Loretta Ross, Amanpour & Company

Interview with "Calling In" Author Loretta J. Ross. Aired 1-2p ET, Amanpour and Company, February 18, 2025

GOLODRYGA: Well, while the U.S. is stoking division on the world stage, an atmosphere of hostility is also being felt within the country, from federal agencies shutdowns and layoffs to the slew of polarizing executive orders, many Americans feel at the mercy of the new Trump leadership.

So, how can we foster productive dialogue at this time? A longtime human rights activist and co-founder of the Reproductive Justice Framework, author Loretta Ross provides some answers in her new book, "Calling In." And she joins Michel Martin to discuss.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Bianna. Professor Loretta Ross, thank you so much for talking with us once again.

LORETTA J. ROSS, AUTHOR, "CALLING IN": Thanks for having me on your show.

MARTIN: You are a very well-known human rights activist. You've been doing this work for, what, some four decades now. But I just want to read how you start your latest book, it's called "Calling In." And you say, I am a reformed call out queen. I've furiously called out enemies. I've righteously called out friends. I've gleefully called out strangers. I even once called out President Barack Obama, although that's a story for another time. My ego sure gets the appeal of putting people on blast, but I also realized a long time ago that running my mouth never did seem to accomplish

what I wanted it to.

OK. Wow. What a way to start.

ROSS: Right, but it happens all the time. I have a tendency to speak first and regret later. And so, I'm always having to call myself in first so that I don't succumb to that tendency and give myself a chance for my intelligence and my integrity to make the impact that I wanted to have.

MARTIN: One of the interesting things about your new book, it's called "Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You'd Rather Cancel."

You recount a number of movements and rooms that you had been in where it started to feel very uncomfortable, where you felt a lot of people who should be on the same side expended a lot of energy kind of regulating each other and applying purity tests to each other that consumed so much energy that the kind of the overall objective was lost.

ROSS: The incident that I described that affected national politics was in Washington, D.C., when President Carter offered the D.C. residents a chance to get congressional representatives. And the D.C. statehood movement was so busy calling each other out that we failed to avail ourselves of that opportunity that President Carter offered, because President Carter didn't offer full statehood, because he couldn't.

And so, do you know how national politics could have changed if D.C. had a chance to send two representatives to Congress? The whole balance of politics could have changed. But we sabotaged ourselves with the call out culture in the 1970s. So, that was a significant moment for me because the moment was quickly lost when, in 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected and there was no chance of getting congressional voting representatives in Congress after that. Hasn't been a chance since then.

[13:40:00]

MARTIN: You've been teaching a class at Smith for a number of years, which is one of the reasons I think you came to public attention. You've elucidated these principles and you've seen them sort of in practice. How did the -- how did this course come about? How did the idea for this course come about?

ROSS: Well, I started noticing the call out culture when I got on social media. And when I asked young people what was going on, they told me that they were in a call out culture and there was nothing that could be done about it. And I didn't agree with that resignation.

And so, I started reviewing how I had taught black feminists to racists, how I had deprogrammed white supremacists from the Klan and the Neo-Nazi movement, and I realized that I had a lot of conversations with people I wouldn't bring home for coffee. I mean, I had a career of having those conversations with people I'd rather cancel.

And so, I thought that telling my story and offering the lessons from my history, but also from philosophers, from other historians and psychologists, would offer young people a way to have conversations that allowed them not only to sit in discomfort, but see how much they could grow from that discomfort and not be afraid of putting something out there on Twitter or Facebook that haunts them for the rest of their lives, but to own your mistakes and actually see your vulnerability as a strength.

Don't be afraid of making mistakes. Being a -- be afraid of not being adult enough to admit that you make mistakes.

MARTIN: You've been doing social justice work, as we said, you know, for four decades now, really more than that now, and social media was not a factor when you first got started, but how big of a factor do you think social media is in contributing to a call out culture, what some people call a cancel culture?

ROSS: Well, I don't know if I want to blame social media for it, because the original definition of a call out killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.

That's the call out. You call somebody, you publicly shame them, and you give them severe consequences for something you think they've done wrong.

And I remember how it enraptured my mother's generation. My mother was born in 1922 by soap operas and so many housewives and women and probably men too were so caught up in those soap opera parasocial dramas that they neglected their families for. So, we just have better toys for those same old human emotions of regret, shame, blaming, anger, fear of dealing with our emotions. And so, I don't know if I want to blame the toys, but our lack of healing as a society, our lack of having adequate healing for people's trauma.

Because every addiction, whether it's social media, drugs, cigarettes, or whatever, is born out of that trauma and those unhealed emotions. That's what we should focus on, in my opinion, rather than think that we can police social media, keep us from ourselves.

MARTIN: At the very beginning of the book, you talk about this extremely powerful and, I have to say, challenging experience. You are a survivor of rape. You are a survivor of incest. You've always been very open about that. You were working at a rape crisis center, but you were approached by an incarcerated rapist. A man who acknowledged raping both women on the outside and men on the inside. And you got a letter from him where he asked you to help.

Could you talk about that and just kind of all that flowed from that? And I start there not just because you started there, but because I feel like, you know, if there's anybody who you might want to not engage with, it would be that person.

ROSS: Oh, I wanted to engage with them. I wanted to cuss them out. Because I could never hold my violators accountable, so I wanted to go to that prison and tell that guy, how dare you ask us for help. And if you're having a miserable life, it's all your fault. But when I went there, and those prisoners started sharing the stories of what had happened to them, and how they had been turned from victims into violators, I couldn't maintain that rage at them anymore.

We were fellow survivors trying to navigate our own human dignity in the most awful circumstances. Me on the outside, them on the inside. And so, I describe that as my first calling in moment, when I had to call my own self in, when I had to call my contempt in for people who are incarcerated so that I could see them as human beings, and they can stop seeing me and women like me as prey.

[13:45:00]

And so, I'm really proud of the fact that I didn't indulge that impulse to curse them out. That instead they called me in. And everything that I write in that book emanates from that transformative moment.

MARTIN: One of the things you talk about is the need to align your feelings with your integrity. Can you say more about that? What that means and why that matters?

ROSS: As a survivor of a lot of racial and sexual trauma, I find that when I give into that first impulse to blurt whatever's coming out at the first impulse, that's usually a reaction because of my trauma of what I've been through.

But I find that if I put myself on pause and then give a chance for my intelligence and my integrity to take the wheel, then I become trauma informed instead of trauma driven. And everybody who's ever parented a child knows that pause. Because if you blurt out, the first thing that occurs to you when your children are getting on your nerves, they'll be in therapy for life.

So, instinctively, we know to put ourselves on pause so that our intelligence and our compassion and integrity can be shown to our children.

I just want us to use that same discipline to everybody we encounter, and especially the people who want to bring out the worst in us. We have a choice. You can say what you mean, and you can mean what you say, but you don't have to say it mean, that's always a choice. So, that pause gives you a chance not to be mean.

MARTIN: Your book arrives at such an interesting moment, because we are in the midst of a change in administrations. They call people out like every day. They seem uninterested in the feelings, the sensibilities of the people who disagree with them.

There are a lot of other people, one might argue reasonably half the country, and they feel very much assaulted by the current leadership of a country. There have been specific executive orders, you know, aimed at, transgender athletes, for example, you know, federal employees, basically, in many departments have been maligned as if they are abusers of the system, fraudsters, et cetera.

What would you say to people who feel that they are on the receiving end of abuse right now, really from our national leadership? How should they receive your words?

ROSS: I refuse to believe that we're in a country where the majority of the people want to be bullies, want to be jerks to other people. I think we have an inordinate visibility of the jerks of our population, because they get headlines, they get noticed, they get attention.

And they have cheapened the concept of empathy and compassion and even pluralism, whether or not we should have to get along with each other.

They're trying to re-fight the Civil War to see if they can win it again. But I don't think that's the majority of the American public, even those who voted for Donald Trump. I think that the majority of them are being manipulated, lied to, and misled. And I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, because I think, personally, it probably -- a lot of them are probably kind people to their animals, to their pets, to their children, to their neighbors.

And so, just because we have a leader who has made a career out of being contemptuous to people, I refuse to believe that that's the majority of the American public. It is the majority who are getting the most attention right now.

And so, let us not fail to see the humanity of our political opponents. Let's try to do a more sophisticated analysis of what's going on, and not assume that just because someone doesn't agree with you, or even votes for the other side, that makes them your enemy.

MARTIN: Well, you know, I get the feeling that your book is aimed mainly at progressives because there's a kind of a dialogue now that looks at the current political environment and it says that actually this is liberals' fault because they took cancel culture too far and this is what they invited on them. This is kind of the backlash to that. What are your thoughts about that?

ROSS: I'm not aware of any liberals that have banned books from libraries, fired people for trying to teach the reality of our history or demanded

that people from their own party be kicked out because they didn't support the Trump cult. I actually do see a lot of that power being misused on the right than the left.

[13:50:00]

Now, it's just human beings to want to hold people accountable for things you think they've done wrong. But the problem with the cancel culture is not the rich and powerful that get canceled. They laugh all the way to the bank. Trump used the cancel outrage all the way to the White House. It's the vulnerable people who lose their jobs, who lose their reputations, who can't face up to their own neighborhood for fear that they're going to be whispering about, oh, you know that person, he used the wrong gender pronoun, or she said the wrong thing, that kind of thing.

So, if the cancellation impulse is only affecting the most vulnerable people, how effective of a tool is it when you're trying to hold the rich and the powerful accountable? It doesn't really work that well because they get away with a lot. And as I said, they can use outrage all the way to power, fame, and the bank. And so, we need to figure out if canceling people is the best tool for the job.

Now, the human rights movement, that's what we're known for. We shame individuals, corporations, and governments for their violations of people's human rights. But it's not our tactic of first resort, it's our tactic of last resort because we try talking to them first or we find other more effective messengers to talk to them.

MARTIN: Is it ever not appropriate to call people in? Are there ever times when calling in just should not happen in your opinion?

ROSS: Oh, yes, I have a different strategy for the people who are mean on purpose, what I call the unapologetic racists and fascists. I mean, I have a career fighting them. That's the course I teach at my college is, how do you deal with the rise of fascism? That people are intentional. But I think that's a very small percentage of the population. And I'm not trying to call them in, I'm trying to overpower them with people of good will who are going to beat back this culture of contempt and meanness and lies and violence that's being imposed upon us.

So, I'm not trying to call in the people who are intentionally harmful, I want to call in the people, who are being manipulated or being harmed by the malicious people who are using this as a way to power.

MARTIN: How do people start calling people in as if they want to stop calling people out? What are just some of the principles that you could leave us with?

ROSS: Well, I always advise the one, two, three steps. Let me tell a story of the blind woman in my online classes, because I teach this stuff online.

And she said, every time I got to go up a step or into a door, this arm comes out of nowhere and places it on my body. And because I'm a sexual abuse survivor, it always feels like a sexual assault to me. And so, I just go ballistic. I curse people out. What can I do differently?

So, I asked her to reinterpret that as an act of kindness done badly instead of an insult. So, one, two, three. First, you thank them for the kindness. Secondly, you set your boundary and say, you know, I don't like these strange arms coming on me or hands on me that I can't see coming. So, you set your boundary. And then, the third step is to say, but if you want to help someone who's blind or disabled, why don't you stop and ask them how they'd like to be helped first.

One, two, three, you turn a call out into a call in, and you can change everything. So, the first person you call in is yourself, because we want people to do more kindness, not less. So, if you curse them out for trying to be kind, they're not going to do it anymore. But you also deserve boundaries. And then third, you can offer your vulnerability as a way to create good change in the future.

MARTIN: How would you recommend that people who disagree with President Trump respond to him and his initiatives?

ROSS: Well, President Trump is a different entity. I have a strategy for President Trump, but it doesn't involve calling him in. But the people who are being manipulated and harmed by him, and particularly the ones who voted for them, I still want to ask them, what's going on with you in your life?

I'm not here to have a conversation criticizing what you've done wrong, I want to have a conversation about what's good about you and how we can build on that more. Because you hear it all the time about how wrong you were, I want to talk about how your belief in the future of this country is a good thing, and can we talk about how we can build that future together without demonizing each other?

[13:55:00]

MARTIN: Professor Loretta Ross, thank you so much for talking with us once again.

ROSS: Thank you for having me on your show.