Running for Office In the Era of #MeToo: Minnesota State Representative Erin Maye Quade

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At age 32, Minnesota State Representative Erin Maye Quade is positioned to be at the forefront of a wave of progressive political leaders representing a new generation of voters.

She made history while running in the Twin Cities suburbs as a deeply progressive, biracial, openly queer, anti-gun violence, anti-racist, pro-social justice candidate.

There’s no doubt she’ll rise high and go far.

The question is: as an unprecedented amount of women run for office and have a good chance of winning, will the powers that be yield to the kind of change politicians like Erin will bring to office? Or will they double down and fight dirty?

Listen to our conversation to find out.

And when you’re done, come on over to The Inflection Point Society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small, daily actions.

A Boardroom of Our Own: Julia Rhodes Davis on All-Women Spaces and The Future of AI

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Ask any woman who’s sat through a long meeting surrounded by men, and she could tell you how exhausting it can be: we struggle to make ourselves heard while carefully avoiding accusations of being ‘bitchy,’ ‘strident,’ or ‘shrill.’ We rarely have the kind of permission to fail that our male counterparts get. We want to take ownership of what little power is tossed our way, yet we’re always at risk of being punished for wielding such power.  

Which is why Julia Rhodes Davis decided to form an all-women board for the non-profit, Vote.org. The question is, can the empowerment that takes place in an all-women board meeting translate into actual, world-changing power once they step outside the boardroom?

Find out what Julia has to say about turning empowerment into power, and also shaping the future so women and minorities don’t need to be “empowered” anymore.

Listen to my conversation with Julia Rhodes, Chair of Vote.org and Director of Partnerships at The Partnership on AI in the latest episode of Inflection Point.

TRANSCRIPT

Lauren Schiller:                  Women are banding together in ways we haven't seen since the feminist revolution of the 1970s. The Women's March, the #MeToo movement. More women than ever are running for office and actually winning elections. There are girls-only engineering camps, girls-only maker camps, girls-only afterschool clubs, and they're growing like crazy. So it would seem to be an incredibly empowering time for women. But there's the trendiness factor. The word "feminist" on every other t-shirt in yoga class, "Like a girl" and "nasty woman" have become marketable catchphrases on Nike ads and sanitary pads and coffee mugs. I mean, I love it, but is that mug really going to get you promoted? Because there's one question that has been bothering me: "Does all this empowerment equal power?"

Lauren Schiller:                  I thought one good place to start to understand this would be to look at the boardroom. That's a consolidation of power if ever there were one. As the chair of the board of Vote.org, Julia Rhodes Davis was empowered to decide who to include on that board. With her CEO, also a woman, they made a conscious decision to only appoint women. I wanted to know why and what it was actually doing for them.

Lauren Schiller:                  But first, let's take a closer look at this trend of all-girl and all-women spaces.

Julia R Davis:                        I think that all-women spaces could be seen as sort of incubators. In other words, incubators or startups or whatever are these places that foster early-stage ideas and provide extra resourcing around the things that are most vulnerable at startups like infrastructure and funding and access to networks and access to know-how. I think that when you think about all-women spaces in a similar way, it's not that we're going to stay in all-women spaces, to your point, but I think especially for younger women and girls there's so much risk taking and failure that comes with learning, especially in sort of the early pursuit of anything. When the world is conditioning young women to be afraid of failure because our worth is attached to our achievement and, by the way, also our appearance and so forth and so on, it's really existentially unsafe for us to fail. I think that that's a huge loss.

Julia R Davis:                        There's actually an amazing ... the founder of Girls Who Code, Reshma Saujani gives a beautiful TED Talk to this idea that we need to create spaces that are safe for girls to fail, because that's actually how you become an entrepreneur and how you become successful.

Lauren Schiller:                  She's actually been a guest on this show.

Julia R Davis:                        Oh, amazing. Well done.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah, and we do talk about that. So it sounds like you're in the camp of, "Women-only spaces can be a place where we can learn to navigate the "real-word" having gathered our strength and gone out there to make things happen." But do you think it actually is a way of solving gender inequality?

Julia R Davis:                        I think it depends on your timeframe. Here I would really sort of look at how power operates. Right? Let's take a few examples. There are right now, or actually I guess this stat is from 2016 from Time Magazine. 77% of all elected officials in the US are mail, 23% are female. So until we're starting to approach parity in terms of a representative government, I am all for as many organizations as possible working on the issue of bringing more women into public office. I think, similarly, if we look at who's writing political checks right now, 80% of political donors, 80% of all dollars political donations are written by men. That means that essentially ... I mean, that just points to how power is going to operate. So I would push for getting as many women to become political donors as possible to shift that power dynamic.

Julia R Davis:                        Then, you look at nonprofit boards. 80% of nonprofit board members are men. So until we shift that dynamic I am all for going in the opposite direction and really taking an exceptional tact to get exceptional results.

Lauren Schiller:                  What would you see in this polarized time as the role of women-only spaces?

Julia R Davis:                        I'm not sure that the role has actually changed very much from the inception of at least women-created women-only spaces. What I mean by that is-

Lauren Schiller:                  That's such an important distinction, by the way, "women-created women-only spaces".

Julia R Davis:                        Yeah. I mean, the paternalism of men creating women-only spaces is a whole different topic. Right?

Lauren Schiller:                  I hadn't actually thought about it in different terms than "women-created". Yeah, that's so interesting.

Julia R Davis:                        Well, because I actually don't know the founding history of, for example ... my first attempt at college was Mount Holyoke College, which was an all-women's school. It is a very small liberal arts school in western Massachusetts. I had grown up in New York City and I showed up and there were more rules and oversight at college than I had in my parents' home in New York City.

Julia R Davis:                        My parents were neither really conservative in terms of minding my time, nor were they extremely permissive. They were somewhere in the middle. When I really unpacked the Mount Holyoke experience and ultimately why it was not a good fit for me, there was a paternalism that was claimed by the administration of the school, as though we as a school of young women couldn't, individually young women, couldn't possibly make decisions for ourselves that would keep us safe and happy and well, which I just reject outright.

Julia R Davis:                        Anyway, that's just a little bit of a tangent on that.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, no, but you obviously didn't know that before you started classes. What was your expectation and hopes for why you would go to an all-women's college?

Julia R Davis:                        Yeah, thanks. I think people tout that there's a freedom in an all-female classroom, for example, for women to find their voice and, to be honest, in a lot of ways I didn't have much trouble finding my voice. I probably often have too loud a voice. Although, put me in a room where I feel intimidated and all of a sudden that changes a lot, or certainly when I was younger it changed a lot. So I think I went for the promise of kind of the freedom of finding my voice and not having to fight for a voice in the classroom or fight for attention of advisors to pursue special projects or whatever the case may be. Because I do think that oftentimes women and men compete differently. I think when you put a group of women together, even if it's a competitive environment, if the rules of the game are not prescribed by sort of a masculine framework of power, you often find collaboration.

Julia R Davis:                        You'll get a winner at the end, some woman will rise to the top, but there's probably a lot more collaboration to get to the top than if you're in a situation where the only way is to compete and dominate those around. And, you know, obviously that's an over generalization. But I think that's one of the things at play.

Lauren Schiller:                  So your hope was that by going to an all-women college that you would eliminate all of those variables?

Julia R Davis:                        Yeah, totally. Because, I will say I went to an all-girl summer camp for 10 years, first as a camper and then as a staff member. It was so liberating. I mean, it was an extraordinary experience of finding myself and figuring out how to be in the world in a way that I could feel good about. Yeah, there were no men there, no boys there. It was a really free experience.

Lauren Schiller:                  Mount Holyoke, where Julia Rhodes Davis went to school briefly, was the first of the Seven Sisters All-Women's Colleges, which have collectively produced some of the most influential women of our time. Here's seven of them: Emily Dickinson, Grace Hopper, Jane Fonda, Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem, Helen Keller, and Zora Neale Hurston. I myself went to Vassar, but as one school t-shirt proclaims, 1969 was the year Vassar switched position, meaning they let guys in by the time I went there.

Lauren Schiller:                  But before that, in 1837, starting with Mount Holyoke, women's colleges were created because women weren't allowed to learn or be leaders in the same spaces as men. Since the founding of the Seven Sisters, families whose names were on buildings and museums sent their daughters to these schools, not necessarily to empower them, but to wrap them in the safety of high society. The plan was for white women who had means to go to school, meet well-connected friends and find a suitable husband from Harvard or Yale, you know, that MRS degree.

Lauren Schiller:                  It took 181 years to get from Mount Holyoke to the first female presidential candidate to be nominated by a major party. And, well, you know how that turned out. Julia Rhodes Davis, as chair of the board at Vote.org, is working to ensure that everyone is being represented at the ballot box and in the boardroom.

Lauren Schiller:                  Tell me about Vote.org. What do they do? Then let's talk about their board.

Julia R Davis:                        Vote.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization that seeks to bring about reflective democracy wherein the electorate matches the population. We do that through making it easier to vote, period. We have programs that are focused on leveraging technology as much as possible to do really high-impact Get Out the Vote campaigns and have a number of other programs that are sort of longer-lead focused.

Julia R Davis:                        One of the reasons we don't have electronic or online voter registration in most states in this country has a lot to do with sort of antiquated voter registration laws that, unlike a lot of other voter suppression activities, these are not actually insidiously antiquated, they just are literally antiquated. So over the course of the next several years we're focused on working with secretaries of state to shift those laws. But in the interim it's really about focusing on who's not getting to the polls and why, and taking a double-down effort to get them there.

Lauren Schiller:                  So as far as your role at Vote.org, you're the chair of the board and you had an opportunity recently to reshape what that board looks like and who was on it. Tell me what you did and why in terms of the makeup of that board.

Julia R Davis:                        I think at Vote.org the commitment is really to exceptional results. So we kind of look across the board at, "Well, what's the status quo or what are the norms in this space and how can we think and do differently?" So when it came to board composition, when you look at the fact that 80% of nonprofit board members are male, well, let's be exceptional there and create an all-female board.

Julia R Davis:                        Will this be in perpetuity? I don't know. But for right now it's working really, really well. We convene the new board in January of this year and it's a small board that are all female. We spent 10 hours in a room together doing all kinds of planning and thinking and debating and so forth, and then we had a dinner that followed on. At the end of it I reflected with a colleague, a fellow board member, "You know, normally at the end of any board meeting, whether I'm on the board or on the staff serving the board, I'm exhausted. This time I'm energized. What's the difference?" It took me a beat to realize that not having to facilitate and manage around gender politics in a boardroom was a very liberating experience.

Julia R Davis:                        So back to the idea of the incubator, the all-women spaces and incubator. Just having that experience and that awareness gave me tools to start looking at other boardrooms that I participate in, for example, and helping to bring some leadership to, "Let's imagine if this looked different." Because I actually don't think that mixed-gender boardrooms are the wrong way to go necessarily. I do think that in general people need more self-awareness about how they show up in a room. So whether you're a man who doesn't necessarily have self-awareness about talking over others or taking credit for other people's ideas, or you're a woman who perhaps doesn't listen very well. I think being in a space where we didn't have to spend a lot of energy making sure that all the voices were heard and so forth and so on, because there was just a more natural flow. It gave me a sense of what's possible. So experiencing the art of the possible in one space can actually help to bring examples of making that a possibility in other spaces.

Lauren Schiller:                  I mean, I'm trying to imagine if the chair of a board of, just pick any other organization, was like, "You know what? We're going to make this board all men." Which is happening, obviously. It's 80%.

Julia R Davis:                        I mean, it has been the norm forever.

Lauren Schiller:                  Right. Exactly. I mean, have you received any backlash for making this decision [crosstalk 00:16:56]?

Julia R Davis:                        I'm sure I will now that I've been on a podcast talking about it. We have not received to date any backlash, and the men that were on our board prior to this cycle were extremely supportive of the idea, so I will say that.

Julia R Davis:                        I think that we have to look at these things in a more global context. This sort of comes back to how I was talking about kind of the power analysis. So if men were marginalized, men would need all-men spaces, but they're not marginalized. Every system of power in place right now is still designed with the benefit of men. So until that's different, this is not a one-to-one comparison. Women need to build power to create a more equal society. Until that's not a need, I think all-women spaces are completely justified as one way towards that end.

Lauren Schiller:                  So thinking about the Vote.org all-female board as this sort of incubator idea, a testing ground and a place for new ideas to proliferate, both inside the board and out into the world, have you set sort of a success metric in terms of, is it working, when do you reevaluate, what happens next?

Julia R Davis:                        So there's a sort of goal-setting framework that's pretty common in tech or tech-inspired organizations, the OKR: Objectives and Key Results framework. So we're developing actual metrics for board performance. I think that that is the place where we'll look to first to see if we're making progress.

Julia R Davis:                        If you're asking is there a point at which we're going to say this all-female board thing was a success or a failure, I mean, I suppose that's an important question for us to be asking, but I think it's pretty early days for us to be framing it up that way.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah, or whether you want to ... if you have a seat open up, whether you're going to continue to look specifically for women, or-

Julia R Davis:                        Oh, we will. I would say for the foreseeable future, but definitely through 2020. I think it's too short a timeframe to expect to see any significant results being a two-year-old organization.

Lauren Schiller:                  Julia's feeling optimistic about her all-female board and I can see why. More women-only spaces are popping up so fast it's hard to keep tracking: women's coworking spaces, event spaces, gyms, networking organizations. In New York The Wing and [Cubby 00:19:44] Club, in San Francisco The Ruby and The Assembly. And while some are quietly growing their member base, others are getting admonished. The Wing for not being in compliance with New York's public accommodation law; a law ironically created to further gender equality. And remember when the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin announced it would host two Wonder Woman screenings where no men were allowed at its downtown location? They were accused of violating city equality laws. But as Glynnis MacNicol, cofounder of The List, a network and visibility platform for professional women from all industries, told the male host of the Story in a Bottle podcast, "As a man that has access to every place, why is it a problem to allow women a safe space?"

Lauren Schiller:                  I brought Julia in to talk with me about the Vote.org all-female board and women-only spaces in general. But she also recently took a job at the Partnership on AI for the Benefit of the People and Society. That's the full name of the organization.

Lauren Schiller:                  We've all heard that insidious things like bias and tribalism can be perpetuated by artificial intelligence, but if you've got someone like Julia empowered who applies an equity lens to everything she does, could that actually shift the power dynamic?

Lauren Schiller:                  But first, don't forget to hit that subscribe button. I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point. We'll be right back.

Lauren Schiller:                  It's time for a shout-out to Care/of for supporting this show. What is Care/of, you might ask? It's a monthly subscription vitamin service that delivers completely personalized vitamin and supplement packs, right to your door. The vitamin aisle is overwhelming, but there's an easier way to figure out what's right for you. I took Care/of's online quiz, which asks you about your diet, health goals and lifestyle choices to find out what vitamins and supplements you specifically need. It only takes five minutes. For me, I wanted to get more sleep, give my nails a chance to get stronger, and have more energy. They account for all of that. Then, your vitamins get delivered right to your door in personalized, easy-to-remember, daily packs, perfect for a busy on-the-go lifestyle. And, your monthly subscription box can be easily modified at any time.

Lauren Schiller:                  When they arrive, it's so great. The Care/of packs have your name on them, and a little bit of inspiration to start your day. For 25% off your first month of personalized Care/of vitamins, visit TakeCareOf.com and enter "Inflection". That's TakeCareOf.com and enter "Inflection", for 25% off your first month of personalized Care/of vitamins.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and this is inflection point. I'm talking with Julia Rhodes Davis, the chair of the board of Vote.org and director of partnerships at the Partnership on AI.

Lauren Schiller:                  So, Julia, what is the Partnership on AI?

Julia R Davis:                        The organization is really ... it's a multi-stakeholder membership organization, which really means that it has representatives from corporations and from civil society, from academic research institutions and others, all of whom are working together to really shape the future of artificial intelligence. From my perspective, this is really the frontier of society. There's so much we don't know, and I think early indications of the impact that technology can have on society suggests that we're in for a ride and we really do need to play a more proactive role in informing and designing technology so that it does benefit people and does as little harm as possible, I guess is the way I can say that.

Lauren Schiller:                  So when you said there's already been some indications that there could potentially be harm, are you thinking of a specific example?

Julia R Davis:                        I mean, you could really point to our current democracy in the United States as an example of at least technology broadly that is in some ways supported by aspects of AI technology. I mean, Facebook was used as a platform and by a foreign power to influence our Democratic election in 2016. That is a pretty significant thing that's happened.

Julia R Davis:                        I think that there are a lot of questions in general right now about, you know, for an organization or company who has previously thought of itself as this neutral utility of being a platform to connect people when it can be used for such insidious ends, what is the responsibility of that company to mitigate that risk? I think that's an extremely important question that should be extrapolated to the entire technology industry and to those of us in and around it. What are our responsibilities to society at large?

Lauren Schiller:                  Can you define artificial intelligence? I mean, is it always some sort of human manifestation or human impersonation? What is it?

Julia R Davis:                        That's a great question and you'll get a million different answers to it depending on who you ask. I think first of all it's worth noting I don't have a technical background. I came into this sort of intersection of technology and society in my career about five years ago and have increased my knowledge hundredsfold as a result of working closely with technologists. So I have a different answer than someone who, say, got a PhD in computer science. But in general, this is a very broad term that I think now media has even further muddied the waters generally, because a lot of folks don't understand the technology, so they're trying to put words to it that don't necessarily get us very far in terms of understanding.

Julia R Davis:                        I think it's an umbrella term that really speaks to sort of making machines more intelligent. What I mean by that is, I think in its very basic sense, a computer that can run a program that has some similarities to a decision-making process could be considered artificial intelligence. So, in fact, your entire smartphone runs on all kinds of "artificial intelligence". Really what that means is there are a number of decision trees that are programmed into the different applications on your phone. The thing that supercharges this technology is that much of these formulas or algorithms as they're known in technical parlance actually adapt over time.

Julia R Davis:                        I think one thing for everyone to understand about AI is this is not a fixed too. So unlike a hammer and a nail, they are a hammer and a nail and you really can't change their form very easily. When you're a user of a smartphone or a user of any kind of AI technology at all, your use of that technology actually changes how that technology operates. So we have this iterative relationship with technology that I think few users understand. I think we should all feel more empowered by that, actually.

Julia R Davis:                        When you choose to use Facebook in a particular way to click on an ad or not, you're actually informing Facebook in the future of how it should relate to you. That can sound scary, but I also think it can sound really empowering and I think that the latter is a better relationship that we should start to cultivate with our technology if we're going to have a better future around it.

Lauren Schiller:                  The thing that I'm trying to understand about the role of AI in the human world and how humans are already interacting with each other is how whoever is sort of setting this technology loose influences the way that it interacts with the world and how that might either magnify or reduce the bias that is already in the world, be it racial, gender, pick one.

Julia R Davis:                        Yeah. So this is a huge topic and a really important one.

Lauren Schiller:                  We're going to solve it today, Julia.

Julia R Davis:                        Yes, please. There are a lot of efforts in the technical community to mitigate and solve for the ways in which data carries bias and can further bias algorithms and therefore technology systems. There are unbelievable examples of early apps that were ... I think there was a health app that was put out early on that had been built entirely by a male engineering team and had zero acknowledgement of menstruation as a regular part of the health that women experience on a monthly, daily basis. So those oversights are sort of the most obvious examples of the ways in which who builds the technology and how they think and who's around the table really informs society.

Julia R Davis:                        I think that we have to think about it in a number of different ways. I actually am really excited about my work at Partnership on AI, because there is a deep recognition on the part of the organization that we have to have a diverse set of voices and stakeholders around the table when we are making decisions about what this technology is going to do and how it's built and designed and so forth.

Julia R Davis:                        I think that there's a long way to go in terms of being able to sort of have more practical ways that engineers in a room can kind of have a checklist that helps them recognize where their own biases might be and how to mitigate them in a technical capacity.

Julia R Davis:                        Then, there's a whole body of work around the pipeline issue and the fact that you have far fewer women in STEM, and though that's changing over time, I think it's a slow process. You have a far fewer number of people of color in STEM as well for all kinds of reasons. So there are many, many efforts to address these different ways in which bias can show up in technology. I think it's important for technology creators to bridge the gap, to sort of shift the systemic issues that contribute to the fact that most technologists are male, for example. That's going to take time. So what do we do in the interim and what are the incentives that we have at our fingertips to kind of shift that landscape?

Lauren Schiller:                  Man. It seems like with every new innovation it's an opportunity to get ahead, but it's also just this opportunity to just make it worse.

Julia R Davis:                        Yeah. I heard a really compelling conversation between Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, et cetera, I think most people know who he is, and Kara Swisher, who's a really fantastic media editor, I guess, and host of the Recode podcast. They were in a public conversation at a conference in San Francisco and they ... Kara was really pressing Reid on, "Why is it that tech companies so often fail to identify unintended consequences and address them before they become the problematic unintended consequences of, say, an intervened election or something like that?"

Julia R Davis:                        Reid's response, it's on the record, is, "When you have a homogenous group of young, largely white, regularly affluently-raised men around a table building a product, this is a group of people who haven't lost very much in their lives, so they're not all that familiar with what it looks like to be on the losing end of an unintended consequence." I mean, that has just sat with me at the front of my mind ever since I heard that conversation. I mean, it certainly speaks to something I've believed for a long time, but to hear it from Reid Hoffman sort of put some teeth to it in a way.

Julia R Davis:                        I think that that should be reason enough to really push for more diverse rooms, whether it's the engineering room as it were, or the boardroom.

Lauren Schiller:                  We need AI to recognize all different kinds of people right now, but we don't have people working on AI that recognize all kinds of different people right now. So how do we get where we need to be, given where we are in this moment? How does your equity lens that you put on everything you see tie into the work that you're doing with Partnership on AI?

Julia R Davis:                        I think that there's two angles to an answer, or there are two different kinds of answers here, one of which I can speak to more directly and one of which is worth mentioning that it's worthy work that other people are doing.

Julia R Davis:                        Representation among engineers matters tremendously if we are going to solve for a more, both inclusively designed and inclusively executed, if you will, technology. The issues of getting more women into technology spaces is huge and I think that there are a number of incredible organizations focused on that and we need to proliferate those efforts across the board. This has to be a serious focus of every technology company, of every academic institution, of ever undergraduate program, et cetera. So that's a huge undertaking that I fully support and I'm so grateful for people who dedicate their work to that.

Julia R Davis:                        At Partnership on AI, I am looking at this question right now in terms of who is our current membership. We have just over 70 members currently and they represent corporations, they represent think tanks, they represent academic labs, research labs, also human rights organizations, advocacy organizations. There's more representation from some parts of sectors and less from others. There are certain constituents who are more and less represented. So I'm very actively trying to understand whose voice is at the table and whose voice is missing and how do we balance who's around the table. That's really at the forefront of my mind in day eight of my job as the director of partnerships.

Julia R Davis:                        We have an institutional commitment, both in terms of our executive director, Terah Lyons, who comes out of the Obama White House, as well as our board to really make sure that our multi-stakeholder organization is representative of and represented by a diverse set of stakeholders, and more to come on that. I think we're doing a good job and I think there's more improvements that we can make in terms of, you know, to get back to sort of the impetus for the question, "How do we make sure that AI is built for and by everyone?"

Lauren Schiller:                  Most of us move through the world with blind spots. Those blind spots are typically created where we grew up and by the stories we were told. Julie Rhodes Davis seems to be called to make places of power blind-spot-free so everyone's story is represented. Where did her obsession with representation come from?

Julia R Davis:                        I come from a long line of change-makers, especially on my mother's side of the family. My mother's family is from North Carolina. Back in the turn of the 20th Century, my great grandfather was one of the leaders around opening the first school for black children in Pender County, North Carolina. And as a result, my grandmother, his daughter, grew up with the Ku Klux Klan regularly visiting the house to intimidate the family, my family, and to try to get them to close the school down.

Julia R Davis:                        Family story goes, you know, hard to fact check this one, but my great-grandfather would regularly go out and meet the Klan and just stand there with actually a shotgun in his hand and just acknowledge them but not kowtow. The line was, "I'll see you in church on Sunday."

Julia R Davis:                        That translated to my grandmother and grandfather participating a lot in Civil Rights marches in Louisville, Kentucky where they raised their family and where my mother grew up. My mother has gone on to build a really impressive institution that trains progressive religious leaders to help bring about a more just and equitable society.

Lauren Schiller:                  What's it called?

Julia R Davis:                        Auburn Seminary. So with that background, you wonder where does technology fit in.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, even before we get to where does technology fit in ... I mean, as far as you growing up, and that's obviously ... it's sort of baked into your growing up experience and the stories of your family and stuff like that, but have you personally experienced your own ... I mean, you're a white woman, but have you experienced your own inequity or anything you'd care to share that might also have influenced your trajectory? Like the first time you were like, "Hey, that's not fair."

Julia R Davis:                        I wish I could remember the first time. I mean, I think the most ... I mean, first of all, I remember seeing a movie, I think I was probably seven or eight years old, I can't really remember. It was called Class Action. I said to my parents, "I want to be a litigator," once I saw that movie. So I think very early on I kind of understood that there was a way in which standing up for what's right and being a precocious young person and girl was somehow subversive.

Julia R Davis:                        I was really politicized really early. I mean, I remember Clinton and Bush running against each other and really feeling very strongly that Bill Clinton should win the election, and I was relatively young. So certainly I was aware of politics, I felt sort of engaged by politics, I was writing current even articles in the seventh grade about politics. I think abortion actually ... abortion access was the first issue that really hit home for me, just in that I remember hearing male relatives speaking about abortion access as though they had any right to any opinion whatsoever. I remember being at a family function and I was probably 16 or 17 years old, talking to 10 fully grown male uncles and grandfather, all of whom were anti-choice, and basically just holding the line and arguing sort of every angle of the point, but ultimately, not willing to see ground around reproductive rights.

Lauren Schiller:                  How did you handle that?

Julia R Davis:                        You know, righteous anger is a good thing, Lauren. I mean, I think on some level I do feel in my bones what is right. Bodily autonomy is something that we all need. It is a human right. The fact that there are women in this country and around this globe who literally every day do not have full control over their bodies is unreal. It's a horrifying thing.

Lauren Schiller:                  Since you brought up abortion and pro-choice/anti-choice, are your parents ... are you guys in the same camp?

Julia R Davis:                        Oh hell yeah.

Lauren Schiller:                  Okay. It's just the uncles. It's always the uncles.

Julia R Davis:                        Exactly. Again this is why I sort of put it in the frame of bodily autonomy. The my mind, the political issue is about controlling women. It has nothing to do, really, with the individual case or what is claimed.

Lauren Schiller:                  I probably should know what this means, but what does it mean to pray with your feet?

Julia R Davis:                        Oh, it's shorthand, I think, for the behaviors we engage in. How we show up in the world I think is the evidence for our beliefs. So if you believe in justice and equality for all, what are you doing to, in the real world, to bring those beliefs about? Quite frankly, if you are pro-life, what are you doing to live that value?

Julia R Davis:                        I mean, this is where I think language really matters. The religious right, the conservative right that sort of started in the Reagan era and built power through Jerry Falwell's church and so forth, they did a masterful job of claiming language. But if you don't stand up for people on death row who have not gotten a fair trial and who are there because of racism and because of xenophobia, that is not pro-life to me. If you put the life of a woman behind a nonentity, that's not pro-life to me either. Quite frankly, if you put your ... let's go down the list, and there are much more articulate people than I on this subject, but the effects of climate change ... is killing our planet and really changing the course of the lives of our collective children. The right has done nothing to preserve life in that regard.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'd love to know what the best advice that you've ever been given is about how to find and be your authentic self.

Julia R Davis:                        You know what's interesting? I've gotten unbelievable amounts of wonderful, wise advice over the years. I've had an incredible access to women of all ages who've played tremendous roles in terms of mentorship and advice-giving and wisdom, both in sort of more formal settings and also just friends around the dinner table.

Julia R Davis:                        At the end of the day, the thing I've learned, it's not someone else's advice, the thing I've learned is any amount of advice is only as good as how much work you're willing to do yourself; how much work I've been willing to do myself. I think everybody's sort of demons are different in a way, but I guess my take on that is you have to find ways to internalize your wins and really fundamentally believe that you are enough just the way you are.

Lauren Schiller:                  Julia Rhodes Davis created her own all-woman space in the boardroom for Vote.org and is willing to give it some time to see if it not only feels good, it does good. As the director of partnerships for the Partnership on AI, Julie is making sure diverse voices are at the table when it comes to who and what technology is used for.

Lauren Schiller:                  I want to hear your stories of how empowerment has led to power. Tell us about a moment when you were empowered by going to our Facebook group, The Inflection Point Society, or go to InflectionPointSociety.org. I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point.

Lauren Schiller:                  That's our Inflection Point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple Podcasts, RadioPublic, Stitcher and NPR One. Give us a five-star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know a woman with a great rising-up story? Let us know at InflectionPointRadio.org. While you're there, I invite you to support Inflection Point with a monthly or a one-time contribution. Your support keeps women's stories front and center. Just go to InflectionPointRadio.org.

Lauren Schiller:                  We're on Facebook at Inflection Point Radio. Follow us and follow me on Twitter @laschiller. To find out more about the guests you heard today and to sign up for our email newsletter, you know where to go: InflectionPointRadio.org.

Lauren Schiller:                  Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco and PRX. Our story editor and content manager is Alaura Weaver. Our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host, Lauren Schiller.

Speaker 3:                              Support for this podcast comes from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting.

Speaker 4:                              From PRX.

How Kids’ Books Can Inspire Activism: Kate Schatz and Miriam Klein-Stahl, co-authors of “Rad Girls Can”

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

Now and then a “girl power” book pops up that is truly inspiring and, better yet, timely. And even better, written by an actual feminist, parent, and educator who wants to use her books to incite change by creating role models our daughters and sons can relate to. Sounds pretty rad right? That’s actually the name of a book series...”Rad Women”...”Rad Women A to Z”; “Rad Women Worldwide”, and now, Kate Schatz and her co-author/illustrator the rad Miriam Klein Stahl are out with a third book called “Rad Girls Can.” I talked with Kate and Miriam at a benefit for children's literacy hosted by Reading Partners, an organization that mobilizes communities across the Bay Area to help students read at grade level by fourth grade. Join me for a special on-stage discussion with the authors of RAD Girls Can, Miriam Klein Stahl and Kate Schatz. The book is available now.

If you want to help elementary schools with one-on-one reading support, consider becoming a volunteer or donating to Reading Partners, a national nonprofit that helps students with the one-on-one tutoring they need to read at grade level by fourth grade.

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TRANSCRIPT

Lauren Schiller:                  From KALW and PRX, this is Inflection Point, stories of how women rise up. I'm Lauren Schiller.

Lauren Schiller:                  A woman walked into my studio two years ago wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the word feminist on it. Cool, right? That may not even seem unexpected for this show, but actually this woman was the first and only of my guests to own that title on a shirt in my studio, and it was right before the election of 2016 when we thought we'd see the first woman president. Why did she feel the need to tell everyone she's a feminist?

Kate Schatz:                          It's incredibly important for me to proclaim that and I do it publicly with t-shirts and buttons and Facebook headers all the time because not enough people do that. I want people to see this t-shirt and either smile at me and nod and say, "Right on," and, "I like your shirt," but I also welcome people to question me if they're ... if they don't quite get it, if they don't understand it. Feminism is misunderstood. It's much maligned and I'm happy to speak on it and speak about it at any time when anybody wants me to, and placing it in a public visible context is a big part of that.

Lauren Schiller:                  Back then, only two years ago, I wouldn't have been able to wear that t-shirt. I of course was, and am, a feminist, but I wasn't ready to wear it on a shirt. I wasn't sure why I was so impressed by her shirt. I think we were still unsure as a culture whether it was socially acceptable to proclaim that you were a feminist, even if you held feminist values. So I asked, "So what is your definition of being a feminist?"

Kate Schatz:                          Oh, the definition question. I'm going to go back to the classic one-

Lauren Schiller:                  Got to ask.

Kate Schatz:                          A feminist is someone who believes in the equality of all genders. What I always add to that is it's also someone who believes in the equality of all genders and who also recognizes the utter inequality that exists currently, and has historically, all around the world and who believes that that needs to change.

Lauren Schiller:                  So who was this out feminist and what was she going to do to create change? Well, her name is Kate Schatz and she co-founded a group called Suffragette Sundays, now Solidarity Sundays, to bring people together in person, beyond the online petitions to make phone calls and send emails and go to swing states to act when something's not right.

Kate Schatz:                          We felt like people were so tired of Facebook activism, clicking on a petition or just sharing a link and we felt ... we were sensing a lot of isolated anxiety from people as they watched more and more gun massacres and violence against women, and all of these things happen. As we saw the rise of a certain political candidate.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yes, so Solidarity Sundays is still going strong since it seems like every week brings a new call for, well, solidarity against the dark forces of far-right lunacy. And Kate does other things too.

Kate Schatz:                          Now I write feminist children's books.

Lauren Schiller:                  I know, I know you can't walk into a bookstore these days without being confronted with an onslaught of books empowering girls. You could almost get cynical about it. Is someone trying to make money off of girl power? Probably. Are they just revisiting the same old, same old women we always hear about? Likely, but now and then a book pops up that is truly inspiring and, better yet, timely, and even better written by an actual feminist, parent, and educator who wants to use her books to incite change by creating role models our daughters and sons can relate to. She sounds Pretty Rad, right? That's actually the name of her book series, Rad Women, Rad Women A to Z, Rad Women Worldwide and this July, Kate Schatz and her co author, the Rad Miriam Klein Stahl, who's the co-founder of the arts and humanities program at Berkeley High School, are out with a third book called Rad Girls Can. Because as rad as those other books were, they all featured mostly adults.

Lauren Schiller:                  This book is all girl. I was able to talk with Kate and Miriam at a benefit for children's literacy hosted by Reading Partners, an organization that mobilizes communities across the Bay area to help students read at grade level by fourth grade. I was blown away to find out that nationwide only 35% of incoming fourth graders can read at grade level proficiency or above. Without these skills by fourth grade, students are four times more likely to drop out of high school.

Lauren Schiller:                  I want to talk with you about how we inspire a lifelong love of reading and what's great to talk with you both about it is because you come at it from multiple perspectives. You are parents, you are educators.

Miriam K Stahl:                   Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  And you are published authors.

Miriam K Stahl:                   All of those things.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yes. So let's just start with something super easy, which is when you were growing up, this is for each of you. We'll start with Kate. What was the book that inspired you or rocked your world as a kid?

Miriam K Stahl:                   That's not an easy question.

Kate Schatz:                          It's not an easy question, but the book, when I was ... So I'll first say that I was when I was very, very young, before kindergarten, my mom worked in a children's bookstore. I grew up in San Jose and if anybody's familiar with [Hicklebees 00:05:40], it's an incredible independent children's bookstore and that's where she worked part time, and she would take me to work with her and instead of ... I don't know, it was the '70s, so it was like fine to just bring your kid. She would put me in this in the corner kind of.

Kate Schatz:                          There was this old clawfoot bathtub full of pillows and ... it's a very quirky store ... and she'd put me in this old bathtub of pillows and give me a stack of books and then she would go work the register and sell children's books. That's where I taught myself to read and I have so many memories of being in there. I was so lucky to grow up with a love of books. It's just always been part of my life. I'd say the books that really rocked my world as a kid, Harriet the Spy, which I believe we share in common.

Miriam K Stahl:                   We do, who hasn't walked around with our [crosstalk 00:06:29], right?

Kate Schatz:                          Which showed me this tough, weird, cool little curious girl. Island of the Blue Dolphins was a really, really ... I read it a million times. You see, I gravitated towards stories about strong, adventurous, independent girls, which is what I wanted to be. Then the book series that really rocked my world was the Anastasia Krupnick books by Lois Lowry. It is literally where I first encountered the word feminist, so it was in one of those books. I would read those over and over and over. Those are some of my favorites.

Lauren Schiller:                  What about you, Miriam?

Miriam K Stahl:                   When I was about six, I got this book by Lynn Ward at a garage sale. It was a first edition and it was hand printed, and it was a couple hundred pages telling a story with just wood engravings. It was kind of an intense story about a artist selling his soul to the devil to become famous. It was this book that was all pictures, no words, and it just blew me away and I still have it. It's like my favorite book and I loved everything Maurice Sendak as a kid and I still do. Then when I was a little older in high school, James Baldwin's Another Country was my favorite book. Then I also discovered Audrienne Rich's poetry and I still love all of those books.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, I was thinking as you were talking about the book that was all pictures and no words and you're reading books that are mostly words and no pictures. That's like your whole life has been leading to this moment where you've been ... where you're collaborating. Writing the words and providing the illustrations.

Miriam K Stahl:                   We were meant to me each other and create books together, I think, because-

Lauren Schiller:                  Exactly.

Miriam K Stahl:                   ... because our books, I think, speak to the kid that was like me that needs pictures and is really drawn into a story through pictures and, and Kate's just the best writer-

Kate Schatz:                          Oh, you're so nice.

Miriam K Stahl:                   ... and the words bring you in.

Lauren Schiller:                  So what role do you think illustration or heavy visuals play in bringing along a reluctant reader? I mean, you have your own experience having done that. Do you have any more thoughts on how that could work for other kids?

Kate Schatz:                          Well, when I had the idea to do our first book, Rad American Women A to Z, I knew that I wanted to have a really strong visual component and I wanted the images to be really, really strong and bold and to kind of reflect, I think, the strength of the women that we write about. So our books tell stories about powerful, inspiring women from history and today. I didn't want them to be super cutesy. I wanted them to really reflect a kind of strength. But I also was thinking a lot about creating a book that young people and adults would enjoy.

Kate Schatz:                          I think those of us who spend a lot of time reading to children, which I think is a lot of people in this room, know that there's some books that we're really excited to read a million times and there are some that we're like, "Really? This one again?" So I was thinking, as a parent of young children, I was thinking about creating a book that would visually and intellectually appeal to grownups as well as young people. And I knew Miriam's work, to me, had that aesthetic and would be able to draw someone in from a range of ages.

Miriam K Stahl:                   Yeah. I think the way that we set up our book with an image, and then a quote that's bold, and then a longer format story gives many entry points to different age kids. A kid could have the same book and ... as like a three or four year old, just look at the picture and maybe identify letters and maybe read the quote. Then as they grow older, they'll be ... they'll go back and see the image that they loved and then read the story. I think images can pull kids in and that way too, at different, ages.

Kate Schatz:                          I liked that you used the term reluctant readers. Actually, our first book was one of the ALA's picks for reluctant readers for the reason that it would ... can really draw in young people. I've seen kids kind of flipping through, looking at the pictures and they'll see something that catches their eye and then that will lead them to the text. That's always an exciting moment.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, that's another area I wanted to talk about, is about what catches your eye. One of the girls that you write about in your new book noticed that there was a stunning lack of diversity in the books that she was reading, Marley Dias. She decided to do something about it. Could you tell us a little bit about her?

Kate Schatz:                          Yeah. So our new book is called Rad Girls Can, and it comes out in July, yay.

Miriam K Stahl:                   July 17th.

Kate Schatz:                          Yes. And that's a galley. The real book is hardcover and everything. But yeah, so we write about ... it's 50 stories of girls under age 20 who've done amazing things before they were 20. One of the girls we write about is Marley Dias, who when she was 11 years old she was an avid reader and she started thinking about how she wasn't seeing enough books about black girls like her, staring black girls, centering them as protagonists. So she started this online hashtag campaign, 1,000 Black Girl Books, and she started soliciting donations of books centering black girls and she received over 10,000 books, started a whole organization and she got a book deal. Her book actually just came out a few months ago and it's called Marley Dias gets it done. She's gone from being ... I know, she's amazing.

Kate Schatz:                          I mean, she interviewed ... she's talked to Oprah, she interviewed Hillary Clinton. She's like 13 and amazing.

Lauren Schiller:                  Can I have her number?

Kate Schatz:                          Yeah, right. And it all came from her love of reading and her seeing ... loving reading but really seeing that she wasn't being reflected and really [inaudible 00:12:42] to reach out and find books like that. All those books that she received as donations, she's then donated out to schools and organizations. So we got to write about her. It was really fun.

Lauren Schiller:                  Love that. You look like you wanted to say something.

Miriam K Stahl:                   The picture I made of her also makes her look kind of like a superhero because she's holding many, many books in both hands.

Lauren Schiller:                  I actually looked at that illustration and I thought, did she pose for that or did you actually like [crosstalk 00:13:07]-

Miriam K Stahl:                   Totally made that up. That's how I imagine her, just like I have these books. I couldn't find them when I was little, and here they are now for all of you to check out.

Lauren Schiller:                  Coming up after the break.

Kate Schatz:                          My heart is sad. I would like to ask you to speak with the president and Congress in legalizing my parents because everyday I am scared that they will take them away from me.

Lauren Schiller:                  Before we get back to the conversation, I want to turn you onto a podcast that I just love. It's called Reckonings, and it explores how people change their hearts and minds. Episodes have ranged from a deeply conservative congressmen who made a dramatic shift on climate change, to a white supremacist who transcended a life of hate and became a force for nonviolence, to two teenagers who managed to overcome bullying. In a time that feels so polarized, it's refreshing and hopeful to see people capable of such monumental, shall we say, reckonings. You can find Reckonings on your preferred podcast app and at www.reckonings.show.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller, and this is Inflection Point. Talking with Kate Schatz and Miriam Klein Stahl, authors of the new book Rad Girls Can. There's another great example in the book, which I would just ... I'm just going to connect the dots and say that it, for me, is ... tells me the role that literacy can play in social justice.

Female:                                   Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  And it's the story of a five year old girl, Sophie Cruz. I just was wondering if you ... one of you ... would read a little bit of her story because that's-

Kate Schatz:                          I will.

Lauren Schiller:                  ... an amazing story.

Kate Schatz:                          So in this new book, one of the things I wanted to play with in this book, among many things, is stories of varying length also because I think that's also a really good entry point for readers and for teachers is there are some stories that are about 700 words and are over two pages and then there's some that are just like a couple paragraphs.

Kate Schatz:                          So this is a really short story about Sophie Cruz. She was born in Los Angeles in 2011, so really recently. All right, so five year old Sophie Cruz became one of America's youngest immigration rights activists when she delivered a powerful message to Pope Francis. During his visit to Washington DC in 2015, Sophie ran up to the Pope and gave him a letter that she'd written. It read quote, "My heart is sad. I would like to ask you to speak with the president and Congress in legalizing my parents because everyday I am scared that they will take them away from me." Sophie was born in America, but her parents weren't. They came from Oaxaca, Mexico, escaping violence and poverty. Because they weren't American citizens, they could be deported at any time.

Kate Schatz:                          Sophie's bravery made an impact. The next morning, Pope Francis addressed Congress and he discussed immigration policy at length. He asked the congressmen to treat immigrants with the same compassion with which we would want to be treated. Soon after that, Sophia was invited to the White House where she got to meet President Obama. In January 2017, Sophie was the youngest person to speak at the women's march in Washington DC. In both English and Spanish, she told the massive crowd quote, "Let us fight with love, faith, and courage so that our families will not be destroyed."

Female:                                   [inaudible 00:17:13]

Kate Schatz:                          So now Sophie's seven, so much older now.

Miriam K Stahl:                   She's retiring.

Kate Schatz:                          But no, she's still [crosstalk 00:17:28] on the book deal, but I've been able to be in touch with folks who have worked ... we work with her and her family and she's still active.

Lauren Schiller:                  It's amazing. I mean, I don't know if anyone still has chills, but that gave me chills.

Miriam K Stahl:                   There's just a big mural that went up of her in San Jose.

Lauren Schiller:                  So this book Rad Girls Can, has a title, I would say, is biased toward action. Was that your intention?

Kate Schatz:                          Absolutely, yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  So what role do you see in books for inspiring activism and creating change?

Kate Schatz:                          Oh, I mean, that's ... So yeah, I mean, the focus of this book really is action. In writing a book about young people, where our other books are about more historical figures, whose stories are kind of written, though many of the figures we write about in our other books are still alive, their biography and their story is relatively complete. With this book, we were writing about five ... literal five year old. So it was a different task in creating these stories. It wasn't about ... as much about who they are and their whole biography, but what they've done, an action that they took.

Kate Schatz:                          So we wanted this book to be really focused on that one thing that a person did. One idea, one action, one way that they saw something in the world that they wanted to change, something that they really love to do, something they believed in and then the action that they took to make that happen. Some people in the book, it's one small thing and some people, it's a huge thing. That's what I hope translates to readers, is the idea that you can have one thing that you really care about. Then how are you going to make that happen? What can you do with it? What is the thing that you can do in your life to kind of make that dream become reality?

Lauren Schiller:                  What I love about your ... the first book in your series is that it's got the A to Z in it and you've got posters, pretty much, of all of the various women from A to Z. I just love the idea of thinking about kids' rooms all over the country. Just instead of having little fuzzy animals with each of the letters of the alphabet. There's these rad women just [crosstalk 00:19:37]-

Kate Schatz:                          Now they all have Angela Davis on their wall.

Miriam K Stahl:                   I mean, I think not only posters on their walls, but we're seeing great student movements happening right now at the ... I mean, obviously Parkland was very inspiring around gun violence, but also dreamers really stepping up and talking about immigration and so Kate and I just feel like this book is coming out at exactly the right time when kids do feel activated and feel like their voice ... they're ready to step up and put their voice out there, and they're doing it. We're learning a lot from the youth.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller. I hope you enjoyed this special on-stage discussion with the authors of Rad Girls Can, Miriam Klein Stahl and Kate Schatz. Their book comes out July 17th. If you want to help elementary schools with one-on-one reading support, consider becoming a volunteer or donating to Reading Partners, a national nonprofit that helps students with the one-on-one tutoring they need to read at grade level by fourth grade. I'll leave links to Rad Girls Can and Reading Partners in the show notes at inflectionpointradio.org. While you're clicking around, don't forget to subscribe to Inflection Point on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Radio Public, all of them, to get more stories in your feed about how women rise up. This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller.

Lauren Schiller:                  That's our Inflection Point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple Podcasts, Radio Public, Stitcher, and NPR One. Give us a five-star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know a woman with a great rising up story? Let us know at inflectionpointradio.org. While you're there, I invite you to support Inflection Point with a monthly or one-time contribution. Your support keeps women's stories front and center. Just go to inflectionpointradio.org. We're on Facebook at Inflection Point Radio. Follow us and follow me on Twitter at LaSchiller. To find out more about the guests you heard today and to sign up for our email newsletter, you know where to go, inflectionpointradio.org. Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco and PRX. Our story editor and content manager is Alaura Weaver. Our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host, Lauren Schiller.

Speaker 4:                              Support for this podcast comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

What trans women can teach cis women (and vice versa) - Daniela Petruzalek, diversity activist

Three years ago, software developer Daniela Petruzalek took the leap to transition to her true female self. One of the first things she had to get over were her own internalized prejudices.

“I come from a family where they had traditional morals and were quite homophobic.” She said. “And I had to deconstruct everything. It took me many years to do so. I was a white cis heterosexual male... and nowadays I'm a lesbian.”

Not only that, she was back to competing in the male-dominated world of tech, but now--as a woman. She immediately noticed the double standards rooted in gender bias.

“The only time in my life I was unemployed was after my transition and took me 6 months to get a new job.” She told me. “When you send resumes as a man, even if you aren't a fit for the role, the people will call you and talk to you. But when you send a resume as a woman they expect you to have like 100 percent of the skills or they wouldn't want to even start talking with you.”

Now Daniela uses this knowledge to fight for diversity and inclusion in the tech world. Learn what trans women can teach cis women—and vice versa—in our conversation.

Daniela Petruzelak

"I am powerful by just living" - Sarah McBride, LGBTQ activist

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

In 2016, Sarah McBride made history--and a childhood dream come true when she stood on the stage at the the Democratic National Convention as the first transgender person to speak at a national political convention. As of 2018, more than half of LGBTQ people live in states that don’t protect them from discrimination or are even actively hostile towards them. Some states have enacted laws that allow businesses, healthcare providers and government officials to actually deny services to LGBTQ people.

In the most challenging moments--the 2016 election results, everyday sexism and misogyny and the death of her young husband-- even then she fights to update our laws to protect and include LGBTQ people.

Sarah is now the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest LGBTQ civil rights organization. And she’s the author of the new book, “Tomorrow Will Be Different. Love, Loss and the Fight for Trans Equality.”

RESOURCES referred to on this episode:

Human Rights Campaign

Transgender Law Center

Sarah McBride (photo by B Proud)

Why Rosie the Riveter is "not my icon" - Betty Reid Soskin, National Park Service

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

For the past decade, 96-year-old Betty Reid Soskin has served as the nation’s oldest Park Ranger, where she gives talks at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historic Park. But the triumphant story of the now ubiquitous feminist icon, Rosie the Riveter, is not Betty’s story. While Rosie was breaking barriers for twentieth century white women in the workforce, Black women like Betty and her slave ancestors had been serving as laborers for centuries. In our live talk at INFORUM at the Commonwealth Club, Betty offers a clear-eyed perspective on the untold stories of the American narrative and the ever-rising spiral our country is making toward equality.

TRANSCRIPT: To err is human, please let us know if find a mistake.

Lauren Schiller:
From KALW and PRX, this is Inflection Point, stories of how women rise up. I am Lauren Schiller.

Lauren Schiller:
Something's not right and you go do something about it. I am Lauren Schiller and this season on Inflection Point, I'm talking with the women taking charge and leading change on the issues that are standing in the way of progress, and what we can all do about it. I need your help to make it happen. Our goal is ambitious, but we can do it.

Speaker 6:
Can you really say that out loud without [inaudible 00:00:42]?

Lauren Schiller:
Yes I can. I want to raise $30,000, which covers the cost of one season to pay for things like studio time, transcripts, equipment and people power. I am wildly thankful for everyone who has given so far. Now I need more of you to go to inflectionpointradio.org and click the Support button to make gifts of all sizes so we can reach our goal by November 18th. It's easy to do and it's even tax deductible. Help us make media that shows how women rise up. That's inflectionpointradio.org and click the Support button.

Lauren Schiller:
I just heard about a new podcast you are going to want to hear. It's called Sick from WFYI and Side Effects Public Media in Indianapolis. Jake Harper and Lauren Bavis are two seasoned health journalists. On the first season of Sick, they're diving into the fertility industry, the story of one doctor's abuse of power and the generations of lives he affected. You won't want to miss every twist and turn. Season One episodes start on October 15th and it comes out on Tuesdays. Subscribe wherever you get podcasts. Go to sickpodcast.org for more information.

Lauren Schiller:
There's a saying that goes, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." While that may be true, a wise woman once told me that ...

Betty Reid S.:
... what gets remembered is determined by who is in the room doing the remembering.

Lauren Schiller:
That wise woman is Betty Reid Soskin, who at 96 years of age, is the oldest serving career Park Ranger in the United States. You can hear her speak at the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California. She was instrumental in ensuring the park was inclusive of African-American history. Now, three times a week, Betty shares her experience as a young African-American woman during World War II.

Lauren Schiller:
This International Women's Day, I was invited to interview Betty on stage for INFORUM at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, where I introduced her to an audience of several hundred adoring fans in a gleaming new building.

Lauren Schiller:
One of Betty's first jobs was as a clerk in the segregated Boilermakers union during World War II. She has also been an activist, a singer/songwriter, and a field representative for California State Assemblywomen Dion Aroner and Loni Hancock. She was a small business owner, operating Reid's Records in Berkeley, which has now been operating since 1945. She's got an honorary degree from Mills College and the California College of the Arts.

Lauren Schiller:
Betty attributes her career trajectory to social change over the years. I would argue, Betty was part of making that social change. I started off by asking Betty Reid Soskin to tell us more about what she means when she says, "We have to go back and see the past for what it was, so we can see how far we've come."

Betty Reid S.:
We have to recognize in truth where we have been, because other than that, we have no way to know how we got to where we are, because we have been many nations over the years. Some of them I have lived through. Some of them were not very comfortable.

Lauren Schiller:
Your great-grandmother was a slave.

Betty Reid S.:
Yes, my great-grandmother, Leontine Breaux Allen, born into slavery in 1846, in St. James Parish, Louisiana, and was enslaved until her 19th birthday, which time she married George Allen, who was a Corporal in the Louisiana state Colored Troops fighting on the side of the north in the Civil War. She lived to be 102, not dying until 1948, when I was 27 years old, a mother, married and I knew my slave ancestor as a matriarch of my family

Lauren Schiller:
I read in one of your blog posts, so Betty's a blogger, you all can follow her, that you were doing an interview with someone who didn't want you to say anything too difficult or challenging about slavery. They wanted you to just keep it nice and tighty.

Betty Reid S.:
Yes.

Lauren Schiller:
Your response was, "What? Is that possible?"

Betty Reid S.:
My response was, "How do you clean that up?"

Lauren Schiller:
Noncontroversial, that was what they asked you for.

Betty Reid S.:
Yeah. It was a family show coming out of the Universal Studios in Southern California where I was invited to participate. It seemed to me that there was a [inaudible 00:06:05] of history, that I was being asked to participate in. I couldn't do that. It's true that they wanted to mention my great-grandmother, but they didn't want to mention slavery.

Lauren Schiller:
That makes no sense.

Betty Reid S.:
How do you do that?

Lauren Schiller:
Is there anything that has just stuck with you about what was passed on about your great-great grandmother's time?

Betty Reid S.:
She was amazing. She was the midwife, the intern to the doctor who came to about every three months on horseback into St. James Parish. My great-grandmother was the one who delivered the village babies and took care of people. Her job was to go out on horseback and drop a white towel over the gate post every place he was to be needed when he came through. After he would come through, he would confer with her on the after care of the patients. She was the caretaker for her village.

Betty Reid S.:
That struck with me. That's a story that came down on my family from my grandfather and from my mother's younger sister. It set the patterns for me when I was very young. I thought, "That was an incredible thing for her to be."

Lauren Schiller:
What do you mean, it set the patterns for you?

Betty Reid S.:
Because when I was in Washington, the first award that I received was from the National Women's History Project. I knew that I was going to get this award at a hotel ceremony that evening, went down to Anacostia to the museum there in the African part of Washington, D.C., and there was an exhibit of midwives of the Civil War period. Wonderful pictures, and I found myself bursting into tears at the sight because she only had that role in my fantasies. I had never seen her in that role.

Betty Reid S.:
But that evening, during the ceremonies, I found myself able to receive an award that I felt unworthy of because you never feel worthy of those kinds of awards. But I felt it if I could accept it for her, because I realized that I had been wooed many times to run for public office, but this had never been a role that I wanted, that I had been dropping imaginary white towels over imaginary gate posts my whole life. It was in that spirit that I was able to accept that first honor and have been accepting them ever since in her name.

Lauren Schiller:
You mentioned your grandfather, which I also, I understand he was an inventor, an unrecognized-

Betty Reid S.:
Oh, my father's father.

Lauren Schiller:
Yes.

Betty Reid S.:
Yes.

Lauren Schiller:
So different grandfather.

Betty Reid S.:
Yes.

Lauren Schiller:
On the patrilineal side.

Betty Reid S.:
He was Charbonnet, Louis Charbonnet. He was a eminent builder, millwright, engineer. His degree was out of Tuskegee University on correspondents courses. I have his books in my apartment, books that took him through Tuskegee. He left edifices all through New Orleans. There's a high school, Corpus Christi Church, which he built. The First Order convent for the First Order of Black Nuns in this country, the Holy Family Sisters, he built their convent.

Betty Reid S.:
I have all those, but either he couldn't get patents because he was a Creole African-American. He couldn't get patents on anything that he built. He had to work under the licenses of a white contractor always. All of his buildings are under the names of others. That has been something that has been a cross that I've had to bear for my whole lifetime.

Betty Reid S.:
But I don't believe that he ever resented it. It was the world as he lived in it. It was the nation that he was born into. He accepted it. I'm not so easily accepting. That part of the tradition I didn't carry with me.

Lauren Schiller:
Was he able to see, at any point in his life, his name on one of his buildings or his inventions?

Betty Reid S.:
No. I have maybe two dozen old photographs, vintage photographs of his projects that have come down to me. There's a rice mill, there's a ballpark, the Crescent City Ballpark that was designed and built by my great-grandfather that under the ... There was an entrance on one street. From that entrance it was a dance hall under the bleachers. This was at a time when ballplayers, there were black leagues, and the only people who played in those parks were African-Americans. But I often wonder [inaudible 00:11:59] very much good. We should have kept those because that ballpark, I still take a look at it every now and then.

Lauren Schiller:
I have this notion that you have collected his drawings, and photographs and things like that, and you are now passing them onto the-

Betty Reid S.:
Yeah, I'll been going back to Washington, D.C. in April and I'm going to donate them to the African American Museum.

Lauren Schiller:
That's wonderful. He will finally get the recognition that he deserves. That's wonderful.

Betty Reid S.:
He will finally have recognition he deserves.

Lauren Schiller:
With all of this in the background of your life as you were growing up, and you were born in 1921?

Betty Reid S.:
Yes.

Lauren Schiller:
As a little girl, what did you dream you wanted to be when you grew up?

Betty Reid S.:
I think I lived my entire life in a constant state of surprise. I'm not a planner, nor am I list maker.

Lauren Schiller:
A dreamer?

Betty Reid S.:
A dream, maybe, but I don't remember. I guess before I was 20, my life was framed by the country that I was living in. At that time, I could not aspire to even college. I graduated from high school with two opportunities for employment open to me. I could have worked in agriculture or I could have been a domestic servant.

Betty Reid S.:
My eldest sister, Marjorie, spent the first five years of her marriage as half of a domestic team. Her young husband was a chauffer and Marjorie was a housekeeper for a family in Piedmont. Because lived in on the premises with Thursdays off, which was traditional, they could save every penny they earned toward the down payment on their first home. This was the traditional pathway into the middle class for African-Americans. This is the country that I grew up in.

Betty Reid S.:
I escaped that because of the third choice. I married Mel Reid, whose family came out across the country from Griffin, Georgia at the first sound of cannon fire, the Civil War. In 1942, when I married, Mel was in his senior year at the University of San Francisco, playing left halfback for the San Francisco Dons. What 19 year old wouldn't prefer that? Mel, his father and his grandmother were all born in Berkeley General Hospital on Dwight Way. My life took a turn at that point. But up until then, I had no ambitions that I could think of because I was limited by what was possible.

Betty Reid S.:
Now, that meant that for about 20 years I lived out in the Diablo Valley in an architecturally designed home with my four kids that I raised to adulthood, outlived of two husbands. Spent a lot of time with friends, some who were quite powerful in my church who were in my neighborhood. I returned 15 years ago. Well, after 20 years in the suburbs I returned to Berkeley as a field representative, for a member of the California State Assembly.

Betty Reid S.:
If you're wondering whether I became a [inaudible 00:15:49] 20 and 15 years ago, may I quickly assure you that's anything but true. That arc of my life, from 20 to 15 years ago, is not a sign of personal achievement, but a solid indication of how much social change occurred in this country over those [inaudible 00:16:12] years. Something we all did, all of us, black and brown, and yellow and red, and straight and gay, and trans. Some of us did it kicking and screaming, and some of us are still kicking and screaming.

Betty Reid S.:
But enough of us because of what happened here in the city of Richmond, in the Bay Area generally. Between those years of 1942 and 1945, during the second World War home front period, because of that enough of us completed that full trajectory so that to this day social change continues to radiate out of the Bay Area into the rest of the country. That was enough to build a park around. That's what we did.

Lauren Schiller:
Did you build your home in the Diablo Valley after the war or before the war?

Betty Reid S.:
No, 1953.

Lauren Schiller:
It was well after.

Betty Reid S.:
It was after the war. Well after the war. Went through about five years of death threats because those people had built the suburbs with their GI Bill to get away from people like me.

Betty Reid S.:
The year that we moved into our house, I had a third grader who was the only young African-American child in his school. That year the PTA fundraiser was a minstrel show. All of his teachers and the administrators were in blackface because that's who we were in 1953. That's who we were.

Lauren Schiller:
Did you discover that upon arriving at what you thought was going to be a fun school evening or ...

Betty Reid S.:
No.

Lauren Schiller:
... how did you discover that?

Betty Reid S.:
I learned about the minstrel show from a neighbor who came to me the day before the show was to be shown, to be staged. She told me about it. I knew that was wrong, but it was something that I had never run into before. I had no idea of why it was wrong, but I got into my car and I went down to the school. I was led into the principal's office, sat there and he was not in, but he came in five minutes later. His costume was hanging on the doorway, big blousy polka dots, red and white, black pants.

Betty Reid S.:
He walked in about five minutes after I was there, and saw my face and turned around to go out. Then he turned back and I said, "You're having a minstrel show." The poor man, miserable, embarrassed said, "Yes." I said, "You know that's wrong." He said, "I didn't know that until I saw you there." He said, "But you know, don't really misunderstand. We're really showing how happy-go-lucky colored people are." I said, "Do I look happy-go-lucky?" He said, "No."

Betty Reid S.:
I said, "You know that minstrel shows were created to ridicule black people." He said, "No." I said, "I know that your show is tomorrow evening, and I can't possibly ask you to cancel it because it's too late now, but I want you, when you have your dress rehearsal tonight, to explain my visit to you to your staff." I said, "Tomorrow evening I will be here, sitting in the front row."

Betty Reid S.:
I did go with my neighbor Bessie Gilbert. We sat in the front in the front row and cried all the way through it. But we made them do their minstrel show in our presence. But the next week there was a Aunt Jemima pancake feed in the middle of Civic Center Park, so we didn't do that much. But as I say, that's who we were in 1953.

Lauren Schiller:
Talk about looking at the past for what it was. You really explained something.

Betty Reid S.:
It was a time of growth for all of us.

Lauren Schiller:
Well, even in building your home as the second black family in the neighborhood, and the experience that you went through with that, you then saw that happen to yet another family, right?

Betty Reid S.:
Yes. There was a young couple that was moving into Gregory Gardens, which is a low-income community that was being constructed at the time. I read about them because there was an Improvement Association meeting to find an answer to the intrusion of these people into their community.

Lauren Schiller:
Improvement.

Betty Reid S.:
Yes, Improvement Association. I read it in the local paper and decided that where I had felt impotent against what was happening to our little family, that as a defender I could have strength.

Betty Reid S.:
I wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper complaining about this. Someone, an attorney who lived in the area, liberal attorney, name of David Bortin, now deceased, read my letter, found how to get to hold of me, called, and he wanted to offer help because I had said that I was going to attend that meeting and he said, "You can't do that Betty, because they'll hurt you." I said, "No, they won't do that because people don't say those mean things in my presence. They only say them behind my back. If I go there, I will be able to tell them what I want to say and then I will go." But I knew by that time that our community had gotten past this, pretty much, and that I could tell them that it could be better. They could all get through this.

Betty Reid S.:
I drove out to the school, parked my car and walked into the auditorium, and sat about in the middle on the aisle seat. I was not protected by my color because I'm so racially ambiguous that nobody picked it up. Though I was that black nigger family, only three miles away, here that evening I just blended into the crowd. They went on with their meeting saying all those awful things that I had never heard them say.

Betty Reid S.:
When one point a woman stood up and said, "If we can't get them out, the undesirables, if we can't get them out any other way, we can use the health department on the basis of the filthy diseases they bring in," and at which point I couldn't any longer stand it because I didn't want to be eavesdropping. I got up and I walked to the front of the auditorium, and I talked to her about 10 minutes, and then ran out because I panicked. Got into my car and David Bortin was there.

Betty Reid S.:
It had been daylight when I parked my car and it was dark when I came out of the meeting. I heard footsteps behind me. I thought I was being chased, but apparently there was a reporter who came and tapped me on the shoulder just before I was juggling with my key in the car, then the lock. He identified himself as being a reporter, said, "I need to know your name and give me your telephone number. I will call you because I need to get back in to see what happens now." Then David Bortin introduced himself. He was one of those that was running out of the [inaudible 00:24:38] and he [inaudible 00:24:41] me, and that was beginning of my being able to take on. That Improvement Association never met again. That was fine.

Lauren Schiller:
You're here.

Betty Reid S.:
I'm not sure, I wasn't sure that it was ever successful. Over time, I think that I was because that same community that was so disturbed by our being there sent me, 20 years later, to represent them as a McGovern delegate to Miami Beach. That's how fast social change was occurring.

Lauren Schiller:
I'm Lauren Schiller and this episode of Inflection Point was recorded with Betty Reid Soskin for INFORUM at the Commonwealth Club on March 8, 2018, International Women's Day.

Lauren Schiller:
We look at icons like Rosie the Riveter as a shorthand for what happened in the past and often what can inspire us for the future. The Rosie the Riveter National Historical Park where Betty gives talks three days a week is proud of its Rosie heritage. So much so that they've continuously held the Guinness World Record for largest gathering of people dressed as Rosie the Riveter for a few years now.

Lauren Schiller:
I took my family there to help them keep their standing just this past summer. The pictures were precious. I put one on our holiday card, you know, have a Rosie 2018. But Rosie is an icon, and history is never as neat and tighty about as say Rosie the Riveter's headscarf. Betty Reid Soskin told us why the Rosie Story couldn't be her story. We'll hear why in a moment.

Lauren Schiller:
This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller. This conversation with Betty Reid Soskin was recorded live for INFORUM at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.

Lauren Schiller:
Well, we should probably talk about Rosie the Riveter.

Betty Reid S.:
Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:
She's become something of a feminist icon.

Betty Reid S.:
Yes.

Lauren Schiller:
But there's something missing from that narrative for you. She's not your icon.

Betty Reid S.:
No, she's not because in ... Where do we begin?

Betty Reid S.:
15 years ago, when we came back into the city from the valley, as a field representative, the park was created in my assembly district. It simply rose up. The Rosie Memorial, which had caught national attention, was less than a mile from my office in Richmond. I was in a satellite office, one-person office. Even though it was only a mile away, I had never [inaudible 00:29:34] to visit it because that was a white woman's story.

Betty Reid S.:
The women in my family had been working outside their home since slavery because back in 1942, it took $42.25 a week to support a family of five if you were white. But our fathers and our uncles were all members of the service workers generation, earning $25 to $35 a week. Pullman porters earned $18 a week plus tips. It had always taken two wages to support black families.

Betty Reid S.:
That story, it wasn't that I was boycotting the Rosie story, it simply had nothing to say to me. But when the Department Interior planners were gathered in my assembly district and held their first meetings to begin to frame this park, that was when I discovered the National Parks, because it was coming into my area and being defined by scattered sites that laid throughout the city, which I instantly recognize as sites of racial segregation.

Betty Reid S.:
But it's also true that nobody in that room knew that but me, because what gets remembered is determined who is in the room doing the remembering. There wasn't any grand conspiracy to leave my history out. There simply wasn't anybody in that room that had reason to know that but me.

Betty Reid S.:
I became involved in the planning of the stories because the Child Development Center, the Maritime Child Development Center did not service black families at all. Atchison Village was built by the Maritime Commission. It was part of the parks, but it was built to house temporarily Kaiser management, but there wouldn't have been any black managers at the time, so the [inaudible 00:31:35], but Nystrom Village, which was to be restored to show how workers lived, was built by HUD, but you couldn't live in Nystrom Village unless you were white. But there wasn't anybody else in that room that knew that but me.

Betty Reid S.:
Why the story of Rosie the Riveter is extremely important is the feminist story and as a feminist icon. There were many, many stories on the home front. There was a story of the internment of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans, 70,000 of whom were American citizens. There was a great story of the explosion at Port Chicago, in which there were 320 live lost, 202 of them being black dock workers. The mutiny trials because 50 of those men refused to go back and load those ships because nobody could explain what had happened.

Lauren Schiller:
This was the ammunition [crosstalk 00:32:28] that they were loading onto the ship had exploded.

Betty Reid S.:
Yes, at Port Chicago.

Lauren Schiller:
They didn't want to go back because they were scared.

Betty Reid S.:
If you didn't live in the Bay Area, you had no idea that Port Chicago even happened, that those ships had even ... two Kaiser ships. There were so many stories that the home front ... There were 37,600 lives lost in industrial accidents in the home front alone, lives that were never memorialized. That story is so complex and has so many moving parts that being reminded of that became something that I was obsessed with because the story was so important and had been so lost to history. That's when I became on a four-year contract, to consult into the National Park Service because you guys have forgotten all that good stuff.

Lauren Schiller:
Well, it's so much easier to look at her pretty face and her flexed arm, and be like, "Yeah, unity. We got this."

Betty Reid S.:
I really think that that story, because I'm so passionate about my story, that that story gets crowded out because there is an important white feminist story that we don't get to. Some day we're going to get a kick ass white feminist that's going to tell that story just as I tell mine.

Lauren Schiller:
But she's not in the front of the room. She's on a lunch box, she's on posters. Rosie the Riveter is getting her day in the sun, that's for sure.

Lauren Schiller:
Would you have been a Rosie if you could have been?

Betty Reid S.:
No.

Lauren Schiller:
No.

Betty Reid S.:
That was simply beyond my imagination. Since I worked in a Jim Crow segregated union hall, that was nowhere near the shoreline, I never saw a ship under construction, nor did I ever see a ship being launched. All that history completely escaped me. I wasn't even always sure who the enemy was during that period. I would not have ever aspired to Rosie because that was simply beyond my imagination. I've learned more about that history since I've been a ranger than I ever knew before.

Lauren Schiller:
Well, even the job you did hold was not a typical job for a woman, right? At the [crosstalk 00:34:48] Boilermakers union?

Betty Reid S.:
[inaudible 00:34:48].

Betty Reid S.:
No. Actually, being a file clerk in 1942 was a step up. My folks would be proud of me. I wasn't making beds in a hotel, I wasn't taking care of white people's children or cleaning white people's houses, wasn't emptying bed pans in some hospital or rest home, I was a clerk, which in 1942 would have been the equivalent to today's young women of color being the first in her family to enter college, because that's who we were.

Lauren Schiller:
How did you get that job?

Betty Reid S.:
I backed into it as I did with most in my life. I came onto the National Park Service at first as a consultant on a four-year contract. After four years became a National Park Ranger at the age of 85, which the congratulations go to the National Park Service, not to me. I can't imagine the conversations that railed in Washington about that. But I have now been a permanent Park Ranger for 11 years.

Lauren Schiller:
Well, how did you get the job as the file clerk?

Betty Reid S.:
Because the unions were putting us together simply by the color of our skin. The Executive Secretary of the Jim Crow union hall was a friend of mine, [inaudible 00:36:24] was brought out here by his minister's uncle who was chosen by the Boilermakers and put him in charge of the union. He was a minister from Oakland, because he was the right color. Then he felt that was not fitting for a black minister, so he sent for his nephew [inaudible 00:36:46] in Chicago, came out. Because we were social friends, those unions were made up of people of color, mostly because they were connected socially.

Lauren Schiller:
Networking.

Betty Reid S.:
Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:
You said something just a few minutes ago about what gets remembered is a function of who is in the room doing the remembering.

Betty Reid S.:
Yeah, that's true.

Lauren Schiller:
This is a philosophical question, but you can maybe answer it tangibly, which is how do you get in the room?

Betty Reid S.:
How can I answer that? No, it's related to another question that I can answer. There's been a drive in the National Park Service for a number of years now to encourage more people of color into the park system. I keep running into that constantly. There are professional programs, there are kids gathered up in inner cities and delivered to National Parks so that we can have representations in the parks. There's been an honest to goodness effort to get people into the parks.

Betty Reid S.:
I find myself feeling like the National Parks are really created and used by the middle class. You have to have the leisure time and the financial resources in order to take advantage of the parks. If the National Park as a federal agency concentrates on bringing more people of color into the middle class with the jobs program, we will find our way into the park. I think that that's the answer [inaudible 00:38:29].

Lauren Schiller:
I've heard that if any group is comprised of at least 30% of pick anything, 30% women, 30% people of color, 30% you name it, that that's the tipping point. That's the point at which more people who fit into that category will join in.

Betty Reid S.:
I don't know. I'm sure that there's a critical mass that [inaudible 00:38:53] operating and that might be true.

Betty Reid S.:
I am surprised sometimes and not at other times that my audiences at the National Parks don't have nearly as many people of color as I would expect to have because my presentations are clearly out of my shoes. But then when I realize that those were years of rejection, that there's very little to be nostalgic about, if you're not white of the periods of 1942 to 1945. My young husband, who was as I say a left halfback for the San Francisco Dons, went down immediately when the war was declared to enlist, fight for his country, and found himself in the [inaudible 00:39:48] because the only thing a young black man could do was cook in the Navy.

Betty Reid S.:
He lasted only three days and refused because he had grown up as a Californian, not as an African-American. He had never faced into that level of discrimination. He lasted three days. The commanding officer who was on the committee that examined him decided that he was clearly honest and his intent was not to get out of serving, but wanted to define how he was going to serve, decided to give him mustering out pay and honorable discharge. Told him just to forget that it ever happened, but that they could not put a man who was a natural leader of men onto a ship where men might be easily led because it might spell mutiny. They sent him home and he went to his grave believing that he had failed this country, when his country had failed him. That was who we were. Thank God we are not there anymore.

Lauren Schiller:
Do you feel like we've made enough progress?

Betty Reid S.:
I think that it's a fallacy to believe that democracy will ever be fixed. It's a process. It has to be regenerated by every single generation. It has to be recreated. We'll always be forming that more perfect union and promoting the general welfare. I don't know that we'll ever get there. I'm not sure that's the object. I think the 39% turnout four years ago in the election was predictive of the 400% turnout in the most recent election.

Betty Reid S.:
We have a [inaudible 00:41:50] protected right to be wrong. Our [inaudible 00:41:53] protected right to be bigot, if that's what we want to be, that's part of the freedoms. But we've also created this incredible system of National Parks where it's now possible for us to visit almost any era in our history, the heroic places, the [inaudible 00:42:09] places, the scenic wonder, the shameful places and the painful places in order to own that history. Own it, that we may process it in order to begin to forgive ourselves, in order to move toward a more compassion future, because I don't believe that we have yet processed the Civil War as a nation. Though they weren't designed for that purpose, that's how I see the National Parks at this point in my life, that's the National Park that I'm involved in.

Lauren Schiller:
It's so easy to think of history as just this dry boring thing we have to learn in school, but it's so not.

Betty Reid S.:
No, it's an amazing, amazing trip. No.

Lauren Schiller:
Well are there any ... Is there anything for the ... I've got two of my children sitting in the front row here, and there may be other kids in the audience. I see a couple. Is there anything that you would like them to know that they can take with them tonight?

Betty Reid S.:
Yeah, I think that there's a place on the film that we show that was ... It's called Home Front Heroes that's shown as an orientation film for my presentations at the park. There's a place on the film where Agnes Moore, a still living Rosie says that that period of 1942 to '45 was the greatest coming together that she had ever seen of the American people, that she had ever lived through. When she first used to say that on the film, and I would stand up against the wall and watch her, and I'd say, "How can Agnes say that? She knows that isn't true and I'm going to have to talk to that one."

Betty Reid S.:
One day after my 90th birthday, I was suddenly able to hear that as Agnes' truth. I realized that we all create our own reality and that there are many truths. They rise out of religious conviction, they rise out of education, they rise out of life experience. Many of those truths are in conflict. As long as there is a place on the planet where Agnes' truth and mine can coexist, that was all I needed from that day forward. I'd like to be able to tell every 14 year old that comes through our park that insight so they don't have to get to be 90 years old before they recognize it. Thank you.

Lauren Schiller:
I have to ask you one more thing.

Betty Reid S.:
Okay.

Lauren Schiller:
Which is, I understand that you played Spin the Bottle with Paul Robeson.

Betty Reid S.:
I sure did, I got kissed on cheek by Paul Robeson.

Lauren Schiller:
Can you take us inside that moment?

Betty Reid S.:
I was a teenager and we were picketing the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, A Song of the South of Walt Disney. Paul Robeson was in town, I think to do something at the Moore shipyards. We met him there at the Paramount Theatre. Afterward, there was a lemonade party for us kids and Paul Robeson. It was at Matt Crawford's house in Berkeley. We played Spin the Bottle and I got kissed by Paul Robeson.

Lauren Schiller:
You'll never wash that cheek again.

Betty Reid S.:
Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:
As you can hear, Betty Reid Soskin brought the house down. She received a standing ovation, including from me.

Lauren Schiller:
Now, a few days before we got on stage together, I met Betty on her stomping grounds at the Rosie the River National Park in Richmond, California. At that time, I sat with the audience and watched as a full house was also wrapped with attention as she spoke. She got a standing ovation there as well. I think it's because she's providing a clear-eyed perspective and a sense of optimism. It bears repeating.

Betty Reid S.:
I now am more aware of the past, and I am aware that these periods of chaos are cyclical, and that they have been happening since 1776. I sense that we're on an upward spiral. We keep touching the same places at higher and higher levels. I'm not enslaved like my great-grandmother was. Each time we hit one of these places and we're in one of them now, that's when democracy is being redefined and that's when we have access to the reset buttons. When that happens, on this upward spiral we're setting the stage for the next generation.

Lauren Schiller:
My conversation with Betty Reid Soskin was recorded for INFORUM at the Commonwealth Club. I'll put a link to the Rosie Museum and to Betty's blog on my website at inflectionpointradio.org. I am Lauren Schiller, this is Inflection Point.

Lauren Schiller:
That's our Inflection Point for today. Know a woman with a great rising up story? Let us know at inflectionpointradio.org. While you're there, I invite you to become a patron of Inflection Point. Your contribution keeps women's stories front and center, and you'll be rewarded with gifts like an Inflection Point mug and EO body care. It's all on our contribute page at inflectionpointradio.org.

Lauren Schiller:
We're on Facebook at Inflection Point Radio. You can follow me on Twitter, @laschiller. To find out more about the guest you heard today and sign up for our email, go to inflectionpointradio.org.

Lauren Schiller:
Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7FM in San Francisco and PRX. All of our episodes are on Apple Podcasts, RadioPublic, Stitcher and NPR One. Give us a five-star review and add us to your listening queue. Our Story Editor and Content Manager is Alaura Weaver, our Engineer and Producer is Eric Wayne, and I'm your host, Lauren Schiller.

Speaker 4:
Support for this podcast comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Speaker 5:
From PRX.

My Privilege Wake Up Call With Ijeoma Oluo, Author of So You Want To Talk About Race

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An awkward conversation with her white mother about “good white people” inspired Ijeoma Oluo to take on the unenviable task of writing one of the most user-friendly books on race of our time: So You Want To Talk About Race. In plain language, Ijeoma has confronted deeply uncomfortable questions surrounding racial injustice from the school-to-prison pipeline to the Black Lives Matter movement to white feminism and intersectionality.

In our conversation, Ijeoma helps me to understand the insidious nature of white supremacy in our world. She also wakes me up to the fact that solidarity between all women cannot happen until white cis women hold themselves accountable to the ways they have benefitted from systems of oppression. Most importantly, Ijeoma offers practical, everyday actions that you can do today to help dismantle the system of racism.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

The Implicit Bias Test: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/index.jsp 
Take this test to see how unconscious bias may be influencing how you interact with the world. When you see where your biases lie, you can begin the work of examining where they come from and how to overcome them.

Meet Your DA: https://meetyourda.org/
District Attorneys have the power to determine who gets charges filed against them, the severity of charges, and if the charges get filed at all. These elected officials have the power to send people to prison for life. DAs can funnel people into the prison system, trapping them in the revolving door of mass incarceration. OR they can give them a 2nd chance. They’re supposed to represent our voice but often their actions don’t represent what they believe. Get to know who your district attorney is and how they’re carrying out the wishes of your community. And if they’re actions reflect the wishes of for-profit prisons over those of your community, get in touch. This website will tell you how.

P.S. Want to connect with other everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change? Come join The Inflection Point Society, our new Facebook Group, and take part in daily conversations about rising up together.

Ijeoma Oluo

How Girls Are Changing The World - Paola Gianturco and Alex Sangster

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When we work so hard to preserve what we see as the innocence of childhood, are we actually holding our kids back from the courageous work they can be doing in this world? Twelve-year-old Alex Sangster and her grandmother, accomplished photojournalist Paola Gianturco partnered to interview and photograph over 102 girls aged 10 through 18 who aren’t waiting for a new day to begin their activism: they are rolling up their sleeves and ushering in that new day right now. 

Listen to my conversation with Paola Gianturco and Alex Sangster, co-authors of Wonder Girls: Changing Our World, about what it looks like when we let girls lead. 
 

How To Welcome A Refugee- Christina Psarra of Doctors Without Borders

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Refugees literally sacrifice everything to keep their families safe and to start a new life. Christina Psarra of Doctors Without Borders gives up everything to help them. The only thing she knows for months at a time is the arrival of refugee after refugee after refugee.

So what’s left over for her? The other side of the refugee story is the stress for the aid workers and their 24/7 schedule. And with Christina putting so much of herself into her work, what does it take not to burn out and what keeps her coming back? Listen to our conversation.

Learn more life as a refugee at ForcedFromHome.com

How To Find Joy In The Resistance - Paola Mendoza and Sarah Sophie Flicker, Women's March Organizers

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As national organizers for The Women’s March and leaders of The Resistance Revival Chorus, artist activists Paola Mendoza and Sarah Sophie Flicker see their purpose as connecting fellow members of The Resistance to the moments of joy and transcendence that come with being a part of history in the making. They walk in the footsteps of the Nina Simone’s and Joan Baez’s and Aretha Franklin’s of the world--the artists who helped to fuel the Civil Rights movement by nourishing the souls of the people who marched for freedom.

And if there was ever a time when we need to consistently keep our souls replenished for the fight against injustice, it would be now.

Hear how Paola Mendoza and Sarah Sophie Flicker use the power of art and culture in activism, what they learned in documenting The Women’s March for the newly released book, Together We Rise, and how you can participate in the 2018 Women's March.

And tell us how you found your voice in 2017 and what you are going to do with it in 2018, on our Facebook page!

Paola Mendoza and Sarah Sophie Flicker, photo by Guy Murrow