America, Who Hurt You Transcripts

Sarah Jones  00:30

Hi, everybody, welcome to America who hurt you the pod where we talk in many voices about politics, our trauma, and how we can heal them both. I’m your host, Sarah Jones, and I’m here with a few co hosts; Rashid. 

Rashid  00:35

Yeah, you know who it is 

Sarah Jones  00:37

Nereida. 

Nereida  00:38

Hola everybody!

Sarah Jones  00:39

 Lorraine,

Lorraine  00:40

Oh, hi there. How are you?

Sarah Jones  00:41

And Bella.

Bella  00:42

 Hi everyone. 

Sarah Jones  00:54

And by now you know they’re not exactly co hosts. They’re my characters from my one person shows and my movie Sell, Buy, Date, who live in my head and they also may pop in during interviews with our guests.

Rashid  00:56

Yeah, I might have to sit this one out though. My stomach hurt. I think some messed up my microbiome. 

Sarah Jones  01:02

Oh, Rashid. Wait microbiome. You’ve sound like you’ve been listening to a lot of wellness podcasts? 

Bella  01:09

No, he just started following this fitness influencer on Instagram. Now all his ads are for like gut health seminars and raw hemp yogurt. 

Nereida  01:20

Good for him. I mean, we’re all trying to get healthier, right? Especially people of color. I am jealous though. I tried this 10 Day juice cleanse, and I only lasted eight hours. I swear I’m just never going to lose my freshman 15.

Lorraine  01:35

Oh Nereida you’re back in college? 

Nereida  01:38

No, it’s the same 15 pounds from like, 12 years ago when I was a freshman. I just can’t lose it. My daughter teases me that my BMI stands for banana muffin index. 

Bella  01:47

Okay, but you do know that like the BMI is totally made up, right? Like you should google that. 

Sarah Jones  01:52

Yeah, that’s a whole other look. I don’t even think dieting is the answer. There are so many other ways to be healthy. You guys. I mean, that’s actually the topic of today’s episode. Most of us have bought into the idea that wellness means we have to eat a certain way and look a certain way just to be a good person. But the truth is, a lot of us are judging and blaming ourselves, when really what’s keeping us from wellness often isn’t our fault. We’re in a culture that overworks and overwhelms us with impossible standards. And plus, they’re like harmful chemicals in our environment, our health products, even our food

Rashid  02:24

Wait hold up. Are you saying my hemp Yoga is the problem or the solution?

Sarah Jones  02:35

I’m saying it’s more complicated than that. But luckily, our guest today knows a lot about all of this. You may know Jamila Jamil from her roles on the Good Place or She Hulk, But she’s also a wellness mythbuster extraordinaire. After years in the spotlight in the UK, having her own body picked apart by the FAMOUSLY body positive British press (hope you can hear my sarcasm) and seeing the way the entertainment industry promotes an unrealistic body image for women, Jameela decided enough was enough. She started her own podcast iWeigh, that interrogates diet culture, the wellness industry, and how our obsession with alleged health is actually making so many of us LESS healthy. Since its start in 2018, iWeigh has grown into a movement that helps millions of people struggling with health issues body image, including me. Now right before we recorded this interview, we had like a little tech issue that had me feeling not very well or at least nervous. And Jamila reminded me to just pause and breathe. It was so helpful, I thought, let’s leave that in.

SJ: 

So now we’re gonna be great. Okay, here we go. Hi.

JJ  03:24

Take a deep breath. Let’s just do a deep breath together. Let’s do six No, sorry, three seconds in. And then six seconds out.

Sarah Jones  03:31

Can we please keep this in the pod? 

JJ 

One more time. Slow reset. 

Sarah Jones  04:20

Parasympathetically way better. Thank you. This is why this is why you, you, missy. So here we go. In addition to being my breathing coach to be with Jameela Jamil, I was gonna say like, seriously, this episode is about wellness and how many of us ironically, have an unhealthy relationship to it. Right. And I’m wondering, is our obsession connected to the country being so unwell politically, like you just proved right then breathing is free. Our bodies are naturally self healing, right? Yet we are constantly inundated, overwhelmed, distracted, especially as women, I think, by everything that’s going on, including the next new health product we have to buy. Would you say the wellness industrial complex might be distracting us from making things better around here?

JJ  05:10

Yeah, I don’t think it’s distracting by mistake. I think it’s distracting by design. If you look at how gendered so much of wellness culture is, it’s very clear that it is. I mean, I’m not allowed to say it’s clear because then I sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it is an amazing coincidence. Uncanny coincidence, that women specifically are expected to be terrorized of every inch of our bodies, we are supposed to fight time and gravity. We are supposed to have a thin face that is somehow Forever Young, which is not fucking possible. We’re supposed to have big tits, but thin arms but big asses, but skinny thighs, we’re supposed to worry about elbow fat. We’re supposed to worry about armpit wrinkles. There is not a centimeter left on a woman’s body that someone has not committed. 

Sarah Jones  06:04

And the wild part is none of this is actually about wellness, right? It’s purely about how we look. But somehow we’ve conflated being healthy with appearance and attractiveness, usually demand right? It’s like we’re cosplaying the idea of wellness. But actually, we’ll do anything including having dangerous procedures on all our body parts.

JJ 05:55

Was it earlobe-plasty? That was like the moment that I bottomed out and I was like, That’s it. This is end stage capitalism. We’re here. It’s arrived. We’re fucked.

Sarah Jones  06:06

Well, one of the things we wanted to talk to you about the royal we apparently it’s just me, but no, there will be like, 

Bella  06:45

Hi. I made her promise that she could just like let me say what’s up to you? Because like I Stan, what’s up? What’s up? I’m sorry. Hi. We love a little bit nervous. Okay. Yeah. 

Sarah Jones  06:25

Okay, so Bella loves you like not, it’s not a normal amount. And my characters may pop in, because one of the things that you’re so helpful, I think at helping people navigate is we’re not, we’re not the problem. And specifically, you know, this show is about politics and our trauma and hopefully healing them both so that they don’t keep killing us all because they’re in a little loop together. And I think a lot of us have like wellness trauma, like I’ve been that person who’s like, need to get some calorie you know, need to get the rest of this treadmill burn, I don’t think I’m gonna make it to my voting place. Like I was that way around body image, almost to the point that I didn’t have a life much less a political awareness and feeling like my personhood was dependent on what I weigh and all of that.

JJ  07:18

All of that, if women aren’t eating enough, if we’re not sleeping enough, because we’re getting up early to do our hair and go to the gym, and then we’re thinking all day about how to cheat time and gravity. It’s like, of course, we’re going to be distracted from our proper end goals, which are not eternal youth. It is not eternal fuckability, it is supposed to be our happiness, and our health, and our friends and our families, our community

Sarah Jones  08:15

Ourselves, for fuck sake.

JJ  08:18

Well, we’re supposed to squeeze those things in as an indulgence, pleasure has been rebranded as an indulgence rather than a necessity. And instead, we are just supposed to spend all of our time terrified over things that men are congratulated for, I know that there is an increase in body shaming for men, but when it comes to their wrinkles when it comes to their, their salt and pepper hair, you know men are not pressured in the same way to do this sort of thing. So it’s hard to to to not think of it as a conspiracy. So for now, we’ll just stick with extraordinary coincidence.

Sarah Jones  08:49

Wild coincidence and may it’s almost like diet, culture, fat phobia have rebranded themselves as No, no, no, this is good for you. This is part of the you know, you’re on social media, you care about self care, right? This is you’re a good person, so don’t worry, your obsession with weight is actually you know, we’re gonna rebrand it as something that’s virtuous. 

JJ  09:13

Yeah, it’s all it’s, it’s clear that it’s a lie because you can get on a plane and then six hours be somewhere with a completely different beauty standard. And we’re in the same year, we’re in the same day, month and year, all over the world. And yet, in India, the brown girls want to be lighter skinned, in America, the white girls are putting tanning products which are doing God knows what to their skin to get darker, threadings so their eyes look more Asian. And then you got Asian girls trying to widen their eyes to look more Western, like it’s chaos. 

Sarah Jones  09:50

So I– talk about gaslighting. I really believed all of the like BMI and I want to be really careful here obviously if people you know have health issues that need to be dealt with, that’s one thing, but an entire culture where you know the illusion that skinny by any means necessary equals health and wellness and good for you. Meanwhile, I remember reading it I believe it’s called fear of the black body by a professor called Sabrina Strings. She kind of breaks down the history of fatphobia as rooted in anti blackness and anti people of color narratives. So we’re all running around people of every background are running around panicking about an extra inch on their body or like you said, every inch of our bodies, and it’s impacting younger and younger people, of course. But also, I feel like if all of us who were like Black Lives Matter, okay, then stop your diet, because actually, this whole thing of like measuring ourselves against this impossible standard is rooted in, you know, racial hierarchy that blew my mind. 

JJ  10:50

Yeah, I think Listen, everyone should be eating nutritiously according to their own individual needs. Right? I don’t think it’s I don’t think that we should ever generalize with anything when it comes to people’s individual health. But you’re right that it is rooted in white supremacy, as is the hairlessness obsession, you know, that they used to look as look at people of ethnic minority, especially black and brown people as closer to animals and so then I got them having body hair. Alok is really brilliant about this. They’re a great educator on this subject. But they were telling me on my podcast that, you know, there is a there is a link to seeing hairiness as closer to being animal like and therefore, what they associate that with brown and black people and that’s why white people must be seen as completely hairless. And then obviously that then started to bleed out across other cultures where then we started to feel similar shames around hairlessness. But it all comes from it’s all it’s all rooted in racism. 

Sarah Jones  11:50

But this is so key because I think if people realized, I don’t wanna say it was my ethos, but I really was like, Okay, this is who I have to be. It just seeped in, I was an intelligent person otherwise, but I like you said, I was distracted by design. From all the politics, I knew I wanted, you know, I wanted to be living my values. And instead, I had no idea that, you know, all of the kind of chasing of these impossible body standards was itself counter to the politics that I believe in. And I don’t think people make that. And this is no shade to anybody. But yeah, there is a direct link between, you know, live real liberation, real wellness, and hopefully not needing to go under the knife to feel acceptable in this world.  It’s funny, Jamila mentioned conspiracy theories. But what we get into next really is controversial territory for a lot of people. And especially as a Brit, I know she can get a lot of flack for being critical of what’s going on here in the US. But I found her critiques to be really helpful reminders that we can’t talk about the wellness industrial complex, without facing these industrial size harms that are being done to many of us in the name of health and beauty. 

I was thinking even about just sort of the depths of cause the political includes all of our racial, you know, kind of class, and political stuff, it’s all over the world. I mean, we’re talking specifically about America here. But you know, we are leading the charge, like disguised as self care, and looking your best helps you feel your best and all that, you know, I get that. 

JJ  13:45

But you don’t need any of this in any other country on Earth. There are so many hundreds of chemicals that are legal here that are illegal in Europe where I grew up, like there is something wrong with the products in this country. And so rather than fix the products, they were like, brilliant, we’ll make these people sick. And then we will sell them increasingly unaffordable products. So this like poison and then sell you the cure system of America. This doesn’t exist. I cant believe how much this country has been gaslit into thinking it’s their fault.

Sarah Jones  14:24

I hope this pod is to help people see it’s not you, you and you can actually have a role in reclaiming your power. And it’s not easy.

JJ  14:30

It’s supply and demand, right, you know, like we keep perpetuating it, when we give attention to certain body types, or certain manufacturers or certain, you know, surgeons on Instagram or Tiktok, then what we’re saying explicitly, is that we are interested and therefore they keep supplying to our demand, this is a two way street. And we have to take some accountability, we can’t just play victim here. Because we, because it’s very important not to play victim because then you don’t feel like you have any power, it’s important to recognize that actually, you do have some power. And if we could all just stop fucking giving our time and energy and money to these people, they would shift accordingly, we can see that things shift when we want it to, we were able to for a while at least get body positivity to be a thing. And then as ozempic came in, and then everyone stopped supporting body positivity, and then it was sort of gone. And it was out in a massive way. And all the people I know who are working in that space are just like, can’t get a booking, right. 

Sarah Jones  15:30

But that reminds me around wellness. This, this is all stuff like body positivity versus body neutrality, right or things like orthorexia, which I had never heard of, but it’s the unhealthy obsession with eating only healthy, like only pure food, right? Or exercise bulimia, which I also didn’t know was a thing, even though I was doing it, right, like trying to burn off whatever you eat with exercise. So I think so few of us really know about all of this stuff, or how to name it. And we don’t realize we’re doing it while calling it health. So kind of like you said, you know, we don’t want to become victims. But how do we get informed but not overwhelmed around all of this? 

JJ  16:13

Okay, so what I would say is that how I have gotten to a personal place of peace is education. Right? I have educated myself about the history of the beauty industry, I have educated myself about the current state of patriarchy, I have educated myself about the side effects of a lot of the quick fix medications and pills and laxatives that are available to us. And when you understand it, it’s much harder for you to be manipulated and swayed, because then you can see it for how arbitrary it is. But I swear to God, if we could get our nutrition, and our exercise and our general education level of like, what’s happening in our society up, we would feel so much more in control right now. Because we just have we’re like this headline reading generation who just have been I used to be like this. Like just tidbits of information. And there’s just so much information that we’re being bombarded with our brains were not, our brains were never designed to take in this much information we were just supposed to identify is this very poisonous or not poisonous. You know, like, we just had such simple, simple brains that haven’t updated. According to this,

Sarah Jones  

we don’t have a new operating system.

JJ  17:30

So because of that, it means that we don’t dig deep into anything I learned this expression of what is it the call give me a second it is the illusion of explanatory depth. Wow. Okay, the illusion of explanatory depth. And I’ve only just learned about this recently, which perfectly explains me four years ago, and everyone I know, which is that we, we think we know about race, different things that we talk about. But if we were actually asked to explain them, we wouldn’t be able to we would be completely stumped. Because we’re just like a soundbite generation. We have this illusion of thinking that we understand what we’re actually dealing with or talking about. It’s like all these complex systems and hierarchies and chemicals and diseases like everything just coming at us all of the time, geopolitical nightmare after nightmare. And we have a kind of just like a 1% knowledge about all these different things and we speak about them with such confidence. Yes, we think we genuinely think we understand and we don’t and so to educate oneself, and actually learn to an explanatory level, about the things we care about, would massively inform how can we fill in the world because it is the feeling of chaos and not actually understanding what is happening. That is, I think, increasing our level of anxiety. And I only say that from my own personal experience, because the more I’ve grown to understand everything, the more I can understand a system, you cannot navigate a system that you do not understand. Right.

Sarah Jones  18:45

Right, and that’s when you feel powerless. I, what I was going to mention is this, I believe it’s that the human brain is still wired, because we haven’t had a supposed upgrade to our systems. We’re wired to be able to make 125 executive decisions per day, per day, right? That’s the berries. So if I’m on Instagram first thing in the morning deciding like, what to like and what not to, like, 125 times I’m done. I’m fried for the rest of the day. And then I’m supposed to go out and interact with the world and be a responsible citizens now.

JJ  19:10

protect your decision making at all costs, right?

Sarah Jones  

The decisions are in our hands. 

JJ  19:16

We have the power. Part of the problem is us. The market is always going to supply what they think that we demand. So they do manipulate us to think that we want these things. But once we wake up from the spell, and go Oh, actually, why did I come to the conclusion that I should look ageless forever? Where did I write conclusion that my labia is too big? 

Sarah Jones  19:46

When did I come to my ear low but I’m really this Yeah, all my pierced places. I’m exaggerating…

JJ  19:55

Once you once you wake up from the gaslighting, then I think that you have to unfollow the fucking people and the brands, and the surgeons and all the different people like stop giving it power, the market will change and shift towards us.

Sarah Jones  20:10

So let me ask you this right, it? You’re absolutely right. I’ve had the experience myself. I’ve had to do like physical, tangible exercises. And I’d love to hear anything because the whole point of America, Who Hurt You? is like, How the fuck do we heal though? Like, we can see the damage? How do we undo the damage in practical ways. I remember being told if you can stay out of the mirror like Okay, make sure you don’t have spinach in your teeth or whatever. But as much as you can get out of the orientation toward your appearance as who you are. Right? Do you have any kind of practical has anything?

JJ  20:40

Yeah, I only look at the mirror, twice a day i i normally have never lived in a house with like a full length mirror until recently. And I just kind of avoid it unless I’m about to leave the house for a red carpet. And I just have to glance to make sure I don’t have any like jizz on me or something. 

Sarah Jones 21:00

Okay. First of all, thank you for the jizz on me. But secondly, I have to interrupt with what Lorraine is saying to me right now. I’ll just let her say it.

Lorraine  21:15

Okay, it’s all well and good. Look at you. You don’t have to look at a mirror. Anybody could tell you. You’re absolutely perfect as you are. I’m sorry. I hate to break it to you. But you gorgeous sweetheart. So that’s my point. When you’re my age. Unfortunately, I have a mirror around every corner just to remind me of the harvest from all sides.

Sarah Jones 21:33

Now, that’s not ideal, because the rain was raised in at a time when it really was like, You know what, how you look, I wanted to say that are living, right? Like it’s real that I’ve been told I either need to lose weight or gain weight for a role. So how do we navigate a world that even outside the entertainment industry is fat phobic in hiring practices. Like how do we navigate the realities of how the you know, this illusion of wellness or health or whatever, can be institutional and kind of imposed on us even if we’re trying to do the right thing where we are?

JJ  22:12

It has to be a group effort, and it has to start with you. So you have to also start checking yourself as to what you say to yourself in the mirror what you say about yourself, you know, that’s so funny. How often will be like, Well, I’m too unattractive for anyone to love me. You would never say that to a friend of yours. You would never say that to a colleague. You would never say that to anyone that you care for or respect and yet you freely say these things to yourself like I don’t deserve this. I’m gonna sabotage myself. So first of all, it comes in building ourselves up. Another thing I would suggest is exercise. I cannot stress this enough how important exercise is and how bizarre it is that diet culture has taken over exercise and bastardized it and made it something that we do for our aesthetic. Oh my god. Yeah, for your mental health. I am literally begging you to move your body in any way you can. Even if you cannot walk, find a way to move your arms, but for 15 minutes and nine seconds a day. That is how long it takes for your body to release happy endorphins right ASICs did a study it’s 15 minutes and nine seconds a day. It immediately starts to make you feel more in control. Get off your phone, get off your phone, look at your screen time. Fuckin cut it in half and then cut it down to a quarter spend as little time on social media as you can spend as little time following people, like unfollow all the people who are toxic, do not participate. If you do not if enough of us and encourage your friends not to participate, if you see that they are having a toxic reaction to the people that they’re following online and comparing themselves and trying to change themselves to match that, give them the same advice, start a walking clubs or any kind of joyous exercise, it doesn’t have to be an expensive gym, you don’t have to wear the Lululemon matching bra and thong, please don’t take the power back over your own body like doing that, when I was training for Marvel was the first time I’d ever exercise and it wasn’t to lose weight, it was to gain balance to be able to kick higher and to be able to have bigger thighs, like stronger thighs. Yeah, and it completely what I what I didn’t even really notice the physical changes that much because I was in so much pain. And there’s that part don’t like get that level of fit at the age of 37. Because it will kill you. But the difference in my mental health was unbelievable. I came down on anti anxiety meds, I stopped shopping as much as when you’re unhappy as when you’re more likely to buy things to acquire to fill the void. And I made a I did a huge call on the internet of who and what I look at, I was like, You know what, I just actually don’t need to be that informed. If information is that important, it will find me just like it did when I was younger, I don’t need to know everything that everyone was doing. I don’t need to look at these images of these poreless ageless women who are older than me, I just need to I need to exist and be present in the moment. I also highly recommend spending time with animals. Yeah, spending time with them. They don’t give a shit what you look like they are so much more sane than the rest of us. And and then like I said, voting with the dollar man, like you get to decide who’s famous. You get to decide who is successful and what is successful. And so take that power back and protect your mind.

Sarah Jones  25:12

Yes, yes. So all of this. And for me, this is kind of a bridge to a conversation about our political power. Because I really meant it, that like the size of my thighs about you know, and I want to be clear about this. I had anxiety and this was a way for my anxiety to manifest that was socially acceptable. I could get together with all my friends and panic about carbs. And it just seemed normal. When really what I needed was, I started to say like, did my therapist send you because I’m like, I can’t write down all the things she says. But luckily, we’re recording this. Like the there is a practical almost like a manual of things that you can do to be restored to who you are so that then you can look around in the world instead of at your phone or at your ass in the mirror and say wait a minute, this society doesn’t reflect who I am.

JJ  26:00

It’s a sick society. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying is that get offline, get offline, get back to your friends go and do things in your community. I spend very little time on the internet now, very, very little I spend most of my time with my friends or with animals or outside. I am not interested in absorbing myself anymore in this virtual gaslighting.

Sarah Jones  26:24

That part. Well, that brings me to I am kind of irrationally hopeful, in spite of how bad the onslaught is, because ultimately wellness is social justice. Like that’s what it really is. It isn’t diet culture, or fat phobia or body obsession. And I think as people, you know, can come home to themselves as a source of their own wellness. Like literally, when I can just stop, like you said, and notice that I just said something terrible inside my own mind about my own body, then I can stop and say, Wait a minute, where did I get that from? And realize it was some kid on the street in New York, you know, 15 years ago, and then work on that. Like it actually does work to change your mind? Yeah, wellness.

JJ  27:08

I think wellness is affection. It’s time with loved ones. It is eating nutritious whole foods, it is getting a little bit of exercise every day. And in an affordable way that works for you that fits in with your schedule. It is not living to work, it is not waiting to rest when you are dead. Or when you’re older. It is learning to be present it is spending time with nature, it is spending time in love. Like that is what true wellness is none of those things can be sold to you in a tincture bottle. Like none of those things can be sold to you in a pill. All of those things can maybe slightly alleviate the pain that we’re in. But until we get back to the fundamental values of what makes humanity amazing, which has connection and compassion and community and and true care for oneself looking at your body as an engine that you are fueling for the day. Until we can get back to that and look at that as real success rather than acquisition and acquisition of bullshit that we don’t need. Then we’re never gonna get well it all lies in us as individuals and as I said it is much harder to manipulate people who are awake, who understand who are kind to themselves and who are well.

Sarah Jones  28:28

I mean, I this equipment is too expensive, but I’d like to drop this mic. Okay, not gonna drop it. My engineer just screamed no. So virtually dropping it. Thank you Jamila. It’s so good to hear you. I’m giving you grace. Thank you, my dear, appreciate you.

Nereida  28:58

You know what, I think I really needed to hear that. Just thinking about all the hours I’ve spent juicing root vegetables for these diet cleanses. I don’t even like jicama!

Rashid  

Yeah and I might have to cancel my yoga subscription, saying they got me on auto pay son.

Lorraine  

I think that’s Jamila’s was point Rashid. As much as wellness is about putting good things in your body, fancy yogurt that costs more than your sneakers, just go for a walk in your sneakers.

Sarah Jones  29:52

Yes, Lorraine, because you know, the marketing may be about wellness. But ultimately, these companies are also trying to make money. So we just got to be careful about believing everything they say even the experts, it doesn’t mean we can’t trust them. But we also get to trust ourselves a little bit. And our common sense 

Bella: 

Totally, like the common sense that if you’re so stressed about eating only organic that you’re having anxiety attacks, then you might be getting diminishing returns on the whole clean eating thing. That’s why I use a rose quartz chakra cleanser I got on Tik Tok to regulate my internal balance instead. 

SJ: 

Well, I mean, sure, Bella, maybe also try what Jamila said about being on social media less. But that brings me to this week’s prompt. And as usual, I hope you will join me in getting quiet and putting your hand on your heart. Or maybe don’t, maybe this time, you could wiggle around and make some noise. I don’t know, you get to choose whatever would feel good to you. If wellness is ultimately about feeling truly happy and healthy inside your own skin, then maybe you can find something that makes you feel alive internally, even alongside whatever is going on externally. You could practice deep breathing. You could make some art without judging it, please, you could go outside and listen to the birds. You don’t have to buy anything. You don’t have to restrict anything. And if whatever you choose feels healthy but not happy, then maybe it’s not the right answer to the prompt for you. So you can try again. Maybe even come up with your own prompt. If you need some inspiration, check out our show notes, we’ll link to some of what Jameela mentioned, including her pod, iWeigh, and the episode with comedian and poet, Alok Vaid-Menon.  Also if you do try the prompt, I hope you’ll share it with us on socials at yes-I’m-Sarah-Jones. And no matter what. Here’s to your health.

Sarah Jones 32:59

America, Who Hurt You? was created by Sarah Jones and Sell/Buy/Date LLC. Remember to follow, rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can keep up with pod and share your prompt responses  at Yes-I’m-Sarah-Jones on Instagram and TikTok. 

America, Who Hurt You? is a collaboration of Foment Productions and The Meteor, made possible by the Pop Culture Collaborative. Our host is me, Sarah Jones, our producer is Kimberly Henry, with editorial support from Phil Surkis. Our executive producers are me and Cindi Leive. Our audio engineer is Shawn Tao Lee. Our Logo was designed by Bianca Alvarez, and our music is by Coma-Media.

Jane Fonda: And I decided that I was going to leave everything behind and become an activist I have been vilified. I’ve been shot at. I’ve had bombs dropped around me. Homes have been broken into and phones tapped and threatened and all of that. I wouldn’t give up a moment of it and go back to the empty life. I think that every one of us needs to feel that our life has meaning

Sarah Jones: Hi, everybody. Welcome to America Who Hurt You, the pod where we talk in many voices about politics, our trauma, and how we can heal them both. I’m your host, Sarah Jones, and I’m here with a few co hosts, Rashid. 

Rashid: Yeah. What’s up America? 

Sarah Jones: Nereida. 

Nereida: Hola, hola, everybody.

Sarah Jones: Lorraine. 

Lorraine: Hi there. 

Sarah Jones: And Bella. 

Bella: Hi everyone. 

Sarah Jones: So you already know they’re not exactly co hosts. They are my characters from my one person shows and my movie, Cell By Date. And they’re probably going to jump into interviews with our guests. But especially today, since this week, our guest is the one and only Jane Fonda. 

Lorraine: I can’t believe it. You know, she won an Oscar for both Clute and Coming Home. I just rewatched them both.

Bella: Well, in the workout video I found on YouTube, she’s giving like leotard leg warmer feminism. I just knew she was a sag. 

Nereida: I was trying to finish reading her memoir in time for this, but then I’ve also been phone banking for my congressman, volunteering at a soup kitchen, plus campaigning for this climate justice group I just joined, and I 

Lorraine: Oh my goodness, Nereida, slow down. Where’s the fire?

Nereida: Um, Lorraine, the fire is literally the entire planet. 

Rashid: Aight I know it’s a lot right now, but if you burn yourself out, you kind of like add into the fire. 

Nereida: Rashid, don’t shame me when I’m just trying to do everything I can. It’s not my fault there’s only 24 hours in the day and like five minutes until the election.

I can’t tap out now. 

Sarah Jones: Nereida, I get it. And I think this conversation with Jane Fonda could actually help you. People might hear her name and just think Hollywood celebrity, but she has decades of experience as a serious activist and movement leader. Plus, she’s had years of practice at finding balance so she doesn’t burn out.

Rashid: Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Longevity. Especially since ain’t nobody solving these problems overnight. 

Bella: Yeah, totally. Like it’s a whole marathon, not just one amazing aerobics class from the 80s. 

Sarah Jones: that’s why I’m so excited to talk to Jane and hear not just how she got into activism, but how she’s found these connections between all the issues she cares about and how she sustains herself through all this work all these years. 

Jane, you are one of the busiest people. I literally don’t know how you do it all.And you know, one of the things I love so much about being around you

Jane Fonda: We’ve spent a lot of time together

Sarah Jones: We’ve spent a lot of time together. I looked at my life and I was like, what did I do to deserve hanging out with Jane Fonda this much? This is a lot of Jane, but the truth is. because of the way you lend your voice to people who otherwise wouldn’t be I already knew you as this iconic figure, but 

for people who maybe don’t know, who are, you I’m thinking of my Gen Z, character.

Bella: Jane, I know you like you’re, it’s true. You’re iconic and like truly iconic, not in the way that like, you know, like, if you get a really great haircut, you’re iconic, you’re like actually iconic, also great haircut. Um, but for those of us who like, the first time we saw you maybe was like monster in law or like Grace and Frankie and like then.

If, like, we go Google you, you’re, like, getting arrested as, like, an activist

Jane Fonda: Tell us, like, for people who don’t know. Like, how would you describe yourself Whoa. Well,

I’m white. I’m privileged. I’m the daughter of a famous movie star. Who’s name is Henry Fonda. Um, my mother died when I was 12. She suffered from mental illness. My brother died from lung cancer a few years ago. He was an actor. Um, I was. I think totally lost and unhappy for the beginning part of my life.

Then I became hedonistic. Then I learned the truth about the Vietnam war. I was 31. I was pregnant and I decided that I was going to leave everything behind and become an activist to end the war

Sarah Jones: Wow. I just have to pause you for a second because already Bella, that character,Like, what’s the hedonism part like? Like, I need to know more, 

Jane Fonda: I did a lot of playing around people say, oh, my God, you’re so incredible. You’ve been an activist all your life. I haven’t, which in a way is good because the before and after is very vivid for me. And I would not turn back for anything in the world.

I have been vilified. I’ve been shot at. I’ve had bombs dropped around me. Homes have been broken into and phones tapped and threatened and all of that. I wouldn’t give up a moment of it and go back to the empty life. I think that we need all of us. Every one of us needs  to feel that our life has meaning. Feel to feel that they could answer the question. Why am I here? What am I supposed to be? 

you know, and it’s very hard when you’re young. I’m speaking now to, um, what’s what’s her name with the glasses 

Sarah Jones: Oh, 

Bella: me, Bella? Yeah. Oh my God. 

Jane Fonda: Bella, it’s very hard to be young, you know, to figure out a lot of questions when you’re young.

But I remember how much my life changed and how happy I became when I became an activist. It was fun. The people that I met were people that I, I just, it was, I had never met people like that before. I mean, my dad was a little bit like the people I met when I became an activist in that he was a very, he had really solid values and, and, um,

Bella: What values? Like, I, I’m so super curious. 

Jane Fonda: justice. I mean, think of the, he, you know, he produced and starred in the movie 12 angry men.

He also starred in, he played the lead character in grapes of wrath, the great Steinbeck novel. The wrong man, the oxbow, so many movies about justice and fairness to the underdogs.

Sarah Jones: Ok, that’s enough from Bella. It’s Sarah again, Jane. So do you feel like your experience growing up with your dad and you also mentioned your mom’s mental illness, which I can really relate to having family members with mental health issues and how that impacted me. I think for so many people, trauma means you’ve been through a war or you’ve been through something, you know, kind of unspeakable and terrible.

But the idea of something like having a mom who’s struggling with mental health issues that can be traumatic for a kid or,For me, it’s just a part of my story that I had to be resilient in a certain way. And I feel like you’ve talked about that is how does that connect up with the woman you’ve become, but also what you got from your dad, what, what you got maybe from your mom, I actually got something from my relatives with mental health issues, you know, alongside the struggles.

I’m curious about any of that. 

Jane Fonda: Well, my dad, you know, I once had a conversation, a phone conversation with, um, Martin Luther King’s daughter. I asked her if, if, if her father had bounced her on his knees and talked to her about life and values and how to behave and blah, blah, blah. And she said, no, he didn’t.

Sarah Jones: Hmm.

Jane Fonda: And I said, yeah, my father never did too.

You had your father’s sermons.

Sarah Jones: Right. 

Jane Fonda: I had my father’s movies. And so, because each of us respected and loved our fathers, those sermons and those movies inculcated values in us, unconsciously. It was like, um, the soil. I grew up with a fertile soil that was then fertilized 

when I was older 

older 

Sarah Jones: Hmm.

Jane Fonda: by the people that were fighting against the Vietnam War.

Sarah Jones: Wow. And so really, you. It took your experiences of, you know, in part, your dad’s movies raising you as much as maybe he raised you. But I think that’s really powerful too, right? Because we have to find what we can. 

but I want to focus You know, the part of you that, as you said, was lost, 

 but you also are so clearly, you know who you are now. Was there a spark in you even in your teenage years, in your twenties, even when you felt lost, was there a sense of like, well, I feel lost, but I know there’s something in here. I just have to find it.

Where is it? What is it? Did you have that?

Jane Fonda: Well, you know, resilience is an interesting thing. I don’t know if you can create, I think you’re born with it, or you’re born without 

1. Mysterious thing. Um, I was born with it. And what I mean by that is in spite of the, um, instability, inconsistency at home, um, I was always as a little girl scanning the horizon, like a laser beam, an infrared beam for any warm body that could teach me something or take care of me or love me.

 I was, I was sexually abused at 7 and, um. 

 My mother was abused when she was the same age 7 years 

old. And I always knew as a child that something bad had happened to her. Um, That she could not be present as a, as a mother. And I, but I didn’t know what it was until I was, you know, much later in my

 actually I was in my 60s writing my memoir. And, um. I managed to access the records of my mother when she was in, she committed suicide in an institution, and I discovered that way that she’d been abused. And that kind of thing is passed from what happens to a person who’s been abused can manifest.

In future generations

Sarah Jones: Yes.

Jane Fonda: I was, I have been a resilient child and, um, have always, I’ve never felt that I was good enough. So I always committed myself to getting better. Whatever that meant, whether it meant joining a religion, whether it meant going into therapy, meditate, all those things.

I’ve worked very, very, very hard on myself.

Sarah Jones: you’re making me think of something I’ve heard and I wonder if this resonates with you. The idea that, you know, with trauma We hope to bounce back from it, right? But some people bounce forward and that’s what you’re describing, right?

the fact that you’ve become an activist who is so passionate, who, you know, lends your voice to people who have either experienced trauma. You could think of the planet as experiencing the trauma that human beings, are perpetrating against it.

 you have a unique ability to empathize. would you think of it as empathy that when you meet other people who perhaps, like you said, you just discovered this, right? you’ve been Jane Fonda out there in the world doing all the incredible things you’ve been doing all these years.

 before learning about your mother. I’m thinking about listeners out there who maybe haven’t yet discovered, or they can feel there’s something there. how would you help people arrive at the decision to, okay, I’m going to do some personal work or I’m going, and not everybody is a movie star.

Jane Fonda: Not everybody is a white woman with privilege as you describe yourself, but. what can help us if you think about, uh, activism out there in the world, it’s almost like we need to be activists within, like, what can we do to take really committed action to uncover or discover whatever might be going on with us? Yeah, I think it has to be both. I mean, because I could have done all the work on myself But right now, if I wasn’t an activist, I would be so depressed because of what’s happening to the planet. So, I think it requires both. Um, well, partly it requires being curious. I think one of the most important things is to stay curious, you know, little children are curious, but why, what looking at things, picking them up, asking questions, questions, questions.

Well, it’s good to stay that way. I learn every day. so I think it was curiosity that made me want to be better. That made me want to, to,overcome my insufficiencies and inadequaciesand, and just knowing that you actually can change how you behave.

 You can change how youPresent to the world all those kinds of things, you know, but you have to be You have to really dig down and, and, and work at it. Part of it is reading books about psychology and why certain like, you know, when I, when Ted Turner, my third husband and I were divorced in 2000, I realized that I really needed to understand him in a way that I couldn’t when I was living with him, and so I read a lot of books like Alice Miller’s, um, the drama 

Sarah Jones: of the Drama of the Gifted child 

 and it shed a lot of light on him. And consequently, I could learn about how I was in the relationship. What was my role and, you know, having it not last forever, et cetera, and so forth. So, I do a lot of reading, and I think reading is really a good way to learn stuff that you might not know from your friends or from watching television.

So that’s 1 thing writing. I’ve written a book that I like a lot. It’s called what is it called?

If it’s my favorite.

Jane Fonda: It’s called primetime. That’s right. Um, in order to write that I sometimes write a book because I want to learn I forces me to research. So I, you know, I learned a lot about resilience and about how people change and what does change and what doesn’t and

That was very helpful, but in it, I described the value of doing what, what is called a life review when I wrote my, my memoir. I didn’t realize that I was doing a life review and why that’s so important. Even if it’s never published, it doesn’t matter. But, uh, so I would recommend reading my book primetime.

Sarah Jones: I love it. I love it. And this is also to me unique about you that, you know, you’ve written, like you said, you write almost to learn about yourself, but you also study, you study others. From what I can remember, your, uh, activism, your anti war activism also started with reading a book. Isn’t that right?

That’s right.

Jane Fonda: Yeah, I have a lot of book epiphanies a soldier who had been in Vietnam and had fled and come to Paris where I was living and had a family. Um, I didn’t believe the things he was telling me about Vietnam. And he gave me a book by Jonathan shell called the village of Ben. Sook and I read it in a 1 sitting and.

I closed the book and I made a decision to change my life.

Sarah Jones: Wow. And may I ask, what about, cause when you say, here’s this man, right? Telling you he’s his experience and you couldn’t believe it. What do you think that is? Sometimes I think there’s a uniquely American thing that we are either raised to not know. You know, it’s almost like our education system is like, don’t look over here, kid.

Don’t look behind that curtain. You know, maybe it’s not only an American thing, 

Do you feel like that was a factor at all? 

Jane Fonda: you know, my dad was in the Navy and he was given a bronze star and he, I mean, we were kind of patriotic and I just assumed I wanted to assume that if our soldiers were fighting someplace that we were on the side of the angels. And it was very hard for me to hear the opposite, you know, like when I I’ve been living in France quite for 10 years before that time when I read that book and all the French talking about how terrible it was that we were fighting in Vietnam.

I just viewed it as sour grapes. They’ve been there before we were and they lost the Vietnamese beat them too. And, um, I didn’t allow it in.

Sarah Jones: you say, that is so helpful for me to hear because it gives me compassion for people who say now, right, in 2024, they need to believe what they need to believe about, you know, our behavior as a world power, our, you know, foreign policy and some of the things that we’re doing out there. It helps me to think maybe these people are just.

Jane Fonda: Unable to let in the truth. And when I hear you say, reading this book changed your life. There’s, but I just remembered before I read the book and before I met that soldier, several things had happened that had softened me up. Before I moved to France in the 60s, in the early 60s, I had a friend who was part of the Freedom Rides. These are people, mostly young white students, going from the northern part of North America to down south to register black people to vote.

Sarah Jones: So this was during the civil rights era.

Jane Fonda: Yes. And she, she said, you’ve got to come down. And I did not. I chose instead to go to France. Um, 

Sarah Jones: Do you regret that? Do you regret not going on the freedom rides?

Jane Fonda: no, because I needed that time in France to become someone who could handle what was happening in the South.

Sarah Jones: Oh, I love that answer.

Jane Fonda: I made up for it

Sarah Jones: You sure did. I was about to say, but what do you think that is in you, Jane?

Jane Fonda: it could be, I have a very strong feeling about this, that when you’re innocent, when you don’t know, You don’t know once, you know, once you discover something that needs to be acted upon and you don’t, then you’re part of the problem. And, and I just, I want to state that because to show how important protest is. I was pregnant at the time and I was, um, I almost lost the pregnancy. So I was in bed in 1968 when there was this huge March in the United States.

Anti war protesters marching on the Pentagon and the Pentagon surrounded by armed soldiers and these students coming up to them and handing them flowers and protesting and I said, I want to be there. I just felt drawn to those people. 

So that made me ready to be reading a book that would change my life.

Sarah Jones: Mm.

Jane Fonda: And, you know, it’s happened to me all reading is, is such a way to make your life better. I think,

Sarah Jones: I mean, I’m grateful for every book you’ve read because vicariously, you know, as you’re talking about this, the parallels, right? The number of times that we as Americans are led to believe whatever it might be, right? Are the people in our government. will tell us that we have to go to war and we have to give up all our tax dollars to, you know, to supposedly fend off a threat somewhere.

And meanwhile, we don’t have education. We don’t have, you know, access to healthcare for everybody. It’s, it makes me think there are many people who still have to keep having that awakening many wars later, but it makes me want to ask you. I mean, and this is important, you could have read that book and maybe even said, Oh, this is an interesting topic.

And sure, you know, I care, but you still could have gone right back to, I mean, you’ve, you’ve once, you’ve been nominated for six Oscars. You won two, you know, um, you know, Early in your career, you cemented your status as a major star. So you could have just, relaxed and lived your life as a celebrated artist who’s smart and cares about things, but you certainly didn’t have to become the Jane Fonda we know.

Jane Fonda: well, it’s, I allowed myself to know whether it was a wounded rabbit in the woods, a kid that was hungry, whatever it is. When I know there’s trouble, it’s very hard for me to not act, to turn away from it, and that’s, you know, that’s what happens in terms of the environment. I, you know, I, I, I’ve always been an environmentalist because I always was nature was my solace.

I was a tomboy outside caring about nature and, you know, and every time there was a protest, I would go and I would speak and, but along about 2019, I read a book by Naomi Klein. It wasn’t the most important book she’s done on climate. I had read another book, but I was ready when I read this book. first of all, it talked about Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist who at 15 sat With a little sign that said, I am on a climate strike from school in front of the Swedish parliament and sparked a global movement. 

And at 1st, I learned in this book, she didn’t believe what she was learning from science. Because she thought if what they’re saying is true about global warming, all the adults around me wouldn’t be going about business as usual. All that anybody would be thinking about is, what do we do?

 And so she didn’t believe it. And when she realized it was true, she stopped talking and almost stopped eating for almost a year. Her father feels that stunted her growth. She went into a very deep depression. She said, our house is on fire. We cannot go about business as usual.

This is a crisis. And I just, I knew it was true. Then the other thing in the book was the way she talked about the science. It laid it out like homework and I had never really read. Scientific reports,

Sarah Jones: About

Jane Fonda: have our climate emissions in half by 2030. We have to stop all new drilling and fracking and we have to begin a gradual phase out altogether of fossil fuels.

And so that was it. I knew what I had to do. Let’s move to Washington and get arrested. And I did.

Sarah Jones Scarlett: And you started doing , Fire Drill Fridays right, So just so I make it clear for folks, Fire Drill Fridays was you and Greenpeace and activists coming together, I remember, and then you were doing them virtually because of the pandemic, 

the, 

Jane Fonda: 10 million people following us online after the pandemic hit, we had to do it online. And what was so interesting, Sarah, is we were, we were online with Fire Drill Fridays every Friday with a guest who would come or more than one when George Floyd was murdered. And so we began to have our guests were mostly black, mostly women, not entirely, but mostly black women and some black men talking about the relationship between climate and racism.

And what I, what I learned was there would, if there was no racism, there’d be no climate crisis.

Sarah Jones: wow.

Jane Fonda: If there was no patriarchy, there’d be no climate crisis. It’s a mentality that puts certain people, mainly white men, on top of the pyramid. Nature is at the bottom to be exploited, and then women of color, and then white women, and it goes up to the white men.

And, and it’s a mentality. and um, That was a big for me because it allowed the intersectionality of things that I had been working on to join me in this fight to save us and the climate.

So if you could say to our listeners, you know, first of all, the ways that you can make connect these dots, I think this is so huge. And I think again, the idea of talking about what’s hurting us personally and what’s hurting us as a planet and as a country, those things are so linked and 

Sarah Jones: For the person who’s saying, Oh, the environment, I don’t know. That’s not really important. I’m worried about immigration. I’m worried about my relatives getting deported. I’m worried about that. What would you say to people and what would you encourage them to do

if they can’t 

Jane Fonda: Well, 1st of all, I just read that the World Health Organization feels that there could be as many as 1. 5 billion climate refugees by mid century. So, if you’re worried about immigration. Just imagine what it’s going to be in 30 years.we, we haven’t even begun to understand what’s going to happen to us if we don’t do something about the climate crisis.

Now,  I do individual things. I know that it’s not going to be the solution to the problem, but 

because the problem is structural. The problem we, you know, we have all the money. We have the technology. We need now. We don’t need to go and invent a lot of new things.

we have 70 percent of Americans really care. You know, want something to be done. We have everything but the political will we don’t we we don’t have people elected to office who understand the gravity and are willing to be brave enough to do something about it. And that’s why I encourage people to vote with climate in their hearts.

Find out if and you can find out if the person you want to give money to takes money from the. Fossil fuel industry or if you want to vote for somebody, find out if they take money from oil and gas, because a lot of Democrats as well as Republicans do that. And it’s why I started the Jane Fonda climate pack to, to give money to people who vowed never to take money from the fossil fuel industry and to stand up to them when they’re elected to office.

We’ve got to elect people to office that care about the planet and people and not just corporations and not just getting rich. So one of the big things that your listeners can do is vote for people who will care about the planet and you, and not just rich, being rich, rich, rich, and not, you know, a lot of rich people I know are going to vote for the orange guy because he’ll cut their taxes.

Sarah Jones: They get to enjoy 30 more years of good taxes before the planet ceases to exist.

Jane Fonda: No, I mean, it’s just so disturbing.

Sarah Jones: It really–I can’t On that note, and we’ll make sure to link in the description to how folks can learn more about their representatives and get involved

 because I think people can feel really hopeless, especially young people. And I remember you talking about, you know, not only how nature has been so important to you, but you can. you know, describe a time when there wasn’t smog in L.

1. and freeways and, you know, when the water wasn’t so polluted And so how would you say? Maybe it could help kids who they’ve, all they’ve grown up with is the hopelessness of what you described with Greta Thunberg.

Maybe helping them know another way is possible is that something that you find you have to, Tell young people, Hey, it doesn’t have to be like this.

Jane Fonda: And it’s true. I mean, the scientists are saying it’s not too late. People have to wake up and, and act. Okay, you can act by voting. You can act by joining organizations. You know, if, if, you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far and deep, go together. That’s why when I got struck by a bolt of lightning, reading that book and deciding I wanted to.

Become a climate activist, I called Greenpeace because I wasn’t going to do it by myself. I would have done it all wrong. And it wouldn’t have made any difference. I went to an organization that I knew was brave enough. They were standing up to fossil fuels. Not all big green organizations were even 6 years ago, believe it or not.

And, um. And with Greenpeace, specifically the woman who was running it at that time, Annie Leonard, we built something that that continues. We’re now training people to become organizers and activists

Sarah Jones: Yes. Beautiful. Well, and I know we need to wrap up, Jane. I have to just ask What do you do for joy and for, you know, healing practices?

You’ve mentioned that you write. People can journal if they can’t publish four beautiful books, but what do you suggest for people who just, they need that hope they need that joy practice or that healing practice?

Jane Fonda: Don’t be alone. join an organization, so that you’ll make new friends who share your commitment. Number one, I, you know. I sleep 9 hours every night. So, you

Sarah Jones: the snap Jane. You’re my hero.

Jane Fonda: that helps a lot. I, I walk a lot. and I stay curious and I, most of my really close friends are, you know, share my beliefs and values and passions.

and so I don’t feel alone.

Sarah Jones: You help me feel less alone. You are such a fun hang. Jane Fonda. 

Jane Fonda: Well, you’re a fun hang.

Jane Fonda: thank 

Sarah Jones: Thank you for spending time with us. And I can’t wait for people to, you know, get on board and vote like our planet and our lives depend on it because they do.

Jane Fonda: Yes. Thank you,

Sarah Jones: Thank you, Jane. 

Bella: That was epic!

Lorraine: Listen, us over 85s, we know a thing or two. Remember that next time you call me Boomer. 

Bella: I receved that Lorraine.

Rashid: Yeah. Jane got me with that whole starting out military father, patriotic and all that. But then learning the truth about the Vietnam war. 

Bella: Yeah. Like no cap. Every time she mentioned Vietnam, I just kept thinking about Gaza and Sudan and Congo and like how so few people even know what’s really happening. But I guess it also gave me some hope. But like, if she woke up, maybe we will too, eventually. 

Nereida: Well, I also appreciated that she said it’s all connected. Like most people don’t realize wars don’t just destroy people. They destroy the planet too. And like she said, if you care about immigration or women’s rights, racism, you have to care about the climate because we’re impacted the most by all of it.

Rashid: Yeah, true facts. But did you also hear her say you need to go for a walk sometimes too? I’m not saying stop doing the work. I’m saying you got to have other parts of your life that’s feeding you. You feel me? 

Sarah Jones: Exactly, Rashid. Fighting for the change we need is so necessary and it can be rewarding. But it can also be super overwhelming. So alongside our activism, we need to have other aspects of our life that fill us up. Which brings me to this week’s prompt and thinking about some practices that can replenish and sustain us, not just till November, but till we’re in our eighties and beyond. So if you’re with me. Let’s get quiet, put your hand on your heart and think about something that really lights you up.

Something super easy to access though. Like, especially when things feel toughest, maybe it’s cuddling with your kids or your pets. I’m looking at you, my fellow childless cat ladies, or maybe there’s a favorite playlist. You can sing or dance to in your living room just for five minutes. If that’s all you have, but 15 would really get your endorphins going.

Just saying, or. For those times when even reaching for a playlist feels impossible, or mobility issues or fatigue make movement harder, I’ve actually just learned that a deep breath in, followed by a deep hum out as you exhale, kind of like saying om in a yoga class, can instantly calm your entire nervous system.

Try doing it several times in a row. We’ll link to more info about this technique and the science behind it, which real talk, a lot of folks grandma’s probably been doing in a church pew or temple somewhere most of their lives, but we’ll share more in the show notes.

 Jane also mentioned her habits of reading, writing, being in nature.

You can pick whatever appeals to you. And add it to your list to have handy on your phone or your fridge door, somewhere that can remind you to find balance when it all gets to be too much. Let us know if you try any of this and if you haven’t done one of our prompts yet and shared about it with us on social media, we hope you reach out because we would love to hear from you. 

 America, who hurt you was created by Sarah Jones and sell by date LLC. Don’t forget to follow rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can keep up with the pod and share your prompt responses at yes. I’m Sarah Jones on Instagram and tick tock and all the social places. America Who Hurt You is a collaboration of Foment Productions and The Meteor, made possible in part by the Pop Culture Collaborative.

Our host is me, Sarah Jones, our producer is Kimberly Henry, with editorial support from Phil Serkis, our executive producers are me and Cindy Levy, our audio engineer is Sean Tao Lee, our logo was designed by Bianca Alvarez, and our music is by Coma Media.

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Sarah Jones: Hi, everybody. Welcome to America Who Hurt You, the pod where we talk in many voices about politics, our trauma, and how we can heal them both. I’m your host, Sarah Jones, and I’ll be joined by a few co hosts, Rashid,

Rashid: What’s good, y’all?

Sarah Jones: Nereida

Nereida: Hola everybody.

Sarah Jones: Lorraine,

Lorraine: Hello there.

Sarah Jones: and Bella.

Bella: Hi guys.

Sarah Jones Scarlett: And as you know, they’re not quite co-hosts, they’re my characters from my one person shows and my movie, Sell/Buy/Date, who like to talk to my guests. 

Speaking of, today’s guest is my friend Ai jen Pooh. She’s here to talk to us about the care economy, which apparently the whole country is a part of, even though most of us have never even heard of it.

Rashid: Hold up, the care economy? That mean like, do I care about economics and money and whatnot, right? I mean, yeah, I’m all about the care economy.

Sarah Jones Scarlett: No, Rashid, well, money is in there, but it’s actually more about people and jobs,

Sarah Jones: Even though most of the jobs associated with the care economy, including childcare work, housekeeping, elder care, they don’t get the respect they deserve in general, much less acknowledgment for their huge contribution to our economy. That’s actually why I wanted to introduce a special guest cohost for this episode. Or you wanna introduce your self Miss Lady.?

Miss Lady: Hi everybody, y’all could call me Miss Lady. I’m not gon’ give y’all my goverment name since i don’t know who out there in the podcast internet. And I know i don’t sound like no fancy co-host or whatever but that don’t mean i don’t have something to say. So a liitle bit about me–I’m from the south and I been around a long time. And I did work in folks’ homes taking care of children and the whole family since tback when that job was called a “domestic” and for sure before anybody was talkin about this “care economy.” So i wanna hear what ya’ll got to say.

Sarah Jones: Thank you Miss Lady, i appreciate you, and especially that you can add some first hand experience of the history of care, but most people don’t realize they’re interacting with the care economy every day. Actually, let me ask all of you this. When I say domestic workers, nannies, or home care workers, what do you think of?

Nereida: I think it’s complicated…on the one hand it makes me proud because I think of how hard my mom worked when she was a home health aid, but on the on the other hand it’s frustrating because people don’t see those jobs as like deserving respect, and growing up sometimes I felt embarrassed that I had a lot of caregivers and cleaners in my family. 

Bella: Well, now this feels problematic or whatever, but I actually had a nanny growing up and she was like my second mom. I loved her so much. I just, I do remember that like, she was with us so much of the time , I kind of felt guilty that like she wasn’t with her own kids.

Nereida: No shade, Bella, but oh yeah, she probably didn’t get to see her kids. And it shouldn’t be like that–you shouldn’t have to miss out on your own life just because you’re supporting someone else’s Plus, it can be super stressful that you, not only are you working so hard, but like you have someone’s wellbeing, or even their whole life in your hands , and yet you’re so underpaid.

Sarah Jones: Oof, that part. Lorraine, what about you?

Lorraine: Well, I never was a domestic myself. I mean, unless you count my own house. That’s what you did back then. You know, women, we had to take care of the kids, the house, the cleaning, everything. But it wasn’t like it was a real job.

Sarah Jones Scarlett: Well, the care economy would disagree with that, Lorraine. 

It is very much a real job and it still falls mostly to women, whether they’re unpaid family caregivers or underpaid workers. 

Miss Lady: I know that’s right!

Sarah Jones Scarlett: and Ai jen Poo is helping the country see all the parts of the care economy in a revolutionary new way. This is the weirdest thing because what I really want to do is talk to you and ask you how you’re doing as  your friend. Yay. But I want everyone else to get to know you. So Ai jen Poo is a next generation labor leader. She’s the author of The Age of Dignity, Preparing for an Elder Boom in a Changing America, which hi, we are it.

Ai-jen Poo: She’s also a MacArthur Genius Fellow. She’s the co founder and president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. as well as co founder and executive director of Caring Across Generations, which is a phenomenal organization. Hi thank you for having me, Sarah.

Sarah Jones: I have had the great fortune to work with Caring Across Generations and learn about the care economy that you have helped people, you know, really start to understand the value of this in our country.

For people who are like, wait, care economy, what, what now? 

Ai-jen Poo: Well basically it’s this part of our lives and our economy that is almost like, if you think about a tip of the iceberg, the care economy is basically all the activity that happens in our families and our homes in our communities that makes life possible and therefore powers everything else in our economy.

And that’s like, the aging care that allows for our elders to live with dignity. It’s the support for people with disabilities that allows for them to live whole full lives. It’s The childcare that enables the potential of our children to grow.

 There’s so much research now about that period of our lives from zero to three and how much our brains are forming and how much is of our kind of pathways and potential for the future are set during those times.

And what our child care workers and our nannies and our early childhood educators do is they set us up for. The, the ability to realize our full potential in the world, um, to be able to think critically to imagine to dream, um, to create and those. People, those relationships are so valuable and there’s so much skill, emotional intelligence, actual hard skills, so much capacity, um, that goes into providing care.

Sarah Jones: Mm hmm. Yep.

Ai-jen Poo:  So it’s everyone who does it as a profession. Who provides care as a profession, it includes child care workers, nannies, um, early childhood educators. It includes all the direct care workers who get up every day and make sure that people who are in nursing homes or assisted living facilities have the care they need or the home care workers who make sure that older adults and people with disabilities who are trying to live life independently in their communities have what they need.

It’s all of the care, the supports that meet our basic human needs living on this earth from birth.

To death, it’s called the care economy, because it really does have this economic value that is often unmeasured. But it’s why we call it the work that makes all of their work possible.

Sarah Jones Laptop: I love that. This is the work that makes all other work possible. 

And that’s a MASSIVE contribution to our economy, but what I’ve learned from you is that so much of it isn’t measured because the care economy is more than just paid, professional careworkers. It also includes unpaid caregivers, like family members. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Sarah Jones Scarlett:  literally 6, 000, 000 of us are caring for loved ones with Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia. 11, 000, 000 of us are sandwich generation family caregivers who are caring for young children and aging loved ones at the same time Ah ok, Sandwich generation meaning we’re like, sandwiched in between, having to care for both, right, it’s the intergenerational piece you’ve spoken about 

Ai-jen Poo:  I was personally raised in an intergenerational household. All of my grandparents were involved in, in raising me, my parents, my mother, and every single 1 of those relationships is A part of who I am, and then as they aged, they needed care and we changed roles in terms of care as caregivers.

And they also needed professional care workers as they needed more assistance. And in the cycle of life, every one of us is going to be touched by this issue

we all have people we love who we are going to care for, or who we are currently caring for and organizing our society around making sure that we’re supported in that project is such a powerful unifying force. It gives us a vision to move towards together. And so that’s why I love this work and this movement is because it’s this place that is.

Fundamentally rooted in love, um, where we can come together and, and imagine a future that supports us all in a whole new way.

Sarah Jones Laptop: I love that. 

Sarah Jones: So, if that’s the present of the care economy, what’s the history? Like, I have a friend, I think you know, who wants to chime in here. 

Miss Lady: Uh, my name is Miss Lady. Hi, Ai-jen. How you doing, baby? 

 you know, when I was a young girl, I’m a black woman from the South. Domestic was the job that black women could have. And that’s part of maybe why they said, we don’t want to pay these people. Nothing. You know, I think there’s racism in, in this also, this legacy. That, you know, uh, BIPOC, you would say, people, our labor does not get valued as much.

And I’m so happy to see that, you know, in this generation, y’all are seeing the value. I want my reparations, baby, for all the domestic, you know, contributions that we made.

Ai-jen Poo: Yes well,The onion to to peel back on this is really, um, is really profound. The 1st domestic workers, the 1st care workers in the United States. Many of them were enslaved black women. Domestic work has always as a profession been associated with black women. Immigrant 

Sarah Jones: women yeah. 

Ai-jen Poo: of marginalized social status, and that is not an accident.

 That’s at the roots of our entire economic framework. And, and it, it has sustained through time. Um in the 30s when, um, President Roosevelt was developing the vision for the New Deal that was really the foundation of our labor laws. It would really set the tone for the kind of rights and protections that working people have in our country.

These massive sweeping bills were created the Fair Labor Standards Act that set up the minimum, the right to a

Sarah Jones: Minimum wage, right.

Ai-jen Poo: The National Labor Relations Act that gave people the right to form a union and collectively bargain for better working conditions. And then after that, social security and on and on. Um in in the time that those bills were being debated in the 30s.

Southern Dixiecrats who were very invested in a plantation economy and the kind of slavery rooted economic model

 refused to support those bills if they included protections for domestic workers and farm workers who were the two groups of two industries where black workers were concentrated. And In a concession to those members of Congress, those bills passed with those exclusions in place, and it really set the tone for how domestic workers would be treated in our law and policy.

So, over and over again, you’ll see these exclusions for generations to come until, um, Black women like Dorothy Bolden started organizing and demanded change at the federal level. And the National Domestic Workers Alliance is very much a part of that proud tradition of women of color organizing to try to assert the dignity and the value of this work.

 And and so that’s the promise of care. It’s like, it could get us, it could get the flywheel going in the right direction. So to speak, um, for our democracy, for our economyacross the board, but especially for women. And people of color who’ve been disproportionately harmed by our lack of a care infrastructure.

It’s always the people with the least amount of power and resources who are hurt the most by our failures to collectively take on these challenges as a society.

Sarah Jones: Yes, And it’s like, you know, fast forward to now we’re still dealing with all of it misogyny and racism. It’s like, we shouldn’t need a pandemic to understand how essential all of this essential work really is. You know, and not just professional workers, but like, it’s all of us, right?

I can’t think of anybody who’s not helping their aging parents or raising kids or doing both at the same time. Or in my case, I got injured and all of a sudden I was a big part of the care economy. I needed the folks, you know, at the various facilities that were helping me. I needed help in my home. And it was like, Oh, without these people showing up for this really difficult, highly skilled work, can you speak to that piece?

I feel like there’s this, you know, I grew up in a family of people who worked in the medical field And so there’s almost this like, oh, if you’ve gone to medical school, then your labor is worth more than the person who still is responsible for like keeping you alive I’d love to hear your thoughts about that.

Ai-jen Poo: It’s so funny because we have our, our economy is defined by these categories. Like, what is skilled labor versus unskilled labor? is, um. Professional versus what is natural? What is productive labor versus reproductive labor or nonproductive labor? And the truth is, is what those categories do is sometimes erase some of the most important and valuable inputs that we have in our lives.

And. Um, when I think about some of the caregivers, I know, whether they’re family caregivers or professional caregivers, I can’t think of a more valuable and also highly skilled services. I mean, the, the art and science of making sure that someone who is not mobile is able to actually get out of bed. Get dressed, take care of their hygieneand let alone participate fully in the community as even a worker.

Um, and that is what care workers enable for millions of people, whether they’re unpaid family members or professionals. It is. In some ways us at our highest purpose, and for so many, it’s a calling. It’s not just a job and people take enormous pride in the work. In some ways, you kind of have to, because the work is not actually valued materially the way that it should be in our economy.

Our care workers are some of our lowest paid workers in the entire economy.

Sarah Jones: And they’re more often,women of color, more often folks in right socioeconomic situations that are already taxed and challenging. 

Sarah Jones Scarlett: And that feels directly connected to all the inequalities we see in our society, and our politics more broadly, so

Sarah Jones: To me, what you’re building in this movement, it’s kind of the bridge to the democracy we actually want. It’s, you know, making sure that we have people who can then contribute to a thriving, democratic, you know, kind of community focused society. 

Ai-jen Poo: Absolutely. 

II mean, there’s a few aspects to that, um, to the role of care in a healthy democracy. First of all, in a country as diverse as ours is, it’s so important to have these experiences that we share with others. Really at the forefront of our culture, the former first lady, Rosalyn Carter has this famous quote.

There are only 4 kinds of people in the world. People who are caregivers or will be caregivers people who need care or will need care. And most of us share more than 1 of those identities at any given moment. And that is so powerful in a time when we’re constantly reminded of how we’re different and how we’re divided to actually be like, no, this is a place where we all have people we love who we are going to care for, or who we are currently caring for and organizing our society around making sure that we’re supported in that project is such a powerful unifying force. It gives us a vision to move towards together. and then the other piece is just at a very practical level.

Um, we have a growing aging population that needs care. We have jobs that could be created good jobs that could be created to provide that care, which would then enable working parents and family caregivers to have the support. They need to participate in the workforce and that layer of stress on our democracy that has to do with economic inequality, like a huge amount of pressure that has to do with care could be alleviated.

 and that would just help us all that would just increase our chances that we would thrive.

Sarah Jones Scarlett: Yes, exactly. I did want to ask, because you coined this idea, the genius of care, and also I’m thinking there’s something to, like the wisdom of care , like if you haven’t lived any of this yet, you don’t and I don’t know if this is an obstacle in your work, but is it harder for people who don’t want to ever think, I might get injured, maybe somebody listening is in their twenties or their thirties and they’re like, I don’t have kids, you know, my parents are fine.

Bella: I feel like you guys are like talking around me, so I’m just going to jump in. Hi Ai-jen, I love what you’re doing and I totally hear you about care but there is just so much else to deal with. Like me and my generation are protesting stuff that’s happening NOW I mean, like currently my tax dollars are paying for wars, they’re opening up new oil drilling sites every day, like police violence. I mean bviously I care about care but like, worrying about mySELF like 50 years from now? It’s just feels like selfish and hard to prioritize.

Sarah Jones Scarlett: Thank you Bella. So, yeah, that, almost the detachment or denial if we’re not old enough yet, of not wanting to feel like these issues will ever touch us or we’re not, You know, wanting to think, what if I become disabled or what if, you know, I have disabled folks in my community, in my family, like, is that a part of a lack of wisdom that can push careto the margins– not that all the other urgent issues aren’t important, but care is urgent too, it’s not either or 

Ai-jen Poo: I do think that there’s so many cultural norms and beliefs that we have. Um, we’re obsessed with youth in, in our culture. We’re fearful of aging, we’re fearful of disability. We have so many phobias that are so deeply seeded in our culture, and they’re all reinforcing of these hierarchies of human value, right?

CAN I HAVE AN MMM HERE?

That some lives. Are more valuable, um, more, they contribute more or, you know, they’re, they’re just like all of these norms, if you kind of trace them back, they’re all rooted in a story we have about whose life is more valuable and the genius of care that’s really just about. Being really in touch with humanity, with the reality of humanity, the reality of humanity is that 

Disability is a part of life. And as you said before, like, any 1 of us could become disabled at any moment.

Sarah Jones: Oh my God. Yeah.

Ai-jen Poo: the reality of humanity is that aging is living aging is a part of life.

Disability is a part of life. And as you said before, like, any 1 of us could become disabled at any moment.

Sarah Jones: Right. There was this great statistic. Is it that 10, 000 people turn 65 every day in this country?

Ai-jen Poo: That’s right. 10, 000 babies are born and 10, 000 people turn 65 We’re also living longer, so we need more care. And what’s happened is technology’s improved and our health care has improved essentially we’ve added an entire generation onto our life span. so we’re all living longer, and yet we haven’t changed how we live.

And that’s why there’s so much increased attention and pressure on the care economy, because we’ve kind of left it up to all of us as individuals to kind of navigate and figure out all of these people in our lives who we love, who need care on our own without an infrastructure and a set of policies, a set of systems to support us.

And we need that now more than ever.

Sarah Jones: Oh, that’s so, it’s like, what if we had this infrastructure of care as the basis for.

You know, how we think about democracy at all. You wouldn’t see an unhoused population like the one we have now. There would just be some basic safety nets. And like you’re saying, these jobs, these are incredibly valuable contributions to our economy overall.

 Isn’t this like a 600 BILLION dollar industry, I mean that’s bigger than pharmaceuticals!  But when I think about how much it costs to not care, 

Sarah Jones: we’d dig ourselves out of a hole faster just by actually caring.

Ai-jen Poo: It’s amazing that in 2024, we’re still having to assert that, but we truly are. And one of the things that is happening now, that’s so incredible is that we’re finally starting to see that, I mean I don’t know if it was COVID when we were all hyper isolated, we finally started to realize that we are actually in the same boat when it comes to care.

We can do everything in our power, and there’s actually no way to care for the people that we love without more of an infrastructure.  Without policies that help us afford child care without paid family medical leave without the kind of home care infrastructure that we need for our growing aging population or.

Disabled people. These are in a 21st century economy Actually, Senator Casey said it best. He said some people need a bridge or a tunnel to get to work and other people need child care. Other people need home care, and that is the awakening that we’re in the midst of right now.

And it is so exciting to me because it’s revolutionary in a way. You know, it’s like all this and we can see below the waterline and we’re starting to imagine what it would be like, what it could look like to live with all of that care visible and supported, it’s life, and just being able to not only not deny it or avoid it, but actually be present for it and think about how we can all grow together in the process of being more connected and present for the truth of our humanity.

That is the genius of care.

Sarah Jones: Oof, that’s why it’s genius, beyond just wisdom, even though you’re helping us find that too. I just feel like, for people listening, if they’re like me, they’ve never even heard of these ideas, and people can really get, you know, kind of caught up in an anxiety in a society like ours, the way our capitalism looks right now, since we have so little care infrustructure in place it’s like we’re all racing and scrambling and still can’t keep up. What if the solution is actually counterintuitive like what if we could slow down, be here, be present with what’s happening if we had the support we need.

Ai-jen Poo: and the beauty of being present for all of it is that that is how we grow. As humans as a society, and what is not normal or natural is not building systems to allow for us to be fully present on our terms. Right? When that is within our power to do John Powell, who is a social scientist at Berkeley often talks about how there’s 2 kinds of suffering.

the kind that’s kind of an inevitable part of life. Like we will all have our hearts broken. We will all endure grief and loss. Um, but there is suffering that is unnecessary, that is a result of human choices and policy like Child poverty, there’s absolutely no reason why there should be child poverty in the United States.

And in fact, we prove that when we lifted a huge percentage of children out of poverty with just one act of policy, the child tax credit during the pandemic. So it’s like, how do we do what we need to do in terms of our policies and our culture change to be able to address the unnatural forms of suffering so that we can be present as humans for life as it truly is.

Sarah Jones: I mean, the level of care that you’re talking about on the community scale I think it really trickles back into our own personal, right, ability to find that genius of care within ourselves.

Ai-jen Poo: That’s the beauty of it. It is within all of us. The fact that we have the potential to tap into an inner genius just because we’re humans is, care is how we do that. And, um, and that feels so hopeful to me.

Sarah Jones: And that is not only the genius of CARE, that is the genius of iGenPoo. And I’m excited for people to learn more about how they are personally part of this movement. Thank you so much.

Ai-jen Poo: Thank you, my love.

Rashid: Wow, that was deep, yo. Real talk.

Sarah Jones: Yeah, get you a friend like Ai jen.

Miss Lady: Listen, I think she a friend to everybody cause like she said, ain’t nobody getting out this life without needing care or needing help giving some care–or both. If you ask me this coountry need a whole Department of Care. Shoot, they spend all that money on department of Defense, and homeland security–if you really wanted a secure homeland you would make sure we take care of each other.

Nereida: Yeah, speaking of governments, apparently like, even the UK has like a health Ministry of Loneliness for disabled folks and the elderly since they’re so susceptible to isolation? 

Bella: I just feel so like late to the party– like I guess I knew elder care was a problem, I just never really thought of any of this as something the government could do anything about. Meanwhile, apparently seniors are the fastest growing unhoused population? I just feel bad none of this has been part of my activism.

Rashid: Ima let you off the hook, Bella, cuz yeah, you priviledged, but you ain’t the main problem– I think some people in the government just don’t WANT you to think this is something they could fix.

Nereida: That they have a responsibility to fix! We have subsidies for farmers in this country, we’re constantly bailing out banks and airlines it’s INSANE to think we can’t pay for this one thing we ALL need. Like imagine if millions of women and people of color could finally get fair pay for the work we do

Sarah Jones: Yup, we could have affordable daycare, healthcare, paid family leave.

Nereida: OMG, we would going be like a diverse version of Sweden, but with more daylight in the wintertime.

Sarah Jones: It’s so dope, right?  Lorraine, you’re very quiet.

Lorraine: I just never thought about how much it hurts the whole country that people don’t have care. I feel a little dizzy and lightheaded.

Nereida: I think what you’re feeling is anger, mama. That’s a good sign. That’s what’s gonna fuel us to change this stuff.  Also, in the spirit of America, Who Hurt you? When you can start to feel your anger you’re a step closer to healing it. 

Sarah Jones: That’s beautiful, Nereida. This country puts so much on all of our plates– we grind it out at work, we’re taking care of our famillies, and when it all gets to be too much, we blame ourselves for bad time management or not being strong enough to handle everything. When in reality, we’re overwhelmed because we don’t have the care we need–the care other countries DO provide their citizens by the way, at least every other so-called developed country. And, if hearing about this kind of support makes you think “well, Americans have just lost their work ethic”, then this week’s prompt might be for you.

Think about a time where you or a loved one didn’t have the basic care you needed. Maybe a job interview you couldn’t make because your childcare fell through last minute. Or a whole career track you had to quit so you could take care of your aging parents? And the disabled folks listening know all about our lack of care, because this country thinks it’s it’s a luxury to have support around the house, when it’s actually an essential mobility and access issue. 

Whoever you are, think of any time care would’ve been a game changer, for your mental health, your financial wellbeing, or your physical needs. And if you’re fortunate enough to have care in your life, think about how laws that make it available to everyone would improve our entire culture. 

Like we learned today, some people need a bridge to get to work, other people need care. So let us know what this prompt brought up for you, and any forms of care we haven’t mentioned that could be the bridge we need to the society we all deserve.

And by the way, if you haven’t shared a response to one of our prompts yet we’d love to hear from you, follow us on social media at the link in the description. We post reels every week and you can share your response in the comments–and we might repost it to our audience!

Jonathan Metzl: If you are white and live in a red state, and your politicians were people who blocked Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, or were very, very pro gun, those policies were as dangerous to you as, Um,

living in a house with asbestos or second hand smoke. So they were literally health risks.

Sarah Jones: Hi everybody. Welcome to America Who Hurt You, the pod where we talk in many voices about politics, our trauma, and how we can heal them both. I’m your host, Sarah Jones, and I’m here with a few co hosts, Rashid,

Rashid: What’s good, America?

Sarah Jones: Narita,

Nereida: Hola, it’s me,

Sarah Jones: Lorraine,

Lorraine: Hello there, everybody.

Sarah Jones: and Bella.

Bella: Amazing. Hi, everyone.

Sarah Jones: And by now, you know, they’re not exactly co hosts. They are my characters from my one person shows and my sell by date who are based on my real family and

Bella: of family, you guys, I finally did my 23andMe. I was hoping for like at least some kind of diversity, you know, but it turns out I am like even whiter than I thought. Just like pure European.

Lorraine: Bella, so you’re European. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Other groups get to be proud of their background. Why shouldn’t we?

Nereida: You shouldn’t feel ashamed just because you’re white. But Lorraine, you realize when you mention other groups like people of color being proud, we’ve had to do that because of racism telling us we’re inferior.

Rashid: True facts. This whole country was built on white privilege, you feel me? And matter of fact, it’s so important to some white people, they can’t let it go even if they life dependent on it.

Lorraine: Well, maybe that was true in the past, but nowadays it seems like the people of color have all the advantages, and white people are being pushed out.

Bella: Lorraine, I thought we blocked her Fox News subscription.

Sarah Jones: Unfortunately, she’s not the only white person who feels this way. Lorraine, we’ve talked about this. Media bias can make it sound like people of color have taken over, but just because you see more black and brown faces in ads does not mean systemic racism has gone away. Sadly, by many measures, it’s getting worse.

With attacks on DE& I, diversity, equity, and inclusion, bans on teaching the real history of racism, and it goes on and on. But get ready for this. One of the most surprising groups being harmed by white supremacy and its violence is white people themselves. From voting against policies that could improve their health to supporting gun laws that put their own lives at risk.

Many white folks seem fully committed to drinking the Caucasian Kool Aid, no matter how bad it is for them. But, in happier news, our guest today is educating folks about all of this in hopes that it can help not just white people, but everyone. Jonathan Metzl is an acclaimed physician, sociologist, and author of the groundbreaking book, Dying of Whiteness, How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland.

 And now Jonathan’s new book, What We’ve Become, Living and Dying in a Country of Arms, takes the conversation even further by looking at a racist mass shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, and reexamining how we as a nation should address gun violence. Let’s get into it. 

Jonathan Metzl: Hey,

Sarah Jones: thank

you?

for doing this. Great

to see you. 

Jonathan Metzl: my honor, it really is.

Sarah Jones: So just to dive in, we’re looking at our country and this legacy of whiteness, right? We’re seeing one overwhelmingly white political party in the lead up to a historic election. And yet, as you point out in your book, it’s, it’s hard to even talk about, right?

 I’ve, I’ve interviewed people and I even have people in my own family who, when you ask them, you know, what are you, they’ll always ask me what I am, right?

White folks are, what are you? What’s in there? But if I turn it around to them, Oh, I’m nothing. I’m just white. Or, you know, you’ll, you’ll get these varying, whiteness is a thing. It isn’t a thing. What is it? Can we talk about it? It felt like in 2020 we could, and maybe now we can’t, like, kind of post, you know, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and now we’re into, you know, DE and I, for some people’s, stands for we didn’t earn it. And I think, wow, that is a study in whiteness right there. I want to be like, y’all stole the country, had other people build it for you, but we didn’t earn it. So, I know you understand all of this, at so many levels and how it drives violence, you know, particularly gun violence.

What is kind of the story of whiteness 101?

Jonathan Metzl: Well, 1st, let me just say 

 I think that’s a great starting point right now and I’ll say that it’s been kind of a process for me. I mean, when I wrote dying of whiteness, that book came out 2019 2020 and it felt like America was at a particular moment where we just didn’t know how to talk about whiteness and there was kind of a hunger for how do we have this conversation. So I’ll just start at the beginning for me, which is that I’ve got two books really that focus on whiteness. And Dying of Whiteness was a book that was basically saying, Hey, the system’s not working for anybody. It wasn’t trying to make anybody apologize for who they were.

 it wasn’t trying to say you need to. Give away all your worldly possessions. What I said is we’ve created this crazy system where life expectancy is falling for everybody, including for the demographic majority group. And so let’s come up with a system that works better for everybody. I have a lot of data and that book I show that, for example, if you are white and live in a red state and you’re.

Politicians that run your state were people who blocked Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act or overturned, public education or were very, very, very pro gun.

Those policies were as dangerous to you as, living in a house with asbestos or secondhand smoke or not wearing a seatbelt.

Um, so they were literally health risks. And so the first project that I did was really like, Hey, look, this structure is not working.

Sarah Jones: And it’s funny, even as you were sharing about, you know, this idea of people were starting to catch on, right? Or people were hungry for a conversation about whiteness that they hadn’t been able to have before, that they, you know, weren’t using the term or, you know, that there was awkwardness or, like I said, a sense of, Oh, we’re nothing. Right. I wanted to say that’s true for a broader, you know, wider mainstream white audience, right? Because among Black people and people of color and, you know, sort of more traditionally marginalized communities, Whiteness was front and center.

We could talk about it. Like that word was, you know what I mean? We were very clear, like, Oh, white folks are doing what white folks do. You know, for us, it’s sort of like, yay, thank goodness. You who areable to reach those white audiences, right? Cause if I write a book dying of whiteness, people are going to be like, put her in that book someplace where we don’t ever have to find it. Whereas I think you, 

 say, Hey, this is what I’ve found. This is what I see. I’m a white guy,And I’m here to maybe translate for those of, you know, the white community who aren’t as ready for that.

question or that, that conversation at all.

Jonathan Metzl: so I’ll say that when my book first came out, you know, you would think Dying of Whiteness would be like the most problematic title and all these things but actually the It was the opposite.

A lot of people, when that book first came out, said, you know, we knew something was up and we just didn’t know how to talk about it. And even when that book came out, I ended up going back to pro gun community. So I interviewed, um, I ended up speaking on Fox news on ministry television, kind of right wing Christian television.

And so there was, there was this moment of kind of like, let’s just figure out a way forward here. and certainly it’s a, it was a sample bias of like who, who wanted to talk to me in the first place but I will just say that, you know, it felt like we were breaking a barrier.

before,

It was kind of like, how can we talk about this constructively?

That’s how I felt in 2020. and I’ll just say it’s felt more difficult over time, um, because politics of race have gotten more contested. even my book title, 2020, won all these awards and now I get all this blowback and I’m just like, dude, where you been?

The thing’s been out for four years.

And so it feels like something’s been happening, a kind of tribalizing narrative where what used to be a relatively easy conversation. Now, for me, when I talk to white audiences, they feel accused.

I think

it doesn’t feel as constructive as it used to. When I talk to other audiences it’s just there’s a tension now about this issue. And, and it’s frustrating because even for the same project, even for the same book, I feel like, I mean, maybe that’s the nature of the beast, but it feels like we’re in, we’re in our camps right now.

Sarah Jones: Right. And I’m really hearing you that there’s tension now, maybe for, you know, I don’t want to make it binary, but both groups.

 meaning white and non white and then within white folks, they’re not a monolith either. Right. So

as, you know, you’re not only a, researcher and an author and a speaker. You also, you know, didn’t just go through medical school.

You actually went through the training of critical race theory, right? Like you really have a comprehensive public health understanding of how things like whiteness more broadly and deep ideas of identity politics and fear. You understand all of that at such a deep level.

And when I think about the history. you know,the OG examples of dividing races and using that to create policy. how do you see that history and how it maybe threads through to now?

Jonathan Metzl: Yeah.I’m a structuralist. And so I don’t. I don’t talk about good or bad people.

I talk about structures that 

either reward cooperation or they put us in competition with each other. 

And part of my frustration, I mean, certainly, of course, there’s a history in the, in the recent book, what we’ve become is really, it’s a story about a naked white male mass shooter, um, who kills young adults of color.

And where did that come from? just the history of who could carry a gun in the United States that we’ve got

 250 years of basically carrying a gun as being a privilege of whiteness.

and so the original point for me in both of my books is actually after the Civil War, um, when there was a moment called Reconstruction.

Exactly, exactly

And I talk about kind of how Du Bois and other people write about this moment, 

Initially, black and white people in the South were working together, um, initially, And I just think like how different our country would 

be now if we would have had cross racial alliances and different kinds of landowners we could have rebuilt the south we could have given land and opportunity to previously enslaved people

Sarah Jones: Didn’t we have like more black folks in Congress then, than like until like 1970 or something? Right

Jonathan Metzl: it’s crazy. And so the reason I think this is important is because there was a moment of fissure where we were like, man, we just killed millions of people in our country for this idea, this idea of racial hierarchy. 

Sarah Jones: Right. It’s like a fork in the road. Like a moral 

Jonathan Metzl: I mean there were a lot of really poor ass white people and there were newly freed slaves who had nothing and so they were incentivized to work together and Du Bois basically coins this term The wage of whiteness.

He says, um, there’s no material gain to being white. In fact, it’s probably bad for you for in terms of, you know, if you join forces with the newly freed slaves, you could extract more concessions from elites. You could get land, you could do all these things.

Sarah Jones: could improve your life overall

Jonathan Metzl: Exactly, 

 he calls it a psychological wage. And so in a way, there’s this psychology of we become tribal and then we’re like, nope, nope, we’re not going to go there. And there are moments where just everything feels thrown up for grabs. And those are, for me, are the moments where we, um, where we can kind of remake these wrongs in a way And unfortunately, we’ve seen this, we saw it after George Floyd, we saw it during the pandemic, all these moments where like everything’s up for grabs.

 I don’t know, but we keep living that history. And so for me, 

after the Civil War, is really for my work,

one of the key moments.

Sarah Jones: Ah, so powerful. 

Part of what this sparked for me, and I know you’re going back to the 1800s and that is such a salient, right? People are literally putting their bodies and their health.

It’s like, Nope, I would rather hold on to this identity of whiteness that at least puts me higher in the hierarchy than, you know, putting this in huge. air quotes, you know, welfare queens and quote unquote Mexicans. And it’s like, wow, these narratives that drive our politics are so powerful they defy the impulse to live, right?

Like I would literally rather die than not hold onto my white privilege. 

For me personally, I grew up, you know, being very clear that proximity to whiteness made me safer. I had people treat me differently and treat me better when they saw my mother or they, you know, thought, Oh, she’s, she’s not too black. And these are painful things to say out loud, but it helps me get into the psyche of somebody who’s like –.

Um, you know what, if I’m poor, at least I have my whiteness might be all people have it. I’m so curious about how that connects up with, as you said, even when you said the phrase, you know, a naked white. male shooter shooting people of color. Nakedness really brings up for me this idea of like the emperor’s new clothes, right? I want to know how that factors into like the fear that also is, you know, connected to the gun piece

Jonathan Metzl: Well, the gun piece, I’ll just say first, because it’s such a beautiful question, thank you, the gun book, what we’ve become is about one such moment. It’s about the Nashville Waffle House mass shooting that happened in 2018. Um, it was like 2. 30 in the morning and there were, there was a Waffle House full of young adults of color who are out celebrating and in bursts, this naked white man with an AR 15 kills four amazing young adults.

It’s injures for others, traumatizes the community really forever as, as this happens. 

And for me it was a moment of decision because as I track what happened. I mean in the book I just say how did this guy was from Illinois just like Kyle Rittenhouse and other people who have come from Illinois with AR 15s.

And so I say How did this guy get there and how did his gun get there? And it turned out that part of the story was he had been in Illinois, but he was drawn to Tennessee because of our terrible gun laws.

In other words, anybody could carry a gun and this guy wasn’t allowed to carry a gun in Illinois because he had been arrested by the FBI and all these things. But the minute he came to Tennessee, anybody could carry a gun because we have open carry and we didn’t have any of the laws that that would have applied.

And so the story for me is we had almost pornographically extreme example of what our gun laws do, our terrible gun laws. Um, but it was a moment where we could have said, okay, look, we never want this to happen again to anybody. And so we’re going to tighten the ship a little bit. Because what I found was Because of our open carry, this guy was going around telling people he was going to be a mass shooter basically, but nobody could do anything.

And I’m like, this is, this is insanity. And so we could have either said, we’re going to change course. This is our rock bottom moment. Or we’re going to liberalize our gun laws so much that we make sure that this thing happens again because this shooter doesn’t represent the pathology, he represents a much bigger category which is people whose rights should not be infringed.

And unfortunately and predictably we chose the second path and that’s why I call the book What We’ve Become. And so for me, that’s the frustrating thing is it was never more clear as I talk about in the book about how we could have prevented shootings like that.

But our entire legislature made the decision that validated his rights. And so what I say in the book is his naked white body is what poets call an objective correlative. He’s a symbol of the system, even when he’s Such a pathological extension of it.

Sarah Jones: I, you know, this, I remember the shooting you’re talking about and , even in a situation so violent and horrific and traumatizing, this narrative about freedom and his rights, right, his rights to do what he did. Brings a community or at least a political, you know, power. structure together to say, we’re going to double down, in fact. And the idea that for people of color, for, you know, women, for, marginalized groups or folks who are traditionally on the other side of that violence, for us, it’s kind of like, or I’ll speak for myself. If black people open care, you know, if I walk into a Walmart with an AR 15, I’m getting tackled to the ground. it’s that even the laws aren’t evenly applied, right?

This is all this kind of mythology around freedom, but it’s selectively applied to white folks. I don’t, I guess what I want to get at, Jonathan is, I don’t know how to make it make sense. Like we have this election coming up and you say this elsewhere, it’s not about how many people have to die. there’s this bigger ideology that I think so many of us don’t understand about freedom. And whiteness, even though we don’t call it whiteness, right? We call it American values. We call it make America great again. It goes back to the, uh, what is it?

Stand your ground. Yeah. Laws and it’s like second amendment and I should have all my rights. They’re all bound up together in this psychology. Help us doc. How do we unpack this for people?

Jonathan Metzl: Well, I’m going to say one more super bummer thing, and then we can talk about how to fix it, if 

Sarah Jones: great. Yeah. One more bummer. One more. That’s all we got room for.

Jonathan Metzl: Because unfortunately it’s even worse. It’s even worse. And the reason it’s even worse is because we’ve passed these laws that basically , I mean, anybody can buy a gun right now, um, for the most part.

Not everybody can carry a gun, and so part of the story I say is, um, as you’re saying, if a white man with a gun and a black man with a gun walk into a Wal Mart, One is like, hey, how can we help you? And the other is tackled and arrested and shot and things like that. So there is kind of a cultural ethos of who codes as a patriot and who codes as a criminal, which I talk about a lot in the book.

But the other issue, and this is the bummer part, and I apologize, is that gun sellers, they’re arms dealers. They don’t care. They just want to sell guns.

And so , after George Floyd, for example,on social media feeds, black and brown Americans were seeing messages of, uh. You don’t want to be unarmed when the cops come, or maybe the cops won’t come, or this could happen to you. So they sold tons of guns to black Americans, um, because they were a great market and because this is crisis capitalism, basically.

And then when black Americans got guns, then they turned around to the white Americans and they said, look, all these black people have guns. 

So then they sold more guns to white people. and so in a way, on one hand, getting armed has been a dream of black political thought since Malcolm 

X and, and,

Yeah, Black Panther is a guy named Robert F. Williams who wrote a book called Negroes with Guns in South Carolina in the 50s.

And the idea was having a gun would level the playing field. Um, but what I show in the book is actually that’s not true because the notion of an armed black person who there are many, many black gun owners are among the fastest growing group of gun owners now, but that’s used to sell guns to people who already 

have plenty of guns.

Sarah Jones: like right, like white people 

Jonathan Metzl: And so, in a way, we’re in a market now, and which is not a market that you usually see in, uh, call it peacetime.

In other words, these kind of strategies are used in military conflicts. And so, another reason I call the book What We’ve Become is that We’ve grown accustomed to a level of trauma for everybody.

I mean, white Americans are dying of gun suicide too. We’ve become traumatized in ways that soldiers are, but not ways that civilians living their lives should have to be.

Sarah Jones: And I, you know, I was struck by like learning that

 you point out Something that I think as people of color, it can be very easy to forget that as you say, the trauma of whiteness is real.

That doesn’t privilege it above our trauma because, it’s like the whiteness is horrible and then it leaks and you know, it’s toxic to us, but it’s also toxic to the white folks who are performing whiteness as , you have said, Like, how do we stop this kind of insanity and the profit motive? That’s the other thing. Like, The NRA, I feel like their stock is up. And if I weren’t a better person, a good, decent person, I’d go buy some. 

Jonathan Metzl: So first it’s not just like there are distinct white and black forms of trauma. There are also so many other examples where we’re just like in the same system that we’re all kind of traumatized.

 And unfortunately, I think as more communities, Get guns, we’ll, we’ll see more kinds of mass shooters, more kinds of gun suicide. And so, so much of this is not having really regulations about how you have a gun, how you keep a gun, which I’ll just say, I mean, I, I come from a military family. I live in Tennessee.

I was born on an Air Force base. I’m not anti-gun at all, but I will say every other country. Pretty much has gun laws about those, those things. And they have a lot less of this kind of thing. We’re really by ourselves in terms of just get all the guns, get all the guns yourself, but those moments of, um, you know, is, is there a gun there?

Now I argue in my new book, I don’t blame movies or video games. I, they’re good reflections, but it’s, I mean, think about all the people who watch video games versus who go shoot somebody. It’s like. 10 billion to three or something like that. So it’s not like there’s anything causal, but I will say that’s a moment where we can see we’re all in the same boat.

As an example, like, remember that great Idris Elba show, Luther?  It’s a UK cop show. And you know, Idris Elba will like, chase the bad guy for like an hour. And finally, at the end of the show, he’ll like, find the bad guy. And then he’ll whip out his Billy club and his handcuffs. And even me, I’m like, just shoot the dude, man.

Cause we’re so conditioned. So it’s like, , that’s it. He just handcuffed him. He didn’t like blow him away or something. So we’re all part of this narrative. And again, I don’t think, I don’t think changing that is a thing, but I mean, even me who studies guns, I’m like, just shoot the dude, man. You know?

So it’s, it’s kind of like, it’s part of our. It’s part of what we’ve been trained to see, which is not normal. , I’ll put it that way 

Rashid: What’s good, Jonathan? My name is Rasheed. Yo, it’s an honor. It’s an honor to meet you. Um, Yo, your work is mad interesting, and I’m not gonna lie.

It’s a part of me that’s like, all right, you talking about white people, their life expectancy is going down. I don’t know, I know it’s sad and they, they voted for it. They self, I’m like, dude, you, I mean, you know, shooting yourself in the foot. It’s like a whole other level. Talk about the NRA, they be shooting themselves in everything they got.

How am I supposed to feel sorry for them? You know what I mean? Like for real. It’s like y’all doing it to yourself is impacting the rest of us, too. You so, you know, determined to not be like me that you would rather

just fuck it up for, excuse me, just fuck it up for everybody else you know what I mean?

Jonathan Metzl: How, how do you deal with that? Like, how do we, how do we deal with that? Cause I want to help the situation, but part of me is like, let me just get some popcorn and watch these dudes just keep fucking shit up. Well, let me say, Rashid, that, um, that’s an outstanding question. I mentioned before that I’m kind of what you might call a structuralist, which is to say that America tries to tell us that we’re all in different tribes and American capitalism, part of it, benefits by not having us find common cause. In other words, all the work I do is like, It’s crazy that we’re competing when we could be collaborating.

And this is an exact example where it just shows that we are all connected. And so as much as we live in a moment where I think the motto for a lot of people is,

… F… A… 

Rashid: Fuck around and find I knew it was coming. I was like, let me get to it. But I wanted to let you get to it, but I want to find common ground and fuck around and find out. Yeah.

Jonathan Metzl: Okay. So everybody thinks like, Oh, this is a moment where like your bad shit catches up with you. And we want that. Like that’s social media is gratifying that way. Like, Oh, you pulled this shit and look what happened to you. But unfortunately in all the work I do, I find that that’s, that’s great on social media in the real world.

Systems that don’t work for one group don’t work for all the groups. And so I’ll give one example. In Tennessee, when I did my research on rejecting the Affordable Care Act, white Americans had dramatic falls in life expectancy first, but then everybody had falling life expectancy. It wasn’t just white Americans.

And the reason was because people were getting really sick before they went to the doctor. And then they went with like end stage kidney failure or lung failure or something. And they went to the ER. If you don’t have a federal health system that’s supporting your system. All the money goes to ERs and then everybody’s health care fell.

So even though white Americans life expectancy fell, so did black Americans, so did Latino Americans, so did everybody else. And so, um, that was one example of what I write about that either we all rise together or we fall together. There’s a fantasy that we can create a system that just works for my group.

In all my work, I show that it’s a fantasy to think, um, guns the same thing.

Um, that, uh, in a way, trends that started with white Americans as black Americans started buying more guns, they started seeing more gun suicide. Um, there’s something called deaths of despair, opiate addiction and deaths that started with white Americans, and then it then now the numbers are racially equal.

And so white Americans pay the price for the system that they have, I think, a social responsibility to fix. But I think it’s also the case that it’s just a fantasy when you think about like big systems like education, healthcare, safety, we’ve got to kind of work together. And if that’s not the case, then unfortunately, We all go down the tubes together, even though again, the social media narrative doesn’t, doesn’t play it that way sometimes.

Sarah Jones: Okay. Well, I, hi, Jonathan. My name’s Bella. So first of all, I totally understand like where you’re coming from. Like I’m white. As well. Um, and it used to be super, like, I was, like, so awkward about it. I’d be like, no, no, no. And then Sarah Jones was like, you know, like, use your privilege to, like, talk openly about these things.

and I guess I want to know from you, like, your research and your many books and like, like your, all of your work are trying to help people see the reality 

But like, what would you say now so that people don’t have to say, why didn’t we listen to Jonathan? Like. you know, if you could help people listening to this, like make, you know, dinner conversation that’s different or like, can, is there like some matching funds that like will help? Like, can we just like grab the NRA and like tie them up somewhere? Like, not, I’m not saying I would ever do that. I totally would. But like, you know what I mean? Like, how can we like actually do something right now? And what do we do?

Jonathan Metzl: Certainly we have a pretty clear choice right now about the two different paths to go down. Um, and so one is very, for me, regressive and one is still Fighting about and talking about our uncomfortable differences, but also at least we’re on the same path. And so number one is get everybody you can to vote, because what we see in the system is that there was this great movie about Cambridge Analytica that came out about five years ago.

It’s this disinformation company. And what they realized was in the old world of disinformation, it was like You know, don’t vote for your opponent, vote for my guy. And what Cambridge Analytica realized in about, oh, 2015, was that the trick isn’t to get people to vote for your guy.

It’s for them to think that the system is not working, and they should just sit this one out. And so, There’s so much money trying to get people to think that their vote doesn’t matter, that they need to burn down the whole system, that is a sculpted message.

And so part of the story is to mobilize voter networks, fighting back against kind of a learned helplessness which is like, I don’t know, like I’m a Jewish American and, uh, I have friends who are on all sides of Believe me Gaza right now, and I still have to think we’re all part of the same team in this bigger picture thing because if I don’t think that it’s that thing of like, oh, your friend is not your friend, your friend is your enemy, and you should sit this one out.

And I know that that is a message that is not true. And then for me, Can I tell a quick story? Just really quick. when the Affordable Care Act was first being debated, 

they had this idea that if your city. all got together and lowered your ER visits, lowered your systolic blood pressure, increased your, the parks, the bike lanes. And it wasn’t just your block. It wasn’t just your tribe. It was, you had to go to the other block and meet with other people and say, Hey, we want to build some bike lanes.

Let’s all work together. And so the idea was let’s build what’s called social cohesion or social capital. And they said that if Everybody works together to meet those metrics. The entire city would get a tax break, which everybody wanted. And so they were rewarding people. And it didn’t matter if you were racist or not, it didn’t matter.

We’re anti white or not. It didn’t matter if you were whatever, because the whole idea was kind of like the Delta Frequent Flyer program or something like a totally fake economy, but we’re going to get people to see the material gain of working together, no matter what their opinions are.

And I always thought that was so brilliant. Unfortunately, that was, of course, the first thing that got left on the chopping block, because I think the GOP, when they were going after it realized the minute people start working together, on different blocks, that’s when people really bond and that’s what all the literature on health insurance shows, that health insurance doesn’t just improve health, it improves social cohesion among groups because everybody feels like we’re all working together.

If I’m healthy, it lowers the cost for everybody. And so in a way to me, that’s always the model in my mind for what people should think about, which is I may or may not agree with somebody about a whole host of issues. But I think about the structure, if we’re all working toward that same goal, it’s kind of better for everybody, which I know is kind of a 40, 000 foot way to think about it.

But to me, it’s better than trying to convince your crazy uncle or something like that. If 

Sarah Jones: I love, I love having crazy uncles. I’m right there. And it makes me think of kind of the opposite of, you know, how when you’re in school, it would be like one person did something bad. You’re all getting detention. This is like, if everybody just pulls together and you all do a good job on this project, we all go to the amusement park, right?

It’s sort of that. And I have to just bring one last friend out because what you shared is so powerful to her.

Lorraine: HI there. Nice to see you, Jonathan. My name is Lorraine. I have to tell you, when you said I’m Jewish, I’m also Jewish and Sarah, part of her family is Jewish and part of the, you know, we don’t all come from the same anything.

Everybody’s different. Sometimes there’s fighting, but when I hear you, it’s so Clear how divide and conquer works. They’re more sophisticated about it now than they’ve ever been. And if they can get you to believe that your neighbor is dangerous, or this other one is, you know, uh, you have to stand against them. And that’s all you focus on with your narrow vision. The next thing you know, they can take everything right out from under. All of you. And you’re busy pointing the finger at each other. So I won’t go into more details, but I just want to say you’re a mensch and I’m grateful for what you’re sharing with people, because it is a terrible time where everybody’s divided. I don’t agree with Sarah. about what’s happening in the, I won’t, we can’t even say it, poo poo poo, we won’t say anything. But the point is, if we want to still have a democracy at all, I believe in what you said. We have to focus on the bigger, what did you say, 40, 000 feet? I don’t know, drones and AI, I don’t understand any of it.

Jonathan Metzl: Well, I mean, thank you so much. I mean, you know, these issues are hard. These issues are, um, I use the term before polarizing crisis and a polarizing crisis is something where we have a life or death crisis, and then people realize that they feel differently about it. And we’ve had, think of all the polarizing crises we’ve had.

I mean, COVID all of a sudden you realize that your own, life partner, maybe. People got divorced because one person was for a mask and another person was against a mask. Like it’s really deep. It’s really personal. Um, George Floyd was, was a polarizing crisis. Now Gaza is a polarizing crisis, but it’s important to always remember that is humanity.

We’re living in a really difficult, essential time. And I’m not trying to say, I mean, don’t get me started about Middle East politics. I’m actually very deeply involved in it and I’ve been writing about it a lot, but I will say, so it’s not like you don’t. I have an opinion because, oh, kumbaya, I’m not saying that, but I’m saying it’s important to remember that there, that there are real vested interests in dividing 

us and ultimately that gets us to the wrong place.

And so I think that’s, that’s really got to be the message is keep pointing to the structures that are the structures for the common good. But thank you. That was a lovely question.

Sarah Jones: Oh, well, I’m grateful and I have to say more hopeful. Then I was before this conversation. So you are a bonafide miracle worker. Cause I came on, I was like, Oh God. And it’s like, you know, this is what we need. Thank you so much. Thank you for your work.

Jonathan Metzl: Well, thank you so much. And I’ll just say, um, toward, just toward the end of the last book, I have a bunch of kind of here are 10 action items I think people can do at the end of what we’ve become for how we can change the narrative about guns. But I think they’re generalizable about everybody for everything.

And so I’ve been thinking a lot about this too, because there is just so much strength. The strongest thing we can do together now is to come back together and show the strength of our. Yeah, the, our coalition is very powerful if we, if we let it be.

Sarah Jones: I love that. And where is the best place for people to follow you? And you know, where do you like to engage most? Give us all of that.

Jonathan Metzl: So my, um, my website is just www. JonathanMetzl. com. And I, I’m all my stuff’s there, you know, um, the artist form really known as Twitter. I’m on that a lot and Instagram and, and whatever, but just through my website has a lot of connections and, um, or just, you know, give me a call.

Sarah Jones: Perfect. I love it. Well, we’ll be following you and thank you again so much.

Jonathan Metzl: .

Same. Thanks so much.

Rashid: Yo, I ain’t seen that coming. I kind of feel sorry for white people.

Lorraine: Oh, that’s very nice, Rashid. And I feel sorry for you too, sweetheart.

Rashid: hold up Lorraine.

Lorraine: not in a racist way. I mean, I understand what you kids have been saying, and Jonathan, I mean, that’s why I mentioned the divide and conquer. You all have taught me that.

Bella: Adorbs, Lorraine, even though you still sounded like hella racist just like right at the beginning there. 

Rashid (Laptop): All them times in history when we could have came together from reconstruction to, to that, um, 

affordable care act, right? But instead, they stayed dividing us and this shit got worse. I’m like, what if we got another shot in November?

Sarah Jones: Rashid, you sound so different after this one conversation.

Rashid: real, for real. You know the way white people been wilding out. I was thinking about hitting up a gun range myself. But then Jonathan was talking about the NRA got white people buying they guns scared of us Then they got us buying they guns scared of white people. I’m like meantime y’all running away with the bag Nah, I ain’t the one or the two

Sarah Jones: I feel you, Rashid. And that actually brings me to this week’s prompt. Honestly, this is a hard one. Jonathan’s research just breaks down how some white folks are being manipulated to vote against their own interests, and they have been for centuries. All this time, it’s been the people in power making them believe that minorities are the real threat. So, part of me wants this prompt to be about empathy and understanding that this desperate clinging to white privilege hurts white people too. But regardless of why some white folks are so susceptible to this illusion of white supremacy, I also know how much pain that rhetoric and those policies have caused all of the rest of us.

And I don’t just want to let white people off the hook for that. So, what is our prompt? Is it about finding room in your heart for the pain everyone is feeling? Is it about recognizing the impact that racial hierarchy has had on all of our lives? Maybe the prompt is for you to decide. I really want to hear from you. How did this conversation make you feel about whiteness, whether it’s your own or if you’re a person of color, your proximity to or distance from whiteness and how that impacts your own racial identity for all of you. Does whiteness make you feel safer? How does it feel knowing that so many white Americans are being hurt by the same racist policies hurting people of color? Does it piss you off even more? Does it give you more space for compassion? Since this pod is about acknowledging that on some level, we are all approaching this political moment from a place of pain and fear, trying to protect ourselves and our loved ones. I want to be clear that when we’re reacting from racialized fear, we are repeating a cycle of trauma as old as this country. So for me, Yeah, compassion is the goal. And I’m comfortable saying that’s the official stance of America who hurt you. But I want to know from you all, after this conversation, where do you land? I can’t wait to hear what comes up for you. And if after you do this prompt, all you can do is lie down. That’s all right. As long as you get up in time for November.

America, who hurt you was created by Sarah Jones and sell by date LLC. Don’t forget to follow rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can keep up with the pod and share your prompt responses at yes. I’m Sarah Jones on Instagram and tick tock and all the social places. America Who Hurt You is a collaboration of Foment Productions and The Meteor, made possible in part by the Pop Culture Collaborative. Our host is me, Sarah Jones. Our producer is Kimberly Henry, with editorial support from Phil Serkis. Our executive producers are me and Cindy Levy. Our audio engineer is Sean Tao Lee. Our logo was designed by Bianca Alvarez. And our music is by Coma Media. 

Krista Tippett  

To ask any adult about their spiritual life is like asking them about their sex life. Right? You can’t just ask somebody that question head on.

Sarah Jones  

You have to kind of ease them in– give them a drink first! 

Sarah Jones  00:15

Hi everybody, welcome to America who hurt you the pod where we talk in many voices about politics our trauma, and how we can heal them both. I’m your host, Sarah Jones. And as usual, I’m here with a few co hosts Rashid. 

Rashid  00:30

Yo, what’s good y’all.

Sarah Jones00:31

Nereida. 

Nereida  00:32

Hola everybody.

Sarah Jones00:33

Lorraine. 

Lorraine00:34

Yes. Hello, there.

Sarah Jones  00:36

And Bella. 

Bella00:36

Hi everyone. 

Sarah Jones00:38

And by now, you know, they’re not exactly co hosts. They’re my characters from my one person shows and my movie Sell Buy Date… who live in my head. They also may pop in during interviews with our guests. Now, speaking of today’s guest is the one and only Krista Tippett. She’s a Peabody Award winner, National Humanities medalist and a New York Times best selling author, probably best known for creating and hosting the hugely popular radio show and podcast On Being, which looks at spirituality among other topics. And in this conversation, she blew my mind and really my spirit with her thoughts about the relationship between religion and politics. 

Bella  01:22

Yeah, but that should not be a relationship at all. Like even one nation under God. The God part wasn’t even put in there until the McCarthy era. 

Nereida01:32

Yes, Bella, but politicians using religion for their agenda. That’s different than really being a believer in something bigger.

Rashid  01:39

Real talk. My grandmother she used to take as a church like she would go every day if she could. I know it helped her through a lot. But on the other hand, I was always like, if God is so good, how can we stay broke riding the bus? 

Lorraine01:52

Well, I know faith has helped me survive too. But now with more hatred than ever between the religion sometimes I wonder, where’s the God in any of it? 

Sarah Jones  02:04

I hear you, Lorraine. I hear everybody. And I’m not saying we solved the problem in this conversation. But Krista did help me see a bigger picture, not just religion and politics, but our fuller humanity and ways to still have hope even in these times. My first thought was, oh no, I’m interviewing Krista Tippett. Like it’s one thing to be excited about interviewing the mind behind On Being, but you’re also an interviewer par excellence. That is not fair. Everybody else I interview I can be like I know what I’m doing, with you I’m like, the role of Sarah Jones should be being played by Krista Tippett right now. 

KT  02:54

No, but you know, I’m also somebody who loves a good conversation and when I get to be in conversation with you. I’m in conversation with multitudes.

Sarah Jones03:02

This is true. And I was also laughing because when I listened to you, it you know, really kind of massages a part of my brain that loves words. You know, part of the spirituality in my home is I want to get into spirituality with you, was a kind of worship of words. You know, my father, I remember him, he like memorized a section of something from Wizard of Oz, or something the clinking, clinking, clattering collection of caliginous junk, you know, these are the kinds of things that my father 

KT  03:32

I love that.

Sarah Jones03:33

That was his religion, right was kind of indulging in delicious words. But I mentioned this because, you know, not only do you have On Being, you also have this other kind of being in itself. Poetry Unbound, which is a kind of a family member of the On Being world, I was thinking about this mashup of our lives, right, poetry, and you talk you talk about wholeness in that TED talk you gave in 2023, that, you know, the more I listened to it, the more I returned to the what would I call, I mean, there’s a solace in what you share in that talk, and also in all of your work, and I love the way it has all these different colors. It’s, you know, you’re a spiritual person. I want to talk about kind of the differences between spirituality and religion. And you know, I feel like we’re all you know, imbued with spirit whether we think of it that way or not, not everybody feels that way. And so for me, you represent you contain multitudes you’re the Emma Goldman here but I’m just gonna kind of jump in and ask you first of all in my role as not you but my I’m channeling somebody, I don’t know who this is. But you Krista Tippett, ask your guests about the role that spirituality played in their childhood and I think that’s especially interesting. Why childhood?

KT04:59

Oh, well Childhood because actually to ask any adult about their spiritual life is like asking them about their sex life. Right? It’s not a question. Right? And it’s not you can’t just ask somebody that question head on if you want to get a response.

Sarah Jones05:17

You have to kind of ease them– give them a drink first. 

KT  05:20

Yeah. I mean, it’s a very intimate question. And it’s also a part of us that, however important, it is, is really hard to talk about. I mean, talk about words like words fail. So to ask somebody a question about, you know, tell me about your spiritual life? Or, or even Are you religious, you know, the, a yes, or a no, also doesn’t quite do it. So. But what I found is, interestingly, even though that’s true, if you ask somebody, and I’ve learned, you know, I learned this, like, I stumbled on it. So I learned that if you ask somebody about the spirit, I usually say, like the spiritual background of your childhood. And what I found about that is that all of that inhibition falls away. And you know, even people who would say, No, I’m not religious, I’m atheist, still, the atheist will have an incredible story of formation. It might be of you know, that their mother went to church and their fathers sat in the car, and they wondered why their fathers sat in the car. But there’s always a story of formation, and also, this is a place in us when you ask that childhood question, this is, this is where it just questions reside. It’s very, really soft, it’s searching. I do believe every, I think the word spiritual can be problematic. But I think we’re just talking about interior life, and everybody has one. And I feel like when you ask about this in the childhood, that’s where people go.

Sarah Jones06:43

I love that. This is this is an interesting question, because I wanted to ask it to and one of my friends, Nereida,  is really, I think, kind of torn about this question of spirituality, right? Apparently, there’s some statistic that a large, you know, a growing number of Americans in, you know, 20 to 30% ish, think of themselves as spiritual but not religious. Right. So there’s that, there’s that distinction. It’s almost like it’s uncool, or oh my God, how could you think I would, you know, believe in God, except that I say, oh my God all the time. But other than that, I mean, but and then there’s also, you know, the, the idea that even spirituality itself is fraught or problematic if you’re a you know, a scientist, you must be an atheist. And I’m thinking about Nereida, okay. 

Nereida07:32

Hi, first of all, Krista Tippett, this is amazing. So I just want to say that and I know there might be a stereotype that you know, who listens to NPR, some people who listen to NPR sound like me, thank you very much. But, this idea that, for some of us, it is very complicated, right?

I have relatives, we do worship, you know we grew up in the same communities, and they are not– I don’t even want to say like, they don’t agree with me about certain things. I don’t take ALL of it, but some of it is very beautiful to me, it’s part of who I am. It means more than just political issues for us, it’s like this is our culture. I do take it back to my childhood that some of my comfort comes from, you know, when the rest of the world is going crazy, or everything is terrible. Or in my case, you know, if you have people being, you know, oppressed in your life, then at least the feeling that we know, we are worth the same as everyone else in the eyes of God, right? 

KT  08:21

Yeah, well, just that there was such an important thing that you said about how religion I guess you would call the religious world. I grew up an evangelical, but that’s not how it described itself. It was kind of a mishmash of, you know, charismatic, evangelical tradition. But it was thoroughly apolitical interest for most of the 20th century. Actually, the people like the traditions we think of as evangelical, stayed on principle out of politics, right? totally forgotten this story, right? And so it’s a newish phenomenon that including especially charismatic religion, and these are like, this is a family tree that everybody doesn’t know because 

Nereida09:10

can you explain the charisma because I’m loving it. I’m like maybe I’m charismatic, I feel like I’ve always been.

KT  09:18

So charismatic Christianity in the United States in the last decades, in the same period that evangelicals became politicized, became evangelical became associated with evangelicalism. But charismatic Christianity started in Los Angeles, at the turn of the century with a black pastor ordaining women. While the South was Jim Crow, and they were ordaining women in 1906.

Sarah Jones

Oh, I have goosebumps.

KT

This is 70 years before and globally as that charismatic tradition, for example, went south in the Americas. It became emancipatory and it hit Catholic countries where, where you had this very authoritarian, also colonial, you know, tradition, right. And it wasn’t just that everybody grew up Catholic, the judges were Catholic, the president’s were Catholic.

Sarah Jones 10:22

The water was Catholic.

KT 10:23

 Yeah, the water is Catholic, but charismatic Christianity came in with precisely that emancipatory message, which people heard that way that you, we are all equal in the light in the eyes of God. Everyone has a direct line to the Divine, you don’t need a priest, you don’t need an authority figure. And I think also what this gets out is something that’s important to me that that spiritual but not religious language is very vague. And that reflects an amazing thing, an astonishing thing that’s happened over the last few decades. If you think of our species, across time, across cultures, for until about 10 minutes ago, or 10 seconds ago, in cosmic time, everyone inherited a religious identity, like they inherited the color of their eyes, right. And what I mean by that is it was community and it was songs, and it was text, and it was rituals that we need, we need Rituals. Also, it’s it’s conversation across generations about the ultimate questions. So the spiritual but not religious is this very specific moment in time where that kind of inherited given identity has fallen away. I do think that if we survive this century, right, like, we gotta say that, if we do, there’s going to be some, there’s still going to be have to be some re- See, I don’t know, I don’t think we invent this from scratch. I think the traditions really matter, and they also we human beings, and the institutions, especially I think, like in the 20th century, were not good stewards of these depths. And so, and the forms just don’t make sense anymore. Just like none of our forms make sense anymore. Like school doesn’t make sense anymore. It’s not in the Bible anywhere that churches attend. I am Sunday morning. Right. Right, and actually, the entire institution being structured around church at 10am, Sunday morning for 21st century people becomes very problem. So, again, you know, my message is always it’s complicated.

Sarah Jones 12:43

The whole reason this podcast exists, right? The idea of America, Who Hurt You?, it’s that something might have happened in the past right there. I’m thinking about what’s in the zeitgeist, you know, what happened to you and, and you talk about wholeness. And that implies that we might have to be dealing with a brokenness or a fragmentedness or a fracturedness. When do those, you know, you talk about rupture? When did when do those first tiny ruptures first happened? Maybe they’re not tiny. But you know, talking about trauma, to me, they’re all connected because of what you just, you know, kind of pointed out that soft place of childhood, we can most of us can still access it. We’re lucky. I’m wondering, kid, may I ask the question you always ask your guests. Did spirituality play a role in your childhood? What kind of role?

KT13:32

Yeah, it was very, I grew up in I grew up in a really kind of, you know, Bible Belt, immersive religious world. My grandfather was a Southern Baptist preacher. He preached hellfire and brimstone. Wow. But he was, but you know, part of my answer to this question, because my grandfather was very stern. He had a second grade education. He had a beautiful big mind. I was aware of that but he’d never been invited to apply his mind to his Bible that he loved. And so there was a fearfulness in him about asking questions, and I didn’t have that fearfulness. There’s a way in which I feel like my work is me doing things that he couldn’t do. Because I also think he would be nice rolled by, by what unfolded? And that the other thing about him where that question takes me is he was full of contradictions. So he was preaching, honestly, this heaven that was so small that practically nobody was getting in. Methodist weren’t getting it over from there, and, but he was the funniest person I knew. He was loving, and passionate and I actually think even as a child, I picked up on the fact that he was full of all these rules for not falling into sin. And I think he was just a really lusty person who was kind of struggling with himself. And I think that those contradictions, I mean, I love by the way, I just love the title of your podcast, I love this. I love the exploration you’re doing. And I think, you know, when I think of my grandfather, who in our world would fit into certain categories, but what I would also know what I would know is that, yes, he said, he preached these kinds of rules. And also he was a very complicated human being. That I think, has really shaped the way you know how I look out at our country now. And I see people in boxes, and I can never actually confine them to those boxes.

Sarah Jones 15:37

That speaks so much to how you, you know, I look to you as kind of a light that helps me navigate through what can feel like a really I don’t, you know, darkness is a tricky term. But this moment we’re in, it is easy for me to not only want to keep, I want people to stay in those boxes, where it feels like they are trying to, you know, preach authoritarianism or harm me or others I love and it’s like, how to, and I know you’re not advocating for harm, you’re advocating for the opposite. But the way you frame it, I think we are so accustomed in America now to this polarized and often along religious lines. Right. Like you said, there’s been an evolution.

KT16:23

Yeah, I want to say so what you said, when I say not confining them to their boxes, I what I’m seeing is, you know, when I think when I say we can find people to their boxes, right, like, I know, you I know you voted for and then this kind of, you know, very comprehensive assumption that we know a lot about them. Right. But when in fact,

Sarah Jones  16:46

We think we know everything. I’m like got it, done. 

KT  16:49

Right. And so what I’m saying is, I think, knowing that there is not just complexity, but contradiction in all of us. None of us like as this perfectly rational list of things we believe in, do that is, you know, coherent. And so to me, that means that there’s always and I really do believe this. I know, there are some people who are lost to the dark side, but I think for most people, if we could, we’re really good at shouting people down and, and kind of backing them into their corners. Where they actually do get smaller than they are. And I think I think to know that somebody is actually more complicated and contradicts themselves, suggests that there’s a space for us to coax them out into that complexity.

Sarah Jones 17:41

See, I think this kind of nuance, we don’t have time for it right now. Right? When I say we, the collective ADHD of you know, myself included, like this moment of the soundbite and TikTok, and you have this long to decide who someone is. And actually, I think it I wonder what you think about this, but there’s a kind of demand of political purity or just sort of purity? You know, you have to if you are this, then and what you’re talking about is the opposite that actually, every one of us, you know, we’re filled with contradictions, you can’t predict exactly who we’re all going to be based on who we voted for. 

That said, you know there is this question of like you said when people are backed into their corners and the worst of us really can come out. You know, I’m not a historian, but I remember reading about how in the Reagan era, he was a conservative president, and he really helped solidify this partnership, that made the evangelical church synonymous with with these key conservative political goals, like being anti-abortion and anti-queer– they didn’t even address the AIDS crisis. It just feels like a transactional thing that doesn’t feel connected to anything spiritual at all.

KT  19:05

Yeah. And it’s been you know, even when we have these you know, I really these checklists of you know, you associate someone in that religious camp, believing in all the, you know, all these things and, you know, even if just to take one example, inside evangelicalism, Even inside conservative evangelicalism, which is a big, big swath of people, you know, young evangelicals, for example, might be pro life. But they’re probably also ecological activists, right environmental activist. So it just doesn’t line up, right. And then, you know, if we can overcome our very unreasonable desire that people be simple, right? And we can just decide they’re one thing or the other and dismiss them, or call them our friend, then we could say, okay, you know, you believe this one thing that really feels, you know, can even feel harmful to my identity and harmful to our world. And yet, here’s this thing that we are both passionate about, that isn’t good for our world. Can we at least be in conversation or even some kind of partnership around that? And then, then, if you’re in relationship to somebody, and there’s just a general truth, a new possibility opens up.

Sarah Jones 20:12

Right? I think that when there’s a silly sounding expression, that when I’m pointing at you, there are three fingers pointing back at me. And I don’t think we can indict someone else without kind of, you know, a feeling inside a sense of I’m also bad and wrong, or I also have contradictions. And I feel like that drives our politics is just like a mudslinging. You know, I don’t know, if you experience in your work as that I’m especially interested in this lab for the Art of Living idea. Is there a political component? Does the lab for the Art of Living include getting souls to the polls, or getting

KT  20:45

souls to the polls! You know, I have this conversation with somebody the other night, who was telling me that I needed to be totally engaged in, you know, the election, and I, I’m just going to tell you what I what I said to him, I, I’m working on a different timeframe, myself in my work,

Sarah Jones 21:07

You mean you don’t think you save all of humanity and the entire history of the universe in the next couple of months Krista Tippett?

KT21:57

I actually, look, I know, we have a lot of important elections in our world this year. And in our country. I also do not think that one Tuesday in November, is the only day that is going to matter in terms of health as we turn out. And I know that there are a lot of people working on that electoral piece, and I’m kind of working I’m working on and I feel like what you’re doing here, we’re working on, who are we through this and beyond this, whatever happens on that Tuesday. So some of us have to be doing that work? You know, I just want to say also, I think just in terms of what you just said. There’s something that our brains do that is very interesting to me, that we tend to imagine, in the other group, whatever other we’re talking about, an incredible homogeneity, right and so and the other thing that happens through media is we also have a worst case exemplar of the other group. So we make this move, which is just natural. It’s just our creaturely nature, to associate everybody in that group with that one person. Right? We generalize and yet, we all know that if you ask us about our group, our extended circle of friends, the colleagues, we love our family members, our children, our parents. These are people with whom we may often disagree with whom loving them may often mean doing things, because we even though we don’t feel like it, you know, we’d rarely feel perfectly understood or perfectly understanding. And so, you know, and I think one thing that comes up when we have this conversation about how do we get out of our boxes is somebody will say, but you know, there’s real danger. And that’s true, right? This is this conversation you and I are having is not about stepping into danger, it’s also not putting about about thinking everybody should, should be that vulnerable person, right? Like there’s a place to, for some of us to put our bodies between, you know, in front of other bodies. I also want to insist and I know this is true that the number of you know, that we are fixated on we have a river we’ve a big imagination about that worst case exemplar and the people who truly are harmful, right? Toxic, lost? And then there’s a bigger space. There’s a bigger space than we imagine of people who also have some questions who also would be curious, and where there might be a really hard conversation to have, but there’s not enmity, right. So I just want us and I feel like that’s what you’re doing. I want us to step a little bit more boldly into that, towards that and just get curious about it, right?

Sarah Jones 24:03

Yes. All right. I have a friend who is going to do his best to ask his question, but he feels a little awkward. And I’m gonna let that be okay.

Rasheid  24:18

Yeah, what’s good Krista Tippett. First of all, I’m not really that NPR dude you know what I mean, but Sarah Jones introduced me to your work, to your TED Talk. And you was talking about, you know, to me, it seemed really important. Like, we have a negativity bias. You say in that in the talk, and don’t get me wrong, my interactions with cops will prove to you that it’s not in my brain, that danger is real. But at the same time– I ain’t gonna say dude’s name, but a real scary dude and first thing you think when you see this person is oh my God, I’m fired. Me with somebody bringing that energy and they the authority, it is hard to then be like, okay, but still, most of us out here is not that one dude. And, you know, we trying to, like, find some kind of safety inside. That’s what I’m saying. Like, I feel unsafe outside. And I didn’t realize that’s very connected to like, I didn’t have that place to feel safe inside and had that place to feel like okay, but it’s a lot of beautiful things happening out in the world. How do you, how do you help people, not just be doom scrolling? And be like, Yo, this hell is a countdown to hell, you know? I mean,

KT  25:25

I mean, I wish I had the power to stop people from doing scrolling. Right? I mean, this is kind

Rasheid 25:32

I see Sarah Jones put a phone down at like two o’clock in the morning after listening to your texts. So I’m not even gonna lie. So sometimes it’s powerful. You just need somebody to be like, Hey, you don’t got it? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

KT  25:40

Well, you know, one thing I just invite people to do to get into this reality that there is this generative narrative, right, that, that there’s the story, there are the bad experiences, and they’re also the million terrible stories that confirm our sense that the world is a terrible place,

Rasheid 26:01

Right? We’re not going to spiritually bypass, like they say, we’re not going to get that happening.

KT  26:03

No, and that’s coming at us all the time. But I feel like if anybody, okay, that’s probably too big a statement, but I feel like most of us, if I just asked you to think about the people, you know, like you in your world, the really normal ordinary interactions that you have in the course of the day. There’s just a lot of goodness, there just is goodness, there. It is not a, you know, a total, it’s, I don’t I yeah, if you’re in the war zone, it’s a total picture of destruction. But even there, right, even in the worst place, I have to tell you, I’ve spent a day last week at SingSing prison with these men, you know, incredible men, incredible human beings. A lot of them been in this place for 10 or 20 years for something they did, or something they actually didn’t do, when they were 17 or 18 years old. I have rarely been in a conversation with a bunch of adult men who were more- who had done more work on themselves internally, who loved each other more. Like who took care of each other. Now, I know that there are a lot of minutes in their day when they’re not sitting in that school, part of the prison, where there are terrible things happening. But I feel like I can, you know, I can be confident even in making a blanket statement like that, that any of us can find a lot of goodness, if we look for it. And then what I’m just saying is let’s, let’s generalize more around that we can generalize around what is awful. Let’s stretch you know, let’s actually not default to our primitive brain which only wants to wants us to focus on threat. Right? And that’s, that’s not easy.

Sarah Jones 28:03

That’s a conscious I was gonna say, right, it’s it’s reps in the gym or in, in the lab, for the art of living. You might have to do your reps in the lab. And I think this idea that we have neuroplasticity, right? That was my I’m like America who hurt you but also, America, how do we heal how who healed you? Who’s healing me? We’re healing each other. And it isn’t this woowoo thing you really can sort of do reps of, I’m going to you know, we hear about gratitude lists or you know, making sure that we have a daily dose of something like what you put into the world. What are some of your suggestions for not all of us, you know, are willing to be proximate as Bryan Stevenson might put it and you know, get to SingSing, but what are the ways that we can engage in community maybe get outside our comfort zones so that we do you feel more empathy for quote unquote, the other? How do you help people? You know, make a beginning, as you say?

KT 38:57

Well, you know, you know, I love the the I love taking questions as friends. Right. And I and I actually think questions really are, you know, they’re kind of spiritual technology they can be we’ve kind of lost we think questions or things to be answered, but I’m talking about questions as ways we expand. So yeah, I mean, you know, Brian Stevens, just saying get proximate, get proximate, they didn’t just know what they needed to get proximate to it first. Right. So, I think I think we’re in a really overwhelming world right now, all of us and there’s a lot that we know about that we are powerless before. That’s the that’s a very new situation right.

Sarah Jones 29:51

How so? Because it’s interesting, you say it’s new for powerless, because I was thinking about-

KT  29:59

What’s new is the intimacy we have with what we’re perilous before. Right? It’s the pictures, the immediate can see it playing. You feel implicated, we are implicated. But we know more about that, but not in a way that actually allows us to touch it. Do you know this phrase, I’m in the military, there’s this phrase moral injury or get out of the military, right? Which is people who get implicated in something, they’ve done something or is or they, you know, they were forced to do something? Or even observe something that that that absolutely, that is abhorrent to them morally, that’s that defies their moral core. And I almost feel like to be alive right now. With everything that we see, and know, and it’s coming out at us constantly injustice and violence in the world that our species is enacting and that our governments are implicated in right? And to feel powerless it’s almost like moral injury is part of the human experience. Now, if you’re paying attention, I’m not going to be able to do anything about a lot of the things that are weighing on me today that are happening in the world. I think for each of us to stand reverently, before the question of what is my work to do, like, what can I see and touch? Where might I be proximate? Really take that, that question almost as a spiritual discipline, right, like as a companion? And also it’s not for a day or a week, right? Take it? 

Sarah Jones 31:36

Right, it’s for just November, right? It’s not just a Tuesday? 

KT31:40

it’s I mean, I would say for a year, I think a question that big, which is really about what is my calling in this time deserves discernment. We’re also like it as you know, we’re impatient, as you say, We want things to be quick, this is deep. And this needs a different kind of attention. So it’s countercultural. So it’s a bold move? Yes.

Sarah Jones 31:58

You’re making me think of, you know, if there’s moral injury, and that is so beautifully put, and I really don’t think any of us escape it, we may think we’re escaping it. But I believe there, I’ve heard it called soul loss, that you lose, you know, sort of this eroding of our souls. There’s also repair there, we can perform a kind of spiritual surgery on one another. I’ve had some of my most profound moments. You know, I live in LA now or back in New York, where I’m from catching a stranger’s eyes on the subway. And instead of looking away or thinking of them as an other, having this incredible tender moment, just locking eyes with someone and having an exchange of spirit. And, you know, I know that sounds naive, you’re not going to stop, you know, brutality and, you know, the Supreme Court doing whatever the hell it is it’s doing, you know, you can always lock eyes with Clarence Thomas, I don’t know if he would want to. The point is, I think we do have access to these moments you’re talking about and when we live in the question, as you say, that beautiful Rekha concept that you bring to us. Yeah, it I think the answer is needing to live in answers shuts us down, living in questions opens us up even in the face of the pain. Yeah.

KT 33:22

We actually waste a lot of time rushing to answers that are too quick, that are not that are not that are not deep enough. And then we walk down paths and we wreck things too quickly. And then we have to walk it back. Right? What you just described on the subway is the power that each of us has to make this phrase, make someone’s day. And equally, it’s really easy for us to break someone’s day. Think about you know, Ocean Vuong had this amazing conversation with him right after the pandemic was breaking, and we didn’t really know it yet. And he talked about how in his Vietnamese household, you know, they learned that you take off your shoes at the door because out of reverence and for the people and the place and he said, you know, what he works out is to try to take the shoes off his voice, so that he can be that presence that he wants to be. So I mean, talk about a spiritual discipline. Wow.

Sarah Jones 34:40

I am committing to taking the shoes off my words. Krista, all I can say is if I could do this with you every day, I would probably be a much healthier person. What do I want to say? And just there’s a part of me the very youngest part of me is so grateful for this soft you know, we live in such a kind of up armored time. So my inner little girl is saying more Krista, please.

KT 34:45

Oh, I feel so honored by this. I just love it. And I love you. And we will keep talking.

Sarah Jones 34:55

We will.

Rasheid 35:00

That got me emotional, locking eyes with strangers on the subway. I’m saying no, don’t try that with no cop. They definitely gon search your bag and break your day.

Bella  35:11

Yeah, I’m an atheist. But I’m also like a Libra with a Scorpio rising. So I’m totally here for like the ritual part and like, culture connecting people. It’s only when it’s like weaponized to like divide and conquer. 

Lorraine35:24

Well, Bella some people are always going to use religion the wrong way for power and control. The point is, no one religion is all good or all bad. And we all have our contradictions.

Nereida35:36

But I mean, it’s still not equal, when some people’s contradictions can destroy our whole democracy. Yes,

Lorraine  35:40

but you did hear Chris’s point. You can disagree with people, but still come together on the things we do agree about.

Sarah Jones 35:54

I think you’re both right. The balance of power in America feels more undemocratic than ever. And yet, it’s also true that Americans share more common ground than we’re taught to believe, even across religious backgrounds. In fact, a recent AP poll found only small variances between Republicans and Democrats on many of our most basic rights. So just imagine if the majority of us took our power back from the most extreme voices that benefit from polarizing us. And what if that could start with reclaiming our higher power, which brings me to this week’s prompt, and stay with me if this all sounds too woowoo. I know many of us don’t believe in a bearded guy in the sky type of God or spirituality. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a connection to an inner life. Like Krista mentioned, I’ve found it can be anything like anything at all, hugging your kids or spending time with your pet, walking in nature, or it could be a song that moves you to tears. Anything that helps you plug into inspiration and a sense of meaning beyond yourself, can give you a spiritual experience. That spirituality can be a resource, almost like a battery that recharges us and reminds us that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. And yes, even bigger than November. So if you’re up for it, I invite you to take a couple of slow deep breaths, put your hand on your heart and ask yourself, have you ever felt a connection to a higher power? Maybe it was swimming in the ocean as a kid or a really great yoga class? Or maybe you grew up with religion and there were beautiful connections that you can still feel. Now ask yourself, How can you imagine that same energy being helpful to you in your current life, maybe even being a source of strength or hope in difficult times? Now, if you’ve never felt a connection to a higher power, or if you’ve had negative experiences in the past with religion or spirituality, how can you start completely fresh? Imagine a whole new spiritual power as a resource for you. What kind of daily practices could you start to plug into some suggestions? Maybe journaling? Deep breathing first thing in the morning for a couple of minutes or hugging a tree? Not one you’re allergic to? Visit us on socials at yes I’m Sarah Jones if you want to share what came up for you with the prompt– and either way, I hope you go get your inner life.

America, Who Hurt You? was created by Sarah Jones and Sell/Buy/Date LLC. Remember to follow, rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can keep up with pod and share your prompt responses  at Yes-I’m-Sarah-Jones on Instagram and TikTok. 

America, Who Hurt You? is a collaboration of Foment Productions and The Meteor, made possible by the Pop Culture Collaborative. Our host is me, Sarah Jones, our producer is Kimberly Henry, with editorial support from Phil Surkis. Our executive producers are me and Cindi Leive. Our audio engineer is Shawn Tao Lee. Our Logo was designed by Bianca Alvarez, and our music is by Coma-Media.