean Start has come this far–we’re about to celebrate our 10th year anniversary next year–and, were it not for positive philanthropy, we wouldn’t have come this far. And so, when the philanthropists lean in to listen and learn, and not use their position negatively, as a power point or power brokerage, because we’ve had those instances where…

HILARY PENNINGTON: Yes, sometimes we do think we know it all.

TERESA NJOROGE: You know, and unfortunately, it’s the people on the ground, the people who are doing this on a day-to-day basis, who are close to these problems, who truly know what needs to be done. You know, and honestly speaking, what has worked for us is multi-year grants, unrestricted funding and especially funding the operations and not just the programming. You know, that really works. And funders and philanthropists who listen to our feedback, who journey with us, who journey alongside us as our partners. You know, as our partners in this work, that makes all the difference. But where there has been a power play, it has really worked adversely. And the losers are the day-to-day poor people who truly would have benefited from that dollar coming their way.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Well, I love what you’re describing because you are talking about a partnership that puts dignity and impact at the center. But you can’t achieve that through small-scale support over short periods of time, especially in the kind of work that you do.

TERESA NJOROGE: Yeah, yeah, it’s long-term. It’s endless, you know, so we’ve got to look at it from a long-term perspective. And so when the philanthropy comes in, we’re in this for the long haul. So they need to come in and look at it from a long-term perspective, and, and help us to do the distance.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Well one day, maybe some of the women that are starting enterprises with you will themselves be philanthropists, politicians, changemakers. So thank you for this. And we’re going to move—We’ve got so many questions from people across social media who want to hear more. So the first question comes from Dr. Aghan Oscar from Nairobi, Kenya. And he asks you, “How does mediation and arbitration fit into the judicial system?”

TERESA NJOROGE: That’s such an incredible question from Dr. Oscar, because mediation should be the model and the unfortunate part…

HILARY PENNINGTON: As opposed to incarceration.

TERESA NJOROGE: As opposed to incarceration. Incarceration and putting people into custody should truly be the last resort. But unfortunately, Hilary, we are overusing custodial sentencing. And in our case, where we’re dealing with women, girls, and children, this separates and breaks families, and the children who are the invisible victims of this overuse of custodial sentencing really are traumatized, suffer, and are on pathways to either the juvenile justice system or the criminal justice system themselves. And so mediation is so key and at Clean Start, we truly advocate and push for non-custodial sentencing, mediation, and alternative dispute resolution. It works. And we’ve got evidence because Kenya is always on to decongesting prisons. And I want to take a case in point, during the COVID time.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Yeah.

TERESA NJOROGE: We had to decongest the prisons. Our prisons are always over-congested. So during COVID, there was no other way but to decongest the prisons. A huge population was let out. We didn’t have increase in crime. On the contrary.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Fascinating.

TERESA NJOROGE: You know, people were with their families. But as soon as we were done with COVID, we got right back to congest our prisons. Why? Again, the poor, the vulnerable, filling in those spaces. So a lot of the cases, to be honest, can be resolved through alternative dispute resolution and mediation. So this is the way to go. And I must commend the first woman chief justice, Lady Justice Martha Koome. She’s doing incredible work.

HILARY PENNINGTON: You have an amazing chief justice.

TERESA NJOROGE: Oh my goodness. And she is a champion and visionary around mediation and alternative dispute resolution.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Our mental models limit us. You know, that’s such a powerful question.

TERESA NJOROGE: Yeah.

HILARY PENNINGTON: All right, so then our second question comes from Zimbabwe, from Makaita Chikamhi Magarezano, and Makaita wants to know what you believe are the most pressing issues facing the criminal justice system today and what steps should we take to address them effectively?

TERESA NJOROGE: I love that it comes from a different part of, you know, within the African continent, because what I’d like to say is that we’ve got very similar problems as much as the context is different. You see a lot of African countries still have the penal code from the colonialists. To be honest, the penal code we inherited was primarily to subjugate the citizens to a master who just wanted to control as they took over what belonged to the natives. It no longer serves us. Africa needs to rethink a justice system that suits its own citizens. A lot of those laws are out.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Yes.

TERESA NJOROGE: You know, the British, for example, don’t even, no longer use some of the laws we’re still applying that they left with us. Honestly, they don’t have place anymore in our books. So as a continent, let us rethink justice. Let us rethink laws that suit us. And honestly, before the colonizers came, we had our own justice system, you know, which was the barazas and people would resolve their issues.

HILARY PENNINGTON: They didn’t put people outside the community.

TERESA NJOROGE: Exactly. We can still use some of those. It’s still applicable. We’re very community-oriented, and we could still go back to that. And, you know, we could still resolve our issues. So let’s find ways that work for us and, you know, for our culture.

HILARY PENNINGTON: I love that. You know, I think you, you may have just answered the last question, but it’s from Honorable J.J. Opondo from Uganda. We did get questions from all over the continent for you, and he is similarly asking, “How can we fix the broken pillars of the criminal justice system in Africa?” And, and, I love that you are starting to go towards a way to reimagine things for a continent.

TERESA NJOROGE: Exactly. That suit the people. Honestly, that’s the basis of looking at this. We’ve got to have a justice system that’s people-centered. It’s about the people. So let’s have a justice system and pillars that work for the people. I mean, it’s about the people. So it’s got to be suitable to the people.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Absolutely.

TERESA NJOROGE: Yeah. Yeah.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Oh. Thank you. Thank you so, so much. You know, every time I see you, you give me so much inspiration and energy. I think your vision and the work that you’re doing is amazing. But I have to ask you because it’s hard work.

TERESA NJOROGE: Yeah.

HILARY PENNINGTON: And it’s a hard time. You know, it’s a time of so much division and suffering. So I want to ask you the final question, which I ask everyone on these interviews, which is: What gives you hope?

TERESA NJOROGE: Wow. Yeah, indeed. There’s so much going on across the world, which is heartbreaking to watch. Community for me has been such a beacon of hope. Hard-edged hope. Working and, you know, being with women who wind up poor, don’t have access to–whether it’s finance, justice, and just so many other social needs that they’d love to have, every single day–it’s seeing their resilience. It’s coming together as a community and together finding those solutions. And at the end of the day, knowing that the solutions lie with us. And then, of course, the many partners and allies who come and lean in and journey alongside us as community to bring the change. You know, at the end of the day, it will take the humility of each and every one of us to admit that we need to have a different lens and reimagine what this world could look like and be. And truly have love to see to it that we are audacious enough to bring that world to being.

HILARY PENNINGTON: I love that, and I love the image you paint of, of the women in the front and people coming along behind them and alongside them. So thank you, thank you so much for your work, for your spirit, for the world you’re calling into being. It’s really, really a privilege to know you and to spend time with you. Thank you.

TERESA NJOROGE: My pleasure, Hilary. Thank you so much for having me on “On What Matters.”

HILARY PENNINGTON: The “On What Matters” series now features over 20 social justice leaders discussing critical issues like humanitarian aid, restorative justice, and disability rights. Visit our website to watch the full series. And thank you to everyone who has joined these conversations.

End of transcript.

Accessibility Statement

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Please welcome to the stage, Charles Blow.

[applause]

[Charles Blow, a Black man with a gray beard wearing a black suit, Host]

CHARLES BLOW: Hello. And. Oh, okay. Hello and welcome to “Ideas at Ford with Charles Blow,” where we bring together some of the best thinkers and activists who offer ideas on how to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Tonight’s topic is comedy for culture. Now, we don’t always think about comedy when we think about social justice, but comedy—whether it is stand-up or written satire or sitcoms, sketch shows, movies, stage plays—have been central to social justice movements across time.

And tonight, I am pleased to be joined by comedian, former Daily Show correspondent—alright this is not The Daily Show—alright—and the host of CNN’s Have I Got News for You, Roy Wood Jr.  

[applause] 

And stand-up comedian, actress, and advocate, Joyelle Nicole Johnson.

[applause] 

Okay. So let’s start with a question for both of you. The list of comedians who have been part of social justice movements, that have made social justice, like, integral to their comedy is incredibly long. And I’m curious as to whether any of those comedians influenced your careers and if that influence bleeds over into the work that you do. I’ll start with you Roy. 

[Roy Wood Jr., a Black man with short hair wearing a green double breasted suit Comedian, Producer, and Writer]

ROY WOOD JR: George Carlin comes to mind to start. And Joyelle and I were talking about Carlin backstage, and it wasn’t so much that I put Carlin above Dick Gregory. It was that I had more access to George Carlin because, you know, HBO free preview weekends in the ‘80s and in the ‘90s, that’s how you discovered new comedians, is that once a year, everybody in America had HBO, and they would put their best foot forward and they would show Comics Relief. And that’s where you got Robin Williams and Whoopi and Billy Crystal, and then they would sneak in a Sinbad every now and then. And so that’s how I just started learning about those people. 

Dick Gregory came a little bit later in my career, once I started doing stand-up and I was doing morning radio in Birmingham as I was building, you know, we would go down to Selma and do like a comedy show or a banquet or something every year during the bridge crossing annual celebration. And so, that is where I met Dick Gregory, and that’s where I kind of saw what he did. And it’s hard to say, you know, like “comedian-activist” versus “activist that happens to be hilarious.” And I always kind of saw him as a little bit of that, more so than just a straight up comedian. But I mean, you know, in terms of influence, it was like, yeah, it would be nice if the joke can make somebody think. I don’t, I don’t believe that any of my material is going to—I don’t think there’s a golden bullet joke that’s gonna change everything. But if I can get you to maybe look at it differently, then it’s a win.  

CHARLES BLOW: Joyelle—

[Joyelle Nicole Johnson, African-American woman in a bright pink suit with her hair is in an afro puff, Comedian, Writer, and Actress]

JOYELLE NICOLE JOHNSON: I have the same exact answer. I mean, I was a latchkey kid and my mother actually paid for HBO, you know? 

[laughter]

I wasn’t watching it for free. I didn’t even know about that. So I would be watching stuff I was not supposed to be watching at a very young age, like Taxicab Confessions and stuff like that. I’m like 12 years old, you know? And George Carlin was the first access I had to television because, you know, he’s on HBO. And I just remember I was like “That! I want to do that. But oh my gosh, that looks so scary.” And then my mother was like, “Well, there’s this comedian, Dick Gregory, who’s coming to town and you need to see him.” So I’m watching George Carlin when I’m 13, and she took me to see Dick Gregory when I was 15, and I was just like, “Oh, I’m doing that, baby.” Yeah so. 

ROY WOOD JR: So I wish I would have had that. 

CHARLES BLOW: You wish you would have had HBO for real? 

ROY WOOD JR: I literally did not know my hometown had a comedy club until I got to college, because that part, like the lifestyle part of the newspaper where you look and see the movies and here’s where to shop and so—that was—I didn’t look at that until December. That was the only time you even thought about going over the mountain to where all of the suburbs and the white people were, and like, that’s like, I never—I watched stand-up every day and had no idea that it was happening where I lived. So, I mean, I think a lot of what you’re exposed to, it’s partly what you can find but it’s also what your parents choose to expose you to. And I’m a child of two educators, but they both—every civil rights march you can name, my mama was there. My father covered it as a journalist. They didn’t laugh a lot, like that wasn’t…

[laugher]

It was just different. 

CHARLES BLOW: You’re giving us a bad rap. I don’t know, I don’t know if I like that,

ROY WOOD JR: But that’s where my scope for what’s wrong in the world came from. Because I didn’t, you know, my dad, like, we rode in the car and we listened to NPR and AM news like, yeah, we didn’t listen to soul records. Maybe on cleanup day on a Saturday in the house. But yeah, in the car we was listening to proper, like, news radio. 

JOYELLE NICOLE JOHNSON: I mean, we listened to proper news radio, but my mother also was the person who tortured me with talk radio. She’d be like, all right, you have to listen to both sides. So not only did we listen to the left, but she had me listening to Bob Grant and—yeah, word—we’re not cheering for him. But I feel you. Bob Grant, Rush Limbaugh and other stuff. And I’d be like, “Mom, can we please listen to music?” and she’s like,“You need to listen to this, and you need to understand what they’re saying.” And I didn’t know it was going to prepare me for my future.

ROY WOOD JR: Yeah. It did.   

CHARLES BLOW: Roy let me ask you about some of your stand-up. You have discussed criminal justice quite a bit, both in stand-up and also on The Daily Show. Why that issue? 

ROY WOOD JR: I think that I sit in a unique position where—so I got arrested when I was 19 for stealing credit cards when I was in college. And so we would take credit cards. I worked at the campus post office, would take credit cards, go buy some clothes, sell the clothes, take the money, buy pizza. That was the big operation that we were in. And I got, I got suspended from school for a semester. And that’s when I, that’s when I got into stand-up. And so you come back into college and I graduate with a degree in journalism, but now you have this conviction on your record that you’re dealing with. And I was blessed enough to work in radio, and entertainment is one of the few mediums where your ability to do the job supersedes any mistake that, that you’ve made. 

The level of disposability with which we treat people who have made mistakes in this country is abhorrent to me. And it’s not something like I went on a crusade for. But it was just anywhere I have an opportunity or a pocket to do something, I’m going to try and gravitate towards that a little bit. You know, I was blessed because when I started stand-up, I was 19, I had a probation officer that actually understood that this was something I enjoy doing. So he granted me travel permits that you’re not supposed to approve so that I could travel the South on a Greyhound sleeping in bus stations just to do shows. So recidivism—there are more people in this country going on probation than in prison. And probation, in a way, is set up as a, as a trap for you to get back into jail. And so—because that’s where the profits are—there’s no profits in letting people walk around with an ankle bracelet. And so for me, that became the thing that I was like, I don’t know, it just always annoyed me. So I just figured out ways within The Daily Show when it fit. You know, we went to, we went to Chicago and we did a walk along with the group of gang interrupters who basically go block to block and intervene and basically mediate tensions between street gangs. And they’re all ex-gang members themselves. And so being able to tell the story of Black people doing something about Black-on-Black crime, in spite of what is normally said in the media about it, that to me that helps. And if I can—and the only way I know to do that is to crack a joke. I sold a television show to Comedy Central that we set in Alabama, where the justice system is not cool. 

[laughter]

And the show was essentially me playing a version of the probation officer I had. Because when you look at the way law enforcement is presented through the lens of entertainment, it’s “catch the criminal, convict the criminal.” 85 to 90% of television shows are about how people end up in jail or putting people in jail. There’s very few shows that are set up about what happens on the other side when you’re trying to rebuild your life. With the exception of The Last O.G. with Tracy Morgan, I have to give a shout out. It doesn’t. That doesn’t happen.

So it was like, “Oh, well, I’ll, let’s just do a TV show about that”—”Oh no, you should do a show where you’re a Black guy and you do. You’re, you’re a pastor.” I’m like—

CHARLES BLOW: That’s how they sound? 

ROY WOOD JR: Yeah, that’s how they be pitching the show. So, I mean, you—they say you write what you know, so I know the side of this country and the judgment that people can put at your feet sometimes, you know, that you are. They try to make you the sum of your mistakes. You know, and you’re not that and it’s, it’s funny because you can also have the same people who will turn around and say that they’re for prison reform. Well, you cannot be for prison reform if you’re not trying to hire returning citizens, if you’re not setting up programs to give them opportunities—like it’s not, the things all run hand in hand.

CHARLES BLOW: Joyelle, you’ve worked with Abortion Access Front, which uses comedy to fight for reproductive justice.

JOYELLE NICOLE JOHNSON: Yes.

CHARLES BLOW: How does that work? What is the set like in front of an abortion clinic?

JOYELLE NICOLE JOHNSON: Oh, okay, so the Abortion Access Front is a group of comedians, mostly, started by a woman named Lizz Winstead, who is one of the creators of a little show called The Daily Show. Yes. So, two women created The Daily Show. A lot of people don’t know that. But, Lizz Winstead—yeah, clap it up for women creating things. 

[applause] 

CHARLES BLOW: And Madeleine Smithberg. 

JOYELLE NICOLE JOHNSON: Yes. And, Lizz is a huge proponent for abortion rights. And when she wanted to start this organization formerly called Lady Parts Justice, she needed a bunch of comedians to get together to, you know, figure out ways to normalize the word abortion. And going back to what, Roy was saying about mistakes and people being the sums of your mistakes in your life. You know, just because you had a pregnancy and you didn’t want it, we demonize people who have abortions, and Lizz’s goal was to not only to stop that, but to also go out to abortion clinics and see what they need and be there for their support. So what we do as the organization, we did a tour of 16 blue cities in red states. The first time we went on that tour of 16 cities, and we would be doing these shows, and the clinic workers would come and we’d do a talkback after—very similar to this—and they would just say what they needed in the community.

And one of the, the things that, like, hit me the most that they would say is “No one ever comes” —you know, we demonize people who have abortions, we demonize people who support people who have abortions. And I knew that, at my very young age that I was like, “I want to be a person that helps that.” And also, my family history is my mother was a nurse and my father was an Ob-Gyn whose specialty was abortions. But he was also a deadbeat dad, which is weird. 

[laugher]

My deadbeat dad was a doctor, so. They were doing abortions in Newark, New Jersey, in the late ‘70s, before Roe was passed. My mother said after it got passed, they were still seeing women coming into the hospital from complications from trying to do a self-abortion at home. So as young as I remember, my mother always told me she’s like, “If anything ever happens, if you need me for something, if you make a mistake, let me know.”

And I got pregnant when I was in college. And I told my mother, I called her, I was like, “Mom, I’m pregnant.” And she was just like, “What do you want to do?” You know, she gave me that choice immediately and did not make, did not judge me, did not make me feel bad about it. And I was able to have a safe, what I like to call a rich white lady abortion. I didn’t see a bill. I was in a doctor’s office. I didn’t see protesters. So I, when I got the opportunity with Lizz to work with this organization, I was like, I want to be able to support people who didn’t have the experience that I had. You know, because it’s so important when we’re escorting women into clinics and Mississippi and all these places that are getting yelled at and shamed and judged, I can be out there for them. And so while I’m not doing stand-up in front of the clinic, I am yelling at protesters. And it’s so much fun, you know?

[applause]

CHARLES BLOW: So, Roy, you grew up in the South—Birmingham? 

ROY WOOD JR: Yeah.

CHARLES BLOW: I also grew up in the South. There’s a kind of particular comedic sensibility  in the South. I think we have a kind of own vernacular cadence. 

ROY WOOD JR: Yeah. 

CHARLES BLOW: And it can sometimes feel like people are not only laughing with us, but laughing at us. And maybe that’s part of the comedy. How does your southernness play into your comedy? 

ROY WOOD JR: Well, it’s well, first off, with journalism, they, they send us to these voice and diction classes, in the theater department to kind of, in a way, kind of beat the accent out of you and, and it—but it wasn’t on some sort of “Hide your culture. Be ashamed of who you are.” If you’re in broadcast journalism and you’re trying to get hired in Arizona to be a reporter, and you can on that, “Maybe I’m told, like this man, tell you what’s going to happen. We was out there, man. They was gonna shoot. We seen a gun, and then the dude had a gun and then back to yell like, back to y’all.” 

[laughter] 

You can’t report like that. So, so they gave us these voice and diction classes to kind of give you a bit of a baseline. And then when I got into radio, morning radio was completely different because you’re supposed to lean into who you are because you want to be relatable to the people that your—that are listening to you. So it kind of gave me a bit of a code switch in a way where comedically in the South, if you’re trying to make money in comedy, you cannot perform for one demographic every week. What I started learning is that if you were able to be relatable, it didn’t matter how you sounded. You know, there are people that are always going to make assumptions about you because you’re from the South, and because they don’t view the South as a smart or intelligent place. But that’s also why I’m always claiming Birmingham. I’m always talking about Alabama. Most of the charity work that I do is for charities in Alabama, and it’s not against any other charity, it’s that I know there’s only so many people from the state that have tentacles to be able to bring in money from the other 49 back into causes that are happening within the state, because we need outside help.

So, you know, I wear being from the South as a badge of honor. And so it’s not something I’ve ever, you know, run away from. But what I can’t be naive about is that my job as a comedian is to get you to connect with me and laugh with me as quickly as possible. That’s the objective. Ideally, from the time you get on stage, within the first 30 seconds, if you cooking, you should be able to do it in 10 seconds. And if my accent is something that’s going to keep you from doing that, then the flip is to talk about something that you’re into. If I—if I’m talking —like if I drink a little bit, my accent comes out more. So if it’s a third show night somewhere, if I talk about something that you care about first, then you at least know that I care about the things you care about. And if nothing else, you will assume me to be competent in spite of how I might sound, you know? So it’s—it becomes a weird sociology game of how much of myself can I be and how fast and still get you on board? Because if you’re not listening and you think I’m stupid, you’re not comprehending the joke.

And now 30 seconds is 90 seconds and I still haven’t gotten the first laugh. Now I’m in trouble as a performer on stage, and the goal is to make the people laugh. So. Like the biggest change between Black and white crowds, for me is with white crowds sometimes I will talk slower because I cannot assume every white person to have so many Black friends that you can keep up with the different tempos of Black conversation.

JOYELLE NICOLE JOHNSON: That’s real. 

ROY WOOD JR: And it’s crazy but like, even as a Black American man from the South, I didn’t meet my first Latino till the seventh grade. I didn’t meet my first Caribbean Black person until college at FAMU. So even catching up with patois, like, like “I’m Trini,” I’m like, “Oh, what is that?” Like, I don’t know, you’re talking too fast like that. So if I felt that within the Black diaspora, then I have to assume that that’s happening when I do a show in the mountains of Kentucky when I first started out, so I can’t come on, “Hey, what’s going on, man? You look good, man. What’s going on with the tie?” versus “Hey, sir, what’s up with the tie?” It’s the same energy.

CHARLES BLOW: But I like that second one too, though. 

ROY WOOD JR: But yeah, but is that really who I am, or is that who I need to be in that split second to get him to pay attention? And now that he’s with me, when I come back later in the show, “Man what’s going, tell me one more thing about the tie, what’s going?” Now I can be a little bit more myself. So I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s a code switch or if it’s just a matter of using people’s biases against them to get them to open up to hearing you. 

[applause]

CHARLES BLOW: Wow. Joyelle, I want to talk to you about—I came across this book. It’s published in 2002, and it’s called A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice. And it argues that because social media has made access to comedy more universal, and that that explosion in access kind of came of age at the same time that some of these social justice movements, like Black Lives Matter, came of age, that that social justice is kind of built into the DNA of some of the newer, younger comedians who exist primarily online. Do you think that’s true?

JOYELLE NICOLE JOHNSON: I mean, I think it depends on the person that you’re watching, because I feel like a lot of the social media comics—we were just talking about this backstage, how the difference between somebody who’s blown up on social media versus people like us who actually were in the stand-up trenches and came up learning stand-up and studying stand-up and studying the craft—is that, those people can talk about what they want to talk about. They don’t have to worry about an audience because of the fact that they’re doing it into a TV screen or a phone, you know, and then their audience comes to what they want to. But if I am talking to all of you, I need to find a common denominator right here, right now. So it seems like it’s just a different, it’s just a different situation versus being—live stand-up comedy, there’s nothing that’s going to compare to having a live audience in front of you and being able to make the audience—you’re not going to find the same thing funny that you’re going to find. And the two of you might have nothing in common, but I need to be able to make both of you laugh. They don’t have to do that on their screens at home. So I just think that’s just the bare difference is that we’re performing in front of live stand-up crowds, and they don’t have to do that.

ROY WOOD JR: I think also, if we’re talking about the newer generation of comedians or entertainers or digital content creators or influencers or whatever, I think that. It’ll be interesting to see over the next four years, because I don’t believe that anger and outrage are going to be enough to sustain a performance or a through line through any type of performative piece. It’ll be interesting to see the evolution of humor, because now this is where the real work comes. Because now you juggling dynamite, because now you’re trying to make a point, but you also need to make people laugh. And the people that prioritize the laugh over the politics, the politics will slip in there on its own. And I think the ease of setting up a camera—to your point of a live show and feeling that rejection and living in it and going home and knowing that no one in that room is going to remember you. That’s the—that’s the beauty of bombing, is that—

[laugher]

No one has a favorite bad comedian. 

JOYELLE NICOLE JOHNSON: Right? Yeah. 

ROY WOOD JR: You have comedians you hate, but that’s political. But just if you heard a bad joke at a comedy club, you’re not going to retain that. So everybody—most audiences—the new performers have to understand that audiences have a goldfish memory and, and make the point funny. You can’t just live in the political, “Yeah, yeah!” Like that’s not going to be enough. And I and—I fear that a lot of creators have fallen into that style of writing and presenting their, their viewpoint. And people show up live and even you don’t know when you like, even when you’re not sure whether or not a meal was good. You know, when it wasn’t great. And that, to me, could affect live show ticket sales and people’s level of give a damn and people’s desire to pay attention to stuff. You know, I’ve had to like— 

CHARLES BLOW: You don’t want these bad comedians to drag you down. 

ROY WOOD JR: Well, I’m not saying they’re bad. I’m just saying you have to change the playing style now. It’s like when the NFL started getting more Black quarterbacks. Okay, well, you need faster linemen because the quarterback’s not standing still no more. So what adjustment are you going to make? And you’re also dealing with algorithms and it’s two totally different audiences that are going to be shown that video simply because of the wording of it. So how to even get your message to make sure that it reaches the people is a whole new hurdle that I don’t even think we’ve figured out yet, because they keep changing the algorithm.

CHARLES BLOW: How do you think it is that comedy is able to give people a fresh take on a familiar or decades-old issue? So you’re working on the issue of abortion. It’s been around for a while. It’s an old issue. We’ve been fighting about it for a long time. How is it that comedy is able to break through and give a fresh take, or make people enter the issue in a different way and see it differently?

JOYELLE NICOLE JOHNSON: I think you just have to make it as personal as possible. That’s the way that I feel like I’m able to connect, because if I’m telling my abortion story, statistically, someone in here has also had an abortion and everyone loves someone who has had an abortion. So I think that if I’m personal enough and I can also be funny—which is the point, is to be funny—then I’m going to be able to connect with more than one person, because I’m telling a story that I know. So that’s what—that’s what I think is what change, what needs to change for comedy. Because observational humor has all been done. We’ve all—we’ve heard everything about an airplane that you could possibly talk about, you know, and while there are new takes about airplanes, sort of, we don’t really want to hear that anymore. So you might put your airplane joke at the beginning to let people be like, “Ha ha, yeehaw.” And then I’m going to get into my more personal takes on a hot button issue, such as, you know, abortion, race, and all that stuff that I like to talk about later in the set.

CHARLES BLOW: So Joyelle, we’re coming to an end now. I want to get your take on the future of all of this. What do you think that comedians can do going forward to drive social change in society?

JOYELLE NICOLE JOHNSON: No pressure. I never—I wanted to, you know, run towards the, the hot button topics. You know? I didn’t shirk that responsibility because of how I learned comedy. You know, if I’m watching George Carlin. And he made me—I mean, he made me question everything: politics, religion, I’m raising my hand in Sunday school and the teacher called my mother and was like, “Your daughter has to stop asking questions,” because I was, like, disturbing the class and getting everybody riled up. So, I mean, it’s the constant question of authority. And when we have fans and we make people laugh, we take people off-guard and we can actually get a message through. When somebody is laughing, your heart is open, your, your mouth is open. I’m putting my opinion into your body, you know, and I think that—that’s what needs to never stop, is the question of authority and the making fun of authority, especially when they’re in the room right next to you, you know?

CHARLES BLOW: Give a round of applause. And I want to thank all of you for being here. This is our last show of the year, but not of the season. Not of the season. So we hope you come back next month. Thank you so much for coming out.

[applause]

Accessibility Statement

Transcript

ANNOUNCER
Please welcome to the stage Charles Blow.

[applause]

[Charles Blow, a Black man with a gray beard wearing a blue suit, Host]

CHARLES BLOW: Hello. Welcome to “Ideas at Ford with Charles Blow,” where we bring together some of the world’s best and most innovative thinkers who are offering ideas for how to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Tonight, we are tackling something that has become an epidemic in this country, which is the epidemic of loneliness. Here to discuss, we have county public health director, host of the America Dissected podcast and author of Healing Politics and Medicare for All, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. And, a comedian, writer, and actor you may know from their specials, Less Lonely and Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda on Netflix, Jes Tom.

CHARLES BLOW: So I’m going to start with you, Abdul. When people talk about a epidemic of loneliness and this being a public health crisis, what are they talking about?

[Abdul El-Sayed, an Arab American man with black hair, a beard and mustache wearing a white shirt and a blue jacket with a floral pocket square, Physician, Epidemiologist, and Public Servant] 

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: I think when we talk about human phenomena, it’s one thing to talk about one’s own experience, it’s another to talk about the emergent phenomena of all of us experiencing this thing at the same time. And what that points to is actually all of the circumstance within which we are not interacting, because like, there’s more people on this earth than there ever have been. The idea that we are more lonely from a just basic logical standpoint is kind of crazy. And we have all of this stuff that in theory is supposed to connect us. 

So what is it, right, about the anti-social media that we’re all a part of? What is it about the way that we’ve organized our society that means that we are literally “water, water everywhere without a drop to drink?” And I think that that experience of it is really what I think people are, are frustrated about, sad about, and increasingly anxious about.

CHARLES BLOW: But the effects of this are profound. The Surgeon General issued an advisory in May calling this a public health emergency. And, you know, he said that there’s a connection between this loneliness and worse mental health outcomes, but also that the levels of premature death rival those of smokers.

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Right. Right.

CHARLES BLOW: How do we engage with data like that to change how we think about loneliness, that it’s not just a sad thing that someone doesn’t have a connection, but that it is a threat to your health?

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Yeah, I applaud and appreciate Dr. Murthy for taking this on and bringing it to the valence of our public conversation. In public health, I think we’ve gotten a bit of a bad rap, if I may, during the pandemic, because we kind of forgot what we are supposed to do. I think in public health, we tried to be kind of a lukewarm version of medicine where we give you advice, and then you follow our advice. And if you don’t follow our advice, then we “tsk tsk” you and shame you, which is not really what public health was ever really about. Public health was really about trying to identify those phenomena that exist outside of us, but ultimately end up shaping us in some really big ways. So when you think about smoking, what did we do about smoking? Yes, we told people you shouldn’t smoke, but we also pursued a set of public policies that made smoking the kind of thing that people didn’t really want to do that much anymore. And that was a big victory. Similarly, when we think about loneliness, right, I think to ask the question of what is the public health intervention now? I really think that, you know, it’s one thing to tell somebody who’s lonely, “You should be less lonely, right?”

CHARLES BLOW: Their response is like, “Tell me about it.”

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: “Yeah, I agree.” But then why? What is it about the way we’ve built our lives? What is it about the fact that you have, you know, trillion dollar industries that exist to monetize our time, our eardrums, and our eyeballs? What is it about the infrastructure that tells us that we should stare at a screen when we wake up to check our email, go stare at a screen to talk to the people who emailed us, and then stare at a screen to watch somebody entertain us after we’ve gotten out of all of our screen meetings? Right. 

What is it about that system that needs to be deconstructed? What are the tools of subsidies? What are the tools of regulation that ought to be there to empower us and enable us? And I think taking this data and breaking out of the individual choices we make and asking the meta questions about why we’re all making them. That’s where I hope we end up. 

CHARLES BLOW: Jes, in your most recent…

[laughter] 

JES TOM: He’s a doctor. I’m a comedian.

[laughter] 

CHARLES BLOW: Balance, Jes. Balance. So your most recent off-Broadway show, Less Lonely, you grappled with a lot that I think boils down to the idea of connection, which is connection to self and how you identify yourself, connection in in terms of relationship, that you were transitioning as COVID pushed all of us into lockdown, and that that experience that all of us experience some level of isolation. You were experiencing a transformation and an isolation all at once. What has been your experience of loneliness in your journey?

[Jes Tom, an East Asian trans masculine person with tan skin and red hair wearing a brown over shirt over a white undershirt and blue jeans, Comedian, Writer, and Actor] 

JES TOM: Well, like you said, my show Less Lonely kind of meets me at the crux of these three different narratives, all pertaining to loneliness. One being my obsession with finding romantic love, like the love of my life, one being my, my gender transition, and then the last being that I was transitioning just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Which effectively means I was going through puberty for the second time in total isolation, which is actually a cool way to go through puberty as we’ve figured out. 

[laugher] 

And I actually had a pretty interesting experience of the pandemic with regards to loneliness and community, because before the pandemic, I was always so busy, and I lived far away from all of my friends. I lived in Queens, which is another country to people in Brooklyn. They will never come to visit you, they’ll lie. So, whereas before the pandemic, I was literally seeing, like, some of my best friends twice, three times a year. In the pandemic when everybody went online, it meant, like, all of my friends were suddenly in the same place. So actually, I weirdly became, like, very connected to people in isolation. And then once we all kind of went back into the world again, I sort of was like, “Now, where did my friends go?”

CHARLES BLOW: Wow. Abdul, talk to us about that idea of the online experience—what it has done to connect us, but also what has it done to isolate us from in-person, intimate, interpersonal reactions? There’s clearly a desire to be in connection with people in person. How did these things live together?

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Yeah, I mean, so think about that feeling that you have after a really good night of conversation with folks that you can look in the eye, whose bodies and faces you can read. That feeling, I think, is the essence of what it means not to be lonely. Like that, that is the thing we’re all kind of talking about. And the hard part is that all of us, on our hips or in our pockets, on our chest, wherever you keep that little phone, have this simulacrum of a social experience that parses that social experience into small bits and pieces that never get to the whole of that feeling. And I think this does a couple of different things that are pretty dangerous.

The first is it cheapens real social interaction by making you think you can have it all the time. The second is that because it glows and makes lights and colors, it pops dopamine into our brains all the time, which make us reach for that thing rather than climbing the overhead cost of real social interactions. Like, “I got to get out of my house and put on some clothes and go to a place and sit with my friends.”

And then it also de-risks relationships, which I actually think is the biggest cost. So you think on the other side of that amazing dinner experience you just had? There’s a lot that could have gone wrong. And, you know, there’s a definition of beauty, which is “marveling at the unlikelihood of being.” And I think being with other people is its own form of social beauty. The unlikelihood of being. You and I found each other and we got to have this amazing experience. But I actually think having those things have some cost—and some risk—gives them real value. And I think between those three things we have given over that amazing piece of what it means to be together to a bunch of companies who spend trillions of dollars to make sure that our social experiences get interspersed with ads for things we really probably shouldn’t buy. Right? But that’s the business here.
CHARLES BLOW: But I want that sweater! 

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: But you would look really good in that sweater! I probably wouldn’t.

JES TOM: You don’t know what it’s going to look like in real life. You don’t know what they’re going to send you.

[laughter]

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: We need to be looking for harder, riskier kinds of interactions. The problem with it, though, is that that’s a long-term benefit and a short-term cost. And humans are really bad at making decisions whose long-term benefits are large, right? But whose short-term costs are large. And that’s the, I think, the tough part.

CHARLES BLOW: I’ve heard you talk about the idea of needing more social infrastructure that, that the way we build our cities, the way we build our communities can actually either contribute to loneliness or contribute to more social cohesion and people being forced together, not like forcing us in a bad way, but in a positive way. What does that look like? Why have we abandoned it, first of all? And how do we get it back?

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Yeah, I really appreciate the question. My daughter, who’s nearly seven years old, every time we come to New York, she cannot wait to get on the subway. And you ask her, “Why?” And she’s like, “Well, because I get to see everybody.” And I think if, obviously, if it’s your primary mode of transportation, you take the upside for granted. And sometimes that upside can be some real downside. I admit that. 

But there is something about seeing and being in space with people who are going about their day to remind you that you live in a society. Now, you can imagine what it means to bring your kids out to a town square or a playground where your kids are now interacting with other kids. Or if you own a dog, a dog park, right? Everybody knows that. Yes. The dog park is a place where the dog has to do what the dog has to do. But it’s also a place where you get to meet other dog owners, people who share experiences with you.

And I think the point that I’m making here is that there has to be a pull aspect to it. And when you build really good social infrastructure, it pulls you out. You want to be there. And part of what makes it so great is the other people who are there. And, you know, I think about when I was a little kid, my grandparents—we used to spend the summers with them—had this amazing pool in their neighborhood. But what made the pool great wasn’t that it was just a body of water where I could swim. It was all of the other kids who were there and all the games that we would play. And I think we forget. Right? That play is a very human thing. And although play starts to look a little bit different as an adult, we all kind of need it and want it.

And when you build spaces that people come together looking to engage with each other, it is those other people that make that experience worth having. And so it has to be aspirational. It has to pull you. It doesn’t you know, it’s got to be something that you want to be a part of. And the problem with it is we stopped building that a long time ago.

CHARLES BLOW: But, but even after we’ve seen experiments where, even though New York City has plenty of parks, you build the High Line. People want it. Commerce shows up. New housing shows up. Aren’t cities learning from these newer experiments that what people want more than anything is public space? 

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: I think we’re actually in the situation where there are several visions of what we actually want out of each other at play. And folks who choose to opt into urban communities opt into them because they understand that what makes this place is the sum of everybody here. There’s some brilliant economics that’s demonstrated the value of having a lot of folks in one place together, exchanging ideas and all the amazing things that come out of that. But there’s also a vision of America where I get my own, you get your own, and I would rather not have to share with you, right? And I actually think that there’s still a lot more work that needs to be done about getting to the foundational questions at the bottom of what happens when the people you’re sharing space with don’t look like you, don’t love like you, don’t pray like you, may not pray at all?

And is it still valuable to share space with them? And folks here have said, “Absolutely, I learn so much about myself and other folks.” But there are a lot of folks who say, “No, that’s scary and I don’t want to do that.” I think we actually have to start asking a lot bigger questions of the cultural experience underneath that and what people select into.

CHARLES BLOW: But one of the things that was in one of your podcasts, you talked about, well, we in the aggregate may be shying away from building public space. Wealthy people are not. In their own isolated communities, they are building plenty of public space that only they in that community can access. So it is an imbalance of public space and a use of public space that does not cross boundaries that is what we’re seeing.

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: It is the new segregation. And I worry, right, because those public spaces are really nice. And the same forces tell us that not only can we not build public spaces in those spaces, but the idea that maybe all of us would have to select into that one public space is not something we want to engage with. The other problem here is, to be clear, we are dealing with a challenge in this country where actually a lot of people don’t have private space. Right? What is the epidemic of the unhoused except for a lot of people just don’t have their own private space? And what happens when a lot of folks don’t have their own private space is you end up getting disorder in the public space, which then opts a lot of people out of the public space. Right. And if we’re not serious about asking that question of how do you build private spaces for everybody, I worry about the continued segregation of public spaces for some folks, right? And the assumption that public spaces for most of us, right, are not worth building.

CHARLES BLOW: I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about how loneliness and isolation has a disproportionate impact on men. I ask both of you about this, but Jes, I want to start with you because I saw an Instagram post or maybe it was some other social media site posts recently, and it was a trans man, and he was in tears, and he was saying no one told him that being a man would be so lonely. That when he lived his life as a woman, women would hug, they would embrace, they would empathize, they would create community, and that all of that had vanished when he became a man. And not only was he lonely, he was feared. So people would cross the street when they saw him coming. I’m curious about how you have experienced this, what you have heard about this from other people who have transitioned, and how they experience this difference between living life identified as a female and then identified as a man?

JES TOM: Totally. Totally. I mean, something interesting about transition is that it really—like the way that a trans person gets treated almost depends entirely on, like, literally what that individual looks like. For example, nobody is afraid of me. 

[laughter] 

Nobody is scared of me. I’m not exactly giving the picture of like threatening masculinity, but, you know, I haven’t seen that clip, but I would strongly suspect that the person who made that video is probably somebody who, quote unquote, “passes very well,” so it can move through society without people noticing that they’re trans, and probably somebody who wants to culturally engage with, like, men and like, straight men in their culture. I am having a kind of different experience. My sort of lore is that testosterone turned me from a lesbian into a gay man, because god forbid I become a functioning member of society. 

[laughter]

So what happened with me is that after living literally 17 years as like, a lesbian or a lesbian adjacent, non-binary person—choosing to be in lesbian spaces, choosing to be surrounded by women and socializing with women all the time. Now I’ve moved into the gay space and I’m socializing almost only with men. And gay men, while they do operate differently from straight men, there’s also, I would say, a real epidemic of loneliness among gay men as well. It’s very common for me to know gay men who have, you know, never had a boyfriend in their life, never had a serious relationship. But they’ve been out as gay for a really long time.

I think that because I am trans and because I am queer, I already have had to break the mold of expectations of like the way somebody’s life is lived. So I already am critical. I’m already looking at everything with a critical eye, so I’m not as susceptible to, like, falling into like, “Oh, this is how a man should be. You know, a man is very serious and doesn’t show his emotions and never hugs his friends.” I don’t really have to be like that. But it’s a matter of kind of everybody realizing that none of us has to be like that.

CHARLES BLOW: Abdul, how do we get to this point where so many men disproportionately are experiencing loneliness and isolation in this way? And what does it mean for us as a society to have that many men living that experience?

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: I think we need to have an answer to toxic masculinity. If all masculinity is just toxic, then you’re going to have a lot of folks out there who are like, “Okay, I guess I’m just toxic.” And then you get the most toxic version. So my question is, like, “What’s the benevolent masculinity?” What does that look like? Are we willing to engage with this question of like, alright, so what is it that is unique and interesting about you being a guy, right? And look, I say that and I’m sure everybody’s like, “It’s the patriarchy.” Yes, it is the patriarchy. I get it. 

But if you tell a person, “Hey, listen, there is nothing unique or redeeming about what you are,” then they’re going to look for the person who says, “There is something unique and redeeming about what you are.” And then you end up in this situation where you have this most, this stew of folks performing the most toxic version of masculinity because they think that’s what this is supposed to be.

And I think the way that we start to engage with this problem, right, is to start to create spaces where folks can come together. And then we, we sort of ask you to kind of experiment with it. It’s like, “Do I like being this tough guy all the time?” Does that make me feel good? Does that give me this feeling of like, ‘I can be and do in the world and people like me and I like them and I’m being productive in the way that I want to be productive?’” And I think most of the time the answer is no. There’s no space where you can go and say, “What is that version of this that is pro-social, that’s thoughtful, that’s engaged, that can cry and hug my friends?” Right?

So I can feel like a tough guy, but I actually kind of feel very fragile and sad inside. Right. And I think we got here in large part because you’ve got a group of people who’ve realized that they can prey on a group of young, vulnerable people. Right. That has been the truth forever. It happens. It’s just, it’s way easier to do when people are isolated from the relationships that nurtured them because of their phones, where this stuff is fed to them because they fall into a particular algorithm and then they can’t really find a way out. And then what happens is folks just lean in. I just don’t think we’ve created the off-ramps that we need to. And let’s just be clear. Right. We can keep doing it this way, but I don’t think any of us like the outcomes. And these men in particular don’t like the outcomes. So we’re going to have to find some rational, thoughtful, engaged, pro-social way of trying to get folks to feel like they can inhabit who they are.

JES TOM: There’s also a phenomenon of transmasculine people who have, you know, undergone medical transition, who for all intents and purposes move through the world appearing to be men who very strongly don’t want to identify as men because of this kind of negative attachment to being a man, to the idea of toxic masculinity or the idea that like once you quote unquote “become a man,” once you give over to identifying as a man, then you do have to give up these things, being intimate with your friends, like being soft, being sensitive. And I also have felt that way, like for a long, long time because of the negative connotation to like being a man.

CHARLES BLOW: So how then, would you weigh in on Abdul’s proposition of, “What does a benevolent masculinity look like?”

JES TOM: Yeah, there’s I mean, there’s a lot of discourse in this, especially among trans men, because a lot of us think of ourselves as being, like, uniquely positioned, you know, to embody a benevolent masculinity just by virtue of, of having lived some period of time understanding, you know, to a certain extent, like what it’s like to move through the world as a woman or as somebody that the world thinks is a woman. Yeah, we’re in the unique position to grow into new types of men. Um, you know, men who are caring, caring without being patriarchal, um, you know, gathering, gathering community and, and taking care of people. Like, I feel like things that you could call, like if you called it nurturing, you would think it was feminine. But men can do that exact same thing, too. 

CHARLES BLOW: Abdul, I want to ask you a question about boundaries of definitions, which is, when does solitude—which can be healthy and reflective—tip over into loneliness, which can be corrosive? Because I think a lot of people crave some solitude, some distance from the noise of the world, especially today, and the screens and whatever, but also from, a break from people around them. But how do we prevent that from becoming loneliness?

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: That’s a really good question, because different people have, from what we understand, different people like and have capacity for different levels of socialization. And that’s perfectly fine, and that doesn’t mean that everybody who’s introverted or doesn’t need to be around people all the time is lonely. And the hard part about loneliness is that it’s not a momentary experience. It’s an emergent experience. The question is, are you getting the amount of nurturing that you might like? The other part of it is, you could spend your whole day with people and none of those relationships are fortifying or, or invested in by either of you. Right. And so it’s not just a function of like, “Am I around people?” It’s a function of “Am I building meaningful relationships to the level that I need, such that my need for social investment, interaction, engagement, and love is sated by the coterie of people I have in my life?”

And, right, there are a lot of people who have, from what on the outside would look like a great family relation—set of relationships who feel lonely for a different kind of interaction in their lives. And so, I think what we, we have to separate from is like the number of people in your life that you see regularly versus whether or not those relationships are deep, meaningful, and offering you what you need to feel sated and to feel together.

CHARLES BLOW: Jes, I want to ask you about how we disguise loneliness in society, because if you open Instagram, nobody’s lonely. Everybody’s around friends and they have the same fake smile in every picture—

JES TOM: You want to ask a comedian about how we’re disguising our mental illness, I—okay.

[laugher]

CHARLES BLOW: I think that the public facing image of a lot of communities is that people are actively engaged in very deep, communal activities. And so people see pride parades and they see people collecting at gay bars or whatever, or drag shows or whatever. And they think that the image that they have is that these are deeply connected people. Clearly, none of them are lonely. And I think that that exists across the spectrum, that we kind of disguise the fact that we are alone or lonely, because we only show the pictures to the world of when we’re happy and smiling and we’re surrounded by people. 

JES TOM: Totally. I mean, thinking about, you know, what you were saying earlier about, like, Instagram and social media. I think that especially Instagram has created this sort of social hierarchy economy where you want to appear, right, exactly like you were saying, like you’re hanging out with a ton of people. You’re surrounded by friends at all times or like, maybe, you know, maybe you have a famous friend and you’re like, hanging out with that person and that makes you look really cool.

And then, so, what it does is it kind of turns what is like a real human interaction—like you’re really there, like at your friend’s birthday party—into a kind of like, chip that you can use, that you can like throw out into the world. “Look at whose birthday party I was at,” like, “Look where I was and look at who I was with.” And it’s when you start focusing on like, “Ooh, this is going to make a really good picture,” or “This is going to look really good to other people who are looking at my Instagram,” then you’re thinking of the people who are in the phone rather than the people who are literally around you in real life. And all of us, I think, are in this. I know I definitely am, of really trying to like, learn how to, like, be present, learn how to like, come back to my real human self and be in the room and be with everyone instead of being like, “Oh my God, like, who do I need to get a picture with next?” The token of the photo is more important to me than the fact that I, like, spent time with that person.

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Can I pick up on that because it’s a really important point. I’m a certain age. We got internet in 1996, I was 13. And then I have a brother who’s eight years younger than me and a sister who’s 15 years younger than me. But the degree to which these kinds of online-mediated social interactions perform this, like, vacuum suck back into them for younger generations, for whom so much of social interaction has to be mediated in these spaces that are online—to me is really profound. Like I feel like I’m still of the age that I can opt out. But I know for a lot of my siblings, particularly my youngest sibling, there’s not an opting out, because that’s the space in which all of these folks interact. So if you want to interact with folks in your age and stage, you’re going to have to do it, in part, in this online mediated environment. Which means you’re always torn, right? Because currency is that you got the picture and put it on Instagram, right? “Pics or it didn’t happen.” And when that’s the case, you can’t just say, “Listen, you know what? Like, I know it’s corrosive and I know it’s a problem. I’m gonna opt out.” And then you’re the only one who’s not actually involved and you’re missing the group chat.

CHARLES BLOW: So it’s another kind of loneliness.

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Exactly. And, and so it creates is almost impossible situation where you’re torn. Like, “Do I actually engage with the real life person in front of me or the online-mediated simulacrum of all my other friends? And I can’t actually choose. I have to do them both.” Which is an impossible thing to be. We talk about being present. That is by definition the opposite of being present.

CHARLES BLOW: So I’m going to give you the last word on this and just see if you can—that’s depressing. And we’re going to see if you have any—

JES TOM: I came to the Epidemic of Loneliness to be cheered up so…

[laughter]

 I’m feeling confused.

CHARLES BLOW: Are you optimistic about how we will be able to dig ourselves out of this?

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: I’m not. I’ll be honest with you. Let me, let me offer you where this small shred of optimism sits. I think that there are a lot of young folks who are so frustrated by this existence that they’re thinking about new ways of opting out. So one—there’s this interesting thing that happened in terms of social media use over the last five years. The sort of monofeed Internet started to fall away. So like, that’s like Instagram, where you’re connected to friends, people, you know, on this one feed that is now feeding you highlight reels of everybody else’s life. And I think it started to bifurcate into two things. One side of it is TikTok, which is people I don’t know, doing things that are like, of the moment, and I just watch them do their thing. And then the other side of it is group chat, right? And you see a lot more group chat, which is, “I’m actually only interacting with a small group of people.” It’s far less performative than Instagram was. And I think that that is a movement or an opting out of some of the most caustic forms of social media. So that gives me hope. 

JES TOM: I want to say something about this. I want to say something about this as a comedian. I’ve spoken a lot as kind of a queer person and a trans person, but as a comedian, I feel very strongly about, like, the gathering of real people in real life. I find comedy—not to overstate the importance of standup comedy in our society—but comedy is one of the few places where you can gather and have, like, a real, live experience with all live people or all—any live performance, poetry, music, anything like that.

But comedy, especially because it’s, like, conversational, because it’s like a back and forth directly between the audience and the person on stage, and with the audience all together. It’s a place where you can get together and everybody can laugh together about something. And I could write essays on essays about the way social media is kind of decimating the way we do standup comedy. But I bring it up to say, like, real life still exists. Real life still exists. We’re all in this room together, having a shared experience together, which is not dissimilar to, like, the shared experience that you have, say, on the subway, or walking on the street and seeing other people. Again, like you said, fully asymmetrical, and we’re in for a long and crazy fight ahead of us. But real life exists, like, we’re here right now. We’re not inside of Instagram.

CHARLES BLOW: I want to thank both of you for being here tonight. I think this is a conversation that needs to happen, needs to happen more often. The more we talk about it, acknowledge what is happening with our isolation, with our lack of connection, at least we move closer to the idea that somebody has better solutions for how to solve it. So I just want to thank both of you and give them another round of applause.

[applause]

Accessibility Statement

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: We’re pleased now to welcome Charles Blow to the stage.

[applause]

[Charles Blow, a Black man with a gray beard wearing a black suit, Host]

CHARLES BLOW: Hello, and welcome to “Ideas Ford with Charles Blow.” What we do is try to bring together some of the smartest and bravest activists and thinkers to offer ideas for solving some of the world’s biggest problems. Today, we’re here to talk about the work of the Courage Fund, and I am honored to be joined on stage by two extraordinary women who do work around ending sexual violence against women and girls, especially in the Black community.

Platinum recording artist and activist Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards, and artist, filmmaker and activist Aishah Shahidah Simmons. Thank you both very much for being here. Tonight, you were both given awards by the Courage Fund. Congratulations. Talk to us about the Courage Fund and the work that you’ve been doing. I’ll start with you, Sparkle.

[Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards, a Black woman with brown eyes and curly, brown golden brown trestles, Platinum Recording Artist and Activist]

STEPHANIE “SPARKLE” EDWARDS: Oh, wow. So, um, just being the inaugural to get the fund is just a blessing. But the Courage Fund means that they see you, that they notice your work and what you’re doing and the work that you’ve put in, and the long hours, the struggle, the tears. It just means strength, you know, in the time of dark spaces for me. It is uplifting and it’s an honor. Yeah, that’s— 

[Aishah Shahidah Simmons, an African American woman with brown skin and dreadlocks wearing a maroon shawl and jewelry. Artist, Filmmaker, and Activist]

AISHAH SHAHIDAH SIMMONS: Wow, just echoing—ditto everything that Sparkle shared. For me—one of the things that I shared on when I first received the news—and it was a complete shock because I didn’t even know—was just there’s something very profound when you are recognized by your own. And so there’s the “own” in terms of the community, all of the founders—Salamishah, Scheherazade, Tony, Ted, Ta-Nehisi, and Kamilah—they’re all folks of African descent. I’ve had the, just, the great joy of knowing and loving Salamishah and Scheherazade and then also knowing the incredible work of Ted and Tony over the years and then from afar admiring Ta-Nehisi and Kamilah Forbes. So I think—and all of them are trailblazers and exemplify courage. So when you are recognized by your peers who are doing that work, it is very profound, and especially around a topic that is so taboo even still today. And really amplifying the work of breaking silences about violence committed against Black women and girls.

CHARLES BLOW: Sparkle, it’s been years since you testified against R. Kelly, and that case involved an incident with your own niece, who I believe was 14 years old at the time. What did it mean for you to come forward and how did the public but also the music industry itself, respond to you coming forward? 

STEPHANIE “SPARKLE” EDWARDS: It took a second for me to come forward. You know, when I heard of even a rumor, like the piece was saying that, I went immediately and called DCFS just to try to get them to go out to investigate. And then when I was shown the tape, and that came about and there was proof that there was something happening, I went guns a’ blazing—like, I didn’t think about career. I didn’t think about the backlash that would come. I just reacted immediately. And I guess me growing up on the west side of Chicago and being the youngest of six and brothers maybe kicking me around sometimes, I learned how to fight. So the exterior is small, but I have a mighty blow, you know what I’m saying? 

[applause]

So—I just—I just knew what I was kind of raised to do, and that was to fight for my own, to fight for the family. And that’s what I did. And without hesitation, without regret, without feeling guilty or ashamed about anything, I—I did it.

CHARLES BLOW: And what was the response from them?

STEPHANIE “SPARKLE” EDWARDS: The response from the public and from my peers? You hear that? 

[silence followed by laughter]

Crickets. Like, nobody had my back. And with my family as tight as we were, I would never have thought this would happen to us or anything like this. I thought they would be like, behind me, beside me, “Girl, get out the way. I’m in front of you”—like nobody. There was one brother, my brother, who stood with me, and love him to death, and I thank him for that daily. But the—my peers, like the silence was ohh the silence was heavy. Because I have friends—I thought I had friends—in the business, and I do have a few, but none of them came to my rescue, so to speak. And I didn’t look for them to come to my rescue because it was mine to fight. But I still would have loved for somebody to be like, “Girl, grab your hand, I’m going with you on this.” Nobody came to that. But in that still, I feel like because nobody came to my rescue, because maybe they were, of course, nonbelievers, or some of the guys—let me just speak for the guys. Maybe some of the guys have dealt with something like this as well. So they would never want to come forward and, you know, hold my hand or have my back because maybe theirs is coming up next. And also, just my sisters, like they were coming at me left and right, left and right. And I was like, “Wow, I thought y’all would see what was going on.” You always see the play and, you know, react as I would, be enraged by it. But, you know, God held my hand and I’m here today, thankful, with right mind, thank God. Yeah. 

[applause]

CHARLES BLOW: Aishah, let’s stay on that response. 

AISHAH SHAHIDAH SIMMONS: Okay. 

CHARLES BLOW: Or non-response. Your film, NO! The Rape Documentary—it’s just extraordinary. There are so many real women telling unflinching stories of sexual assault and rape. There’s also, you know, kind of, amazing feminist thinkers trying to put all of that into context and help viewers understand it. But it’s still very hard to understand a non-response from our own community. How do you contextualize and explain that?

AISHAH SHAHIDAH SIMMONS: I think as we know and we are, you know, centering Black survivors, but I think it’s important to kind of go out for a second, pan out, to say that nobody wants to talk about sexual violence, like regardless of race, gender identity, sexuality, socioeconomic—no one. There’s so much shame, blame, stigma. And then when we factor in the impact of racism on lives, in communities, and we see violence committed against our communities, there’s the impetus to protect and then that gets translated into protecting those—I use “harm-doers”—protecting the harm-doers at the expense of those who they’ve harmed. So I think that that’s a lot of the origin of the silence. And hearing what Sparkle was sharing, you know, I started working on “NO!” in 1994 and it was like, it was yeah, it was crickets. And there was no social media, no email, nothing. So in terms of just getting out the word and it was really Black women, Black straight, Black queer women, queer communities, communities of color as well really saying, “You know, we’re going to support you making this film.” So it was a grassroots effort. But that, that silence is really about protecting. And we’re, you know, constantly dealing with, you know, racial stereotypes, tropes. There’s all this that we’re always having to, you know, hold. Meanwhile, in the words of the late Black gay poet, Essex Hemphill, “a woman or survivor is left to heal their wounds alone.” 

[applause]

CHARLES BLOW: Sparkle, this just seems to be waves here. You know, Aishah makes her film in the wake of the Mike Tyson trial for rape, then a wave comes with the R. Kelly situation, and now we’re back in a situation where we have another very high profile Black man accused of sexual assault. What has changed, do you believe, in the public that might make this time different?

STEPHANIE “SPARKLE” EDWARDS: I will say I feel like the music industry, the entertainment industry, is having a “coming home to roost” moment. And what I feel like I did was in right timing and the steps I took this wave, I mean, the small word I can use is “crazy.” Just to be here again, and to have another young woman having to go through the things —and many others—because there are many dealing with this Puff situation. But the change, I feel like maybe I started a movement to say, “Y’all can do this. Y’all can come forward and speak up and tell the truth about what’s going on with you.” And hopefully it doesn’t have to be a video to show. But, you know, we all can’t unsee the video with Cassie, you know, just like you can’t unsee the video with my niece, for those who may have seen it. But the change, I feel like many are possibly recognizing that we need to believe young girls and women, and we need not throw stones at them, you know, because it’s hard coming forward and speaking as, you know, people would know—like the wrath of the public, like is beyond. And we need to support those who are coming forward and believe them. I mean, the change—ever changing. 

CHARLES BLOW: Right. Aishah, you touched on this before, which is, you know, the the dilemma, the Black dilemma, which is historically, rape was used as a weapon against Black men, of white women, even when they didn’t commit it. And so anybody who’s been to, you know, the lynching memorial, almost every one of those placards say the same thing. And yet there is intra-racial sexual violence committed by Black men and, you know, you talk about a kind of community justice or—I want you to explain what that is, because how do we deal with this? And when we’re caught in this vise of people feeling like they want to protect people who are generally victimized, even if those people sometimes are victimizers themselves?

AISHAH SHAHIDAH SIMMONS: It’s such a um—it’s a rocky terrain to walk. And I walk it as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, as well as rape, my sophomore year in college, in terms of when I—I really, I strive every single day to be an abolitionist. And, and I say “striving” because I feel like it’s a practice and a praxis. It’s not like, “Oh, I just wake up that way.” It is constant because there are times when I’m just like, “No, that—that’s it.” And so I share that to say that when I talk about accountability—and I’m in a community of many, many, many people who are talking about transformative justice and restorative justice—it’s really about not relying on the state to be the arbiter of what’s happening. 

And like thinking about R. Kelly or Mike Tyson or, you know, Bill Cosby, Diddy, who’ve been accused and some convicted of sexual violence. We don’t look beyond them a lot of times. It’s like, “Oh, they’ve been locked up. Hooray.” And what about all of the people who allowed this to happen? And this is not the reason why I am—I believe in abolition. But if we think about all the folks who allowed it to happen, there would be a lot of people in jail. And I think, so in terms of like, this Diddy coming out, it’s like, well, “Who’s going to be next?” And as long as we keep focusing on the one person and not looking at the systems in place—And so for me, when I think about community accountability, is really holding each other accountable, right? And saying what’s said in NO! The Rape Documentary, Men Stopping Violence, Sulaiman Nuriddin, you know, like talking about like, “I’m aware of what you’ve done and you can no longer work here until you get some help.”

So what are these things in terms of where we could funnel the—even a fraction—let alone many of the millions of dollars going into policing, in terms of really healing and accountability, and not that burden be on the immediate survivor. They—she, he, they should not have to be worried about what’s going to happen to the harm—but that should not be their work. Their work should be focused on healing. But if they knew that the community is going to handle it—and I’m not talking about like, “We’re going to take them out.”

STEPHANIE “SPARKLE” EDWARDS: I was just going to say.

[laughter]

AISHAH SHAHIDAH SIMMONS: I can’t talk about that, but really holding folks accountable and possibly putting them, you know, in some kind of social container for—until they can get themselves together. But really, like, that’s—I just really believe in the capacity to transform and heal. And I think that a lot of these— look, let’s look at the high celebrities. They’ve just been able to do it for so long that they’re beyond reproach, or they believe it. So what would have happened if someone had stopped it with your niece? What? And so, you see these folks, they just keep going, and they’re bragging on videos and all that because they’ve been able to get away with it. And what would it look like if the community was like, “No!”?

CHARLES BLOW: We laugh about, you know, “take them out.” But anyone who has read Maya Angelou, that’s literally the reason she stopped speaking. Because she said something and the person wound up dead. And she believed that her words literally had the power of death. So how do we encourage or support more people, whether they be the victims or supporters of those victims from coming forward? Sparkle, what would the right community’s response have looked like to you? What did you want to have your community do in response? Not just, not just the judicial system? How did you want your community to respond?

STEPHANIE “SPARKLE” EDWARDS: I would want them to have our backs, and I don’t know what else to say but have our backs. Like believe. Because it’s hard to come forward, let alone, you know, come forward like, even to your parents. That’s the hardest part. But then to come forward to the world, like, that’s even harder because you’ve got the naysayers and the people who are just not believing you and wanting to just stomp on you when you’re down, so to speak. And I don’t know, I just wish somebody had had my back, you know? Not just for the people who were in my corner, but just the masses like to just see and be like, “She not lying,” like, you know, and just have my back. Have my back.

CHARLES BLOW: Aishah, years ago a friend invited me to a church, big Black church, and the speaker was speaking and she said, you know, “God telling me there’s someone here”—I think she used the word “rape”—”has been raped and you never told and you should come forward.” And at that moment, people streamed out of the stands. And I have never forgotten that moment because I’d never seen a visual manifestation of how much trauma—unprocessed, unacknowledged, unspoken of, in one room—happen. Talk to us about the scale of what’s happening in the Black community that you believe, you know that sexual violence represents for us.

AISHAH SHAHIDAH SIMMONS: I know Black Women’s Blueprint did a study—like 60% of Black girls or women have been assaulted by the time that they’re 18. And I know the work of A Long Walk Home, that they really are in the trenches with Black girls and non-binary youth doing that work. And I’m one of those 60%. And then for most of most of us who’ve experienced childhood sexual abuse, chances are, have a high percentage of being sexually violated again. And it is so pervasive. And I also think that that’s also part of this enforced silence, because as Sparkle just shared, you know, we’re not believed and it almost becomes like a hazing process—”Well, nobody believed me, I don’t believe this person.” 

You know, it becomes this—we have to break that cycle because that plays a role. And it reminds me, when you were sharing, Charles, about when you were at a church—in 2009, there was a screening of my film at Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia. And it was incredible. And what was incredible was to have the pastor, Tyrone Nelson, and one of his assistant pastors, Dwylene Butler, like, speak from the pulpit—I’m not a Christian. I was raised Muslim and I am a Buddhist—and then invite me, Black lesbian, non-Christian, to go to the pulpit to talk about sexual violence. In that church—it was like, what you were just saying. The response— and I think there was something profound for those survivors in the room to have their pastor say, “We are going to take this issue on.” And I think that that’s what we need in terms of community, the pastor, the imam, the babalawo, for we need the leaders to take this on.

[applause]

CHARLES BLOW: But Sparkle, the data that Aishah just told us about, 60% Black women and girls before they hit 18. To your point that—that’s not the same guy doing all 60%. There’s a lot of men out there engaged in that violence as well. And as you were pointing out, you believe that some of the people, men who don’t say anything about what they may know, what they may have seen, what they may have heard, is because they are also complicit in sexual violence. What would you say to those men?

STEPHANIE “SPARKLE” EDWARDS: I can’t say it here.

[laughter]

CHARLES BLOW: This is a safe space. 

STEPHANIE “SPARKLE” EDWARDS: There’s going to be a lot of bleep bleep bleep. My mouth could be reckless, so I will keep it cute. But you guys, “Look at it as if you have a sister, your mom, your auntie, look at it this way. What if it was her that a violation was done on? How would you handle it? How would you want it to be handled?” So that’s what I would want the fellas to do.

AISHAH SHAHIDAH SIMMONS: Charles? May I please say?

CHARLES BLOW: Yes, go on. 

AISHAH SHAHIDAH SIMMONS: I just want to, I mean, I know that we’re here lifting up and talking about sexual violence committed against women and girls. But I just—I would be remiss to not just also acknowledge that boys are sexually harmed. 

[applause]

Transgender, non-binary folks are sexually harmed. And studies have shown, such as the organization Mirror Memoirs, that they’re some of the most vulnerable communities. So we’re dealing with a human problem. And just the layers of silence that just gets compounded. So you know, in terms of what, the silence that, what happens to cisgender women and girls, but then also in terms of men because of patriarchy, and trans folks because of transphobia. So I just wanted to acknowledge that.

STEPHANIE “SPARKLE” EDWARDS: Yeah, I agree.

CHARLES BLOW: Thank you. And I am one of those boys and no one knew about it until I wrote about it, and I was in my forties. Talk a little bit more about the dynamics in family because so much of the violence actually happens in family. It’s not a stranger off the street, it’s a relative, a cousin, an uncle. And what are the dynamics, the pressures the family feels to report it, say something, acknowledge it or not, to preserve what they believe is the sanctity and peace of that family?

AISHAH SHAHIDAH SIMMONS: Yeah. And I will just share, you know, my story in terms of without getting into details, no triggers at all. I was harmed by the only grandfather I knew on my father’s side—and he and my grandmother took care of me a lot while my parents were on the road doing a lot of important and incredible human justice work. And I told. I’m one of the rare, like, little precocious ten-year olds who told and at that time my parents did not remove me. And I—you know, we won’t get into all that. I share that to say, it’s disturbing the peace. It’s bringing the ants to the picnic to quote something that my dad always says in terms of like, when you know, you have this kind of this set up and you need it to work, you need it to be safe, quote unquote, and to disrupt that—for many people, it can be a caregiver, it can be a provider or, you know, all those kinds of things. What do we do with that? And I think that that comes back in terms of my work around abolition, because I think so much of it is, like we don’t want to send another person to jail. 

And so what would it look like if that was not the only option—accountability, but not, you know, locked up in a cage somewhere where people are not being taught to transform. So I really believe that we learn, and the family institution gets replicated, right? So first we protect a family member, then we, we protect the athlete, the entertainer. They become an extension of us. I mean, it’s amazing to watch how these people support celebrities. So I was like, “Do you know them? Are they your friend?” And they’re ready to go to bat. And I think that in so many ways, because we learned that, right? And in, particularly in communities of color, and we’re talking about Black communities, we learned that in terms of keeping it in the family, you know, “Be quiet” or “Well, she shouldn’t have been doing that,” or “She was fast.”

So all of that kind of messaging happens, and then it just gets compounded because of racism and classism in our communities. It’s like, we’re all we’ve got, but in the meantime, we’re harming each other.

CHARLES BLOW: Let me turn the page a little bit and just ask both of you what gives you hope in this space that we can at least move forward to a better situation where people are believed more that there is less sexual violence against women and girls particularly in Black communities?

STEPHANIE “SPARKLE” EDWARDS: That we’re talking about it. But we gotta keep talking about it. We just gotta keep shedding the light on what is going on and continue to talk, continue to support—just all the good feels of being supported just even allows the young girl or young boy to speak up. You know, as Black folk, we don’t have the complexion for the protection as the late, great Paul Mooney would say. So we have to police within, like you stated, and just really uplift each other and don’t be so op to think, “Oh, she lying. Oh, he lying.” Just take a beat and be like, “It could be true. So let me pause for a second just to see it out and see what it really is.” And so, yeah.

AISHAH SHAHIDAH SIMMONS: What gives me hope? I mean, the fact that we’re here having this conversation gives me hope, right? The work of A Call to Men, of A Long Walk Home, and many, many organizations IamNegrx, Mirror Memoirs, like that, that gives me tremendous hope. And, I know Sparkle had spoken to this, her life’s experience, and in mine, in terms of with “NO!” I remember a time, you know, where to speak out against these issues even—I believe that we could have looked at a video of what happened to Cassie—in the nineties, people would find some way to blame her. So I think that we are at a time where we are able to discuss it. This is about the work of #MeToo and Tarana Burke. Like it’s just, we’re talking about this, this work—and the courageous—I think about the film On the Record. And one of my dear friends is featured in this, Sil Lai Abrams. Like just breaking the silence, more and more of us are breaking the silence, and more and more is seen as a community effort, right? Like it is not just like, oh, this is just this woman’s issue. Definitely women and queer folks are leading the way, and men are taking this issue up as well. 

STEPHANIE “SPARKLE” EDWARDS: And that’s key.

AISHAH SHAHIDAH SIMMONS: And that’s so critical. 

CHARLES BLOW: Well, let me ask you two questions. If you were talking to a survivor of rape or sexual assault now, they were watching this, but they had never told anyone. What would you say to them? And the second part of that is, if you’re watching this and you know that you were, you have assaulted someone, or you have raped someone and they never told and nobody knows—what is your responsibility? What should you now do?

AISHAH SHAHIDAH SIMMONS: Oof, Sparkle?

CHARLES BLOW: No, that’s for you. 

[laughter] 

STEPHANIE “SPARKLE” EDWARDS: You got this. Handle it. Handle it for us both.

AISHAH SHAHIDAH SIMMONS: I really, I believe and I understand why people don’t break silences. I think for those of us who’ve experienced sexual violence, it is important for us to speak it. It’s important, though, that we speak it, find a place, a person who will believe us and not victim blame us and not cross examine us. So, because that can just send you in a spiral.So I think that that’s really important. And thankfully there are crisis lines where, you know, it can be someone you don’t even know. It’s nice when it is someone you know, but, you know, just to not hold it because it is, we’re carrying it in our bones, in our somatic responses. So it is important that we release that trauma, I think. So that’s critical. For someone who has caused harm—I think if they are in touch with that person. I can’t—I mean, and I know it’s a slippery slope because we live in a carceral state. I do believe that it is important in terms of being accountable for the harm that they’ve caused. I really believe that, I also believe the way, it’s not the same, but the way in which people who have been harmed hold the trauma, the people who harm hold the trauma. And so to free themselves and to free the person they harmed, by speaking. 

CHARLES BLOW: I want you all to give a big round of applause. Thank you so much for coming. Don’t miss our next episode of Ideas at Ford with Charles Blow. Thank you.

[applause]

Accessibility Statement

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Please welcome Darren Walker.

[applause]

DARREN WALKER: Good afternoon. I am delighted that you are all here. You’re all here not because you want to hear from me, but because we have a new iteration on a longstanding program at the Ford Foundation, “Ideas at Ford.” And one of the reasons we created this program a decade ago was because we believe that we need ideas. We need fresh, innovative thinking. We need people who are prepared to engage in deep, honest, candid conversations about the most pressing and important issues of our day. And as we reflected on ten years, we thought it was time to refresh. And how could we refresh more than by finding a host, a host who is a most compelling public intellectual. A person who, of course, you know Charles Blow as the award-winning columnist, the author, the public intellectual who has challenged us to think not only about race and sexual identity, but inequality and issues of justice, not just in the U.S., but globally, worldwide. And so Charles, with the Ford Foundation, has designed the next iteration of “Ideas at Ford.” And, as we contemplated the design of a program over the next two years, the idea of women in sports emerged as a priority. And, because there are two women in sports whose names I need not tell you, but I will. Billie Jean King and Clara Wu Tsai, who are both sheroes of mine, and both in their own right.

[applause]

DARREN WALKER: Billie, as the iconic trailblazer who transformed women’s tennis. Clara Wu Tsai, who is the owner of the women’s team, the men’s team in Brooklyn, the Barclays Center—we love it when women own big projects and big buildings!

[applause]

DARREN WALKER: And so I am delighted, delighted, to introduce Charles Blow, your host for the evening. Charles Blow, join us.

[applause]

CHARLES BLOW: Welcome to “Ideas at Ford with Charles Blow.” That’s me! I’m Charles Blow. We have an amazing series of talks that we’ll be bringing to you this season. And it starts tonight with a very pressing issue that has kind of consumed the culture, which is equity in women’s sports. Billie Jean King, she’s a sports icon, a champion of equality. She was named one of the 100 most important Americans of the 20th century by Life magazine and is the first female athlete to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She’s also the founder of the Billie Jean King Foundation, Women’s Tennis Association, and Women’s Sports Foundation. And finally, she is part of the ownership group of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Angel City FC, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Professional Women’s Hockey League. Please welcome Billie Jean King

[applause]

BILLIE JEAN KING: Hi. How are you? Great to see you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

CHARLES BLOW: And my next guest is the governor and owner of the New York Liberty, owner of the Brooklyn Nets, a vice chair of BSE Global, and founder of the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation. Please welcome Clara Wu Tsai

[applause]

CLARA WU TSAI: Thank you!

CHARLES BLOW: So let’s jump right in. I’m going to have this question for both of you to answer. I want to get a big picture of how you framed the issue of equity for women in sports. Both the advances that women have made, but also the challenges that still exist for women.

BILLIE JEAN KING: I hope you’ve been to a Liberty game

[applause]

BILLIE JEAN KING: Yeah! Good! Well, women’s sports are a microcosm of society, they tell us what’s going on with women all over the world. Really? We make a lot less. This year, though, I think we went over $1 billion. Okay, the men: 83 billion. This is just North America. NCAA is just now starting to get very commercial on it. They were at, I think, 1.3 billion. These are all B’s now. If you’re, if you’re an M, you know the millionaires, that doesn’t work anymore. But it just shows you what women’s sports is telling the world. “We’re trying to level the playing field.” That’s what we’re trying to do. Everything we do, and make life not better just for us, but for the future generations. And we mean, we don’t mean athletes, we mean women, women of color, women living with disabilities, and we don’t have equality yet. Women don’t. And it keeps varying. It’s going to be 100 years, 300 years. COVID put us back another hundred years. So I don’t know what it is. But all I know is I’ll be long gone, but I’m going to give it every breath of my being now to help us move forward in that direction of equality.

[applause]

CLARA WU TSAI: Okay. Well, first I want to say it’s a pleasure to be here. It is my honor to be here with you, Charles, and my really good friend Darren, and Billie Jean King. I don’t know if you know this, but in 2023, the top ten highest-grossing tennis players in the world, five of them are females. And that would not have happened without Billie Jean

[applause]

CLARA WU TSAI: And I guess I wanted to set that context because I think a lot about, you know, my position and my role as an owner of a WNBA team in a huge market like New York City, and I think, how can I use my power and my agency in the way that Billie has, but Billie is an athlete. It’s incredible what she’s accomplished, you know, on the field, but also what, you know, what she’s done afterward. So she’s incredibly inspiring. And I’m just so grateful to Billie.

BILLIE JEAN KING: We need businesswomen!

CLARA WU TSAI: Yeah. Okay.

BILLIE JEAN KING: That’s you! If we don’t got you, we don’t make it!

CLARA WU TSAI: You’re a pretty good business person too

[applause]

BILLIE JEAN KING: I like it.

CLARA WU TSAI: You’re really innovative. I get a lot of great ideas from you

[applause]

BILLIE JEAN KING: How do I be sweet here? I always want each generation, no matter what you’re in, what your career is, or whatever, not just to think about yourself, but to think about the groundwork you are laying for the next generations. And it’s really, I mean, that’s my whole life, really. When I was 12 years old, I had this epiphany—I played tennis one year, somebody introduced me to tennis and I’d never heard of it. Basketball was my first sport. Track and field, I loved all the team sports. So Susan Williams in fifth grade said, “Do you want to play tennis?” And I looked at her, and I go, “What’s tennis?” Says, “You’re kidding me.” I said, “No. What do you do?” She says, “You get to run, jump, and hit a ball.” “Oh, okay.” So we go out to her country club and of course, my dad’s a firefighter. I’m like, “This isn’t happening. I’m not going to. I’m not going to be a tennis player.” So we also played on a softball team. And she told the coach, Val Halloran, “Hey, I took Billie out to play tennis.” She says, “Oh, we have free instruction here with Clyde Walker every Tuesday.” Now we’re talking. And I go home and I go, “Mom, Dad, I need a racket. I want to play.” It was really fun because I figured out at shortstop, I probably touched the ball six times in a game. I got to bat every ninth time in a game, and I could hit 100 tennis balls in less than five minutes. I’m going, “I love this!” And I also was at the Los Angeles Tennis Club at 12. And I looked around and everybody wore white clothes, played with white balls, and everybody who played was white. And I go, “Where’s everybody else?” And so I made a promise to myself that day that I would fight for equality the rest of my life. And that’s every time I have to make a decision, I go back to that moment as a child at 12 years old. Why am I in this game of life? Why am I here? I want to champion equality. I want everyone, everyone. I just go back to that moment when I get maybe a little discouraged or whatever. So I think it’s really important. You decide what makes you tick. Everyone has to decide what makes you tick.

CLARA WU TSAI: What’s really interesting is you can fight for equality but also have a good business.

BILLIE JEAN KING: Oh, they go hand in hand.

CLARA WU TSAI: Yeah, well, especially now.

BILLIE JEAN KING: Now, yes!

CLARA WU TSAI: I think you’ve written before, a lot of women like to do things with purpose, right? You know, there’s the numbers behind a business, but I think in this case, we’re finally at a situation where women’s sports is truly a good business as well as something that you know, that you can do because it is also part of your values system …

BILLIE JEAN KING: Yes, it is.

CLARA WU TSAI: Where you want to see society going …

CHARLES BLOW: I want to stay on this issue of the business because it’s a fascinating idea, and what I want you to help me to understand is the chicken and egg quality to this. On the one side, they say this is kind of a market demand issue, that there’s not enough demand for women’s sports, and therefore they don’t get paid as much.

CLARA WU TSAI: Right.

CHARLES BLOW: But, there’s also, as you have pointed out before, only 5% of all sports coverage is of women’s sports. So how can there be demand if you never talk about the people who are playing the sport? So how do we detangle those two things when we talk about building the business of women in sports?

CLARA WU TSAI: Well, it’s investment. So, if you believe in the potential of, in our case, in the potential of the WNBA, then, you know, you’re going to invest in it. I think the most important thing for this sport was not just to make sure we had a great product on the floor, you know, that you were really building a team that could compete, but you also had to make sure that they’re visible. I don’t think owners should be like the face of a team, but in this case of the WNBA, where there is so little visibility and attention, I try to use my platform in this way to really shine a light to the women athletes and the quality of play. You know, in fact, I actually executive-produced a movie a couple of years ago called Unfinished Business. It’s a documentary that basically covers the last 25 years of the WNBA. You know, it came upon a milestone, the WNBA has now been around for 28 years, but a few years ago it was the 25th anniversary, and this documentary traced the last 25 years through the lens of the New York Liberty, because the New York Liberty was one of the original eight franchises. In that same documentary, it followed the Liberty team in the first year that we moved them back from Westchester to Barclays Center. But the reason that I made that movie was because so little media coverage and so little storytelling has been devoted to women’s sports, even though there is an appetite for it. That’s one of the reasons I did it. But if you guys want to see it, it is on Amazon Prime and it’s called Unfinished Business

[applause]

BILLIE JEAN KING: It’s very good, I’ve seen it

[applause]

BILLIE JEAN KING: The NBA is, you know, 78 years old. We’re really young, especially women’s professional sports. And if you’ve heard of Title IX, well that’s the reason we can have a WNBA. That’s the reason we can have a talent pool of people that we can, like, you could draft. Before 1972, there’s no way. Men always had scholarships. Women always had sports. Even in high school. Like, I went to Long Beach Poly. I don’t know if anybody—that’s in California. We had the most NFL players and the most MLB players ever. My younger brother, Randy Moffitt. Moffitt’s our birth name, he played 12 years of professional baseball. And by the way, my parents didn’t care for any good, and I think that’s why we’ve done so well. We drove them crazy, because he and I are very intense. I want to be number one, he wants to be in Major League Baseball. And my parents are going, “Ugh.” So they worked three jobs, with my dad took another job, my mom worked, and they never asked us if we won when we came home. How often do your parents ask, “Did you win?” Our parents did not. Why do Randy and I like pressure so much? Because he didn’t put any pressure on us. We love pressure. Randy was a relief pitcher. What is that? That’s—when you walk out there—that’s just total pressure. Sports is pressure. I loved it. I want the ball, I want the ball. I don’t want them to double-fault. I want the ball. It’s so much more exciting. So anyway, I think that’s why he and I made it, because of the way my parents were. And we had access. And access is huge. That’s Title IX provided access, but we have access at the public park. And everybody here, you know people who don’t have the proper access. Not only did we have access to a ball field and a court, I got free coaching. Someone has to organize you—if you show up at a basketball court, if you really want to get into it and play, or a tennis court, someone has to help, help the child get organized. Or an adult, if you’re an adult that wants to go start something. So it’s so important. But what does it take? It takes money.

CHARLES BLOW: Billie Jean’s talked about: you have to invest in the athletes. Well, you have been able to take care of the women. You have invested in the New York Liberty. You bought the team. You poured resources into them, you built a locker room, you built, you know, hired front office staff and performance staff. You ended up getting fined $500,000. The biggest fine ever in the history of the WNBA. Let me tell you why this is. Because she dared to charter flights for her players. Because WNBA players were expected to fly commercial. Layovers, canceled flights. And so when you didn’t do that, they fined you for it. Just so happens that that same year you made it to the playoffs, and also the next year. But why did that investment for you and how has that impacted the rest of the league

CLARA WU TSAI: Well, I always knew that the WNBA could be a really good business, and especially the New York Liberty. Well, first of all, when you look at the fundamentals of the league itself and the team in New York, right, the very best basketball players in the world play in the WNBA. And this New York Tri-state area is actually the biggest media market in the world. And New York is a basketball-crazy town. So, you know, those, those alone, you know, made us think, okay, you know, there was a real opportunity here. In addition to that, as I mentioned, the New York Liberty was one of the original eight franchises, and it had a storied history. Actually, the Liberty made it to the finals four times in the first six years of the league’s inception. And some of the best, most famous WNBA players actually played for the New York Liberty. So that’s one thing I learned that I didn’t know when we bought the team, how important it is. You know, the Brooklyn Nets, we’re like 11 years into our Brooklyn identity. You know, the Knicks have been here for 75 years. I mean, I know in 20 years the Nets is going to really occupy a really important space in New York basketball. But building from that versus building, as from one of the original eight teams is a much different proposition. And I also love the women. And so, you know, if you love basketball and you really believe in these women, you’re going to invest. So. Right. So one of the first things we did was move them from Westchester County Center, which is where they were playing. It was a gym that’s fit like 2,000 people, and we moved them back to where their fan base is, funny enough. I mean, but, you know, in New York City, and we moved them to Barclays Center, which is the home of the Brooklyn Nets. We built a state-of-the-art locker room, and we invested in performance. And so it was a very slow process. But, you know, people think that we started to win over one year, but it was like a five-year process. And then also during that period through the draft and through free agency and through trades, we started to assemble this team of stars. And, you know, now some of them are, they should be kind of household names, I think to New Yorkers. But you know, Sabrina Ionescu, Courtney Vandersloot, who used to play on the Sky, Jonquel Jones, who was an MVP, right. And then, of course, getting Breanna Stewart was really the feather in the crown. And I went to Turkey, to Istanbul, to actually go and recruit her. And it’s so funny because never before had an owner, you know, come to talk to her.

BILLIE JEAN KING: You’re kidding.

CLARA WU TSAI: And for these women, you have to invest in them, make sure they know that you think they’re worthy. You know, that you really value them, and that you want to treat them like professionals. And so that’s what we do basically, is set up the conditions for them to be great. Because if you talk to these players, what comes out of their mouth is, “I want to be great.” And so they want it for themselves. But these women are, you know, they’re so multi. They do everything, right. And so, when they want to be great, you know, you need to set up those conditions. And then, as I said before, I want to make sure that they’re visible. I want to give them visibility. And then I also want to make sure that we set up conditions so that we can bring fans in. We invested in our in-arena entertainment so that our games become a destination. You know, you’re, it’s great play. But you’ve also got this mascot called Ellie who…

BILLIE JEAN KING: Love Ellie.

CLARA WU TSAI: And then you also have our Timeless Torches, which is our ageless dance
team.

[Billie Jean reacts excitedly]

CLARA WU TSAI: And so we have to set them up to succeed, you know, by creating an experience for fans. And then, the other thing you want to do is make sure that your games are easy for people to watch. And so one of the things we did over the last off-season was sign an over-the-air deal with Fox 5 and My9, local over-the-air stations. So that means everybody in this Tri-state area, that 7.5 million households can watch Liberty games for free. You don’t have to have cable. You know, you don’t have a network. So …

[applause]

CLARA WU TSAI: So, um, that’s what we do to support our players. We invest in them and just think about how do we give them visibility and how do we bring the fans.

BILLIE JEAN KING: The ice hockey, the new league we started. We put everything free on YouTube. Everything. It’s not free though.

CLARA WU TSAI: No, it’s not.

BILLIE JEAN KING: Because someone has to produce. When someone says it’s free. It’s free for you, but it’s not free. Okay? I just want everyone to know that.

CLARA WU TSAI: We are getting a fee. A small rights fee. It’s going to go up.

BILLIE JEAN KING: At the beginning.

CLARA WU TSAI: It is not free. We told Fox 5 and My9 that these games are worth something.

BILLIE JEAN KING: They are.

CLARA WU TSAI: Yeah. And you know again chicken, the egg. So then you do this and when the viewership goes up you know it’s good for them. And then the rights fees will continue.

BILLIE JEAN KING: You just have to get started though. It’s hard. It’s really hard.

CHARLES BLOW: Billie Jean, I want to talk to you about the importance of rivalries in kind of kickstarting the popularity of women in sports. You know, I remember being a kid and, you know, watching basketball, and it was all Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, and that was what drew everyone to the sport.

BILLIE JEAN KING: You know, the NBA was going bankrupt back before that. Okay. Because I was friends with Jerry, Dr. Buss, he owned the Lakers.

CHARLES BLOW: Right.

BILLIE JEAN KING: And he came to us, and he said, that’s when they had the championships delayed, delayed on television. And so, what happened, that college game, Michigan State and Indiana State had the largest audience ever in college basketball. I think it could still be. I’m not sure. Yes, apparently it is.

CLARA WU TSAI: Right. I looked it up.

BILLIE JEAN KING: It’s my understanding. Yes, but the difference was David Stern. The three of them together is what made magic. It was the business guy and the two great players and now Magic likes to be called Earvin—is also a business person. Like, unbelievable. He’s very into business, which, you should see his documentary. It’s fantastic. What he did and continues to do for community as well. But those three, and I remember sitting with David Stern at the U.S. Open, tennis, because he played tennis. He loved tennis. And I sat next to him in the president’s box one day. And I said, “David, I have a favor to ask.” I was like this.

[Billie acts out being nervous]

BILLIE JEAN KING: I was like, should I, shouldn’t I? He says, “Yes.” And I go, “You have to promise me one thing, just one thing.” He says, “What?” And I said’ “You cannot let the WNBA fail. You cannot.” And he says, “I promise.” I don’t know if you know that story, but he promised me.

CLARA WU TSAI: Right. And so…

BILLIE JEAN KING: And it is still going. It’s going well.

CHARLES BLOW: So then how do we translate our present rivalry with the Caitlin Clarks and Angel Reeses? Also, this is the first time that women’s March Madness outranked the men’s in the finals. How do, how do you build on, and, yeah, we clap for that, how do we build on that momentum and build a thriving business, the way the NBA built a thriving business off the backs of these two people and their rivalry?

CLARA WU TSAI: So I would say that we are in a similar situation, and I think these rivalries that are starting early, we can say all these things about how the skill level and the talent is off the charts now. And, you know, players play with more fight and heart than ever before. But there is no doubt that the massive increase in viewership does have a lot to do with the personalities. I mean, we have a sensational rookie class, headlined by Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, and they’re spicy, right? And people like spice. And there’s no doubt that that rivalry, and by the way, there is an incredible pipeline of also high-star-power people coming up. And which is why I think this is sustainable. What we see is sustainable. But for sure it is that rivalry, those interesting matchups, you know, that really are driving people to watch. And the analogy is exactly Magic and Larry, because in 1979, Indiana State, Michigan State, they battled each other. It was, I did look it up. It still remains the most-watched collegiate, televised basketball game. And then Magic and Larry went to the NBA, and they played against each other in three championships.

BILLIE JEAN KING: It’s perfect.

CLARA WU TSAI: Yeah, it’s, and that really ushered in the, the, what I would say the golden age of fandom for the, for the NBA, And so I think we’re poised to see exactly the same.

CHARLES BLOW: That analogy stretches off the court as well, because, you know, we also now see other issues being drawn into the sport of women’s basketball, touching on the race of the players and whether or not they’re being treated equitably or whether or not they’re getting the same access to brand deals or whatever, whether or not a straight presenting person is treated differently as someone who is queer. How is this? How does this play out for you across the culture, how this impacts and kind of dredges up some of the ugliness of our sports.

BILLIE JEAN KING: Things are better than they’ve ever been. I mean, I’m gay, so I can tell you how it happened with me. I was outed and I lost everything in 24 hours, lost millions of dollars. I was finally near the end of my career, 37 or 8, and my publicist and my lawyer did not want me to say I was, or I was at least trying to figure myself out, my sexual identity. And I argued with them for 48 hours, and I said, “No, I must tell the truth.” And they said, “No, you can’t. You deny because you’re going to lose all your money. You’ll be nothing and you’ll never have anything after this.” And I said, “I don’t care.” My parents taught me about telling the truth. The reason I didn’t talk about it before, because sponsors told me if I discuss what I was feeling, that we wouldn’t have a tour. So that made that real easy. That decision was easy. It wasn’t just about me. I was going to retire. So I was having all these great contracts. I was finally going to make some money. I lost it all and had to start my life over. But it was one of my darkest moments. But it was one of my most honest moments, and you certainly find out who your real friends are, that is for sure. And that’s worth a lot. Now, I mean, Jason Collins came out, the president calls him, says, “Fantastic.” He gets a job with the NBA, which was great. So anyway, the men have been my allies through my life, and without male allies, I wouldn’t be here. So it’s true. Everybody counts. That’s what I’m trying to tell you for different reasons. Especially in the 60s, if guys weren’t on your side, you had no chance. In 1972, pro tennis had just started really. We’re in our second year with the US Open. I won the US Open, Ilie Năstase wins the U.S. Open. In the press conference, remember, we had no social media in those days. We had four channels. PBS and three, you know, ABC, NBC, CBS.

CHARLES BLOW: Absolutely.

BILLIE JEAN KING: So I’m sitting there with the media, all men. I don’t think there was a woman writer yet. And something inside of me, I had had it. And then I said,” I haven’t talked to the other women, but I’m going to go for it.” We’re not, we the women probably aren’t going to come back next year if we don’t get equal prize money. And then I thought, “Oh, I haven’t talked to the women.” I’m like, “Oh, what have I said? I’m really in trouble here. Yikes-a-doodle.” And I’m like “Okay.” I stayed with it though. I said the heck with it, I’m going for it. Ilie Năstase made 25,000. I made ten, and I’ve had it when we’re making not even half, I’m like crazy. So I also was part owner of tournaments. Business. So what do I have to do? I’ve got to go get some money. Relationships are everything. So I went to people that I had relationships in business and said, “Would you make up the prize money next year to make it equal for the women?” And I’m praying like crazy, right? And I went to different ones. I said, “Maybe together you could do it so you wouldn’t have to spend as much or want.” Bristol-Myers came up to me and goes, “We want to do all of it.” Yes, but I went to the women. I said, “I really think I put my foot in my mouth. I think I ruined it.” And they said, “No, we’ll go with you on that.” So anyway, Billy Talbert, who was the tournament director, a former player, former hero, he had type 1 diabetes. I really learned a lot about that from him. He announced that in 1973, in July, we’re going to have equal prize money. But that’s how that worked. So when they tell you, oh, we’ve had 50 years of equal prize money, I want you to know the backstory. It gets back to business again, and relationships, and men have been great allies to me.

CHARLES BLOW: Clara, when do you think women’s basketball could get to a point of equal pay?

CLARA WU TSAI: What we want is to close that gap and I think we can get there. Yeah, I believe in ten years I want, I want the New York Liberty to be the first women’s sports franchise that’s worth $1 billion.

BILLIE JEAN KING: Yes!

[applause]

CLARA WU TSAI: So right now, the way men’s salaries in the NBA are calculated, they get 50% of basketball-related income that comes into the NBA. For the WNBA, the women are getting about nine. Okay, so if you just kind of think that we can get in that range, I think we can definitely move the needle. And I think what I’d like to see and what I think is possible in my lifetime, is to increase the salary cap to be a larger percent of revenues, but also on an absolute level, you know, it needs to go up, and it needs to go up so that women don’t have to do more jobs. They don’t have to have a side job in the off-season, or they don’t have to go overseas and play in Russia or China and, you know, risk being injured.

CHARLES BLOW: Or imprisoned.

BILLIE JEAN KING: Imprisoned.

CLARA WU TSAI: Or imprisoned, exactly. So what you want to do is get somewhere in between. I think what happens with the NBA is, I mean, now the media contracts are for so many games, 80 games, but 80 games is really hard on a man’s body, on anybody’s body. So, but it’s just, no one’s going to dial back from that, you know? But then you have load-management issues. They don’t want to play all those games. The season is too long. So we don’t want to get there. If you get paid that much, look, look what the toll that it takes on your life. Right. So I don’t think of equal pay, but I think of a salary that makes sense and that allows them to make a good living.

BILLIE JEAN KING: What you’re doing is amazing. I try to tell the players, you know what, athletes think everybody’s there for them. I said, “No, we are there for them, to entertain them, to make them go home happy.” Or maybe it’s not so happy if they lose, but they’re in it and they love it and they want to do it again. And maybe they want to go play, or I don’t know. But the point is, I think the players are performers. Our job is to make the audience happy.

CHARLES BLOW: Give us a round of applause for our two amazing guests tonight. Thank you so much.

[applause]

CHARLES BLOW: And thank you all for coming.

Accessibility Statement

Transcript

SARITA GUPTA: Hi, I’m Sarita Gupta. Thanks for joining us for the latest conversation in our 

”On What Matters” series. I’m the vice president of U.S. programs at the Ford Foundation. I’m a brown-skinned South Asian woman with salt and pepper hair. And I’m speaking today with Willa Johnson about making art and media in the Appalachian region and seeding new creatives. Great to have you with us, Willa.

WILLA JOHNSON: Hi. Thank you for having me here today. My name’s Willa Johnson. I’m the director of the Film and Appalachian Media Institute here at Appalshop in East Kentucky. And I am a white woman with light brown hair in a blue dress.

SARITA GUPTA: Terrific. Well, welcome. Let’s get into it. I’m really excited to learn about your work in action. There is such a rich culture in rural America, and uniquely in Appalachia. What inspired Appalshop’s creation in 1969? And how are you carrying that mission forward today?

WILLA JOHNSON: In the late ‘60s, there was the War on Poverty that was taking place, and with that was a lot of media being created about what poverty looks like in America. And Appalachia really became the poster child of that. And along with that were these initiatives to train young people on how to learn how to use cameras. And the idea was that they would train them how to use cameras and they could leave and find employment, but what happened was because we had been facing a lot of stereotyping and, and really harsh, gritty pictures that didn’t tell the full story, that didn’t tell the full narrative, that people felt really misrepresented and untrusting of media in the region. But then suddenly you were training young people with cameras and they were turning that lens on their own community. And they told the story of the community they know. Which was a richer, deeper story than the outside media could do. And so at the heart of it, it really became, how do we show America what living in Appalachia is really like—the good and the bad—how do we represent our community, and also how do we push our community to be better?

SARITA GUPTA: What an amazing story you just shared with us. The idea that people in the community can gain these incredible skills, and the assumption was that they would leave the community, but in fact, they decided to stay in the community and tell the story of their own experiences, their own lived experiences. That’s such a powerful idea of voice and agency. So Willa, how does Appalshop reflect its community today?

WILLA JOHNSON: Today, Appalshop works across many different platforms. We have film, we have radio, we have an archive, we have youth programming, theater, a little bit of everything. And every summer we have 18-year-olds, 14 to 22 year olds, but approximately 18-year-olds, make a documentary about their own community. And so for 35 years, we’ve collected what it looks like to be 18 in Appalachia. And to me, that’s a real representation of what Appalshop does, because it shows historically where we were, where we are, and where we want to be. And that is evolving—there’s full stories here happening, there’s diversity, there’s conflict, there’s community, there’s color. And so a lot of what we do is like, how do we represent our community as it looks today, how do we preserve what was yesterday, and how do we dream of what’s tomorrow. And so it’s not only pushing our own community, it’s, it’s pushing the outside world too, to look at us as, as a place that deserves investment, so that people have the ability and access to move forward.

SARITA GUPTA: So Willa, can you tell us about Appalshop’s work to lift up and support emerging artists, and why it’s so crucial? And I wonder if I could invite you to tell us a little bit about how you got involved with Appalshop.

WILLA JOHNSON: How I got into this work started really personal. I grew up in front of a mountaintop removal site in a holler. And one day during a storm, a coal silt pond burst, and they’re these, man-made dams that they create to, to clean the coal, it burst, and when it did it, it wiped out the entire holler I was living in. Neighbors lost homes, lost cars, lost yards. My dad, who drove a coal truck, who never questioned the industry, became really irate when the coal industry said, “It was a God, a God-made event, it wasn’t man-made.” And so he took a 1990s VHS camera in the middle of the night, and he hiked up to the mountaintop, and he recorded the footage from the dam and how it had broke. And he drove it an hour away to the local news station and handed it over. And it was this moment of the power of a camera and how it can hold people accountable. That was a really pivotal moment for me to realize the power of media and storytelling, and, what it means to have these capabilities in local people’s hands. It changes, it changes everything. And so finding my way to Appalshop as a young person was this really pivotal moment of, I didn’t have to leave to become a journalist in another community, that my own community was rich with stories that deserve to be told. And so, that really led me down a road of recommitment to my own community when I thought I would leave—we’re told that in order to be successful, you have to leave—and, and so finding an avenue like Appalshop, finding a way to tell stories was really life changing for me. And so now, in my line of work, I get to work with young people who are looking for that, that outlet, right, they’re looking for ways to create art, to create stories, to question the systems they’re in, to represent the full narrative of their community. And so it’s really important work not only for what we’re putting out, but for the people who are creating it. It’s life changing to be able to represent something you love, but also want to see be better. And it really changes a lot of how people talk about where they’re from. You know, I remember 20 years ago, young people weren’t using the phrase, I’m Appalachian. They were from Kentucky. They were from East Kentucky. “Appalachian” was sort of this, this thing that you weren’t always proud of. But now, there’s so many young people who have really found identity through creation and art and storytelling, who really changed the narrative of what it means to be Appalachian. And I feel like Appalshop in particular, had a huge role in reclaiming the pride of, of that label.

SARITA GUPTA: Oh, I love that. I could just imagine young people in the region, you know, just gaining a sense of real agency, dignity, and voice, which is so crucial to any community. So, Willa, why do you think rural storytelling is so powerful? And what do you think outside audiences can learn from it?

WILLA JOHNSON: Rural storytelling is incredibly needed. It’s incredibly powerful. And anyone who doesn’t believe that in America, I promise every four years in the election cycle, you turn to rural America to ask what’s going on. Rural America makes up the majority of your land mass. It makes up a huge chunk of your voting population. And it really dictates how people are interpreting these national messages that get spread down to smaller communities. And so, rural storytelling is incredibly important in, in every aspect of journalism, of media. There’s this way that people talk about rural America where it’s either painted in this really soft, romantic light, or it’s really villainized and demonized as the problem. But there’s, there is complexity here. There is difference of voices here. There are people who are working across all spectrums of an issue here. And so it’s really important to invest and listen to rural America, instead of just writing them off, because at the end of the day, like, they are deciding what is going to happen in this country. They are deciding what is, what is the message that is being played out throughout America. And so rural storytelling is incredibly important. It’s also really important because we make up a lot of the culture, a lot of the history of America. A lot of things that will play out to be popular are born often in rural America. Think back to 10, 15 years ago when drinking out of mason jars became very trendy. That was not that was not something that we thought about here. And so it’s just, you know, it is really impactful to see how rural culture plays out and rural storytelling plays out in this country. But it’s not often spotlighted or identified. And I think there’s another complexity to it of who is telling that story. It’s different if you don’t come in, and you understand the people and you understand the culture, you’re not going to get the story that someone who is from here is going to get. And so it’s really important to have people who understand the community they’re in telling the story they’re telling, and that’s not just for rural America, I believe that’s for any subculture in the world, really, is you need someone from that culture to be able to tell that story fairly and justly.

SARITA GUPTA: Yeah, Willa, the work you’re doing is so important, and I deeply appreciate it. You know, at the Ford Foundation, we have worked on, and we’ve been paying a lot of attention to just deepening polarization in this country. And so much of the polarization we experience is, is the lack of deeper understanding of the, the texture as you’re describing it. That you’re right, when people think about rural America, it’s so black and white, as you were saying earlier, yet there’s so much nuance, there’s so much richness, there’s so much texture there. And so the work you’re doing and the way you’re describing it really resonates with me. So to that end, Willa, what are some current projects that excite you?

WILLA JOHNSON: There are several projects we’re really excited about at Appalshop right now, that really make us feel passionate and enthused about what we’re telling. Climate crisis is hitting a lot of rural America first, so really becoming a voice for how that is happening is pretty important part of our work now. And so we’ve really taken a pretty big step in that by producing a film called “All is Not Lost” about the flood, where we talk about climate crisis being a part of what led to a one in 1000-year flood that cost us lives and cost us so much. So we really have taken that as a step of trying to connect people and remind people that, in order for us to create change, you have to pull rural people up to the table with you. We’re getting ready to launch “Shades of Home,” which every month will feature a regional artist, whether it’s a singer-songwriter, a poet, a rapper, a potter, a painter, and really shine a spotlight on the art that’s being created here. And not only the art, but the diversity of the artists who are creating it. We have rap videos in line right now. We have singer-songwriters, we have young trans musicians, all who have been working with us to tell the story of what their Appalachia looks like to them. And then we also are working on a project called “Roof Over My Head” that talks about the unhoused here in Appalachia. The housing crisis looks very different here than it does in other parts of the country, and so often it’s not discussed enough. It’s not seen as critical. But we were already in a crisis before we faced a major natural disaster, and now it’s even more crucial that we talk about housing. So we’ll be following people who are living in campers, living on couches, couch surfing, living in churches, shelters, to really talk about the housing crisis we’re facing here, and try to talk about the systemic reasons that lead to that.

SARITA GUPTA: They sound like incredibly powerful projects, because again, they challenge the assumptions, right? And help us understand the bigger issues at play. So, we have an audience-submitted question from John Heckmann of Memphis, Tennessee. He’s with WKNO Public Media for the Mid-South. And his question is, “How can the challenges and proposed solutions to addressing rural and urban poverty best be highlighted through multimedia?”

WILLA JOHNSON: Yeah, I think that’s a really great question, and I think, the real power lies in bringing folks together who experience poverty in different areas. I’ve seen in this line of work at Appalshop, we’ve worked with a lot of urban communities dealing with poverty, and what happens is like we see a lot of differences from the immediate start, right? Like we, we think, oh, there’s such a difference or oh, your access is better than my access, or the reason why we’re here is different. But once we’re together, once we talk about the root causes, often we find a lot of similarities and, and I think there’s a lot of power in how we work together to tackle these issues, and to lift each other up in our own voices. And so a lot of times, we really will work with other groups who want to tell the story of their community, whether it’s another rural community or an urban community, to talk about what we’ve learned, about what it means to turn the lens on your own community, and what it means to push the stereotypes that people think about your community. And so, I think there’s a lot of importance for us to work together, to lift each other up, and then also to, to not only notice the similarities, but to notice the differences as well. To be able to talk about things like white privilege, even when you’re in an impoverished community. To be able to talk about monoeconomies or often environmental damages that lead to impoverished communities facing the challenges they face. So there’s a lot that I think there just needs to be more space for these communities to be able to work together to tell these stories. There needs to be more space for collaboration. But the importance of both being told is critical. If we want to think about how to create a healthier world for the people who are below a certain income level in this in this country.

SARITA GUPTA: That’s so important, the importance of partnerships, collaborations,investments and really helping make sure these stories are being told, but amplified, right? And I love what you said about, we want to lift up the similarities, but we also want to be clear about the differences, that we shouldn’t shy away from that either. Thank you, I love that. So, Willa, this work takes time and can be really tough. So in this context, what keeps you motivated?

WILLA JOHNSON: What keeps me motivated is to celebrate the smaller wins as well as the bigger wins. Especially rural organizing, rural storytelling, it’s really hard to see the numbers at the end of the day, and, they’re never going to be as large scale as someone maybe in an urban community, because of the isolation, the way we’re spread out, the size of the audience. And so, realizing on the scale that we are in, the success we are having, and for me, that often the way I’ve taken that success is when we have a community screening and 100 people show up and participate, and are excited to be there and ask questions, that is one of the things that drives me the most in this work is that community engagement aspect we have here. But also, when I go into work and I see so many talented people from the region in the office with me, really pushing themselves to do this really complicated balance of celebrating and questioning our own community. It inspires me a lot. My coworkers inspire me a lot, because I know what it’s taken for myself to be here, and I feel really proud and excited to see them in the same setting as well. And often every summer we bring in new young people and train them how to create documentaries and that summer is really a recharging time for me every year, to see new young people, new perspectives, new stories being brought into the space. It brings so much energy to us every year, and so having that revolving door of, of talent and passion and investment really is what inspires me to keep moving.

SARITA GUPTA: Wow! Wonderful! Thank you, Willa. And to everyone tuning in for this insightful conversation, we hope you will continue to join us for the rest of our “On What Matters” series.

End of transcript.

Accessibility Statement

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Please welcome Charles Blow. [applause]

CHARLESBLOW: Hello, everyone. How are you?

CHARLES BLOW: Thank you. So this is our second “Ideas at Ford with Charles Blow.” We’re talking about the heartland and elevating the voices of people in local communities—not just talking to them, but listening to them and understanding that there is a real perspective that they can give because they are closest to the problems that they have themselves. And we have two amazing people. The first is actor, musician, and founder of SixDegrees.Org Kevin Bacon.

[applause]

KEVINBACON: Thank you, man.

CHARLESBLOW: And the second is agricultural pioneer Gabe Brown. [applause]

So I’ll start with you, Kevin. Everyone in this audience recognizes you from some movie. But not only have you done all those movies, you’re a musician and podcaster and philanthropist, and you founded this group, SixDegrees.Org. Why did you extend yourself into that space?

KEVINBACON: Well, when I was a child, my parents, especially my mother, was very active in the community and very active in politics, in antiwar and Vietnam. We were talking about civil rights growing up in Philadelphia. And I got sort of involved in things like Earth Day, you know, when I was a teenager. And then I moved to New York and became an actor, and all of that went away. It was all about me. Like, I didn’t read the paper. I didn’t think about–

CHARLESBLOW: I’m not going to forgive that one. [laughter]

KEVINBACON: Yeah. Well, you weren’t writing. I wasn’t doing—I wasn’t doing anything outside of trying to get where I wanted to get, you know, fame and wealth and, and all that kind of stuff. And then at a certain point, you kind of grow up and, you know, I had children, I was married. I was reading things about the world.

I was starting to read the newspaper and, and, and I felt just sad and frustrated and angry or helpless or concerned or all these things that all of us feel. And so I actually thought about Paul Newman. I opened up the refrigerator, and there was Paul on a jar of tomato sauce. He really took his face and said, you know, “I’m going to just use my face. I’m not gonna pretend—I’m not going to secretly give money to something. I’m going to actually have a product, sell it, and give the money away.” And I thought, well, is there anything that I could do in a branding kind of way?

And then I thought, “six degrees.” It wasn’t anything that you could buy or sell, you know, it was just this kind of concept of the connectivity. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, well, that’s really what we’re all—we’re all connected. The things that we do have an effect in our community.

At Six Degrees, we are really focused on trying to take people who are living in a small grassroots way and have smaller organizations and giving them the ability to put their word out a little bit farther.

CHARLES BLOW: So now I’m going to fan out a little bit. Okay. So Footloose comes out. I’m 14 years old.

KEVINBACON: Okay.

CHARLES BLOW: We’re just getting into high school. All of us are trying to figure out how to do all the moves. Maybe reckless doing it, but the kids at the school where the movie is based in Utah—Payson, Utah. They get together and petitioned to have you come. What are they saying to you?

KEVIN BACON: Well, that was interesting because on one hand, that trip back to Payson, which happened this year because it was the 40th anniversary. On one hand, it could have been a fluffy kind of thing to do. “Hey, kids. Yeah, I’m back.” And, you know, it could be, I found it to be a sort of self-serving concept in a way, you know: Aren’t I great that I deign to, you know, get on a plane and come say hi to your high school? They were tearing the high school down where we shot the movie, and they wanted to show me the locker that I stood at, you know, in the movie, you know, that kind of stuff. But then, I was talking to Stacy and Brigid who run Six Degrees, and they kind of come up with this idea of going back, but also turning it into a community event where people are giving back to their community.

So they had come up with the idea of these building kits and getting people to donate items. A lot of times, essential items or hygiene stuff that people need, and building these kits and then taking them back into their community. What I was really struck with was the excitement. There was as much excitement about me being there as there was building these kits and doing something for the people that they live with.

You could see not only that this was still a very, very tight-knit community and very similar to when Hollywood rolled in, in this film crew and made this movie 40 years ago. I think it’s more about just listening to them and saying what is it that you need?

CHARLESBLOW: So now I want to listen to Gabe Brown because I am just fascinated by what you have done agriculturally with this concept of regenerative agriculture, and explain to this audience what that means.

GABE BROWN: Sure. And regenerative agriculture, Charles, is nothing more than time-tested ecological principles. It’s nothing that Gabe Brown devised. It’s nothing that any one of us devised. I’ve kind of fallen on this definition that, that we like a lot: It’s farming, ranching and, I’ll add, and gardening in synchrony with nature to repair, rebuild, revitalize, and restore ecosystem function. Beginning with all life in the soil and moving to all life above the soil.

And I think that’s all-encompassing. You know, many people don’t realize that there’s more microorganisms in a teaspoon full of healthy soil than there are people on this planet. Yet it’s those microorganisms that actually cycle the nutrients, bring the nutrients to the plants, that lead to nutrient-dense food. And we’ve tended to have forgotten that. And what we’ve done the last, particularly the last 80 years, is this marked decline in the health of our soils.

I have the good fortune—I travel all over the world now, and I tell people I have never, ever stood on a single farm, ranch, or garden, including my own, that’s not degraded. Approximately anywhere from 25 to 75% of the carbon that was once in our soils is now in the atmosphere.

The beautiful thing is, using these regenerative practices, we can bring that back down. And that’s the whole thing. We can do it while improving the water cycle, the earth cycle, increasing profitability, and providing nutrient-dense food.

CHARLESBLOW: So then the obvious question is: If you can capture more soil, you get higher yields, you have more nutrition in the crops that you grow, you are more profitable. The soil is healthier. Why isn’t everybody doing this?

GABE BROWN: Yeah. I’m not going to say yields of a monoculture crop will be higher. Now work by Dr. Jonathan Lundgren at the ECDYSIS Foundation found that regenerative farms and ranches, 78% greater profitability. 78%. What does that mean to rural communities? What does that mean to all those who make their living off the land or are involved in marketing agricultural products? It’s a win-win-win.

Now, here’s a little-known fact that most people, they think, “78% higher profitability. Oh, you’re charging a lot more for your product.” I can produce my products at a much lower price point, as can my neighbors, because I don’t have all these expensive added inputs. So the beauty of it is we can produce healthier product while restoring the ecosystem at a lower price point, and that’s good for everybody.

[applause]

Except maybe the chemical dealers, fertilizer dealers—they can find something else to do. [laughter]

CHARLESBLOW: In addition to that, you were saying, because the food is more nutrient- dense, this also helps rural communities, poor people. You can eat less fuel, food, and be healthy because it’s more nutrition in the food that you do eat.

GABEBROWN: So we’re working with a team of scientists led by Dr. Stephan van Vliet, Utah State University, Dr. Fred Provenza, Dr. Scott Kronberg, and we’re identifying farms, ranches side-by-side: one that’s going down the regenerative path, one that’s in the current production model. And then they bring out a team of scientists. They look at the soil microbiology. They look at the plant diversity, animal diversity, insect diversity.

We grow the same grains, fruits, vegetables, or pastured protein on both. Dr. van Vliet and his team use a mass spectrometer, can identify over 2300 different phytonutrient compounds. And those phytonutrient compounds are what drives our gut microbiome, so equates to health in us. They’re not seeing just a little difference. They’re seeing, like, conjugated linoleic and fatty acids, which is a positive thing, 239% higher on the regenerative farms and ranches. Oxidative stress markers, which lead to things like heart disease, etc., 67% lower from that produced on the regenerative farms and ranches. This is just groundbreaking. However, what we’re going to be up against is, how many large in the agro-industrial complex: They’re going to fight this type of data, but we’re getting the data and we’re going to prove it. And beautiful thing is, you’re going to start seeing it on store shelves very quickly.

CHARLESBLOW: Otherwise, we’re all going to be emailing you for a shipment of corn. So both of you are talking about different ways in which local communities can benefit from just change

in practices, or us listening to good practices and helping people to exercise those good practices. Economically, what do we think that local communities need, and how can we better serve them?

KEVIN BACON: Well, I don’t know that I’m really the person to answer that question, Charles. I mean, what I would say is that, you know, economics are such a complicated thing. I think that, you know, we live at a time where a lot of people feel that they are having a hard time, you know, making ends meet. I think that we have to, you know, just listen to these communities and see if there are ways specifically for them to be addressed. We’ve gone to places all over the country where people have just had these community gardens. I mean, speaking of agriculture, where they are, you know, planting trees or, or growing food that they’re then, you know, distributing to the community. And it’s a—it’s a way not only to use a space in a positive, nourishing way, but also to give people the opportunity to go in and get their hands —children, a lot of times—to get their hands dirty, to see the connection between what it is and what we eat and what we grow. You know, these little tiny organizations are the things that Six Degrees is often really focused on.

CHARLESBLOW: That is interesting because the community gardens are often urban.

KEVINBACON: Yeah.

CHARLES BLOW: And should we be thinking about the heartland differently? That it’s not just where our friend Gabe lives, but it is everywhere? It is where people, you know, the heart of the country is not an urban, rural split. It is different than that.

KEVINBACON: Well, Gabe and I were talking about this before. I mean, what we really want is for the heart of the country to feel unified, right? That’s part of the biggest issues that we have right now, is that we have an idea about what the coasts are. Listen, I mean, you know, we’re here, we live near the coasts. I know farmers, you know, I know people that are working really hard, raising animals, raising crops that live, you know, an hour away or half an hour away, you know, and as you said, urban gardens.

I mean, the idea that between the coasts and the middle of the country, that we have a kind of a us-or-them concept, is something that I feel like we really need to get past. And again, listen, it’s six degrees, right? We’re connected. We are connected. You know, it has nothing to do with me—

CHARLESBLOW: It has everything to do with you— [laughter]

KEVINBACON: No, it really doesn’t. It really doesn’t. I always think about—you go to a, you’re someplace—or let’s say your plane gets—you’re in the airport and your plane gets delayed in a snowstorm. So you end up in the bar, or in the coffee shop. You strike up a conversation with somebody. All you’re going to do, right away, is find connections. And you will, you know, you

will. I mean, as long as you stay away from politics. But it’s true, that the idea of the heartland, the whole country is the heart.

[applause]

GABEBROWN: I think of it a little different. I don’t think the heartland is geographically—I think it’s right here.

[puts hand on heart]

CHARLESBLOW: Yes.

GABEBROWN: And I think it’s as humans, we can agree on 85, 90% of the issues. Why do we spend all of our time arguing about that 10 or 15%? Let’s come together and find common ground for common good and move forward. All of us.

CHARLESBLOW: So, Stacy and Brigid are sitting right in the front row. What have they brought to your organization?

[Stacy Huston, Executive Director, and Brigid Zuknick, Director of Programs & Development, both from SixDegrees.Org answer from audience]

KEVINBACON: Everything. Listen—this is, this is what I do. This. [Kevin points to his face]

[laughter]

They do everything else. Yeah. I mean, Stacy. Stacy, how long have you—when did—eight years. Stacy’s been eight years. Brigid, you’ve been here two years, a year-and-a-half? Yeah. They are the heartland of Six Degrees.Org, and I don’t know anything. I mean, I’m sort of starting to learn a little bit, but when it comes to the world of philanthropy, we’re an organization that needs new, fresh ideas all the time because, as I said, we’re not just focused on one specific thing. And that’s one of the great things that these two amazing women bring are new ideas, always pitching. We did the podcast last year. It was very, very successful. And our initiative to build these kits all came from them. So and, and they’re on the ground traveling. I mean, they do everything.

CHARLES BLOW: Gabe, we’ve been talking about the, the heartland of America, but you’re consulting with farmers all over the planet. Because, you know, a lot of what you’re describing is about the health of the planet itself.

GABEBROWN: We were talking about communities and what communities need. And, Kevin, I agree with you. The first thing you have to do is listen. What are they interested in? We had a community call us that, they had a smaller community. They needed to retrofit their entire water

treatment facility because of too much nitrates in the water. It was going to cost them excess of

$400 million.

They didn’t have that kind of money. So we said no, we got to look at what’s the root cause of the problem. What’s putting those nitrates in your watershed? It’s excess nitrogen being applied upstream in the watershed. So instead of using your money there, why don’t we educate the farmers upstream to grow cover crops, hold those nutrients on the land? Two years. No more did they need that water treatment facility. At a cost of a couple hundred thousand dollars. So this is the type of things we can do to help communities educate farmers and ranchers. This can take place all over the world. That’s just one example.

KEVINBACON: That’s cool.

CHARLESBLOW: Amazing example.

CHARLESBLOW: I keep being blown away every time you talk. I’m like, what? [laughter]

Both of you are doing interesting things to elevate voices. You have an amazing podcast. You have this book but also you did a Ted Talk. Talk to me about how important it is that local communities reclaim the narrative of what is important for them and to them.

KEVIN BACON: Yeah. I mean, I think that, even if you live in an urban center, you still have a sense of your community. You still have what you call your neighborhood. That’s exactly what it was when I was a kid. And it’s still what it is. I still know where my neighborhood is. I still see the same faces, the same people that we have. We—if we live in New York, you know, we’re going to share a wall.

You know, the problem right now for me that I see is that with the internet, there’s a lot of great stuff about it, but it’s very easy to fall into a rabbit hole of information as opposed to looking out your window or looking at the sky, or walking down the street or seeing somebody that, that you know. So I think that anything that we can do to encourage a sense of community will encourage a sense of the community of the world, you know what I mean? We want clean air. We want water. We want safety. We want health care. We want family. Everybody wants the same thing.

With the Six Degrees podcast, it was, what was really interesting about it was that it was a sort of celebrity-generated podcast, right? Because we figured, okay, this is how we’re going to get people listening and watching. So we’re going to have stars, people, celebrities that will come on. But the second half of it were people that were working in grassroots organizations that these celebrities supported—some of them were actually running their actual foundations—and it was a way to pull people in. And then you find out that there’s all these amazing people who

are not, they’re not being seen, but they’re doing great work out there, on the ground, in the community, in specific ways. And that’s really what we’ve been trying to highlight.

GABE BROWN: Yeah, exactly. When we go into these rural areas and small communities, it’s amazing the ideas that can be generated there if we just listen. And, you know, just coming through the COVID pandemic and that we learned about some of the issues in our current food supply chain. Okay, there’s some major issues. And one of the things that we’re really encouraging is: Let’s eat local, let’s source local, eat more local, support the rural communities.

So we’re seeing interest in these small communities to be food hubs, to aggregate production amongst the smaller producers and then market it over a broader scale. And you can find wonderful ideas and stories of things like that happening. And that’s exactly what we need, so that things like COVID don’t negatively affect the food supply anymore, but it also revitalizes that rural community. Keeps the money there, helps build the profitability, keeps kids in those school systems so they’re not closing. It’s things like that that we can advance for the betterment of everyone.

CHARLESBLOW: How do we–I guess it’s back to the economic question. If you have the great idea, a lot of these small organizations just need more money. They don’t have enough staff.

Maybe it’s just one or two people doing something, or a group of neighbors and they just need help financially. How do you guys help to put pressure on the people with the deep pockets?

KEVIN BACON: Yeah, yeah. It’s, well, listen, I mean, it’s raising money and it’s always the pursuit, right, to, to have funds to, to do good work. We don’t focus just on the dollars and cents. It was kind of a three-pronged approach. One was to isolate a community organization that needed help, whatever it happens to be.

It’s going to be a small community organization. The second is to reach out to the, you know, to corporations, people who have products. Who have, 4000, whatever, notebooks, or something is nothing, you know—or, you know, socks, or whatever happens it to be. And then the third one is the volunteer piece of actually asking people to come and build those kits, and we’re not asking them for money. We’re asking them to just spend three or four hours putting things in a bag to help somebody in your community that is less fortunate than you. So when it comes to getting dollars and cents out of hard-working people who have a lot of other things that they could be doing with, with $10 or whatever, that’s tough.

That’s a really, really tough ask, and especially a tough ask from someone like me if I’m fronting it, because people go, “Well, why don’t you pay for it?” You know, which makes a lot of sense, honestly. But to be able to go to bigger donors, foundations and then to bring in volunteerism at the community level is, for us, has been—it has been really successful.

CHARLESBLOW: I can hear them on the phone, by the way, at night: “Can you believe that Kevin Bacon asked me for $10?”

[laughter]

KEVINBACON: Yeah. I know.

GABEBROWN: So I really think that, that there’s ways to, to bring those groups together, the smaller groups in the, in the rural communities that have a good idea, want to do something.

And we’ve had success going to co-ops, larger organizations and say, “Hey, this is worthwhile to build your community. Are you willing to donate so much for every, you know, bag of seed you sell, or whatever the case may be, to go to this project?”

And that way, you know, they’ll just mark it up, of course, the price of that, but at least they’re putting money back into those worthwhile projects.

CHARLESBLOW: You’ve been doing Six Degrees since 2007, is that right? Gabe, you’ve been on your journey for 20 years or so?

GABEBROWN: Yeah.

CHARLESBLOW: What changes have you seen in the work you’re doing, the people whose lives it is affecting, over those years?

KEVIN BACON: From my standpoint is—I just want to keep trying, you know, just want to keep trying to make some kind of an impact. And when we live in a world where we so often feel overwhelmed with everything that’s going on, you know, the antidote for despair is always some kind of activism. Some kind of work, some kind of positive thing, just for, just to make yourself feel like, you know, I did something today, you know. So having an organization, I think to myself, you know, what is it that we want to keep on keeping on? And you just have to sort of trust that, that it is having a positive impact.

GABE BROWN: Now, for me, you know, I’m up there in age, been at this a long time. And it’s amazing to me to see the degree of change that I have, the past 30-plus years. I really think what drives it home, though, is the hope, the hope that is regenerative agriculture. You know, the thing that’s near and dear to me right now is: You look at the incidences of ADD, ADHD, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autoimmune diseases, etc., and are farmers, ranchers, and the current ag production model to be blamed for all of that? No. But are we to be blamed for some of that? Absolutely, yes. And now, to finally see scientific studies coming about that are proving what many of us—and it’s not just me—many of us who have gone down this regenerative path for so long have known, that there truly is a difference. Climate change—I was just telling them backstage, we just finished a scientific study that showed through adaptive grazing practices, we can sequester 12.4 tons of CO2 equivalent of carbon per hectare per year. That’s astronomical. Nobody thought we could do that. Well, we can do that. We want to reverse climate change. It’s easy. We just need to get more grazing animals out on the landscape. We’ll reverse climate change very quickly. We can easily take animals out of the feedlots where they

don’t belong, put them out on the land, and we can negate the amount of CO2 emissions in the United States on a yearly basis.

We can do that quickly. So seeing things like this come to fruition and seeing now more and more people talking about it. You know, I spend a great deal of my time talking to CEOs, boards of directors, heads of sustainability of large companies, government agencies, etc. Seeing them want to learn more? That’s a good thing. We’re finally starting to drive some real change.

CHARLESBLOW: You mentioned government agencies. That has been nagging me about this conversation. It’s like, if you have proof that this works, and it’s profitable, why? What is the impediment for government doing more to subsidize more of what you’re doing?

GABE BROWN: I can answer that. It comes down to what I said earlier. They want to argue about the 10% rather than agreeing on the 90%. They’re just too bullheaded. I’ve testified in front of the House AG Committee. You talk about a lesson in futility. Both sides want the same thing, but they’re too bullheaded to come together. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

And you know the way it is with the political winds: Things change sometimes every four to eight years, it appears. Well, then they start from scratch. They want to do a whole reset, and they tend to throw out all the things, if there was things that were working. It is—also you have to realize with government agencies, agriculture is heavily subsidized and it’s subsidized not so much for the farmer and rancher, but it subsidizes the agro-industrial complex that that feeds.

You know, because agriculture is a very, very large industry in this country. And so the subsidies are really flowing through the farmer back to those companies.

CHARLESBLOW: What idea do you want to leave this audience with?

KEVIN BACON: Well, first of all, let me say that it’s been great to listen to you, Gabe. I mean, I’m so inspired by that, that kind of specific and well-thought-out work. Where do I want to leave it? I go back to the concept of six degrees. You know, you just have to take me out of it and remember that your actions have consequences—that whether they’re good or bad, whether we like it or not, we’re all riding this same boat, you know, spinning through the universe, and we, and we have to share it. We have to figure out a way to share the community and the country and the world and the planet. And if you just keep thinking about those connections, maybe people will show, you know, a little bit more generosity and compassion to their fellow human beings.

GABEBROWN: I would just encourage everyone to make a difference. Realize that the current agriculture production model is driven by consumers. You can make a difference by sourcing regeneratively grown and raised products. Make a difference in your local school system.

Demand that they serve fresh produce grown locally. You know, there’s a great example here in New York City: I toured a high school that had their own greenhouse and was growing food for their community and their classes. We need to, each of us, do what we can to make a difference. Nothing is too small.

[applause]

CHARLES BLOW: And that round of applause is not enough. Let’s give a bigger round of applause. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming. So thank you very much. All right. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

[applause]

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Transcript

HILARY PENNINGTON: Hi, I’m Hilary Pennington. Thanks for joining us for “On What Matters.” I’m the executive vice president for programs at the Ford Foundation. I’m a white, middle-aged woman with short hair and a blue sweater, and my pronouns are she/hers. And today I will be speaking with Marlene Sallo about amplifying where disability intersects with justice. Welcome, Marlene.

MARLENE SALLO: Thank you so much, Hilary. I’m Marlene Sallo, and I am the executive director of the National Disability Rights Network. I’m an Afro-Latina female with shoulder-length gray-brown hair, and I’m wearing a yellow blouse with flowers and I go by the pronouns she/her/ella.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Let’s dive right in to learn more. I want to ask you about the systems that support or fail the disability community. But first, can you start us out with how you describe the nature and the size of the disability community itself?

MARLENE SALLO: So according to the CDC, one in four Americans have a disability. But I would say that we’re even larger than that, because we always need to consider the fact that as we age, most of us will also develop a disability over time. So we are everywhere but, most importantly, we’re not monolithic. We intersect with every single identity and every single community throughout the U.S. and beyond.

HILARY PENNINGTON: So, holding that in mind, let’s talk about the various systems that we do have to serve people with disabilities. And, if we were to redesign those systems, what would today’s disability justice framework look like?

MARLENE SALLO: I believe that the disability justice framework goes hand-in-hand with what we call reflective democracy: making sure that all the work that we are doing is representative of the demographics of the communities that we’re serving—and so, taking into account the fact that we are everywhere. We cross a section with individuals who come from other countries, who are African-American or Latino. We are in the communities as homeless individuals. It is important, as we do this work, to ensure that every advocacy point that we’re bringing to the table, every policy that we are creating, is inclusive and is representative of every single individual within that community. Sometimes the systems get it right and sometimes they get it wrong, but it’s important for us in the disability community to be front-and-center, allowing our voices to be heard and making sure that we have a seat at the table.

HILARY PENNINGTON: When you’re describing systems that work with justice, it makes me think about the story we all hear about curb cuts and how really, when something is designed so that it works for people with disabilities, it actually works better for all of us. If we were going to address specific economic and social injustices that affect the disability community, can you talk a little bit more about how you would recommend we do this? How we get at those kinds of injustices?

MARLENE SALLO: Well, I think addressing social injustice and economic injustice across the board is also addressing the social and economic injustices that the disability community experiences on a daily basis. But most importantly, as we are trying to reframe the justice system and the systems at large, we need to take into account the individual needs of a person with a disability, and we need to take into account the needs of the whole person. So sometimes we may say, well, if we fix the ramp into this building, then that’s taken care of everything…but what about the public transportation that got you there to begin with? If that was inaccessible, then you can’t use that ramp in that facility, right? If we’re saying that we want everyone with a disability to be able to work in an integrated, competitive employment, then we need to make sure that we are providing accessible buildings and that we are ensuring that accommodations are being provided for individuals with disabilities based on their personal need. And so we can’t look at it in a very siloed perspective. We have to look at the full range of needs within the disability community and ensure that as individuals are going through the different life stages, we are meeting each and every one of their needs across the board, and not just specifically on one individual thought or process or policy or system.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Well, that’s so important. I have a sister with disabilities, and, I think, my experience with her life is that we have systems that are very, very patchy. There are systems that we’ve set up that serve young children, but the systems get worse and worse and less and less inclusive as someone goes through their lives. Could you talk a little bit about the importance of just…understanding disability justice from not one point in time, but across a lifespan?

MARLENE SALLO: We have laws that protect the rights of students with disabilities in the school system. And so from K through 12, if done correctly, the needs of each student with a disability is being addressed in a holistic fashion, and we’re providing them with supportive services and accommodations as needed. And then, all of a sudden, they reach the age of 18 and they fall off a cliff. And there’s this lack of transition into the workforce, a lack of transition into being independent within their communities at large. And so we need to stop that process and think about, holistically, how do we ensure that individuals with disabilities, under a disability justice framework, have the ability for self-determination, right? And they’re being provided the opportunity to be self-sufficient and to reside in the communities of their choice as productive individuals of their community? And so I think that we need to really take into account that from birth to death, there are many stages in life. There are many opportunities to ensure that individuals with disabilities are receiving the services that they need, and the supports that allow them to be independent and to exercise self-determination.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Well, I love that you talked about laws. You know, when my sister was coming of age, it was before we had the Individuals with Disabilities Act, and, I think, laws are important for democracy. So let’s talk a little bit about democracy and disability. There have been such iconic fights for justice in the disability community over decades, and we have so far left to go. What can we learn from and do with the disability community as we work together on the unfinished project of America to build a multiracial democracy?

MARLENE SALLO: We’re still trying to build that multiracial democracy, I will say, but I think what folks fail to realize is that the disability rights movement, as it started, was parallel to the civil rights movement, and disability rights is civil rights. And so as we continue to infuse the disability justice framework in our day-to-day advocacy activities, we need to ensure that it is bringing everyone to the table. The disability rights movement was led by middle-aged white men, right? We are more than that within the community. For instance, I am an Afro-Latina disabled immigrant, right? So those are multiple identities. And so we need to ensure that representation is always there along that continuum of the advocacy fight, along the continuum of access to services, as well as delivery of services. But most importantly, when we’re speaking about a multiracial democracy, we need to understand that individuals with disabilities intersect. It’s an intersectional aspect of our lives. Therefore, we should be represented within each and every community that is at the table.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Oh, thank you for that. That is so, so very important. And, I can’t resist, you know, you talked about the fact that historically, disability community organizations have been led largely by men, largely by white men, and you are the first woman leading the National Disability Rights Network. Can you just talk a little bit about what that’s been like for you and how women today are continuing to shape the work of the disability rights movement?

MARLENE SALLO: Absolutely. So I will say, just from personal experience, I’ve worked in many different organizations, and it’s led by men most of the time, and so for me, it was important to be here front-and-center as an immigrant, as a Latina, as a female, representing our disabled community. But I didn’t really understand the power of that until my first day on the job, where I received unsolicited emails and text messages from other Latinas saying, “Thank you. Thank you for showing up. Thank you for representing.” It’s about representation, because we all want to be seen. We all want to be heard, and we all want that sense of belonging. And as studies show, especially within a classroom, when a student has someone that represents them at the front of the room, there’s that additional connection. And that also applies within the workforce and it applies within the movement at large. I think what I bring to the table is what any woman would bring to the table, and it’s that additional level of understanding and empathy and the need to connect that is seen among us, time and time again. But also I bring lived experience,  right? Lived experience within different identities that all intersect to make me who I am. And so I think that brings a different level of understanding to the work that I’m currently doing.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Thank you for being that kind of leader. It is so important for people to see themselves in leadership, and in people like you. So we’re going to go to the questions from the audience. And our first question is from Danielle, and she asks, “How do you work to ensure and improve accessibility for students with disabilities in education?”

MARLENE SALLO: Oh, that’s a very important question, and so time and time again, what we’re trying to do is raise awareness—among parents, among teachers, among school employees—about the rights of students with disabilities, not only from a legal perspective, but just a humanistic perspective. So our goal is to ensure that students, as well as their parents, have the information that they need to advocate not only for their child, but also to advocate for themselves. It’s about self-determination. And so we ensure that we provide information, that we provide training, and that we make sure that everything that is provided is language-accessible so that they can learn about their rights. They can advocate on behalf of themselves or others on the rights that they have within the school system. But at the same time, we’re also training and providing information to school districts, the teachers themselves, and the administrators to ensure that they know what they are required to do on behalf of students with disabilities, because a parent and a student may be the best self-advocates. But if the school districts are not being held to ensure that they are following the regulations and the laws by our agencies, and they’re not being trained, then we’re not getting the effect that we want, which is access to equitable education, because it’s a justice issue for students within the school districts.

HILARY PENNINGTON: So that they have agency and charge over their lives.

MARLENE SALLO: Yes, which connects with what we said within the disability justice framework is that everyone has the right to self-determination, autonomy, and advocating for themselves.

HILARY PENNINGTON: 100%. All right. We’re going to go to the second and the last question, from Virginia, and she has a really important statement before the question, which I’m going to read: “Data makes clear that youth with disabilities, especially Black and Brown disabled youth, are disproportionately subjected to harsher school discipline, school push-out practices, foster system involvement, criminal legal system entanglement, and institutionalization in congregate facilities. How does NDRN and its network advocate on behalf of disabled youth of color?”

MARLENE SALLO: This question is very important to me because, time and time again, having been a special education teacher before becoming a civil rights attorney, I experienced firsthand what it means to be a youth of color and to be dually involved in the juvenile and criminal justice system, or “injustice” system, right? What we try to do is raise awareness about the rights of youth with disabilities that are being pushed out of school for no reason but for the fact that they have a disability. We’re seeing time and time again, youth of color are being pushed out of schools just for a manifestation of their disability. So how do we ensure that parents and schools are doing what they’re supposed to do under IDEA, which is the legal protections that exist, and that are ensuring that students from the beginning are being provided the supportive services that they need, and that are required under the law, to ensure that they can remain engaged in school and that they can complete their school day, let alone their school year. And so we’re raising awareness through training and technical assistance, through advocacy at the state level as well as at the national level, ensuring that ongoing discussions are taking place with our federal agencies that oversee the laws that protect youth within the school. But most importantly, we’re empowering parents and we’re empowering youth to speak up and to know what protections they have, and then to hold the school systems’ feet to the fire.

HILARY PENNINGTON: To know their rights. All right, we are at the end of our time, and I want to close with the last question that we always ask on these ”On What Matters” series, which is: What gives you hope?

MARLENE SALLO: What gives me hope is the fact that the disability justice framework is being seen everywhere now. It’s not just within the disability community and the work that I’m doing.

I’m getting phone calls from individuals that work on drug policy protections, that work on reproductive justice, that are pushing back on the prison industrial complex, and they’re saying, “As we’re doing our advocacy, as we’re doing our outreach, we want to ensure that we are embracing and supporting the disability justice framework. Can we have these conversations? Can you join us in meetings?” And this gives me hope because, for far too long, our community has been shunned. We’ve been set aside. We’ve been institutionalized. And we are now seeing that we are at tables. We are being included in discussions. There’s still work to be done, but I’m hopeful that as we continue to advocate and to show everyone just how important it is to have us at the table, that they’ll continue to include us in further conversations.

HILARY PENNINGTON: Well, you and the power and momentum of this movement give me hope, too. Thank you, Marlene, for a really, really wonderful conversation, and thank you to everyone who joined us today. We hope you learned a lot, and please don’t miss our next episode. Thank you.

End of transcript.

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