In the episode, host Annahid Dashtgard reflects on the ability to make meaning in the face of hardship, a particularly necessary skill in this time of global pandemic. Reading an excerpt from her own life story — Breaking the Ocean, A Memoir of Race, Rebellion and Reconciliation – Dashtgard gives insight into the strength that always underlies the most difficult of situations, and offers prompts for listeners to find their own.

In a thriving democracy, unions are a necessary counterpoint to totalitarian power. Yet it seems that general literacy about the labour movement is on the decline— for eg. many of us would be hard pressed to name the current elected leader of our national labour congress while we can sing every word to the latest Gaga release! This episode is a love letter to unions: the why and the how, the good and the ugly, their challenges and their vision. With us is Dr. D’Arcy Martin, who has taught, researched, led and acted in the labour movement for over 4 decades and is author of union bestseller, Thinking Union: Activism and Education in Canada’s Labour Movement.

For the Love of unions

View Transcript in PDF format: Breaking the Ocean: Episode 4

Annahid: Hello, and welcome to Breaking the Ocean Podcast: Soundwaves of Belonging. Today, we’re going to talk about unions, the genesis of the union movement in Canada and North America, the raison d’etre of why it is important that unions exist, especially as we move forward into the future, how unions are connected intrinsically to this notion of a free, democratic, and inclusive society.

With me today to have this conversation on unions, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the visionary, is D’Arcy Martin, a long-time union educator, organizer, and academic. So D’Arcy, welcome. Thank you for being here today.

D’Arcy: Thank you for inviting me.

Annahid: And I want to just start with asking you why you got involved in union organizing many years ago. What brought you down this path?

D’Arcy: I was very lucky in my upbringing. My parents actually deeply cared about each other and deeply cared about us as children. And this is right after the end of World War II. They were coming back from a situation of violence, death of friends, death of family. The war was traumatic for . So I was educated to think that my life was something I should design rather than something I should simply conform to, and whatever the expectations were, I was never pushed by my parents to go into a law firm or anything of that sort. They felt proud at offering me conditions to make choices in my life, and so I made them. And on balance, I mean, all these years later, but I’ve put 40 years of my life into work in the labor movement because I love the labor movement. Now, it’s one thing-

Annahid: Can I jump in for a sec? I love what you’re saying, and I just … When I think about what you’re describing about your childhood and your upbringing … because this podcast is about thinking about belonging and how we create cultures of belonging. And it strikes me that being steeped in that kind of communal responsibility, that communal worldview, drew you perhaps intuitively to thinking about ways of organizing, collective ways of organizing, that would benefit the greater workforce, benefit the vast majority of people rather than really having a more narrow, individualistic worldview.

D’Arcy: Well, if we think back to the 1950s, when I was a child, my parents were Red Tories. That’s almost a non-existent category nowadays, but in those days, it was people who believed in the existing power structure but wanted to make sure that those on the outside were not abused. And my father sat on most of the boards that there were in community organizations in Hamilton at one time or another. The social planning and research council, for example. He was very close to that. He followed carefully issues of indigenous rights. He read widely.

D’Arcy: I remember a long discussion with him one afternoon about Eldridge Cleaver’s book, Soul on Ice, which I had mentioned to him. So he went to the library and got it and read it and came back to discuss it with me. And throughout his life, he would discuss issues with me. And sometimes in his later years, I would arrive and he would have a list of topics written next to his chair carefully, just marked “Topics for D’Arcy”. And it was about, “Should we nationalize Inco and questions like that that were triggered by some reading he was doing, perhaps in the business press, and that he would expect some reflective response from me about that.

D’Arcy: So he was a foil for me, a challenge. I’ve always thought it was important to be intellectually rigorous about what we put forward to people, not to be sloppy, particularly if you’re in a role of intellectual leadership of some sort, which certainly educators always are, that what you present to people is the best you’ve got.

Annahid: Well, let’s talk about that for a moment because you said a couple of minutes ago that you love unions and working within and for unions, and yet, I think of one of the biggest challenges facing unions today, certainly in Canada, is that question of leadership and the kind of culture that unions create. And if that’s the alternative to the capitalist structure, it sure don’t look so appealing all the time. It seems to be as steeped, often, in toxic relationship and power struggle. The same things that unions are working to eradicate in the broader society seem to be the very things that they face internally. So maybe you can say a little bit more about why has this work continued to be the noble struggle for you?

D’Arcy: The idea of unions has been, and I think remains to be, the limitation on the arbitrary use of management power. That’s in the workplace. But unions have a second layer of involvement, which is to be the organizational core of the social opposition under capitalism. Not the visionary leadership. That’s going to come from somewhere else. It should come from the arts. It might, on a good day, come from the academy. But the vision is what unions can mobilize around in order to bring things like maternity leave, to bring things like Medicare, to bring some of the social gains that unions have pioneered in the country and still are the core of preserving and expanding.

Interestingly right now, the Canadian Labour Congress is the most feisty leader in the social networks for the support of pharmacare, for the expansion of Medicare to what it was initially envisioned to be, which was a capacity also to sustain people’s medical support when they leave a hospital. It’s raising the floor for everybody. And it’s that wider vision of the labor movement that I’ve always thought was my role to conserve and to exercise.

Annahid: So can you speak a little bit that noble vision, that being a counterforce to unfettered capitalism? What’s your answer to the question of the role of unions in our society going forward, now and moving forward?

D’Arcy: Political leaders in the political sphere articulate visions, strong and weak ones, but we don’t hold all politicians to the same group test. And I think unions are not monolithic.

D’Arcy: And what’s surprising, Annahid, is the number of well-informed people that I know who could not name even one or two of the top officers of the Canadian labor movement. In other words, they’re uninformed. They will put detailed attention into figuring out whether or not the corporations that are driving the Canadian economy in, let’s say, the oil and gas sector … People talk in an informed way about that. They know the names of different companies. They know the difference between a pipeline and a railway car. But yet, when it comes to the mechanics of daily work life and the ways in which the precarious experience of workers in the workforce today are playing out, they will only bring to it what they’ve heard from their niece from a summer job or they’ve heard from their nephew at a family dinner.

It’s the most casual, unexamined, and just repeating half-truths, which offends me intellectually but also troubles me socially. To my mind, the experience of working people deserves thoughtful examination, and while I love the labor movement, it’s like people that I’m close to. I can love them without thinking they’re perfect and without asserting that I am perfect. Certainly, they are difficulties in certain specific unions around, for example, leadership, authoritarian leadership. Oh, yes, that happens. Absolutely.

Annahid: As it does everywhere. As you’re pointing out-

D’Arcy: Have you noticed-

Annahid: … unfortunately.

D’Arcy: Have you noticed?

Annahid: The human condition.

D’Arcy: And so here we are, and I’m saying, “The labor movement is one of the places in which the drama of freedom and of authority is played out in our society.” And those of us that have made a life choice to be part of that, to engage in that, and to be willing to take some of the bruising that comes with it and some of the unpopularity and puzzlement that comes when we’re in wider social settings have access to a very lively, rich, and passionate subculture. And in that subculture, I feel at home. And I believe that that subculture is the source of alternative ideas of how we could be organizing work, how we could be organizing the society, and how we could treat one another.

Annahid: Wow, that’s really powerful.

It strikes me that one of the things that happens when you reach a certain socioeconomic status in our society is that you can forget that for many, unions still are and continue to be a matter of life and death, as well as important protectors of working conditions, but for how many people they still are a matter of life and death. Can you say a little bit more about precarious worker conditions in Canada and the US?

D’Arcy: Well, I think there’s precarious work at many levels. We see economically an increase in the number of people who are working in contracts rather than in full-time positions or in part-time. We have terms, who are appointed for terms rather than hired as ongoing staff, which is your theme of belonging. The idea that used to be in an organization, private sector or public sector, when you were hired, you would pass probation, and if you were competent at your work, then you had some basis of security that you were able to build a life, to imagine buying a house, to consider supporting your kids in summer camp, to have a decent lifestyle that doesn’t involve doing three jobs simultaneously in different parts of a city and spending two or three hours a day behind the wheel of a car.

D’Arcy: So we need, I think, to look at what this precariousness is doing and what it’s doing to our relationships with one another. Unions have been a force for stability, saying, “Actually, employers, you would like to hire people just when you need them, and you only really need them around Christmas and perhaps around certain occasions in the restaurant industry.” Seems very important to have a big staff on hand for Mother’s Day. Imagine that. So we’ll just hire people for the peaks when we need them. We will hire bus drivers with split shifts that destroy their home lives so that they will drive in the morning rush hour and in the afternoon rush hour and do whatever they want in-between, but it means essentially they’re owned by their work for the whole day, every day. And that sense of control over other people’s lives should not be something we aspire to as a society.

Annahid: So let’s pick up on this idea for a moment that in any society, the protection of freedom … We know that our democracies now are so intertwined with a capitalist economic system, that the freedom of a government to enact laws protecting the majority is sometimes questionable. How many governments are in the hands increasingly of very large, powerful corporations? I’m thinking of Jeff Bezos and Amazon and that whole conversation.

And as you’re talking about unions and collective structures as a balance point and to uphold democracy, I’m thinking too of the roles that unions play in supporting and often sparking movements for change, revolutions, how unions really, as a collective structure, have been pivotal to our societies moving forward, if you look at the last century and a half on some major issues.

D’Arcy: And that’s part of the reason why unions are never very popular. It’s not mine to come up with the famous quote by Karl Marx, “The dominant ideas of every epoch are the ideas of the dominant class.” Well, that’s normal. So we’re talking here about some subordinate ideas because the dominant ideas, we know what they are. They have to do with privatization and wealth, the measuring of success by the use of arbitrary power, and the image of a society in which small numbers of people reap the fruits and make the major decisions.

Now, that’s the dominant idea. So when we bring forward ideas that are … For example, shouldn’t we have childcare for the entire society? People say, “Well, that’s a bizarre idea. Maybe we’ll hand some money to people, and they can buy what they want as consumers,” which misses the point. The point is that your children are my children. Your children are my future, whether I have children or not. I happen to have children of my own, but I have friends, close friends, who do not have biological children but who recognize a community connection and that good childcare is going to produce a more fair and equitable and loving society in the future and that they have an investment in that. And they’re prepared to contribute, whether it’s through taxes or through donations or whatever, to that idea. That’s not just abstract to me. That’s very concrete. It’s very tangible.

The fight for childcare … I’m a male. Is it just a woman’s fight? I don’t think so. Last I looked, I have connections to children, not just my own. My friends’ children, my nieces and nephews, my other relatives. These are all people who need good, loving, safe, stable childcare.

Annahid: So if we pick up this idea that unions are an important force, they’re a force for insuring and upholding the collectivist bonds in a society, for distributing the rights, not just among a few but for the many, it seems to me that the union sector has really taken a beating over the last 10, 15 years. Are you worried at all? Are you seeing the next generation of leaders coming up through the ranks? Are you hopeful that collectivist organizing is going to come back as a major force? I don’t know what time period we’re in, but it feels certainly like it’s been a bit of a drought of collective conversations and organizing in this last while. What are your thoughts on where the union movement … where things are at?
D’Arcy: So when I first got involved in the ’70s in the labor movement, the rate of union density, that is, the proportion of workers who belonged to unions, of employed workers who belonged to unions, was around 30%, a little bit higher in Canada, a little bit less in the States, but still in the high 20s. And today in the States, it’s around 9%, and in Canada, it’s around 26, 27. And if you’re in Quebec, it’s 41.

D’Arcy: The unions are not in decline. Some parts of unions are declining, and sometimes they deserve it. And there are other parts of the labor movement that are growing and interesting new models are emerging of, “How do you organize freelancers?” How do you bring people together who are independent filmmakers and get them to organize together, because they will no longer be on the staff of Radio-Canada. They will now be in little production companies. Well, how are you going to organize that?

These are challenges, but the people who are in those jobs are open to unionization. But the opinion amongst younger people, and talking Millennials in particular, is much higher and much more supportive of unionism as a working reality that relates to their own careers than it is the case for people at 50 and up.

The stats are very, very striking around this. When we talk about inclusive societies like, for example, Scandinavia, you’ll find there rates of unionization of 60, 70, 80%. And if you buy Ikea or Nokia or anything else that comes out of Scandinavia, you know these are not unproductive places. These are high-tech, with-it places that are doing social as well as technological innovation in an inclusive way.

That’s the future of the labor movement. The future of the labor movement is not in holding onto the accomplishments that have already been established. The future is in building the capacity to innovate and create and to propose, not just react.

Annahid: So let’s talk about this for a moment because it’s, I think, one of the critiques of unions is that they are victims of their own analysis. In pushing up against power structures, they abuse power within their own structure. And just to give a couple of examples, like some of the irresponsibility around decision-making that happens where, for example, seniority is the only factor considered. If we think about the education unions, when teachers have been irresponsible to the point of abusive even and teachers just getting … The seniority weighs above any other factors of competence in the classroom.

I don’t want to … We need unions and they’re a good force, and I’m with you on that. But talk a little bit about what work needs to happen? I think you’ve talked a little bit about this, but where do we need to pull up our pants a bit, and why is that important?

D’Arcy: So there’s some basic political education that, not surprisingly, other societies have a much more developed and keen sense around. So here we are doing basic education around, well, people should have rights of security as they’ve worked a period of time in a job. That’s what we call seniority. Is that the only governing principle? I have read a great many collective agreements. I haven’t seen one yet that simply says, “Seniority is the only factor that governs the operation of a person.” If somebody is incompetent, they should be disciplined. They should be supported, coached, trained, given a chance, then suspended, and then eventually fired. That’s what we call progressive discipline. That’s what unions push for. We are actually victimized by lazy management. So management, we’ve got Joe over here. Everybody knows Joe doesn’t work hard. He doesn’t really care about the work. He’s actually a drag. Everybody else has to fill in-

Annahid: Joe is a manager?

D’Arcy: No. Joe is a worker-

Annahid: Is a worker. Okay.

D’Arcy: And finally, some manager says, “The hell with this. I’m going to fire Joe.” And the union says, “Well, excuse me. We’re the defense here.” If you’re going to prosecute, then, in a decent society, there is a defense. “When did you first notice that Joe wasn’t doing his job?” “Well, he’s never done his job in the 17 years he’s been here.” “Okay, and can you document that?” “Well, no.” “Why?” Because one manager passed Joe to another manager, and the other manager got so irritated and frustrated with Joe, he passed him to another manager. And so Joe has moved around through different departments in the operation and has never got a critical review.

Annahid: Now-

D’Arcy: And so the union then comes in and says, “Where is the due process?” We actually give due process to mass murderers in our society. We consider that a mark of civilization. Can we not give Joe the opportunity to have progressive discipline? And we’re not saying Joe is the world’s best employee. We’re saying, “Joe deserves a defense, and that defense will include seniority, but it also includes competence.” And that is true in teacher contracts as well and has been for generations.

So I know that it’s frustrating, for example, for parents who find they’ve got a bad teacher, but what they may have also is a bad principal, superintendent, and school board director who have not being doing their job of documenting Joe and building a dossier such that when they start to push Joe and suspend him, they’re on solid legal ground, and they’re giving a decent opportunity to somebody to pull up their socks and to defend themselves.

Annahid: It strikes me as you’re talking that unions are not in there to be distracting the organization from its goals or its vision but actually should be working hand in hand with management to fulfill the vision, right?

D’Arcy: I totally agree with you on that, and I think that the ability of unions to recognize the mission of the organization and to find pieces of it that they are comfortable with in terms of values is where you can build the bridge.

Annahid: If you are a manager or you are a unionist and you just hold onto the role without the other part, “What’s good for the bigger vision here? What’s good for us, not just for our half,” then we lose something. We set up the war.

D’Arcy: Well, and-

Annahid: Sometimes we need to go to war. I’m not naïve, but I think that the war gets set up and perpetuated far often and people spend more time in war than they really need to.

D’Arcy: Yeah. You fight when you have to, not adopting that because you love war.

Annahid: Yeah, that’s right.

D’Arcy: So most people are there because they want to be. And a union that’s always fighting with management alienates its own members because those members that believe in good education and improvement of curriculum and stuff like that, they’re going to be very open to new suggestions that come from management. And the union says, “Oh, that’s just another trick.” Maybe the first three times it’s just another trick. The fourth time, it’s really a creative initiative. So keep your mind open and go for number four, and fight like hell over one, two, and three. And I think that’s a formula … no-

Annahid: It’s a fluidity.

D’Arcy: It’s a judgment capacity. And let’s build that capacity. So unions that get hooked on seniority as the principle … Excuse me. I’ve done some labor history. Seniority’s not a principle. Seniority was initiated by management in industrial enterprises in the United States as a way of sorting out conflicts between people of different ethnic backgrounds. That’s how it started.

D’Arcy: It’s just a tool. The principle is justice. The principle is dignity. The principle is a sense of a future in which you can hold your head up. Those are principles. Seniority’s … it’s a good tool. I would definitely use it. I would use other ones too in any negotiation with management that I’ve been involved in, but I see no reason to take any one of those tools and pretend that it’s a principle. So in that sense, some unionists are bound to disagree with me, but I’m sorry. My job has never been to promote dogma. I’m not going to do it now. I haven’t done it. And I think that a union that works from dogma will die, and a union that works fluidly, that keeps its eye on the goals and the values and keeps its eye on what the members really want is one that will survive and flourish.

Annahid: You started this conversation…you reflected that you love this work. And it strikes me that many of us don’t have a choice over what work we do, and many of us do have a choice. And what does it mean to really love the work? What does it mean to stay connected to purpose? What does it mean to be rigorous? You used the word about continuing to use judgment, to be emotionally fluid, to not get lazy, that I feel that that’s part of the communal fabric. It feels like that’s ebbing away a little bit these days. The vision, as you describe it, is very powerful, and it’s just purpose. What does it mean to really be connected to our purpose in the work we do, wherever that may be?

D’Arcy: It is a daily practice of democracy, and democracy is rough. Democracy is not all pretty, it isn’t, and the results are not always guaranteed. But it is a life choice of how you want to spend your time and with whom. And if you have a taste for hanging out with working-class people and if you have a sense that the elites will not necessarily take care of everyone else but that some work on justice needs to take place, I have found no better place to spend my time than in the labor movement.

Annahid: That’s a good note to close on. And as we’re finishing here, I’m thinking about how conditions are shifting in the world for many reasons, one of the biggest ones being climate change and the number of immigrants and refugees and migrants that will be arriving to many Western democratic countries, Canada included, and how we all have a responsibility to look out for those that share the land with us, and that it’s beautiful work. It’s important work.

Annahid: What did you say earlier, that, “The ethos of the union movement is, ‘Your children are my children'”? There’s something very beautiful in that. “Your children are my children.” Yeah. I want to just close by asking you, what does it mean for you to belong? When you think of belonging, what does it mean to you?

D’Arcy: I’ve told you that I grew up in a very stable, secure, social and cultural bubble, and I belonged there. I knew who I was and where I fit. Maturity requires that all of us put our sense of belonging under the lamp and look at it carefully and consider whether that belonging is at the expense of others and at the expense of our better selves. And if that is the case, then our human vocation needs to be that we reach past a narrow sense of belonging to something wider.
So I think that the belonging that we aspire to now needs to have a global dimension, needs to have a cultural dimension. It needs to encompass issues of racism, of disability, issues of rights around sexuality and sexual orientation. All of that is a sense of the fullest potential in human beings. And again, if the labor movement doesn’t reach out and include any of the marginalized groups in the society, it will have betrayed its historic mission, which is to represent the excluded. That’s what the labor movement’s supposed to be.

Photo Sources:

• Photo 1: D’Arcy Martin
• Photo 2: Unknown photographer, Crowd gathered outside the Union Bank of Canada building on Main Street during the Winnipeg General Strike (https://www.flickr.com/photos/lac-bac/33304058206)
• Photo 3: CAW Media, Labour Day Toronto 2011, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Labour_Day_Parade_Toronto_September_2011.jpg
• Photo 4: Derek Blackadder, CUPE members on strike for over a year in PEI (5 employee social service agency) greet PEI premier in Toronto at Tory fundraiser. May 28, 2003 (https://www.flickr.com/photos/dblackadder/7899304/)

We’re into fall again – that time of year where most of our young folks are in the first flush of a new school year. And even though schools today generally have a much better grip on preventing and dealing with bullying, harassment and other forms of exclusionary behaviour than a generation ago, we still have a lot further to go! How can we as parents and caregivers proactively teach our kids the opposite of these behaviours? Here are some tips on how to embed critical thinking, empathic leadership and inner confidence in our little ones. Funnily enough, this is one of those places where the old adage “what they learn in kindergarten is true for life”, applies – these tips translate for us adults as well!

Super Kids: Tips for Teaching Empathy

View Transcript in PDF format: Breaking the Ocean: Episode 3

Annahid: Hello, this is Annahid Dashtgard. Welcome to Breaking the Ocean Podcast: Soundwaves of Belonging.

Annahid: At the beginning of the school year I’ve been thinking about what are some ways that we can more proactively and consciously raise inclusive and empathic children. Children that model with empathy, not just feels like, but looks like in practice, the kind of kids that we need in a society that’s growing increasingly polarized, where the future reality is going to be one that will call on people that can be bridge builders, gap crossers, cultural translators, and it starts really early on.

I guess the first thing I’d say is this. A lot of us kinda can operate under the illusion that if we don’t talk to our kids about difference then they’re not gonna notice it. So thinking about race, I’m color blind, I don’t see color, my child doesn’t see color, they have a really diverse group of friends. It’s something that I hear often. Unfortunately, as nice as that sounds it’s neurologically not possible. On an unconscious level our brains are trained to recognize difference. Because you see, our brains are trained to make things as easy as possible, which means that we very early on learn to see the world in patterns.

By association, we see shoe and we associate it with foot. We see one thing and we associate it with another. This is why very early on biases … Kids absorb biases, the most common association between different ideas at the unconscious level, so they very early on associate that women are more maternal or are supposed to be more sensitive or are supposed to be nice. That unconscious bias shows up in behavior, again, very early. I have my nieces who are half Nigerian, so are darker skinned. Very early on were receiving comments, as three, four years of age from their white classmates, “How come your hair is … Why is your hair so curly? If you weren’t so dark you’d be pretty.” Not because of any malicious intent and not even necessarily because a child is hearing that out of the mouths of their parents, but because children absorb what they learn as normal from the society around them thought TV shows, ads, stories, story books, photos in the school hallways, things on the subway, all of that gets soaked into the brain and programs the brain without us being aware.

I’m surprised how still, in 2018, how hard it is to find shows that really showcase the diverse set of children. I think of Paw Patrol, which is a newer show coming out of Toronto, one of the most diverse cities on the planet, and how that show is a young, white boy with a group of pups and there’s barely any other person of color in the entire show. Except the mayor who is a black woman, and unfortunately fulfills a stereotype of a woman that doesn’t have her stuff together and is often laughed at and has this pet chicken that she’s running after. I’m not gonna get into the number of stereotypes that that role enforces, but believe me, there is more than one. Kids soak that up and there’s not so many options available to children.

The first thing in terms of teaching our children to really be inclusive in their behavior and leadership is that we have to offer as many diverse stories to them to counter the dominant story, the dominant biases that they’re inheriting from the culture. So find the books that showcase protagonists or main characters that are racially diverse. Like Princess Boy, about a boy that loves dressing up in girls clothes. That showcase characters that have a physical disability or in a wheelchair, and not in a way that the story is about their difference, but story where they are just learning and doing something as any other child would and the difference is secondary, so our children get to learn about the world and good behavior and families through characters that are multifaceted. That we don’t just pick up the books that have an Asian child on the front just to tell a story about Chinese new year. Asian kids can tell any story, just like any other racial character. But again, those stories are hard to find and I have found, even in Toronto, that I have to go 45 minutes across the city to a couple of book stores that I know of that have a range of books that really offer that diverse array of characters.

Part of this, I’m just gonna slip this in there, is that we can also be proactively lobbying our neighborhood book stores and toy stores and libraries to really not just carry those books, but also feature them.

The second thing is that role playing with children is a really positive thing to do. Getting our children to start to identify who in the class is having a hard time, perhaps is left out more often, maybe feels a little bit alone and what can our children do to bridge that gap. One of the things that’s really helpful is giving children options. The more options children have in any given situation the more literate they will be in terms of … Empathically literate, choosing the best choice that fits the situation at hand.

You might wanna choose a moment. For example, into my child’s class, she was in kindergarten, a new family arrived, a Syrian refugee family and one of the children didn’t speak English. I asked her, knowing this I asked her how this boy was doing and found out that he was having a little bit of a hard time here and there, so we chose one of the situations and we role played it. We took different roles, she was him and I was her, and then she was herself and I was the teacher and then … We kinda triaged the roles and what the different options might be to really allow her to be able to step in and support this little boy and be able to understand that maybe going to what he was feeling and what might it look like to show up … One of the things when we’re role playing is we wanna teach our children how to be allies, rather than superheroes. So it’s not about swooping in and being the rescuer, but taking your cues from the child who’s impacted and being a partner to them. That’s an important thing to keep in mind.

I was thrilled, after having gone through that process with my girl, to hear at the parent-teacher interview that she was the only girl in the class that had … They said, that showed such deep empathy and then went on to give these multiple examples of how she had supported this little boy, including can we write things down or draw pictures so that he can understand, which wasn’t even something that she and I had talked about, she had thought that up on her own.
Thinking how do we cue our children, how do we talk them through some different options and role playing those things. And it does make a difference, because like anything what we pay attention to grows. What our children notice in themselves and in the classroom around them allows them to consciously develop skills in that direction.

And the last thing here is to praise in our children what we want them to develop. I try on a daily basis to notice and praise my children for their kindness and their thoughtfulness, and I tell them that I love them and we use different monikers for their superhero powers. For example, my daughter who’s born in the Chinese year of the dragon, we talk about her dragon spirit. In certain situations when she’s having a hard time, or I’m having a hard time, or both of us, “What would your dragon spirit do sweetheart?” Or my little boy who very early on loved superheros, so I talk to him about Bat boy, being Bat boy, what would Bat boy do in this situation?

Finding ways to get our children to notice in themselves their capacities for kindness, for generosity, for being kinda the hero even in the face of difficult situations, is really great, because like any of us what we really recognize in ourself, number one, but also are taught to cherish, to recognize as a gift, we are more likely to act on, to develop that capacity.

Of course, I think all children come in with these particular gifts. Like many gifts, certainly in childhood, what we … What is in their environment, what we’re taught to pay attention to is what wires in our brain more strongly and then comes out in our behavior later on.

But it’s never too late as well, because as of course with neuroplasticity and all of the research shows that it is never too late for us to change behavior with concentrated attention. Even for children that are older we can be consciously getting them to develop these kinds of practices.
There are many different ways of explaining to our children why empathy, inclusiveness, allyship are important leadership practices. Find your own way, find a way of explaining it that makes sense in your own value system, in your own family, for the world. But the earlier we start, the better off for all of us.

Annahid: So I thought that I would ask my six year old daughter what her advice was. Arion, what do you think that people can do, what kids can do in the classroom to really help everybody feel like they’re important and that they matter?

Arion: Help them learn about stuff and then they can help their other friends that don’t know.

Annahid: But how can kids do that? What do you do to help everybody feel like they’re important in the class?

Arion: I help them learn, because if someone doesn’t know how to do something, then I just help them how hard I can try.

Annahid: What kinds of things do you do?

Arion: Today I was at school and I was helping my friend on the monkey bars, and he couldn’t do it. So what I did for him was I helped him, I showed him how. Then when he knew how to do it I said, “Great job,” and I clapped. And that’s what’s called helping someone that doesn’t know how to do something.

Annahid: That’s cool. I have one more question for you. Has anyone in your class ever done something to help you?

Arion: Oh. Today, I was at school.

Annahid: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Arion: And it was my first day.

Annahid: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Arion: I didn’t know some rules and I made a mistake and I said, “Oh, no, I can’t do this. I don’t wanna get in trouble.” Then someone said, “Everyone makes mistakes, it’s okay. Sophie’s not really a strict teacher, so you can go to her and ask her what you did and then tell her what you did and then you can start all over again and do that again.”

Annahid: Okay. This friend helped you think about the situation and helped you, reminded you that making a mistake is not such a bad thing and you can go and get help from the teacher?

Arion: Yeah.

Annahid: That’s super cool. That’s very cool. Anything your dragon spirit wants to say?

Arion: My spirit wants to say I’ve done a great job reporting on a radio show.

Annahid: That’s awesome. Thank you.

Annahid: And now I’m going to ask my four year old son Koda a question as well. What do you think it means to belong somewhere, Koda?

Koda: I wanted to say…

Annahid: Yeah. What do you think it means to belong somewhere?

Koda: It depends on the health or help somebody if they fall and …

Annahid: Do you look after other people?

Koda: Yes.

Annahid: Yeah. What helps you look after other people? Why do you think that’s important?

Koda: ’Cause they help me sometimes.

Annahid: Yeah.

Koda: I did a radio.

Annahid: And there we have it. From the mouth of babes. Have a wonderful transition back to school. And may your children and your family have a wonderful, safe, happy and inclusive year.

“You never pay a debt until you acknowledge it and we’ve never done that here”

A visit to New Orleans: modern day tourist haven, historical slave port.  Listen to this courageous convo with key American voices on how this past influences the present, and what debt remains in our collective hands. With Eddie Moore Jr, founder of the White Privilege Conference; John Cummings III, Owner of the Whitney Plantation (the only plantation documenting the history of slavery in America); and Bryan Nichols with Medria Connolly, Clinical Psychologists/ Activist Scholars actively researching the psychological case for Reparations.

Please note: Any sound discrepancies in podcasts are a trade-off for interviewing in the field.

Annahid Dashtgard in conversation with Eddie Moore Jr., John Cummings III, Bryan Nichols, and Medria Connolly – June 2018

View Transcript in PDF format: Breaking the Ocean: Episode 2

Annahid: Hi there. My name is Annahid Dashtgard, and I’m host of this podcast, Breaking The Ocean: Sound waves of Belonging. I’m an immigrant born, Canadian woman who identifies as a person of color living north of the border. I do diversity, equity and inclusion work and one of the things that I’ve been inspired by is watching the process of reconciliation towards Indigenous peoples in Canad including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report and things that are happening to start to make reparations toward Indigenous people as a result of our long, broken, painful history.

Recently I went down to visit the American South, outside of New Orleans and the surrounding areas, and I visited the first plantation in America, documenting the history of slavery towards African-American peoples.

I was curious about how invisible that history still is and why a similar process around reparations has not been advanced or at least to the same degree that we’re seeing here north of the border. While I was down there, I happened to run into my friend Eddie Moore, Jr., founder of the White Privilege Conference in the US that’s been running for more than 20 years, a couple years here in Canada. And I had a chance to ask him, whether he thought reparations were important and what the process could look like.

Eddie: One, I think it’s long overdue. I think relationships are better if pain is caused and apology follows that. I think there’s going to be a real healing that happens if we can get this apology followed by reparations.

And I’m not talking about individual white people giving individual checks to black people. I am talking about corporations, organizations that benefit, that built, that in many cases expanded their wealth through the participation of the enslavement of African people, should be given back. Not necessarily in individual checks, but in contributions to society, where we know slavery, the enslavement of African people destroyed human capital. And I think, to some extent, it is the responsibility of those who destroyed it to repair and rebuild it.

Annahid: John Cummings III, is one of those individuals who have taken responsibility. He purchased the Whitney Plantation outside of New Orleans in 1999 and has spent more than $10 million dollars out of his own pocket restoring the plantation as an homage, a memorial, to the history of slavery, not only in the American south but the only plantation documenting this history in the country.

I’m going to start with a question, a different question. What was the most moving thing that you read in the history when you purchased the plantation, that led to turning this into a kind of a memorial?

John: It is a memorial and what, there was no white horse or lighting, but what happened was, when I got to the section on successions, on probate, everyone had an inventory. And for the first time-

Annahid: An inventory of owning slaves?

John: Of slaves. An inventory of everything he died possessed of but I realized for the first time and I was embarrassed that the second most valuable asset on his plantation were human beings and I did not know that. So, I was embarrassed.

Annahid: After sugar.

John: I was embarrassed and I figured that if I didn’t know it since I had everybody in New Orleans fooled into believing I was a Civic Leader, I had two degrees. Many law offices around the United States, tried many of the big cases in the world, that no other Caucasian in my area knew that. I thought the thing that I’d have to do is to try … And that’s when it changed. It was no longer going to be an asset of mine. In fact, at the end of the year, we are donating all of it to a foundation. You know I’ve spent 10 million dollars so far here.

John: I still have a few dollars left, so we’re going to keep doing it, but that’s where it’s going. This place, eventually, will be controlled by African American board members. So that was it, I looked and saw that men, women and children all had a price tag on them. Either in Spanish, French or American currency depending on who was in charge at that time. I didn’t believe it but I figured that I had to do my best to educate my [00:02:30] fellow Caucasians. You never pay a debt until you acknowledge it.

Annahid: I was left so affected by my visit to the Whitney plantation that I couldn’t understand how could it be that in 21st century America, this history is still so largely invisible? I went to my friends, Dr. Brian Nichols and Dr. Medria Connolly, clinical psychologists and activist scholars who have been actively working on the psychological case for reparations over the last couple of years.

I want to start by asking you two, and Medria, you’re here in person, Bryan, you’re joining us by phone, why you think reparations are important, and what could it look like?

Bryan: All right. Thanks for having me, Annahid. Yeah, I worked in community settings for 30 years. The last 18 or so years was in gang prevention and gang intervention. In the City of Los Angeles we invested a lot of money. There was no lack of commitment and money. But I kept seeing multiracial groups of researchers, providers, city bureaucrats come together to try to plan this things. And I kept seeing this group breakdown into racial conflict. Where all the stereotypes and beliefs about each other became present in the room, and it impeded a collaborative progress.
Bryan: Medria and I, also witnessed this process, which we referred to as racial enactment, happened in conferences that we attended. Conferences explicitly geared toward bringing about racial understanding.

Annahid: What did you say, Bryan, racial tension?

Bryan: Racial understanding. I called was a racial enactment.

Medria: Racial enactment.

Annahid: Oh, racial enactments. Okay.

Bryan: Yes. But, it seemed to me that there was some force, I would say floating above the room, that kept undermining the ability of a multiracial group to come together. Old conflicts kept emerging and dominating the conversation, dominating the interaction. It seems to me that something that had not been done needed to be done to clear the air. Then once I’ve read Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations, then I understood.

Bryan: It was that we would never be right. We would never be healed until there was an appropriate apology and compensation for this crime against humanity that was slavery. That’s in a nutshell, if I could say how it came together for us.

Annahid: Well, that idea of compensation is interesting just as a side note, because I understand that Congress has made two apologies. Yet, it seems like they didn’t register with many people. Did you want to-

Bryan: Well, the apologies were made and I’m not one who minimizes that, because those apologies were made by the Senate and the House in 2008 and 2009. So still, if it was so easy to make an apology why would it have taken 150 years to get it out? So the way I view it, is as a step. Even though at the end they said this apology in no way opens this up to claims. Right? That’s all right, it’s just a matter of the proper activism of the people to move it over the next hump of actual compensation.

Medria: Well, part of that too … I mean it is a first step. But I think that the fact that no compensation was attached to it was one of the reasons why it was one of our best kept secrets. There was no media blitz. I mean you and I found out about this, what a year ago? No one I knew was aware of it, but it in fact happened, so it’s ironic. I don’t think most black people are aware that there has been an apology made. So it’s like, okay what is that about? And would something that is that significant to us, as a people, be not promoted. It was not really promoted. It wasn’t highlighted. I don’t know what that’s all about, but it is curious.

Annahid: It sounds to me like you’re talking about this presence that hovers over the relationship between African Americans and folks of other racial backgrounds. I think it seems … I would call it the Ghost of History. I’m somebody that does a lot of work around racism, and I know the history of slavery. I have to say that I was really shocked visiting the plantation yesterday. Hearing the first person accounts. Seeing the thousands of names that are etched in these memorials across the ground. Seeing the slave quarters where people lived. Just hearing the depth, frequency, level of atrocities that happened among people on the plantation. Never mind the journey to move people from Western Africa across the ocean onto the plantations themselves.

Annahid: I’m in tears. I’m on the bus and reflecting. The bus pulls up the other plantation that people have visited, and there’s an Inn on the site. People are sitting and drinking and chatting. This is the other plantation where I think they do a tour of the house, and the people that used to live there, and the china patterns. And I’m just struck by the difference and experience of, how can it be that people … It’s like to me visiting a concentration camp. One concentration camp focuses on the atrocities done to Jewish and other folks at the camp. Then the one across the way has a restaurant and people are just chatting and eating. How is that possible?

Bryan: Well, our friend and colleague, Jeff Prager says, “This kind of multi generational trauma, for the victim it’s something that we can’t forget. But for the perpetrator it’s something they can’t remember.” That lack of remembering is what promotes the haunting, the ghost. It makes it unresolved. And a unresolved feeling that perpetuates through the decades and the centuries.

Annahid: That’s really powerful what you just said. That line, that for people of color, you can’t forget, and for other folks, it’s too hard to remember.

Bryan: Yeah.

Bryan: Because if you remember, if you perpetrate like that, and then you go through the generations and then somewhere three, four, or five generations down, there’s a person who gets up and goes to work and is normal. Is good hearted soul, wasn’t directly involved in it. But yet, they had benefited in what we call, white privilege, but they’re decent people. They don’t want to be affiliated with an atrocity that they have inside of the thing, committed a crime against humanity.

Bryan: “I don’t want to remember that. I’m a good guy. I’m not trying to hurt anybody. But yet, maybe my family benefited and maybe my fellow citizens across the way did not benefit, but if I have to own that I’m gonna have to feel some shame about that. The shame’s too hard to own. I’d rather forget about it.”

Annahid: I think it’s hard for people to see that this is also just not about that distant past. Although, we’re not seeing the level of atrocity towards black people as it existed 200 years ago, or 50 years ago, with the history of lynchings and all of that. That was still recent. But, the rendering of the forms of unconscious bias and the ways in which the micro aggressions, the micro assaults that still happen on a daily basis if you live in a black body. I’m wondering if either one of you want to just speak to that a little bit? What is that like? How does one swallow that, and how do you talk about that to non-black friends?

Bryan: Well, let me just comment on what you just said about we don’t see the level of atrocity. I would agree. We don’t see quite the level of atrocity. But when you worked in neighborhoods like I did, from doing gang prevention and gang intervention, and you see families decimated by their family members being in prison. By some of their family members being killed. By people killing each other. There is a level of atrocity still. When you see the gross numbers of African Americans in prison, and some for serious crimes, but some for very trivial crimes. And in prison for a long time, damaging the family. Harming their ability to get work when they come out, poverty for these groups. It’s pretty bad.

Now, then there are those of us who made our way to middle class, and then we suffer the micro assaults to a certain extent, and sometimes even more. But it’s broad range of assaults that we’re dealing with. Some of us who made it okay don’t have to face that every day reality that some of the people in the hood go through. But that can be a tough reality.

Medria: Absolutely. Then there are other ways that it manifests. I was sharing with Annahid and Shaquille, on our return trip from the White Privilege Conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan on the end of April when I had my granddaughter, Makai, who’s 15. I put her on the plane to fly back to New Jersey. She’s a short girl. She’s four ten and three quarters. She was not flying as an unaccompanied minor so she really had to negotiate all of this on her own. I just told her, which she had done coming out, “Just ask somebody to help you put your suitcase up,” because she can’t reach it.

I later learned from her that when she got on the plane, she stood there asking people to help her put her luggage up. She was completely ignored. People just walked by her as if she was not standing there asking for help. Then she said finally an older white woman got up out of her seat and helped her put her luggage up. Then when she sat down, she was sitting next to another white woman who absolutely refused to look at her. Would not smile. Would not engage her. Acted as if she was not there at all. Just chilled her out.

I have to say, hearing this enraged me, because one, she’s vulnerable. She’s a kid. There was no one there running any real interference on her behalf, and she just had to deal with it. Those types of micro aggressions that happen … she’s a full paying passenger just like everyone else on that plane. But that sort of experience undoes me. I get undone around that, and it triggers my rage. Then I say, “Okay. Well, where do I put that? Where do I take that?” So those are the kinds of things.

Bryan: Let me add to that, Medria. Makai, four foot ten and three quarters though she may be, there’s that research that says that when white people look at pictures of black kids they estimate them to be three to four years older than they are.

Medria: Well, that is true too.

Bryan: Which allows them to not treat them as though they need support, as though they’re vulnerable. This actually comes through in the sentencing of African American teens. But it comes through a million ways, and maybe that was one of the ways that your granddaughter had to suffer.

Medria: Right. Right.

Annahid: Yeah. It’s like the greater emotional tax that is paid by being black and having to swallow the gamut of, as you said Bryan, the existing atrocities. If I’m black and living in poverty all the way to being a more middle class professional context, where it’s the steady rendering of the micro aggressions. I feel like this is like … there’s this huge gap in the conversation between what black people experience and what white people see. And as we’re talking about, are willing to see. I’m wondering do you two … do you have some thoughts on how do we start to … Well, I think the gap is being bridged, but how do we continue? And what are some things that you think about as helping to bridge that gap? What do you think is important? How do we start to take the next steps on this reparations journey?

Annahid: Just that small question.

Bryan: I mean this was part of the foundation of what led us into this in the first place. We would be in these multiracial groups trying to have this conversation, and as I would say, the conversation usually gets … let me say, messed up.

Medria: I would say, it goes south. The conversation goes … it starts off good and then it goes south.
Annahid: Right. When we talk about what we gotta do people kind of …

Medria: Right.

Annahid: And let’s be clear-

Bryan: Because people are seeing things from totally different angles.

Annahid: Yeah.

Bryan: But it’s hard for me to speak to what everybody else wants to do. I speak to myself, and when I hear offensive comments, well I’m making judgements. I distinguish people as being, are you guilty or are you unrepentant? If you’re unrepentant, I got nothing to say to you. But if you’re guilty, I’m trying to hear and I’ll try to be sensitive and empathic, and not reactionary. Mostly, I’m not trying to play my part. I’m not trying to fall into the role of the angry black man, because you can easily be pushed into these roles.

Annahid: That’s right.

Bryan: Once you’re playing your role, then you are reinforcing the old prevailing dynamic.

Annahid: That’s right.

Bryan: So I’m fighting that. I’m trying to be sensitive and keep engaging. That’s what I try to do.
Medria: Well, it’s challenging too because the other side of that is being pushed into the role of caretaker. When you’re trying to have this conversation with whites and they start crying or feel attacked. Robin DiAngelo speaks about this beautifully in her book on White Fragility. She really talks about it in terms of white people really needing to develop the muscle to talk about this. But that they’ve been so protected by privilege that they feel terribly vulnerable when they begin to enter into these conversations. But it’s actually with Bryan and I, having the same experience over 30 years of you have these conversations, but nothing changes.

Bryan: Medria, what did you tell that person at one of our talks when she made a comment about projecting the blackness? What did you tell her? Do you remember?

Medria: You’re talking about when on your paper with Get Out?

Bryan: Yes.

Medria: Oh, she said, “Well, what should we do?” I said to her, again, quoting James Baldwin, I said, “Listen, you have to do your own work. Do not give me that work to do. You have to figure out as James Baldwin said, why you need me to be your negro? That is not my work to do. That is your work to do.”

Bryan: “Why do you need me to be your negro?” That’s just what you said.

Medria: Exactly. That is the issue.

Annahid: That’s great.

Bryan: And to that point I will add, sense of humor. A sense of humor goes a long way. I mean it doesn’t usually sit in these conversations, but for me, it’s a saving grace.

Annahid: Well, and it ties in with the bigger piece in our society that we’re still socially and emotionally stunted. Let me just say it this way, I think we have a lot further to go. I think people generally just don’t have emotional literacy, especially with the harder or more difficult emotions. So I find feeling these harder emotions, grief, fear, shame, guilt. Then, “I want to run away from them as quickly as possible.” People don’t realize that if I run away then I’m putting more burden on those that are already carrying too much.

Bryan: But one of the things in one of the talks we had up in San Francisco, Medria. You weren’t in this meeting when a person was saying, “Now, I’ve been exposed to this, and I feel awful. When I go home at night, I’m gonna feel awful. Am I supposed to hold onto this? What do I do with all of these terrible feelings?” I was like, “Don’t worry about it my man, don’t worry about it. Look, the next time you see a petition for reparations at your local Whole Foods, just sign it. Then be good with that.”

Bryan: Because otherwise, it does feel like feelings that people are just gonna get stuck in. You do need to have an awareness, but nobody wants to live in shame. You can’t … individual human beings aren’t gonna function that way.

Annahid: No.

Bryan: You need an awareness, but you need a pathway to redemption. And reparations gives you a concrete pathway to redemption. That’s what we need.

Annahid: That’s really well said.

Bryan: I’m just not trying to make you feel bad, now live in that. Live in how bad you feel, no. No human being wants to operate that way.

Annahid: That’s right. That strikes me as the inner work in the way that Medria was talking about. You’ve gotta do your inner work. In other words, you gotta work through those difficult emotions, but then get somewhere with them. I like what you’re saying Bryan, that the reparations gives people the pathway. But you gotta be willing to do the work to walk that path as well.

Medria: Absolutely. It really is about atonement, and this is a form of that. And the whole notion of a Truth in Reconciliation Commission … that certainly happened in South Africa. Happening in Canada. One of the things that is clear in my reading is that reason that, that happens is because one of the first steps in repair is listening. A deep listening. Surprisingly, that deep listening makes people feel some kind of way. If you’re really taking it in you are going to feel awful.

Medria: I mean I’m experiencing it reading about veterans since that’s where the notion of moral injury is a term that’s typically applied to Vietnam, Afghani, and Iraqi vets. Where they have their horror stories, and people don’t want to hear that stuff, because … am I’m there. I was reading their narratives and I was feeling like, oh my God. Not only that, but I was feeling my own complicity in the things that they were talking about. I was like, oh my God, I was one of those people who were protesting the war in Vietnam. I was one of those people disrespecting those vets when they came back home. I’m in there.

Then dropping down and recognizing my complicity in something that I really had … I thought I knew about, but in fact I really did not know about, because it’s only now that I’m learning it. How I have taken that information, even from currently, the soldiers in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and those vets who have come back. Where are they? Are they in my mind? No. They sort of are now because I’m doing this reading. But think that there is a parallel process that goes on then for whites in relationship to the legacy of slavery. It’s the same dynamic, so it is work. I get it. You do have to work to hold onto it.

It’s awfully nice when you then have a vehicle, something to say, okay, I’m feeling this kind of way. Let me to do something. I can vote for a reparations because we will all feel better if we acknowledge this wrong and do something to correct it in the here and now. Then we don’t have to keep defending against it. Projecting our negative aspects of the other people purchasing our care and concern for our own group by projecting out our aggression and anxiety onto the other and so forth, and so on.

Annahid: Yeah. It seems like there is a … Yes, we’ve made so many steps forward. And with Trump being elected, it’s just of reminder of how much further we have to go. Are you two hopeful about the future?
Bryan: Oh, don’t get us talking about a hope. We have had long conversations about whether hope is even something to be discussed or considered.

Medria: Right, we have.

Bryan: I’m actually … I’m kind of hopeful. I’m gonna tell you I think Trump moves us closer rather than further away. I think the moment of chaos and crisis gives us an opportunity. That’s what Trump brings. He makes the illness come to a boil. Now that boil has to be lanced. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be pretty. But there is a chance … I think there’s a chance of exposure and working through that’s easier when things seem okay on the surface.

This thing isn’t gonna be done in just little increments. Ultimately, it’s going to be a quantum leap that’s gonna happen if we ever get to this point of reparations and real reconciliation, atonement, equality.

Medria: Well, one of the other things that our conversation around hope, and Bryan tends to be more hopeful than I am. What I say to him is, “Okay. Hope is a privilege, and why do we have to have hope in order to do the right thing?” It’s like, “No, I don’t know if this is going to get better in my lifetime.” If I’m using hope as my motivation then I’m in trouble that it helps certainly … it feels better when one experiences hope. But I don’t feel like it needs to be necessary in order to do the work that we have to continue. Because it’s the right thing to do.

Bryan: Let me distinguish hope from expectation.

Medria: True. That’s true. That’s true.

Bryan: I would say when I read Coates’s article, who by the way says, “I don’t know about hope. Don’t talk to me about hope.”

Medria: Ta- Nehisi definitely says, “Don’t talk to me about hope.” Right?

Bryan: But when I read his article, his article provided an answer to my lifelong question. Why does this continue? How come things don’t seem to get better? When he started talking about reparations I realized, “Oh my God, that’s it!” A crime happened and nobody apologized. It’ll never get better if it doesn’t get rectified.

Annahid: Right.

Bryan: Then I saw it. It was like a clear path. This is what needs to happen. I don’t know about our hope. I don’t care about … maybe it’s more like obsession, but I see what it is to me. So then you … until my last dying breath that’s what we work for.

Medria: That’s what we work for. Absolutely. That is exactly right. That is what we work for.

Annahid: That’s right. That’s right. And it’s very possible. I will say that our Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the report … After the government apology, the commission and then this report generated, there are hundreds of recommendations. Many of which are now enshrined into policy. Including the mandatory curriculum development of the history of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Which has not been covered unless voluntarily by teachers in our school system. Which is astonishing, but no different than in the US here. I just want to say that this is a choice. It’s a story that needs to be heard by people in power. And enshrined in our systems at every level, and especially, in our education. Children in America need to learn about the history that they come out of.

I think about going to the plantation yesterday. One of the most powerful aspects was they had statues of children across the plantation that had … and it’s apparent. It’s unimaginable. But just the children that had lost their lives or been forced into violence or been raped at 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 years of age, because they just … I think, our children need to know the stories of those children. They need to know those stories to they can make different choices.

Bryan: That’s part of the remembering. I’m gonna say one more thing about that hope thing. For us who are working toward this, sometimes I find it almost seems fashionable to say, “Oh, that’ll never happen. That’ll never change.” I’m just not with that. We’re working in this area, why would we ever say that? I’m not saying that’ll never change. Now I don’t know that it will-

Annahid: Exactly.

Bryan: … but if we work on this, I’m not with that. This can be better.

Medria: It definitely can be better.

Bryan: This can be better.

Annahid: Well, I want to say thank you to both of you. I think that’s a really great way to end. It can be better, and we all choose what part we play in making things better.

Medria: Absolutely.

Annahid: Both those things are true, and they’re connected truths. I want to just finish by asking each of you, when you think of the word belonging, what comes to mind? Just a couple of quick associations.

Medria: My first association is to community and relationships. Community is very, very important, so that’s what I think belonging … Not being isolated in one’s experience, which is a hard thing to tolerate.

Bryan: I think accepted, welcomed, on the inside. That’s what comes to mind when I think belonging.

Annahid: Thank you, both of you. That was really, really a great discussion.

Medria: Thank you, Annahid. Thank you for your work.

Bryan: Thank you. Thank you, Annahid.

Judy Rebick, Feminist and Author in convo about her new book, Heroes in my Head.

Heroes in my Head is a heartwrenching and hopeful memoir about the resiliency required to facilitate wholeness, both in the world and in oneself. Overcoming childhood sexual abuse through discovery of multiple personalities, Judy describes how the heroes in her head allowed her to be a hero in the world.  Judy’s book is a reminder that what we marginalize can sometimes be what saves us in the end.

Annahid Dashtgard in conversation with Judy Rebick about her upcoming Memoir: Heroes in My Head – April 2018

View Transcript in PDF format: Breaking the Ocean: Episode 1

Annahid: Welcome to Breaking the Ocean Podcast: Soundwaves of Belonging. This is Annahid Dashtgard and today I am in conversation with Judy Rebick: author, journalist, prominent feminist about her upcoming memoir, Heroes in my Head.

Annahid: Well, first of all, I want to say it’s a really brave book to write. Well, let’s start with that, like how are you feeling about this book going out into the world? It’s different than your other books.

Judy: Yeah. It’s taken me eight years to write the book, and it’s my sixth book, and every other book took me two years, even with research, going to Latin America and all that, so-

Annahid: And the other books are all political, so they’re about external reality.

Judy: About that external. Although I always tell my own stories, but they’re always political stories, right?

Annahid: Yeah.

Judy: So, it was a personal book, so it was hard emotionally to write for lots of reasons, which we can go into if you want. But I also had to learn a new way to write, ’cause I’m trained as a journalist, and so my way of writing is to summarize. To summarize and analyze. That’s the opposite of what you have to do in a book like this. You have to … People have to be able to stay in the scene so that they can feel what’s happening, not just understand the intellectual. So I really had to work on changing my writing, and that was a big part of the work.

Yeah, so, I’m scared. I’m nervous about it. People see me, people’s image of me anyway isn’t anything like what I’m like. People see me as this sort of tough, hard person. I don’t know if that’s still true after I was on TV so long. But they used to see me that way, and I think a lot of people still see me that way. So, when it comes out that I’m not at all like that, I don’t know how people react. One person who read a draft she said, “Why are you giving away your powers?” I said, “What do you mean?” “Well, you’re giving away your powers to the alters.” And I say, “But the alters are me.” They’re fragmented parts of my personality, how is that giving away? In other words, you’re saying, like, the things that people admire most about you; your courage, your tenacity, is due to the fact that you had this disorder. But I actually think that’s true in many people’s cases.

Annahid: Well, it’s interesting ’cause I see this as an extension of your feminism, that part of undoing patriarchy and masculine styles of leadership is honoring and situating the emotional part of our selves and being comfortable with vulnerability. And so I feel like once again, you’re trail blazing. It looks like to lead from a different place.

Judy: Oh that’s cool. Well, yes. I think that the #Me Too happened just as I, you know, I was finished the book. In fact, I was just about finishing the editing process of the book. And I thought, this time I’m really with the times. Sometimes I’m a little ahead of my time but this time I’m really with the times understanding that. By me telling the truth about who I am, really the whole truth. Yeah, I’m like showing that vulnerability. It’s something I’ve been doing in my speaking in the last 10 years anyway and trying to be more vulnerable. It’s hard because once I’m in performance mode, I’m in that person, you know, that person… tough.

I deliberately have to stop myself. Like when someone asks a question that I really don’t know the answer to, I have to force myself to say, “Well, you know, I really don’t know about that, but blah blah blah.” Like it’s so hard for me to say that, you have no idea. So, showing vulnerability is important, but this is like mega showing your vulnerability, right?

Annahid: Yeah, it really is. Well, do you want to, I don’t know how much you want to share. What is the vulnerable part and what was the vulnerable piece for you writing this book for people that haven’t read it.
Judy: Well, the first thing I reveal, which I’ve never talked about publicly is that I was sexually abused by my father starting at a very young age, four or five, and that no one helped me. So, as a defense mechanism, I developed what was later diagnosed as multiple personality, what’s called Dissociative Identity Disorder, which is considered … most people considered it a major mental health disease. And a lot of people confused it with schizophrenia, which is nothing like schizophrenia. So, and it’s been sensationalized in the culture, like Three Faces of Eve, Sybil….

Annahid: United States of Tara.

Judy: Yes, United States of Tara, which is not as bad as the other two. It sort of sensationalizes it. What really I wanted to explain that in my view it’s not a mental illness at all, that it’s a defense mechanism that a child uses. It’s sort of inspiring in a way a five year old who has no power at all in a situation where her father is abusing her, uses the only power she has, which is her imagination and creates these characters to take the abuse for her and doesn’t even know her father is abusing her. So, basically shuts it out. And in my case shut it out until I was 40, you know.

Annahid: Wow, I didn’t realize you were that old.

Judy: Yeah, yeah. Well, 1980 is when I first went through a clinical depression, which to me was the beginning of the healing. So I was 35. And then when I started having the memories I was almost 45. And they had been almost completely buried. I’d had the odd sort of flash, but nothing that I really paid attention to. And the way that I did that was through keeping busy and keeping engaged. So, in the writing I explored …. therapy sessions where the alters … well, they’re called alters, alter personalities come out and my connection with them. One way I communicated with them, which was lucky for me as a writer, as I communicated them in a journal. So I have all the writing, and so I didn’t have to remember what they were like. I had it in the paper.

Annahid: That was incredible to see the different personalities and their ways of communicating.

Judy: Yeah, so, yeah.

Annahid: Well, we’re in time where there’s all this buzz around these words like vulnerability and authenticity and be yourself, and be a whole person, and I think there is not a lot of people that actually have the courage to step into what that means. And what struck me, when I call this book brave I think it’s kind of easier to work for change in the world outside. ‘Cause that’s what we think about when we’re just … in a way to do the organizing, the public speaking, because that’s recognized as courageous and there’s a space for it and there’s a place to be affirmed in doing that work. I think doing the inner work and confronting parts of ourselves that we’ve pushed away or don’t want to … and particularly for you, like these are not just parts of yourself, they were separate personalities. And I was struck in your story, how from the beginning you were curious about these alter personalities.

Judy: Wouldn’t you be?

Annahid: Well, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. No, I don’t know if I would. The sense of compassion that you had for these other parts of yourself. ‘Cause I think a lot of us especially, like for something that could go into the category of mental illness, we can kind of judge ourselves for those aspects of ourself and it can be harder then to integrate those pieces. And I was struck how-

Judy: Well, my thing was-

Annahid: … you really leaned into them somehow.

Judy: Yeah. Like I think it was more like I just had to keep on going on, like that was my way of survival. I think you see that right through the book. Like no matter what happened when I was traveling overland to India, I should have gone home a long time before I did, but I just had to keep going on. I had that thing, and I think it was in part because of the injury and in part it was because of the family I grew up in.

My mother was like that, my father was kind of like that. And I just had to keep going and keep doing what I’m supposed to do. And so when this hit me, the memories of the abuse and then the realization that I had something seriously weird about me or wrong with me, I just kept going. I just deal with it in therapy at first. Like I say in the book, I didn’t read anything about it, I didn’t research it, nothing. I just kept doing it and then trying to keep myself on track while I was doing it.

So, I don’t know that it was admirable particularly. I mean now, of course, when I write about it, I might have some compassion. At the time, I’m not sure I really did. I think I was more like I just trusted my therapist who said I had to listen to these voices, and I did. And so, yeah.

Annahid: Well, it’s really powerful to hear you say that because you describe your different alters, and the different personalities, and then at one point, you actually talk about the alters as coping strategies. That you tried these different coping strategies to get the abuse to stop. And it struck me how the one that was kind of the most effective in a way, was it Porshe?

Judy: Yeah, Porshe, yeah.

Annahid: Who just started to scream, and screamed and screamed and screamed. I wonder if somehow that that was the one that disrupted your father’s kind of abusive behavior. It struck me that that kind of is what you continued to do-

Judy: To do.

Annahid: … right? And then you’re out in the-

Judy: Yeah, that’s a good observation.

Annahid: … world and you’re screaming and screaming and on behalf of others and pushing forward and-

Judy: Oh that’s cool.

Annahid: … the other alters are very different. Yeah, it’s kind of-

Judy: That’s a cool insight, I didn’t think of that. That’s a cool insight, yeah. Maybe. I guess that is what I’m known for, is screaming, so … What do we want?

Annahid: Are you kidding? Well, we need more of that. I was relieved when I heard that part because I could feel in the book and in the writing, and so it was cathartic as a reader to get to that point and to be with these different parts of yourself, but to get to this place of just finally …

Judy: Enough.

Annahid: I think this is where a lot of people want to be, and this is why we’re in the middle of #Me Too moment, right? A lot of people want to have room to scream. You know?

Judy: Yeah.

Annahid: No more. I am really sorry, I have to say, I just want to make space as well to say that I am really sorry that this happened to you.

Judy: Thank you.

Annahid: I think when anyone shares their story and I know you as well, it can be moving, but this story was really … I’m sorry that there wasn’t somebody there for you.

Judy: Yeah, people say when you write things and you should say, “This could be triggering.” You know, how people say, “Be careful, you could be triggered by this.” For me, I think it’s better to say what CBC says, “This could be disturbing.” Because a trigger is a funny thing. The stories that trigger me most are rescue stories, they’re rescue. When children are rescued, I’m just inconsolable. Okay, I just start to cry, and cry, and cry. Because it reminds me that I wasn’t rescued. So, even though there were all kinds of people around me who loved me, it was a different …

Well, I don’t know, I say it was a different time, but would it be that different now if it was happening? I don’t know. I like to think it would be. But I think there’s a lot more abuse in families than we recognize. And it’s been medicalized in a way like it’s not talked about when we talk about ending patriarchy, and that’s something I say in the book that I think that we have to think about what happens in families. I think nuclear family is like the worst possible way to organize society, and I think women and children have suffered mightily for this method of organization. And so …

Annahid: I think the thing that you experienced where your mother is not able to support you, your mother isn’t able to support you happens also in a lot of cases. Where you’d expect the mother to be an ally but that’s not … often the mother will align with the father.

Judy: Align with the father.

Annahid: And how devastating that is. There was a sentence here where you’re describing the abuse and, “Nobody came to help me, my mother never came either.” As a mother, it’s hard to even be able to relate to that. But I think that-

Judy: Well, I think my mother knew something was going on with my father and with me. Well, she did know. I say it in the book. She even told me she knew. When I was five years old she said you dissociate you. When you-

Annahid: Left me?

Judy: Yeah, you cut me off.

Annahid: You cut me off, yeah.

Judy: And later she said-

Annahid: You think that meant that she knew?

Judy: No, I don’t think she knew my father was abusing me, but I think she knew that something was wrong, okay. She knew something was wrong with me and she knew something was wrong with my father, but she didn’t put it together because to put it together would be she’d have to give up her life. My mother’s a very intelligent person, and she wasn’t in a position where she was financially dependent. She was an accountant, she could have made a living, she was close to her family, but she loved him and she didn’t want to fail. ‘Cause when a marriage broke up in those days, it was always the woman’s fault.

And later I talked to my aunts. I didn’t talk to my aunts about the abuse, but I did talk to them about the emotional abuse of my brother, and they were both very well aware of it. And I said, “Well, why didn’t you do something?” “Oh, it’s private, family.” That was the culture then. I don’t know that it’s all … I think it’s different now. I know if I saw one of my nieces or nephews or one of their partners being emotionally abusive to a kid, I would step in and say something. But yeah, that was what I grew up with. For my mother to be my ally, she would have had to leave my father, because he never would have accepted responsibility for what he did, so.”

Annahid: Yeah. Wow. I wonder if times have changed enough that it would be different today.

Judy: I certainly hope so. I think it depends-

Annahid: On the context.

Judy: Yeah, it depends on the context, on the family. There’s no question that … And I talked to women who worked in anti-violence work and to therapists that childhood sexual abuse is way, way more common than we think.

Annahid: Typically, in a lot of closed cultures where sexuality is really closed, I think about South Asian culture and how rampant it is and the secrecy that even you know. And all the dynamics you’re describing how women protect the males: uncles and husbands and grandfathers. It is rampant.

I have to say, as a younger feminist, generation of feminists, the innocuousness of the violence surrounding women’s lives in your book, not just what happened to you in your own personal life, but just in the culture, the violence you experienced traveling and how it wasn’nt just verbal harassment, but these physical attacks. Not in one location but multiple locations. And nobody is stepping in and doing anything, and the activist movement, the kind of … right? Lack of support for women and the ways women got marginalized.

Judy: And you know, I was like one of the boys. In the movement I was treated better than most women because I was like a man. I constructed myself politically to be like a man and so men tended to treat me with more respect than other women.

But on the street, which was true in New York, when I lived in New York and also traveling. And the main thing was, “Well, what are you doing?” Like it’s my fault for wanting to do what men could do and that was basically my feminism at that time was, I wanna do whatever men could do. And so men could walk in the street at night, so why couldn’t I walk in the street at night in New York, for example. Or men could travel over land to India, why couldn’t I? And sometimes I was right, I could. Like traveling in Europe, it was a bit of a hassle but no more of a hassle than New York, and less of a hassle than New York actually, and I could handle it.

But then, I got into a situation where I was in real danger, which was traveling over land to India by myself. It was insane to do that. But I had no way to know that one … ‘Cause everybody said, “Girls can’t do that.” That was like all I ever heard when I wanted to do anything. So, I just ignored it. Also, because I could dissociate, which was this sort of highly tuned skill that I had, I don’t think I have it quite as strongly now, although I still have it. Because I could dissociate from my feelings, I could carry on. I wouldn’t get paralyzed and I didn’t feel the fear after a while. I just stopped feeling it, yeah.

Which is like I say in the book, it’s kind of like a super power, right?

Annahid: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Judy: Because I could dissociate from fear, from could dissociate from fatigue, even pain. I tell a story in the book about how I broke all my ribs in a bike accident, and went to the hospital, and they told me my ribs weren’t broken, and then for a week I walked around with broken ribs, and I completely dissociated from the pain. I could barely walk but I didn’t feel. I felt it was a little sore, but that was it until the doctor told me I had broken ribs and then it became unbearable, right? That’s how crazy it was.

Annahid: This is getting a bit academic here, but do you think … Structures of oppression like patriarchy being one of them, don’t you think on some level it requires a certain amount of dissociation? Like patriarchy privileges a certain kind of spectrum of the human experience… be fearless, be independent, be strong, like the Marlboro Man image. And even men within patriarchy, I feel like are so dissociated, right?

Judy: Totally, well not just that. There’s actually tension, like riot cops are trained to dissociate. Snipers and armies they’re trained to dissociate. That’s why they get PTSD.

Annahid: CEO’s right?

Judy: Yeah.

Annahid: Look who rises into leadership positions in our society.

Judy: That’s right.

Annahid: I think so many of them are dissociated individuals.

Judy: Yeah, you know what? That’s why it is part of the reason for my success. Because unlike most women, I could dissociate from my feelings, so that’s being like a man, right?

Annahid: Yeah.

Judy: People would say to me, “How do you debate right-wingers?” When I was on CBC, you know, “How do you debate right-wingers every night of the week and keep your cool?” Well, that’s the answer. I was still dissociative.
I didn’t turn into another personality, but I totally could keep my feelings away from my conscious mind. And it’s like multiple personality syndrome is. I think it’s way more common than we think also. I don’t think it’s common, but the psychiatric association calls it rare. I don’t think it’s rare, I just think that it helps you to be more functional in our society, not less functional. Therefore, nobody talks about it. Nobody who has it talks about it because everybody will think you’re crazy and otherwise, everybody thinks your confident and good at what you do. So, why would you ever talk about it?

There’s other mental disorders that make you more functional, not less functional. So, it depends on what society you live in. If you lived in a mystical society, a society that believed in mysticism, people with schizophrenia would be Shaman’s, they wouldn’t be considered mentally ill, they’d be considered talking to the spirits, right?

I think one of the things I hope the book will help with is thinking about mental illness in a different way. I think I have a mental injury, not a mental illness. And now there’s evidence, now there’s literature coming out that children who have been abused have a different sized brains than other people. Like there’s parts of their brains that are different size.

So, I think it’s a mental injury to be abused as a child and that this is a symptom of an injury. And I think that’s different than an illness. Because an illness suggests that it’s something you have all the time, and an injury is something you can get over it. I think we have to think of mental illness on a spectrum.

Annahid: Absolutely.

Judy: Some people have it as an illness. It’s genetic, their grandparents had it, they have it, it’s a chemical imbalance, drugs help them, or other forms of extreme therapy. But for a lot of people it’s like me, it’s because of something that happened to them, it’s because of trauma, and I think most people it’s because of trauma. I don’t have any evidence for that, but that’s my sense of it. And so therefore, you have to heal from the trauma to get better.

Annahid: Well, I think that’s why your story is so hopeful, because you are on an extreme end of the spectrum in terms of trauma, mental injury, and yet you found a way to integrate those very hard, hard, hard deep emotions that are some of the hardest to kind of encounter, and I guess my question is like thinking about leadership and the moment we’re in, and do you think it’s possible to be connected to our emotional selves and still be effective in the world? Still be impactful in the world?

Judy: Yeah, that’s a really good question. Because now I have the opposite problem. I had a concussion two years ago and I’m hyper emotional now. What they call labile, it’s a symptom of the concussion. It’s sort of like poetic justice.

Annahid: The word sounds like part of the female anatomy there.

Judy: Right? That’s the-

Annahid: Did you say labile or labia? (laughter)

Judy: Labile.

Annahid: okay?

Judy: Exactly, exactly, I’m sure it’s the same root. Anyway, so I overreact to everything. Not everything, but I overreact to things, so-

Annahid: Well that’s interesting, do you feel it’s an overreaction or do you feel it’s another way-

Judy: When I first got hurt, I had to cancel my subscription to the newspaper because I’d read the newspaper and I’d start to weep like my cat just died.

Annahid: Well, maybe that’s how we should be reacting though, right?

Judy: Maybe yeah, maybe.

Annahid: I don’t know, I don’t know.

Judy: Maybe. But anyway, and I still, my feelings are very on the surface. So it’s really hard for me to go to a demonstration for example, because it’s a real demonstration, not like a rogue demonstration. The kind of demonstrations I used to love, which were a real demonstration where people are really upset and they’re coming to protest. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand the energy, the noise, the anger. I can’t handle it, it’s too much for me, right?

Annahid: Well, you’re raising a really interesting point because it makes me think if we really are connected to our feelings, and we’re kind of present in our experiences particularly in the world we live in now, maybe part of authentic leadership is that we do less, because we have to be able to … being connected to emotion means being able to process the emotions in relation to experiences. And that means that we can’t go at the speed that so many of us are going at because … I find myself that sometimes I’m desensitizing just to kind of get through and I don’t wanna live that way.

Judy: Well, I think that’s totally true. I think that we have to slow down. I don’t know how that’s gonna happen because we live in a society, in a culture where people admire you for working 20 hours a day or whatever it is you do. And if anything, and this has been a problem with feminism, instead of … you know, my generation of feminists wanted women to do what men did, but they also wanted men to do what women did. Gloria Steinem often pointed out that we succeeded in getting women to do what men do not 100%, but by and large in terms of doctor, lawyer, et cetera. But we haven’t succeeded very far in getting men to do what women do, nurturing work and so on.

There is a much bigger proportion of men doing parenting and domestic work and so on-

Annahid: But nowhere near.

Judy: … but nowhere near 50% or even close.

Annahid: No.

Judy: And even the men who do it, I often find the women are still in charge of the household, and they don’t want to let go of it. That is where women used to find their power, was being in charge of the household. But now-

Annahid: Now a lot of women are working double time.

Judy: They’re working double time. And so it’s even worse in terms of keeping in touch with your feelings. And especially if you do suffer any trauma as a child. So, yeah, to create a society where people are healthy, we have to slow down and it’s hard. It’s so-

Annahid: How has it been for you to slow down?

Judy: Oh, well.

Annahid: Are you comfortable with the pace that you’re-

Judy: No, not at all. No, I’m not. I start to get blue, I start to get down, I start to fear. Like even at this point where the book … I’m finished the book and now I’m waiting for the book launch. Now it’s only two weeks away, but it’s been about a month and a half between the time I was finished that I couldn’t change the book anymore and the time the book comes out, which launches a whole … And I like think, “What am I gonna do?” Like I have nothing to do.

You know, like I have lots to do. I could reorganize my house or … but I feel like that. Like I had nothing to do. I’m very uncomfortable with that, and I’m 72 years old. Like 72 years and I’ve worked hard all my life so if I have nothing to do, so what? But I feel like, “Oh I should do something, I should be involved in something.” It’s crazy, right?

So yeah, I think work’s very important and obviously I think being engaged politically is really important, especially right now because we’re in a time of such change. But I also think that we have to have what people want to call a balanced life or take care of ourselves.

Annahid: And I think perhaps it’s … you talk about this in the book. It’s about listening to our own intuition, about what things to take on, what pace we can go at so that we’re not outstripping our capacity to kind of be present in what we’re doing. We need to manage our own lives at a pace that makes sense. And you talk about that, I thought that was really … even when you were exhausted and overwhelmed and when you were making the decision to whether or not to take the presidency of NAC, you talk about how you listen to that voice that you know-

Judy: That thing, yeah the gut feel.

Annahid: … the gut thing, that that was always there as-

Judy: I always had that, yeah. It also helped me with avoiding danger or at least … not avoiding danger but avoiding it before it was too late. Yeah, the gut feeling. I still get that.

Annahid: I think more people could benefit by knowing that A; that that’s there and B; listening to it. And I think that’s part of the antidote to patriarchy.

Judy: That’s right, yeah.

Annahid: Patriarchy is kind of all about … you know, and-

Judy: Well, if you think about patriarchy, capitalism, and European … whatever you want to call it, European dominance. No, it’s white dominance, but it’s really European. I mean, if you think of it culturally, white doesn’t really tell you anything.

Annahid: It’s like enlightenment, yeah.

Judy: It’s the Europeans that created white as a concept. Like it didn’t even exist before. So …

Annahid: It’s like always the head, rationality…

Judy: Yeah, all head, everything’s rational and enlightenment, the whole enlightenment thing, which, it’s true. That contributed a lot of knowledge and wisdom and everything else to society. We don’t want to wipe that out. But it also eliminated a lot of the knowledge that comes from a different place in your head.

Annahid: That’s right.

Judy: And there’s a lot of knowledge like that. You learn that from your indigenous people, other cultures rely more on those other knowledges, right?

Annahid: Yeah.

Judy: Religions, even though I’m not a religious person, but there’s a lot of wisdom in religions that comes from other places.

Annahid: I agree, I think that head of the pack is part of the oppression.

Judy: That’s right.

Annahid: And then cultures, people that come from cultures as you were saying that prioritize a different way of knowing, it becomes a further brick in the wall of their oppression.

Judy: Yeah. And it’s very, very challenging. Like I went to an event at Ryerson recently, Social Justice Week, this year. Christi Belcourt, who is an indigenous artist, she had them turn out the lights, this is in a big sterile auditorium, University auditorium. She had them turn out the lights and she had everybody close their eyes and breathe. Okay, they breathe. And then she said, “I want you to put aside who you are, what you do, you’re a student, you’re a faculty, you’re staff, unemployed, you’re an artist, just put it aside, and then I want you to think about …” and this is what she said, “How lucky you are to have been born at this time.” Which was like the exact opposite of what everybody in the room was thinking about. So she totally shifted your ground, right?

And what she’s talking about is it’s a time of change, fundamental change, and profound change. And then she got us to think about what could we do to promote the kind of change that we wanted to see. And the impact was amazing. You could feel it in the room, the change and the power of it. I mean, I’ve never seen anybody do anything like that before. And so, you think, “Okay, like this is really different.”

And then I notice at demonstrations now like say at the #Me Too demonstration, it’s very different than the old-style rah, rah, rah. They’re more like just people telling their stories, women and trans-people telling their stories. And it’s a very different energy. I still kind of like the rah, rah, but I thought, “Okay, well this is a different way, a different way of doing things.

Annahid: Perhaps a more connected way.

Judy: Maybe.

Annahid: But again, I don’t think it’s about one way being better than others. I think the dogma is a problem. I think it’s about making space for different ways. One way is not better than others. I agree with you. I think the rah, rah, rah, the screaming, is needed. It has its place, right?

Judy: Yeah. So, I have a question for you. I don’t know if you will really put this in the podcast. You’ve known me a long time, so did the book change your way of thinking about me?

Annahid: Well, I’ve always seen your heart beyond the tough exterior. I don’t know, you know, I orient things on quite an emotional level. I think what struck me, I felt like I really was acquainted with the five year old, and maybe it’s because my daughter is also five. But I felt very connected to your five year old self, and as I was reading I was really protective, very moved by your journey.

It didn’t change the way I see you, but it made me appreciate just how brave you are, and it made me really wanna protect you because that five year old is still in there and she’s part of the story going out in the world too. Yeah, I think it’s going to … I don’t know, I think you’re telling the story for a bunch of different reasons, but I think-

Judy: The main reason I did it was for myself. I wrote it for myself to understand my life, and it really helped me to understand my life better.

Annahid: But I think you’re also … One of your primary demographics are the many five year olds still out there. There are the too many five year olds and their mothers and their aunts and their fathers and their uncles and … anyone, not just people that suffer sexual abuse, but all the ways in which people get really hurt and damaged and feel like they’re completely alone in that circle.

Judy: That’s right. And that’s the thing about secrets, right?

Annahid: Yeah.

Judy: Like, one of the things is, my parents’ generation … like for example, I grew up in a Jewish family. Nobody ever talked to me about the Holocaust, ever. Okay? Ever. I learned about the Holocaust, I don’t even know when. Maybe at school, I don’t know. And even my grandparents, who fled from Cossack almost didn’t talk to me about it till I was an adult. The way they survived was, “We don’t talk about bad things.” We don’t talk about bad things and we don’t talk about anything in the family outside the family.

Yesterday I read an article about secrets, about someone who grew up Catholic and how central secrets were to Catholicism, something about Jesus keeping secrets, I don’t know, I can’t remember the theology of it. So there’s a way in which the keeping of secrets is central to our culture, and of course, what-

Annahid: Part of patriarchy again, right?

Judy: Yeah, exactly. And so then the thing is, so what does a secret do? It makes you feel ashamed. That’s what secrets do. It makes you feel ashamed. And then the shame is the most terrible feeling for me for sure. It’s the most terrible feeling. And so, as long as we keep the secrets, we keep the shame, and as long as we have the shame, we’re disabled by it in some ways.

And so, I think that the … Ann-Marie MacDonald wrote a piece, unfortunately, she wrote it in the same, it was in the same issue of the globe that that Margaret Atwood piece that everybody got mad about, so nobody paid attention to the Ann-Marie MacDonald’s piece. But she wrote a piece saying we shouldn’t talk about breaking silence, as there’s no silence. We should talk about telling secrets. We have to tell secrets. Tell our secret. Because we have to release the shame. That’s the only way to release the shame or the anger or the fear or whatever it is, or the sadness or the grief. And so I think telling secrets is really … not everybody has to do it in a book but is really important and it doesn’t help anybody to keep secrets. I don’t think it helps anybody

Annahid: Well it goes back to what we were saying at the beginning. You’re not giving away your power in writing this book, you’re doing the opposite. You’re modeling power and vulnerability. The power in the secret. I think it’s a power that is most needed right now.

Judy: Oh, okay good.

Annahid: Thank you for trail blazing again. Is there anything else that you want to say? I did have a question here. Maybe this is a way to end. When you hear the word belonging, what words most immediately come to mind for you?
Judy: Not me. I never feel like I belong. I always feel like the outsider.

Annahid: Still?

Judy: Yeah, I still feel that way a bit. Not as much as I used to, but yeah. It’s different now because I’m not really part of a group now. Like, I’m semi-retired and I’m a writer and you know, I’m not … but yeah, like I’m in the Writer’s Union and I don’t feel like I belong there. Like I always feel like I have to watch myself. I can’t be my full self there. Yeah, but I’m not part of a group really. But every group I’ve ever been in, I’ve never felt like I belonged.

Annahid: And do you think that’s because of the abuse?

Judy: Yeah, I think it’s because of the abuse and I think it’s because, you know, I’m culturally quite different. Like even though I’m white and have all the privilege of being white and middle-class, I’m a Brooklyn girl. So, I’ve got a big mouth and I always say what I think. Now I’m even worse doing that. Like I have even less filters than I used to have. I don’t know if it’s the concussion or getting older, but I have no filters now.

Like, I was at a dinner party a couple of month ago, and it was a friend of mind in Montreal that made this dinner party for me. It was actually mostly men there, not women. There was only one other woman. We were talking about the #Me Too stuff and at a certain point I said, “Well, you know, some of my best friends are men, but still, after I listen to all of this stuff, I think maybe we should just eliminate them. Eliminate males off the face of the earth.” I thought it was really funny but nobody laughed.

Annahid: Lysistrata society…

Judy: Nobody laughed. Anyway, yeah. So, I tend to … so, I don’t know.

Annahid: But you’re saying that you think it was partly because of the abuse, that feeling of not belonging, but also-

Judy: Yeah. But also my personality, like I’ve been always … I’ve always been an outsider. It’s like a personality trait. So belonging, I guess you’d say belonging, I don’t know, I think it’s something I wanted, like I say in the book that when I came to Canada, I had a really thick Brooklyn accent and kids made fun of me. And I changed it like in a week or two weeks. I just listened and imitated how they talked and that’s because I wanted to belong.
And on the outside I always belonged, I was always popular, all that. I always had friends, but on the inside no, I was always lonely. And I say in the book, I don’t feel alone very much anymore, that’s true. So maybe that is that I feel more like I belong. I don’t know, not sure. Yeah.

Annahid: I guess the journey’s not over.

Judy: Oh, that’s for sure. That’s for sure. It’s never over.