Calling In the Calling Out Culture: A Continuum of Accountability

©Loretta J. Ross – April 2, 2016

Let us turn towards each other and not on each other. - Dr. Joseph E. Lowery

I am so excited that you have gathered for this ground-breaking meeting. It’s the first of its kind in the country intentionally and collectively organized to launch this culture shift: transforming the Calling Out Culture into a Calling In Culture in order to build a united movement for human rights.^[1] This is a historic gathering, and I thank each of you for trusting in my vision that this process is possible, necessary, and urgent.

We hope to offer you an opportunity to actively express, challenge and expand your beliefs. We all face the challenge of doing the difficult work of social justice and seeking accountability from ourselves and others, while respecting our differences in priorities, needs, views, and desires. With effort and luck, we will virally propagate the value of inviting each other in, embracing our differences, and keeping a seat at the table to work through our pains and fears, and consciously live in community with each other. At the end of today, I hope you will be more confident in your ability to call each other in and transfer what you have learned to your day-to-day lives.

I first heard the term “Calling In” from reproductive justice organizer Marissa Graciosa when I was complaining about how activists verbally assault brutalize each other, using their radical consciousness as a bludgeon when they should be united against a common oppressor. Most often, I’ve seen political rhetoric weaponized as a vindictive defense mechanism by people who are hurting and healing. It is replete with derisive takedowns of individuals whose behaviors or words are seen as oppressive. Calling out that does not lead to transformative action is pure verbalism wielded as a weapon. Because oppressive behaviors are the norm in our society, I should not have been surprised that creative younger people had named a conduct that they frequently encounter when voicing opinions over the internet. Marissa’s naming of this normalized brutality led me to the writings of Ngọc Loan Trán and Asam Ahmad who have written about Call Out Culture.

Ngọc Loan Trán, writing in a blog post about an experience at a Facing Race conference, defines the first part of Calling In as allowing mistakes to happen in social justice spaces, that can offer the “possibility for transforming the ways we build with each other for a new, better world.”^[2] Calling In must come from a place of love and respect that’s inside us, not from a place of anger, ego, or fear. When we call people in, we are creating what we need for ourselves: A space to grow, share struggles, envision brightly, live loudly, be accountable, transform greatly. It allows us to be heard and to hear others in building a healthy community for ourselves and others.

Calling In is not “coddling” fragile people. I refer to the dismissive term those contemptuous of political correctness use to dismiss our values. Young people who criticize oppressive practices in individuals and institutions are accused of being coddled millennials or “crybullies” who need to develop a thicker skin and grow up. According to Yale professor Zareena Grewal, calling attention to oppression is not being oversensitive, but instead being “sensitive to that which is not over.”

Calling In means selecting practices that invite people in, or “makes the revolution irresistible,” in the words of Toni Cade Bambara. Another Black feminist, Barbara Smith, a founding member of the Combahee River Collective, states, “What I feel is really radical is trying to make coalitions with people who are different from you. I feel it is radical to be dealing with race and sex and class and sexual identity all at one time. I think that is really radical because it has never been done before.”

Calling In requires a commitment to recognize and support each other’s strengths, and to consciously help each other expand each other’s perspectives. It is about working together to finding and reaching shared goals, according to Marc Chouinard, an expert in team building in the corporate world using Calling In strategies:

It is recognizing, embracing, and working with each other’s fears and reactions, understanding that it is an opportunity to work through them as they arise. It is recognizing that reaching [a] shared goal (used as a beacon) is the path to reaching our individual goals, as opposed to the other way around. It is believing (and knowing, once experienced once) that reaching our shared goal(s) in a co-creation process brings a level of fulfillment, appreciation, and intimacy that [is] more fulfilling than reaching our individual goals—because in this experience we are truly seen, recognized, acknowledged and loved for who we are, “good, and bad.” It is experiencing a glimpse of the magnificence of each other, with all our imperfections...[recognizing] our commitment to staying at the table and helping each other through our fears, prejudices, reactions, compulsions.^[3] 

While I don’t often quote people from corporate America in social justice spaces, it is significant to note that even highly competitive environments in the corporate culture have also turned to Calling In practices to help them build stronger and accountable models that don’t only rely on systems of rewards and punishments to achieve their mutual goals.

Too often, social justice spaces become toxic, isolating and discouraging for people to join, out of fear they don’t know the right language or they will make mistakes that will be publicly and cruelly criticized. They may decide not to engage in meaningful dialogues about the struggle for human rights because others parade their knowledge and political language in peacock-like displays of privilege. Although there is no one “right way” to address oppression among activists, we can make our spaces much more compassionate and welcoming to build the movement by fostering a culture of accountability through love so that people feel respected and can effectively learn from each other.

After reading many articles on this topic, I envisioned that the next step would be to organize a meeting to specifically discuss how to transition from the predominant Calling Out Culture into a Calling In one by learning effective tools. Many excellent writers criticized Calling Out performances, but few offered detailed skills on how to pivot away from our circular firing squad behavior. What do you say to call someone in? When should it be used? When is calling someone out the right thing to do? Should survivors call abusers in? These and many other issues can become part of our social justice discourse.

Calling Out/Calling In is not another false binary but rather a continuum of accountability. No one course of action always works for all situations, but learning a spectrum of possible responses is more useful than we have allowed for in our social justice practices. Sometimes it’s necessary to call someone in who has made a hurtful mistake. Sometimes it’s important to call out someone who is indulging in an excess of self-righteous privilege. Sometimes each of us may be either called in or called out, because no one is a perfect, error-free activist. When dealing with oppression, there is a question of impact vs. intention, but no matter how well-meaning someone is, they can still cause harm of re-traumatization and shame that can lead to isolation. We should not minimize the significance of oppressive behavior, even if it is a simple mistake made with good intentions. We should never invalidate the feelings of those who are harmed. However, we can learn vital skills in how and when to call people in or out to gain the power to protect vulnerable people in our society, and advance a vision for justice that is inclusive, compassionate, and honorable.

We value fairness. We challenge the misuse of privilege. We support victim-survivors. We work to create safe spaces. All of our efforts are in vain if we don’t learn how and when to select calling in or calling out from our toolkits. Should we avoid simply telling someone they are doing or saying something wrong because we disagree with them in our futile pursuit of perfect activism? We bring our imperfect selves to the work and we must allow others the same space and forgiveness. As human rights activists who analyze complex situations every day, we must lift our skills to be able to figure out how to practice the skills of love instead of the skills of oppression on each other. Of course we hold ourselves and others to high standards, and we urge each other to do better in serving the cause of creating a world of justice and peace. But it does not make sense to fight oppression in the world and replicate it within our movements.

We are facing a tumultuous future in this country, with the rise of neo-fascism scaffolded by the Republicans in the context of neo-liberalism enabled by the Democrats. Fighting against oppression and injustice are the dues we pay for the privilege of being conscious. While others have to endure oppression because they can’t risk their lives, immigration status, or jobs, we are honored to be able to challenge it and we cannot take this privilege for granted or handle it irresponsibly. We can afford to optimistic about the future, but we can’t afford to be naïve.

We must build a unified and strategic human rights movement that weaves our strengths together, that uses our differences as a platform for modeling a positive future built on justice and the politics of love, rather than a return to the past based on the politics of fear and prejudice. In elevating the values of Calling In, we understand that we don’t have to create a group-think echo chamber that stifles dissent in order to grow strong together. Instead, we can welcome differences of opinion that are consistent with building our movement.  

Although this may disappoint some of us today, I should admit upfront that we shall spend relatively little time practicing calling each other out. I believe we already know how to do that entirely too well. According to Canadian writer Asam Ahmad, “Call-out culture refers to a tendency among progressives, radicals, activists, and community organizers to publicly name instances or patterns of oppressive behaviors and language use by others.” Call outs are often used to separate “good” group members from “bad” outsiders, by passing judgments on their politics as if they represent the sum of their entire being. Instead, we must learn how to separate behaviors from their values as a person. He continues: “What makes call-out culture so toxic is not necessarily its frequency so much as the nature and performance of the call-out itself” in which it becomes an act of public shaming, humiliation, and  disguised as radical consciousness raising, either in an in-person group setting or over the internet.^[4] When we publicly perform a Calling Out, we may be more conscious of how we look to other activists than remaining focused on why we are together in the first place. One day to divert attention from one’s own imperfect social justice practices is to publicly shame others. This reactionary form of Calling Out replicates the same oppressive practices we’re critical of in the systems and individuals we are seeking to change.

Sometimes call outs are entirely appropriate when challenging provocateurs who say hurtful things as a mocking sport regardless of harm, and who quickly become defensive in their willful ignorance. It often springs from a place that is both morally and intellectually impoverished, supine and lazy. Privilege is when the consequences of your actions (or inactions) affect others and you are not held accountable. Privilege is not necessarily who you are, but rather what you do with who you are.

In contrast, Calling In is practicing the politics of accountability through love. Katherine Acey, founder of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation, says that “Revolution is all about love, it’s all about forgiveness.”^[5] 

Calling In is not about enforcing respectability politics, tone policing, making “nice” with oppressors, protecting white fragility, or being an apologist for oppressive behaviors. It is not about elevating abusers’ feelings over survivors, or invalidating the experiences of those suffering harm. We should not discourage people from speaking up when harms occur. They have a responsibility to themselves first, and should not put others’ needs first. It is not the job of the violated to protect the violators.

Yet some of us in those spaces can offer a positive intervention if we learn the skills of Calling In. With healing from harm as the primary goal, Calling In can be compassionate to survivors, abusers, and the community by addressing issues of accountability, safety, and power dynamics. Choosing to call people in does not dismiss oppressive tendencies within our movements, or ignore the misuse or denial of privilege. It is not about making people with privilege and power more comfortable, but about making them co-conspirators in ending injustice. Each of us reading this essay has some degree of privilege and power, if we are honest with ourselves. The question is will we handle this privilege and power responsibly. Calling In facilitates an accountability process based on love, not punishment. It is restorative, not punitive. It seeks to heal, not harm.

***

This gathering is born out of my 45-year social justice history of Black feminist activism, working against the Klan and other hate groups, fighting white supremacy and building the movement for Reproductive Justice with thousands of women of color. Although I have worked against white supremacists, anti-abortionists, and sometimes racist and misogynist liberals, I have a bad habit of seeing my alleged enemies as people. Some activists have accused me of not being sufficiently dedicated to “the struggle” because I refuse to objectify other human beings, regardless of their beliefs. I discovered in my journey that I could not dehumanize people I disagreed with once I embraced the human rights framework as my operating ground rules, because my opponents have the same human rights I’m working to defend.

As I deepened my understanding of the fear, envy and anger that animates people in the hate movement, I began to see most of them as victimized violators – people who themselves were also harmfully socialized by patriarchy, white supremacy, and homophobia. They were conditioned to violate other peoples’ human rights by first having their own violated. No one is born wanting to be a hater. Haters are created. As James Baldwin presciently said in The Fire Next Time, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”^[6]  

Their lack of inner peace robs them of their capacity for compassion for many others, especially those they define as “different.” It produces a deep sense of self-hatred and sense of inferiority they feverishly try to disguise. They turn to alcohol, drugs, guns or suicide to disconnect from their pain of their accumulated resentments. Predominantly representing middle- and working class white men, they represent the only population in America whose mortality rates are going up, while rates are going down for every other ethnic group. Their misery and resentment is killing them in a nihilist death spiral. Instead of hating them, I pitied them when I had to work with or against them. If a Black woman can’t hate someone in the Klan, who’s left?

I developed the concept of “problematic allies” to describe people with whom I had to work who didn’t completely share a radical perspective I could agree with. This does not make them enemies because we politically disagree; this makes them potential allies I must either figure out how to work with or work around. Problematic allies are entirely separate from actual enemies. Potential allies of all types may be called in to help build our human rights movement to create movements that are inclusive and accessible.

I try to save my Calling Out practices for real, threatening enemies – people who not only don’t want me to have a difference of opinion, but who don’t want me around or alive to express any opinions at all. For me, there is a physicality about threats from enemies – a fear of unexpected violence, accompanied by a murderous, incoherent rage against anyone who is not like them or subservient to their power. They use words to lead up to their physical violence, like tranny, b**ch, c*nt, or ni**er. Katherine Cross calls these “spearpoint words” intentionally deployed to predict vicious assaults. Apologists for these abusers dismiss this as free speech, but the victims of such attacks recognize the speech as the preface to deliberate cruelty. Bigots and rapists, for example, need to be called out, but the decision on how to deal with them is not primarily based on calling them into a community working towards human rights.

More subtle enemies are frequently hypocrites. They are often secretly poisonous people who can be very charming, who manipulate others for their own personal gain, who only value themselves, and who have no moral compass worthy of consideration. We need to put public pressure on those who hold positions of power and misuse authority to abuse, objectify, and condemn others. Calling out is an appropriate tactic for those betraying the public trust.

Yet not all people who can hurt me are enemies. Friends, families, loved ones, political allies, co-workers, etc. are all capable of wounding me because I allow my vulnerabilities to be seen by them. That doesn’t make them enemies. They are most often hurt people hurting others, and I try to see their how their pain is connected to my own. I don’t base my decision to try to call them in on whether I’m hurting or not, but what they mean to my life and my politics overall. Intentions matter as much as outcomes to me and are inseparable.

***

I am tremendously excited about this historical moment because I believe we are uniquely positioned to bring more people into the human rights movement in the 21st century better than at any point since the Civil Rights movement. Social justice activism has escalated, with non-violent direct actions winning incredible victories and even garnering the attention of mainstream media (if you can define that as a victory). The Black Lives Matter movement precipitated a national conversation on racism by challenging unjust policing, white supremacy, homophobia, economic inequality, transphobia, and gender justice. The Occupy movement re-framed neoliberal capitalism as the war between the 1% and the 99%, offering a stark verbal shorthand about economic human rights violations inherent in the collusion between Wall Street and the government. Young activists are willing to put their hearts and their bodies on the frontline for progressive social change, very reminiscent of the bold leadership of young people in the Civil Rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and anti-war movements. We’ve even invented new words for this reality: mansplaining, rape culture, cultural appropriation, the prison/medical/military/academic/non-profit industrial complex, etc.

But many people have not been offered the space and the skills required to learn Calling In practices that reflect the values of our work and can help us build a universal and united human rights movement to defeat this complex matrix of injustices. Calling In requires focused individual attention to support each other in meeting collective and individual interests and needs. As fellow event organizer Ellice Amanna observed, just at the moment when progressives in every movement -- immigrant rights, Black Lives Matter, labor, environmental, queer rights, reproductive justice -- have figured out that we can't succeed without each other, that all of our movements are essentially one human rights movement, the Calling Out culture is threatening to undermine that breakthrough. Calling Out is practicing the politics of hate, the same old enemy. Calling In is the politics of love, not in a kumbaya, touchy-feely sense but practicing love as connection across all boundaries and borders. Those connections are what Calling Out threatens. Those connections are the gift of Calling In. 

Current events have recycled tremendous challenges from the past for our work. We face the real threat of the rise of neo-fascism in the United States with the predictable success of Donald Trump as a serious contender for the Presidency. Those who are surprised by his rise to the top of the Republican ticket has not given enough credence to the racist, sexist, and homophobic dog whistles the Republicans have been using for the past 50 years. Trump is not an aberration; he is an outcome. If he loses (and I think he will), what are the thousands of angry white people who support him going to do, armed with their resentment, envy, and guns? Will they turn their rage against us, against anyone who does not agree with their grievances and worldview? Even if he wins – gasp!—he has given permission for the unleashing of decades of Republican-stoked contempt for anyone who does not follow their cult-like behavior. This may be a significant moment in which the political violence and assassinations of 1968 (Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy) becomes the new norm in 2017, with white murderous rage escalating to a new lethality, moving from the gutter to the White House.

But is this so new? In the 1960s and 1970s, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover ran an anti-activist counter-intelligence program called COINTELPRO, designed to destroy any momentum for progressive social change that could build on the success of the social justice movements. They used many tactics – but particularly Calling Out through public humiliations – to set people up for expulsions and even sometimes, death. Assassinations were too common, and many activists were framed for crimes they didn’t commit. Gossip was one of their deadliest weapons because it split many formations. People failed to recognize the threat and get each others’ backs. We didn’t name it as “Calling Out” back then; sometimes it took the form of apparent ideological or sectarian disagreements that were relatively minor that ended up making people distrust each other, failing to keep our eyes on the real enemies, and not checking those people manipulating and using political power for personal gain. Of course we had to deal with sexism, homophobia, racism, class and all the same “isms” of today, but I’ve never forgotten the fear that drove many people out of the movement; the disappointment that the revolution was not tomorrow; or the realization that we needed to be activists both inside and outside the systems of oppression in order to create social change.

The government’s fear of our potential for radical change towards building a human rights culture that will fundamentally transform the status quo and diminish state power over our lives has not gone away. Those hostile to human rights even have more tools – like Google Earth and eavesdropping on our cell phones and internet chatter – than they had before. As Linda Burnham, a Black feminist leader, wryly noted, the government does not have to sic an agent to monitor a progressive activist anymore. We innocently post everything on Facebook or Instagram, making it easier for them to police us. As social justice activists, if we don’t understand the urgency of being able to more accurately assess threat levels and turn this Calling Out culture into one that prioritizes Calling In, we will be badly equipped to distinguish between a problematic ally and a real opponent. We cannot predict that we won’t inadvertently call in an enemy, but we can foresee we’ll be weaker if we don’t call in all our allies.

As if that weren’t complicated enough, some of our problematic allies believe that we are trampling over free speech rights when we seek to create a Call In culture that limits harm, such as through micro-aggressions or offensive behaviors. Calling In is not an attempt to silence someone or impose political correctness, although critics of progressive politics accuse us of fearing vigorous debates or challenges to our ideas. Instead, Calling In provides an opportunity for further discussion about choices, values, and goals. Our movement requires debate, dissent, and protest in order to be effective and transparent. This requires contentious and “unsafe” conversations as we dialogue about safe spaces and hurtful words, not accepting that the concepts are mutually exclusive. Preventing offense is not the goal, but to accurately delineate the types of threats and harms we face opposing a totalizing oppressive system.

People opposed to human rights often use Call Out tactics to attack our values. They believe that we worship an excess of political correctness and want to be “coddled” and protected from harsh realities of life. They use Calling Out tactics mainly to defend oppressive behaviors or privileged positions. Some assert they can say whatever racist, sexist, ableist or homophobic remark they want, and then claim they are the true victims when they are called out for their abuse of the First Amendment as a shield for hatred and bigotry.

On the other hand, progressives also sometimes use Calling Out tactics to seek to end their own personal discomfort when their certitudes are challenged. For example, during my trainings on Appropriate Whiteness, it is predictable that some random person (usually a white male) in the audience will offer a deflection: “What about X?” to avoid seriously diving deep into the deconstruction of the ideology of white supremacy and its handmaiden, white privilege. If I display my righteous rage against injustice, I get stereotyped and tone-policed as the “angry Black woman” who makes others feel “unsafe,” sometimes accompanied by the tears of white fragility. Anger is an appropriate human response to injustice. Un-discharged anger piles up, like snowflakes create avalanches. It must be released in a healthy way or it will become internalized and create a traumatic physiological response in our bodies. I am not afraid of being called the “Angry Black Woman” because I am empowered to take care of my own needs and refuse to be silenced when I need to express my feelings about injustice. As part of my journey as an survivor/activist, I am also slowly and painstakingly learning how to channel my anger into Calling In practices for my own healing, and to help build our movement. It is not an easy process that occurs overnight, but a lifelong commitment to introspection, self-reflection, and transformative action that addresses oppressive behaviors by me and among my potential allies.

When anti-racists talk about white supremacy, many people think we’re condemning the entire white race, not critiquing an ideology. In a revealingly self-centered way, some people frequently respond to emotionally difficult topics with guilt, fear, anger, or tears. When this happens, I have a choice: to call them in or to call them out. Usually I choose to call them in, because I assume they wouldn’t be in an Appropriate Whiteness training if they did not offer the potential to join the fight against white supremacy.

Safety in a political struggle against oppression is an illusory goal. At best, we can create “safer” spaces, but we have to acknowledge that if being oppressed is not safe, why do we believe that fighting oppression will be safe when we oppose some of the most ruthless forces and people in the world? This is another false binary. Our Calling Out problem is when personal, ad hominem attacks (name calling, for instance) become the rote responses to differences of opinions, understandings, or word choices among people who generally share a common political worldview. That changes a challenge to an idea into a torment against the person with that idea, and signals to others how risky it is to participate in passionate discussions or debates. What the movement needs are people who are willing to recognize their needs for growth, and ability to make mistakes, and commit to doing better together. We all had to learn how systems of oppression work, hopefully in a non-competitive empowering process, and we can extend to others the patience and encouragement for others to acquire new knowledge.

In some ways, that makes me a conversational moderate because I refuse to engage in polemical diatribes against a person’s humanity or worth. Stating this doesn’t mean I always get it right, because it’s easier said than done. I have a quick temper and an acerbic tongue. I grew up excelling at “playing the dozens” or offering hurtful ripostes to shield myself from injury. I thought sarcastic remarks, patronizing attitudes, and belittling comments were excellent tools to demonstrate my agile mind. As I grew within social justice movements through time and experience, I learned the harmful costs of indulging in personalized assaults and making moral judgments about people who don’t politically agree with me or who don’t share my intersectional identity. In fact, I now devalue those practices because they reveal more negativity about the accuser than the accused. Some say I’m too tolerant of people who exhibit problematic behaviors or ideas. Other critics believe that choosing to dialogue with alleged opponents is a form of selling out, and dulls the radical political edginess necessary to propel social change. I strongly believe in the important difference between radical political perspectives and rude political behaviors.

Sometimes we believe that if we don’t fit into a perfect activist box – and police others – we may be cast out of the movement. We replicate a punishment, incarceration, and exile model because that’s how the system we oppose works. We often fear that if we don’t monitor others, we may become the ones punished. Our activist backgrounds help us understand about representation, political rhetoric, and oppressive systems, but we most often use this consciousness against each other. It’s called “horizontal hostility” when marginalized groups turn against each other, or engage in infighting, lacking access to real power.^[7] Instead of looking critically towards a hierarchical system of inequality and working together to disrupt that system, these groups look to the horizontal — fighting with each other while neither have enough resources, and power feels scarce.  Meanwhile the people with economic and structural power benefit from our distraction. 

In contrast, Calling In defines empathy as acknowledging what we don’t know, versus what we think we know. Instead of being egocentric with our acquired knowledge, we recognize that the minute we believe we know someone else’s story or what their words mean, we are comfortably hiding behind our privilege to see ourselves in relationship to this person, not really seeing the person for who they believe they are. While we insist that others’ acknowledge our identities, beliefs and “truths,” we sometimes fail to extend the same courtesy to others.

People want to be seen and heard and have their stories validated. This requires a set of skills not always prioritized by social justice movements who spend the majority of their time trying to persuade others to agree with them, rather than be with them. This is how alliances are built. We need to take the time to determine what it takes to feel that you and others are being heard and how to work together to meet each other’s needs.

Calling In requires you to remember, you’re a guest in their story, not the owner of it, when others share their perspectives and histories. How is your engagement with another person upholding or interrupting oppression, and does the manner of your interruption become oppressive itself? Anti-racist trainer Shakti Butler says: People are either mirrors or windows. If you’re a mirror, you’re saying “there’s only one of us here.”

Black feminist activists and theorists – as agents of new knowledge and social justice practices – generously created capacious theoretical concepts like Identity Politics (1970s), Intersectionality (1980s), and Reproductive Justice (1990s). Honoring the multiple intersectional identities that people claim is a durable Black feminist tradition ever since Sojourner Truth declared, “Ain’t I a Woman?” As Patricia Hill Collins says, “One distinguishing feature of Black feminist thought is its insistence that both the changed consciousness of individuals and the social transformation of political and economic institutions constitute essential ingredients for social change.”^[8] As people have embraced and internalized these radical concepts to articulate their own identities, standpoints, and intersectional social locations, they have produced a welcome expansion of social justice activism that interrogates every avenue of human philosophies and behaviors. We have challenged unjust systems of binaries, hierarchies and certitude. We redefined what it means to be human, and demanded respect for our rights and dignity against rapacious capitalism. With our visions and values, we have dragged our recalcitrant society from the 19th century inequalities into the 21st freedoms. We fight against the social Luddites who squawk against the inevitable march of time and wish futilely for the romanticized past in which we transgressors “stayed in our places.” They are trying to repeal the 20th century altogether, as feminist essayist Katha Pollitt quipped, through their campaigns against women, labor, the environment, people of color, immigrants, and queer rights. We cannot survive using our best weapons against each other while our real enemies plot against all our lives and hopes.

As an African American feminist, I am particularly pained in how our radical, transformative concepts have been misused by some to attack Black womanhood and Black feminists themselves, what scholar-activist Moya Bailey calls "misogynoir," by combining sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia, often cloaked in seemingly progressive language. This is a very divisive and neoliberal development that thwarts progress towards a unified human rights movement in the United States. I describe it as neoliberal because it affirms the capitalist tendency to focus on individualist desires to micro-divide people as competitors rather than unite people for a common good that can meet individual needs. As writer Andrea Plaid says, “As quiet as it’s kept, this intersectional/WOC/feminism/womanism/xicanisma we’ve been creating for at least a couple of generations can hold all of us.” Calling Out can be used to name identity groups, but also to cage or imprison because identity is only liberatory in the service of social justice. Identity politics was originally conceived as exploring and affirming who you are. It has been distorted into focusing mostly on who other people aren’t.

Calling Out practices have generated a culture of identity bullies – a coterie of what Asam Ahmad calls “armchair and academic” activists, whose primary political capital is using their alleged radical consciousness to call other people out for not sharing their own specific political views, language choices, or approaches to the work. This is a form of radical perfectionism that creates artificial standards of thought and behavior that reinforce authoritarianism, domination and oppression. They can also become “Identity Bullies” who use rhetorical shields to create hierarchies of power and suffering – often called the “Oppression Olympics” – by claiming the “most oppressed” status (for themselves or others) in a race to the bottom. They believe the purpose of the movement is to serve them, not about their responsibility to serve the movement. Since language conventions are always shifting, are frequently elitist, and become an “in-group” practice, the language of accountability may be used to justify hurtful behaviors.

Bullying through such practices has sucked the energy out of many progressive spaces and costs the movement dearly in lost activists, time, and momentum. It destroys all attempts of solidarity. Instead of filling people with the inexpressible joy of working together against interlocked oppressions, Calling Out makes people fearful, tense, silent, and suspicious. No one comes to the human rights movement perfect, and no one leaves the movement perfect. We bring our imperfect selves to an honorable cause.

The critical question now becomes can we build the relationships and practices vital to deepening our (and others’) political engagement? Or will we weaponize our elitist languages and our consciousness, using them against those we need in the struggle? Relationship building is also known as base building, intentional activities designed to keep people engaged in the human rights movement, to make the space for the stories of their lives, experiences and passion for justice.

Although a lot of Calling Out takes place now over social media, the Calling In principles are consistent with face-to-face encounters: active listening, respect, sustainability, vulnerability, love, sharing, and patience. It takes recognizing that people have different processes for learning and developing social justice consciousness, and that we must be creatively compassionate.

The Pioneer Valley [in Massachusetts] is unique. I speak at many campuses around the country, nine these past two months, and most of them are far more conservative than those here in the Valley. At some of them, professors get fired for teaching what is commonplace here about radical economics, international relations, queer studies, white supremacy, etc. Because of the cutting-edge consciousness raising here in such concentrated depth, many people have a progressive worldview and are attempting to improve the world in endlessly creative and fascinating ways. The Valley has the potential to be a great launchpad for a student-led human rights movement for the United States.

The Pioneer Valley also produces some stark contradictions as well as opportunities: the awkward lack of substantive support for students and faculty of color; the agonized discussions over trans students; the painful silences around town & gown issues of class and race illustrated by the de-industrialization of the bricked-up working class neighborhoods contrasted against the smug bucolic prosperity of the university environs. I spoke at Northampton High School yesterday. A fellow panelist reported about how Northampton painted rainbow crosswalks to honor LGBTQIA people, but at the same time removed all the downtown benches so that homeless people couldn’t sleep o them. These are all serious issues for the Valley. I don’t naively think we can solve them only with my vision, but we can start by changing how we interact with each other so we can create processes that are inclusive and accessible.

I think the young people of the Pioneer Valley deserve a concrete vision of the world we’d like to see. A world in which human rights are honored, protected, and achieved. We have to express together our shared values and priorities to build this Calling In culture. We have to shatter useless cynicism to nurture our hope for change.

Calling In is not for everyone. Some people are not in a safe or healthy space to facilitate someone else’s growth or learning. They are not obligated to educate someone else about their human rights who doesn’t respect them. That is okay because there are many roles to occupy in the movement. For Calling In practices, I like to reference the book, This Bridge Called My Back by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa that offers a moving metaphor. A bridge is a device by which people standing on one side or the other cross over to their destination. As they walk across the bridge, they are not looking down; instead they’re looking at either where they came from or where they’re going. That makes the person serving as the bridge a rather invisible and neglected entity, because while it’s a choice to be a bridge, that also means not having your individual needs attended to while you serve others as they cross over you. A bridge (however gaudy) is not there to call attention to itself or its needs.

As a practitioner of Calling In, I sometimes (but not always) choose to be a bridge so that people could cross over to new understandings and ways of viewing the world. However, I’ve encountered many women of color who legitimately said, “My job isn’t to explain things to white women,” and I’ve also encountered white women who say, “Why would I want to listen to someone so angry who makes me uncomfortable?” One does not have to continually work to call others in as your dues for being in the movement. Sometimes you just don’t feel like it, and that is your right and your choice. If one chooses Calling In practices, our job is to serve as conductors as best we can, in the spirit of Harriet Tubman (maybe without the gun?), to a new, shared destination, so that people can cross over to the other side of an understanding.^[9] Often, all we can do is persuade people to take the first step. Sometimes they’ll hurry back over, refusing to remain in a different place, and affirming their previous beliefs. Others delight in being in a new state of consciousness. Either response is okay; our job is not to be judgmental. Success in Calling In is not predicated on their response, but your willingness to be a bridge even if someone does not agree with its value, is not quite ready to walk across it, or stay on the other side.

We’ll make a lot of mistakes doing this work. It’s an opportunity to learn and be accountable. If you come from a place of love, we can allow mistakes and healing to take place. One of the hardest things I ever had to do was go to an activist meeting and admit how badly I messed something up. My mistakes were reported in a national newspaper. My sisters called me in instead of calling me out and held me accountable. Some of them are my best friends 30 years later. I hurt others with my mistakes and I’ve tried to be accountable, not always successfully. Mistakes are hurtful, but they do not define me or take away my joy in the struggle. I stay at the table and always keep a seat open for anyone else who would join us.

“Being an activist means being aware of what’s happening around you as well as  being in touch with your feelings about it — your rage, your sadness, your excitement, your curiosity, your feeling of helplessness, and your refusal to surrender,” says Eve Ensler, creator of the Vagina Monologues.^[10] When someone calls you in, you may still have the same reactions as if they called you out. You may become panicked, ashamed, combative, upset, attacked. But it is also an opportunity to learn something new, get a fresh perspective, remind yourself how wonderful this work is, and that you are seen as someone so valuable that someone is taking the time to pay loving attention to call you in.

Although I had this vision for this gathering, I too am learning how to Call In rather than to Call Out. Since this is the first-ever gathering of its kind, we’re learning a liberatory practice together in discovering what it will take to build a human rights movement in the U.S. worthy of the sacrifices of others that have provided us this privilege of being together today. In the immortal words of Malcolm X:

Don't be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today. – Malcolm X