These Precedented Times
9/11/20 - We're engulfed in crises: caregiving, police violence, employment, and an election. These may feel like unprecedented times, and yet, some of our favorite guests have been experts and activists who tackle these issues. We listen back to excerpts from Ai-jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance on caregiving, journalist Annie Lowery on guaranteed income, Josie Duffy Rice on the criminal justice system's impacts on women, and Stacey Abrams on how all of us can lead, beginning from our own experiences and circumstances.
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
Ad sales: Midroll
LINKS
Full Ai-Jen Poo interview on domestic workers
Full Annie Lowery interview on universal basic income
Full Josie Duffy Rice interview on the justice system
Full Stacey Abrams interview on being a good ancestor
TRANSCRIPT: THESE PRECEDENTED TIMES
[Ads]
(0:20)
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: Hi Ann Friedman.
Ann: Hello. Deep exhale. [Laughs]
Aminatou: I know. I'm like inhale, exhale. [Laughs]
Ann: I know. Do we need to do -- you know those GIFs that are like sync your breath with this shape? I feel like we maybe should do an inhale/exhale moment. [Laughs]
Aminatou: That's so real. That's so real.
Ann: In audio format, yeah. [Laughs]
Aminatou: [Laughs] I'm only laughing so I don't cry. This week has been a lot.
Ann: I recently have been thinking about the fact that when I was a kid I noticed that my grandmother would sigh all the time, like just involuntarily at random points. I mean I noticed it because she was the only person in my life who was doing that and I think I have fully become her. Just like [Sighs] multiple times an hour.
Aminatou: Yeah I sigh all the time. Well let's sigh no longer. [Laughs] What are we tackling today?
Ann: Ugh, so today's agenda is talking about all of the things happening in this intense and difficult moment by revisiting some conversations that we had with experts and activists who have been working on these issues long before the fall of 2020. In other words people who are not like "Oh no, this is a crisis right now" but people who kind of take a long and productive view to the kinds of problems that are happening right now.
[Theme Song]
(2:30)
Aminatou: Ann you're right. We are engulfed in a couple of different crises. There's 100 percent a care-giving crisis that is happening right now that is squeezing families, communities, and individuals who take care of other people. Police violence is in the spotlight in a more intense way than it usually is. There is a huge divide between people who work an hourly wage and people who have salaried jobs and that divide is just yawning even wider and wider. And, you know, on top of all of that we have an election coming up in November where we have real, real, real concerns about the future of American democracy. So I'm feeling distressed. How are you feeling?
Ann: Ugh. I mean I know we had a conversation a couple weeks ago about these being precedented times and that is one thing I really cling to. You know, there are experts who have recognized that all this stuff has been at a crisis point long before. I feel better actually when I hear from people who are really steeped in one aspect of this multiheaded, Greek demon crisis that is happening right now. I don't even know what kind of folkloric demon I'm talking about. But I don't know, it just feels like huge and unapproachable and so I think this little dip into our archives is meant to break it down a little bit.
And so our first interview of a series is with Ai-Jen Poo who is the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and co-host of a podcast we love called Sunstorm and in this clip she's talking about domestic work and workers and the fact that these jobs have always been precarious but now we know they have become even more so. And Ai-Jen has some thoughts about how we can all support workers in jobs like this. And so yeah, so here she is from an interview we did with her in 2018.
[Interview Starts]
Ann: Thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
Ai-jen: Thanks so much for having me.
Ann: I want to start with just kind of getting on the same page definition-wise. When you use the term domestic work what are we talking about and who are we talking about?
Ai-jen: We're basically talking about anybody who works in someone else's home doing cleaning or caregiving. So that's house cleaners, it's nannies, it's homecare workers who take care of the elderly or support people with disabilities. That whole workforce that does the work that makes everything else possible, making it possible for us to go out into the world and do what we do every day, but is hidden behind the closed doors of our private homes. And it's more than 90% women, disproportionately women of color, black and immigrant women, and it's the fastest-growing occupation in our entire economy. In fact homecare workers who take care of the elderly in the private home are the single fastest-growing occupation in our entire workforce because the need for care is so great.
Ann: And I have my own feminist guesses but why are these professions so disproportionately women and women of color?
Ai-jen: Well I would say that this work of caregiving and cleaning, family care, doing the kind of invisible, unrecognized work that makes everything else possible has historically been associated with women, really kind of seen as women's work, and then as a profession really associated with women of marginalized social status: black women under slavery and immigrant women throughout history, Native women. So as a profession it's really been racialized in such a way where it's the kind of least-visible, most-vulnerable women in our economy really occupying this work.
(6:25)
Ann: Talk about some of the challenges that you've faced in organizing workers in domestic professions.
Ai-jen: Well what's so interesting is that I mean if you think about it you could go into any neighborhood or apartment building and not know which homes are also somebody's workplace, right? There's no registry. There's no list anywhere. It's not like you go around the neighborhood and there's a sign that says somebody works here. Not at all. In a lot of cases you're really the only person that knows that you work there. If you think about a house cleaner that cleans for ten different houses does her family even know all the different houses that she works at? I'm not sure, right?
So there's just a level of invisibility and disaggregation where just workers are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. And then there's this really long history that a lot of people don't know about where when our nation's labor laws were put into place including the really foundational pieces of the National Labor Relations Act which gave workers the right to organize and collectively bargain and the Fair Labor Standards Act which established a minimum wage, those two core pillars of our labor laws explicitly exclude domestic workers and farm workers who at the time these laws were passed were mostly black women, black workers. And southern members of Congress refused to support these labor laws if domestic workers and farm workers were included. So to this day a lot of those exclusions remain in our labor laws.
(8:10)
So a lot of stuff that you and I take for granted when we go to work every day, domestic workers have never been protected. And so there's just between the isolation and the disaggregation and the invisibility and this historic and repeated structural exclusion from actual protections, it just makes for a really interesting organizing challenge for sure. [Laughs]
Ann: God, yeah. And it's something that I've been thinking about as there continues to be a growing conversation about what are sometimes called 1099 workers or temp workers or people who work doing the service end of a lot of really profitable startup companies, right? And what's really interesting to me is watching sometimes how those things are framed as like "new trend" and then I think about this work that you're doing and the history you described and it's like actually maybe the demo or the type of framing has changed but this is not like oh, we're suddenly in a new era of people who are not enjoying what we like to think are fundamental labor protections.
Ai-jen: Right, no. It's such a good observation. We call domestic workers the original gig economy workers for this very reason.
Ann: Yes.
Ai-jen: I mean basically when I first started organizing domestic workers in the 1990s it was kind of seen as this interesting and exotic thing where there are these workers kind of working at the margins of the economy and like ooh, what's going on in the shadows? And today when I look around the conditions that define domestic work are long hours, low wages, unpredictable hours, lack of control over your hours, lack of access to any kind of benefits or a safety net, lack of job security, lack of career pathways, right? Those characteristics or qualities that define domestic work increasingly define work for more and more American workers. Like this is what's become the future of work for so many and the so-called non-traditional or informal, right? There are all these words that economists have used to talk about this work. It's more and more the norm.
And so we do believe that domestic work and domestic workers and our movement, we have a lot to teach workers in 21st century America as a whole about how we change and how we shape the future of work in a way that actually works for everyone.
[Interview Ends]
(11:20)
Aminatou: Next up we have friend-of-the-pod and journalist Annie Lowery who's the author of the book Give People Money on universal basic income and why poverty does not need to exist. Since Congress seems poised to not send out more of those $1,200 stimulus checks we are all finding ourselves thinking about what the country would look like if we provided guaranteed income all the time. Here is Annie in an interview from 2018.
[Interview Starts]
Aminatou: Hi Annie Lowrey. Thanks for coming on Call Your Girlfriend.
Annie: Thank you so much for having me Amina. I am so excited to be here.
Aminatou: I mean I am super excited. You have a new book called Give People Money: How Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World. That's a lot.
Annie: It's a lot. It's a big ideas book. It's a book about revolutionary ideas. So we have these big promises in there.
Aminatou: You're one of the most impressive people we know so obviously the title is very apt.
Annie: [Laughs]
Aminatou: For the people who do not know can you explain in CallYourGirlfriendese what UBI is?
Annie: Absolutely. So UBI is Universal Basic Income. So the idea is that everybody in a given country would get something like a social security payment. So right now you get social security if you are at retirement age and you have paid in in the United States. You need to have performed a certain amount of work and paid FICA which is payroll taxes then you get a monthly sum after that, like sort of a fixed monthly sum.
And so the idea here is that everybody in the US -- there's some debate, right? All citizens, all citizens plus permanent residents, would it just be adults or would it be adults plus kids, but some huge number of people, some universal number of people, would get like $500 or $1,000 a month no questions asked. Do what you want with the money. So that's this simple, radical proposal.
Aminatou: I mean I'm from Africa so UBI sounds really cool to me because it's already at work in places like in the Great Lakes region, you know? Giving people actual money to end poverty, it sounds very simple and normal. But over here people are kind of freaking out that it's communism.
(13:40)
Annie: Absolutely. And what's kind of hilarious about that is people are like "Oh, this is socialism" or "This is communism." And not to be a patronizing nudge about it but it really isn't, right? Nobody is talking about the state taking over industries here. This actually works really comfortably in a capitalist system. It's just that you're taxing more and you're spending more, right?
But you're really right to point out that this is not such a crazy idea in lower- and middle-income countries. More than 100 of them have either unconditional or conditional cash transfer programs which are hugely effective at alleviating poverty. So I think in countries where there's less stigma around poverty because there's more of it there's more of a sense of all right, you want to get people out of poverty? You give them cash. Voila, they're out of poverty. Whereas here we have this very stigmatized, judgmental conversation about the reasons for poverty, how much is it is an individual thing, how much of it is a social thing?
And so we have these really judgmental anti-poverty programs and we're much more uncomfortable with just giving people cash which we know is like -- it sounds so tautological and so ridiculous. We know it's one of the most effective ways to get people out of poverty.
Aminatou: You have pointed this out before too that all sorts of people get government assistance, right? It just depends how you want to qualify it. Like if you have a mortgage you're definitely getting government assistance of some sort.
Annie: Yeah.
Aminatou: If you benefit from the SNAP program which is essentially what people call food stamps you are also getting government assistance. So the stigma just depends on what class level you are at.
Annie: Yeah, absolutely. So there's really amazing research by a political scientist at Cornell named Susanne Metler. And so she asks people across the income spectrum whether they benefit from government programs. And so high-income folks are really likely to say "No, I don't." But those people absolutely do; it's just that the programs that they're benefiting from are not really cash programs. They're run through the tax code and so they're sort of subsumed, right?
But then you look and they're benefiting from all sorts of things, right? The 529 college savings plan, the home mortgage interest deduction, all sorts of different giveaways. And the government designs those so that they don't seem like welfare, right? It's just oh, we're letting you keep more of your money. But in an accounting sense that's not different than the government giving you money. They're just happening to do it by lowering your tax burden as opposed to sending you a check. Whereas if you look at low-income folks they tend to benefit from not insurance or tax incentive programs but welfare programs and they're very well aware that they're benefiting from them because those programs are blunt and obvious, right? We are sending you this money but you have to do these things in return.
You know, so if you ask them if they benefit from government programs they say yes. And so this is one of the ways that our entire system of social insurance and social welfare is designed to be punitive and judgmental towards poor people and to be invisible towards rich people, to give them more choice over their decisions, to say it kind of happens invisibly for them and lets them think they are not beneficiaries when they really are.
Aminatou: Wow. Whew, girl, say it louder for the people in the back. How does UBI work? How much money are we talking? How long does it last? Who is going to pay for it?
Annie: So I think that the lowest-hanging fruit, the most moral thing we could do for the biggest bang for the buck, would be to eliminate child poverty. It feels ridiculous even saying this. The United States has truly abhorrent levels of child poverty. We ensure that we do not eliminate child poverty in any of our welfare programs or our tax programs. You know, it's just hard to talk about it without getting angry about it. We could do this really cheaply, right? We just spent 80 billion dollars more on our military. One in five kids in the United States grows up in poverty. Through something like a universal child grant that number could be zero next year without raising a single dollar of taxes.
Aminatou: That's wild.
Annie: It's infuriating actually. It's disgusting. I don't know what else to say.
Aminatou: Yeah, we're building a space force but kids are hungry. Okay.
(18:00)
Annie: Yep. Yeah. You talk about solvable policy problems, there's lots of policy problems we don't really know how to solve. This one is not one of them. This is easy. And so then similarly though, you know, just eliminating poverty entirely through the tax code with something called a negative income tax costs something like 200 or 400 billion dollars a year. I'm not going to sit here and say that's not a lot of money, but compared to what our government spends it's really not. [Laughs] You know, it's easy to either raise that through the tax code or frankly just to reallocate it from elsewhere.
But then the really grand idea of UBI is that we're providing a universal form of social insurance and we're saying that if you got the luck of the draw to be born American, the richest society that the planet has ever known, we're just not going to let you fall back into destitution. We're going to give you that boost and that bump. Even doing that, that big, grandest idea, it's not crazy, right? Our taxes would come in line with Europe's. They would have to change a lot but . . .
Aminatou: That's socialism, Annie. We don't want it, remember? We don't want . . . we don't want to be Denmark. [Laughs]
Annie: It's still capitalism. [Laughs] I'm like let's do real socialism. Let's go take over important industries. Let's just go to Wall Street and be like "Surprise! You're all public businesses. You're all worker-owned collectives now."
Aminatou: Wow, Queen Annie, nationalizing everything. [Laughs]
Annie: I feel like we need to expand the ownership. [Laughs] Exactly. Take over the airlines. Like Yale University, you're now a public institution. We need somebody to come out and do this so that people will stop calling things that are not socialism socialism.
Aminatou: Right. It's like let's do real socialism one time and then you people will shut up about it. It's nuts. Well, you know, one of the things that you've also written about and touched on that was kind of eye-opening for me honestly was this intersection of feminism and UBI.
Annie: Yeah.
Aminatou: Something that I was like oh, feminist policy? Tell me more about it.
(20:05)
Annie: Yeah, and I know this is a topic near and dear to the podcast's heart but we have a system that, yeah, has led to the economic empowerment of how many millions of women? And especially now young women in some ways are doing better than young men, right? They're improving their educational credentials at higher rates. But you still have a system that is punishing to women and to parents and therefore especially to women, though certainly not exclusively. And so women do the lion's share of the uncompensated care work in this economy: taking care of parents, taking care of sick friends, taking care of children.
And so that work, we actually can assign an economic value to it and that value is in the trillions of dollars and it's an economic utility, right? The economy does not function without the care work that is predominantly done by women.
Aminatou: You mean we don't do it out of the kindness of our hearts? There's actually being a caregiver is something you can put a value on? I'm shocked.
Annie: Yeah, and it's important, right? And we can assign a value to it but economists have known and this is also to a certain extent it's just obvious, right, that you're not counting it and therefore it doesn't show up in the national accounts. And it's just performed invisibly, right? It's discounted. And so UBI is kind of a way of providing social recognition for that and a way of saying that that work has value and a way of empowering not just women but all people to do more of it, right? What if, you know, a parent or a family member got sick? And it wasn't a given that the woman who in a partnership might be earning less was the one to go ahead and take care of it? What if that family or that household or whatever, even that group of people living together, instead got to make a choice about who did that?
And there's a cliff around -- it depends on where you are, but around 13 or 15 dollars an hour. If you're not making more than that then it often makes more sense for you to drop out of the labor force to perform care work. And, you know, we've known about that but we haven't done enough to boost women's wages so that they can make that decision with more freedom, right?
So feminists for a long time have talked about this as sort of a way of reorienting the whole economy and by extension the whole society around a recognition that your work is valuable even if it's not paid.
[Interview Ends]
[Ads]
(24:30)
Ann: Next up we have Josie Duffy Rice on why abolishing police in prisons is a feminist issue, how she's been thinking about this and framing it for a long time, and how we can focus on taking action to change the system which is honestly so large and so entrenched. Josie is one of our very favorite experts and humans. She is co-host of the Justice in America podcast and president of The Appeal which produces news and commentary on how policy, politics, and the legal system affect America's most vulnerable people. Here she is talking to us in 2018.
[Interview Starts]
Aminatou: We talk a lot on our show about issues that women should know about, right?
Josie: Right.
Aminatou: That they should be active in advocating for and should really be paying attention to. I was wondering if you could guide us in discussing issues -- where women's issues and the criminal justice system overlap that you think are really under-discussed?
Josie: Yeah.
Aminatou: We have an audience that cares about this stuff and I will say in my own life even finding something as small as -- or small to me at least -- as knowing that, you know, there are programs to bail out moms during Mother's Day . . .
Josie: Right, right, right.
Aminatou: Was something that I . . . like I felt so dumb and self-absorbed that it's something I had never thought about.
Josie: Right, right, right.
Aminatou: And have seen firsthand the difference it makes in people's lives.
Josie: Right, right, right.
(25:55)
Aminatou: I'm just curious about issues that you deal with in your work that you wish more people knew about in that intersection.
Josie: Yeah. I think, you know, it's a great question and I think there are a lot . . . to your point of stuff you haven't yet thought about I do this day in and day out and daily I'm like oh my gosh, I had never actually thought about it as a solution. I had never understood that was a problem. So that's kind of the joy and the tragedy of this work. You're always learning new things. But there are so many issues that disproportionately affect women right now.
I think so fundamentally, right, we send a lot of women to prison and we send a lot more women to prison than we ever have. In the past 40 years the number of women in prison has grown by 800% and in a lot of places they're the most rapidly-growing population going to prison, being involved in the criminal justice system. They're more likely to go for a drug offense than men are. We're filling prisons and jails with women, so that's the first thing.
(26:55)
I think the second thing is that women are an integral part of the system no matter who is in prison, right? And there's an organization called SE Justice, it's run by this incredible woman Gina Clayton, and what SE Justice really focuses on is women with incarcerated loved ones. What Gina has really identified, which I think is very important, is when we talk about bail for example who's paying the bail of someone in prison? Probably a woman. Probably a mom, the girlfriend, the niece, the sister. These women carry the weight of the system in such a way that is so pervasive. When men are being sent to prison at these astronomical rates like they have been for the past few decades these are women who now are working two jobs to take care of their kids. Women who are now taking in their grandkids when their son goes to prison.
For 90% of men who go to prison who have children their children are taken care of by either the children's mother or a grandmother of the children. So a woman is taking care of those children.
Aminatou: Wow.
Josie: When a mother goes to prison only 25% of the time is that child taken care of by their father primarily. Most of the time they're also being taken care of by another woman in the family. So you see it left and right that women are kind of carrying the load of the system.
Another thing we see all the time is women who have their children taken away from them for small offenses who lose custody of their kids because they were caught with drugs or because low-level threat or because they are in jail and they can't pay their bail and so they're not home with their children and then they're charged with neglect. Their children are taken from them, maybe put in foster care. Someone else gets custody. You see the separation of families. We talk about it all the time in an immigration context which obviously matters so much. It happens daily here with women whose children are being taken from them for small, small offenses. In fact I don't know if you remember the story a couple months ago about the six kids in I think it was California who . . .
Aminatou: Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was California.
Josie: Who were adopted. And their adoptive mothers drove them over a cliff and killed the entire family. Three of those children were siblings who had grown up in Houston for the beginning of their lives and their mother had some cocaine charges on her record and she lost custody of her kids. Her kids were adopted by this family that obviously was not monitored with the same kind of vigilance that she was monitored with.
Aminatou: Right. Actually, you know, but the thing about the story that is actually fascinating is they were monitored. The police were called.
Josie: Right.
Aminatou: They had had a lot of contact with the system.
Josie: Right.
Aminatou: For multiple offenses. But the difference is those kids are black and the women who adopted them are white.
(30:00)
Josie: Exactly. Exactly.
Aminatou: The consequence for having contact with the system was very different for both of the parties.
Josie: Exactly. Exactly. And that woman's kids are dead now because she had some cocaine charges. It's kind of hard to even imagine.
Aminatou: Yeah.
Josie: You see it all the time with women who test positive for drugs while they're pregnant which can happen for various reasons, often because they're not getting the services they need to address their addiction. They lose custody of their children once they're born usually and not only that but they're often sentenced to up to a decade or a decade and a half in prison for testing positive on a drug test while they were pregnant.
Aminatou: Well, so listen, I feel like you and I know the answer to this right?
Josie: Right.
Aminatou: But what is the answer you tell somebody who says "well, those women have drugs in their system and they should not have their children." Because that is the simplistic way of looking at it.
Josie: Right.
Aminatou: But unfortunately a lot of people think that including people who I would say think of themselves as very progressive people.
Josie: Right. I would say that the answer to that is that it's typically more complicated than that. But that on the front end, right, these women don't have the services or the care that they need to address their addiction. So you don't get pregnant and stop being addicted to opioids. It doesn't happen. And so if you can't actually address your opioid addiction, if you don't have a system that's willing to help you figure out what the best path forward for you is as a pregnant woman who has this addiction, but the only answer to your problem is the punishment end, the consequences end, then this is never going to be a solvable problem right? It just never is going to be a solvable problem.
(31:45)
The other thing is the reality is a lot of these children whose parents test positive at some point for drug use, the impact that that has on the child -- I know that sounds crazy to say . . . it might not even have an impact on the child. But the reality is we're drawing a connection to their ability to love and care for their child from something that is not a direct correlation. So we don't always know. You know, often there are no signs of withdraw from the child once they're born. Often this happened at the very beginning of the pregnancy.
Aminatou: Right. The larger point is again it's about paternalism, right?
Josie: Right.
Aminatou: And it is we have decided that there are decisions the state can make for certain people.
Josie: Exactly.
Aminatou: If they are a certain race or if they are from a certain class or a certain socioeconomic background.
Josie: And the state has not earned it. That I think is exactly the point. The state has not earned the right. You know, the state does not treat poor people, people of color, women, families, mothers with the sort of respect necessary and provide the sort of services necessary to have earned the ability to take your child away with almost no due process and no access to services. It just is terrifying to me as a mother what is possible when the state doesn't value your life and doesn't think that you matter. And that's what we see, right?
Aminatou: Yeah.
Josie: This disproportionately affects black mothers. It disproportionately affects poor mothers. It disproportionately happens in places in the south, and this is the same places that can't even provide basic maternal care for these women and the infant mortality rates are off the charts and disproportionate to white mothers. So the answer is not for every parent who has made mistakes or has even proven themselves to have some sort of systemic problems, the answer is not always the state should take your kid. There has to be some other body or influence or ability for other interventions to happen before your child is taken from you. So those are some of the things that I think really matter for women to focus on.
[Interview Ends]
(34:00)
Aminatou: Last but not least we have Stacey Abrams. These days she's the founder of Fair Fight which works for fair and free elections in Georgia and around the United States. Stacey spoke with us in 2018 back when she was a candidate for governor of Georgia. Here she is.
[Interview Starts]
Aminatou: I finished reading your book Minority Leader and it's great and one of the things I think that really sets it apart from this other kind of leadership book from somebody who's running for office is usually this kind of advice comes from people who are really privileged and so sometimes the advice feels not relatable or it's not lost on you that this person had way more power than you. But I was wondering if you could speak to why you wanted to write this book specifically.
Stacey: I started out writing what I was thinking of as the leadership book. I was giving speeches and talks and having conversations with folks who saw where I was positioned. They saw that I was a minority leader, that I was a business leader. I was doing good things in the civics space and I was giving advice so I thought I might as well write it down.
And so the original goal was to write a leadership book but my agent said you're going to have to tell your own story because people aren't going to just hear this advice if they don't have context. And, you know, what's been very different about my experience running for office is I'm much more private than this campaign has allowed and so sort of my first foray into being more open was writing Minority Leader because my agent was right, there's no -- my agent and my editor. There's no way to tell someone how to overcome barriers if you can't acknowledge the reality of those barriers. So there's a whole chapter on money because for those of us who are not to the manor born money plays a big part in everything. It has been used by some as a reason for me not to run, that my ambition is not permissible until I am financially independent. And for a lot of us financial independence will only come when we have good leaders who understand the challenges.
(36:12)
And even the very notion of ambition. There are a lot of folks who push back on the bigness of my goals. There's a more precise term but really that's what they're chafing at. And for me I wanted to write about it, about how we dare to want to be more. But for those of us who do not come from privilege we've got to work at it, and it's not just working at it to have it; it's working at it to figure out how to get it. And that's why the book is really designed to walk you through exercises, probably the only memoir that comes with homework because I want people . . . [Laughs]
Aminatou: A lot of homework but very good homework.
Stacey: But yeah, the point is I don't want people to simply read about my story and think oh, that's wonderful but it doesn't matter to me or it doesn't relate to my life. I want people to know this is replicable. I'm not special in this way. I've got extraordinary parents and I've had an amazing life but there are real concrete things that you can do to harness your own capacity. And I think the best kind of leadership is leadership that says "I want more of you to join me, not hold me up and see me as special because I've done this." It's "Hold me up and use me as a beacon so you can get here too because I want company."
Aminatou: I love that. You talk a lot about this idea that, you know, being an outsider is not a permanent impediment to success and it's really -- like 1) it's really fascinating to think about you as somebody who is seen as a political outsider but is, you know, you've actually infiltrated this world and you're doing really well. And I'm keeping every finger and toe crossed that, you know, we will get to the other side of this. But I'm curious about how you feel about that term outsider because I think for so many of us that is the first barrier and it is the strongest barrier to entry.
(38:05)
Stacey: It is disingenuous for those of us who are not part of the normative understanding of American experience to say we're not outsiders. Essentially everything we see, everything we do pivots around the white male experience. For good or ill there's no value judgment, it just is. They get credit for creating the US. They get credit for lots of things and so everything begins there. It is the one community that is judged independently of each other, not always a collective experience.
That said I don't think it's good or bad and we often stop and start the conversation there and that's irrelevant to me. I believe in acknowledging what is and then figuring out what can be. And so this is what is, therefore the rest of us for conversations of power, conversations of access, we don't start there therefore we are on the outside of that thing. But that's okay because then the next conversation is how do we still get what they've got? Because what they have is opportunity. What they have is success. And not everyone who has that phenotype has that, but the reality is regardless of whether the barrier or the obstacle is based on race or gender or sexual orientation or region or language, yeah, it's going to be hard but if you . . . there are ways to circumvent it. There are ways, sort of guerilla-style warfare, to undermine what is. I see it as a beginning so I understand the landscape but the goal then is to figure out okay, how do you chart your own course? Unless we acknowledge where we start then we spend all of our time fighting against shadows instead of building what we want.
Aminatou: How do you not get completely beaten down every day by this though?
(39:55)
Stacey: [Laughs] Because you get beaten down when you are fighting. Shadow boxing is exhausting because you're flailing and you're working and there is no progress. I have found that when you acknowledge it, acknowledging means you know it's there. Accepting it means there's no way around it. I don't accept anything. I acknowledge everything. So I acknowledge that I am not seen as the person folks would pick out of a lineup for who would be the next governor of Georgia and in fact there are a lot of folks who did not see this as my opportunity.
I acknowledged that, and if I'd stopped there, if I'd accepted it, then I would still be the Democratic leader in the house hopeful that in the next 10 to 20 years something would change. But by acknowledging it it meant that I then knew I would have to cultivate different types of relationships and different types of support, that I couldn't go to the powers that be to get what I needed, which is why I built a cadre of folks, young people that I've worked with for the last decade. I did that work in a different way.
When I wasn't able to get capital for my small business when my business partner and I lost our business we acknowledged that one of the challenges we had was that men weren't going to loan us that money because they didn't understand women doing manufacturing so we created a new company, a FinTech company, so that we could get money to women and people of color who could not have it. We'd actually do it for everybody but we have an incredibly strong presence for women and people of color who need access to capital.
I acknowledged the barrier but then we went around it and we created our own entity that solved the problem that others wouldn't solve for us and we've now created a strong and thriving business that's helped create or retain thousands of jobs because of that. And we can do that in every facet of our lives: business, politics, personal lives. It's about acknowledging what is and then finding your way to get around it or get through it.
[Interview Ends]
Ann: Whew, I will see you on the Internet.
Aminatou: I will see you on the Internet boo-boo. You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf. Our producer is Jordan Bailey and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.