Podcast: Democracy in Crisis The Courage to Re-Humanize One Another

 Transcript

Speaker 1:
Hello, and welcome to this special episode of Who Belongs, a podcast from the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC, Berkeley. This episode is part of a series of talks and panel discussions recorded during the breakout sessions of our Othering & Belonging Conference that took place in Oakland this past April. This session is titled Democracy in Crisis: The Courage to Re-humanize One Another. It focuses on a project called Bridging for Democracy, which is developing strategies for grassroots organizations working in different parts of the country to bridge across racial, ideological and urban rural divides, and to strengthen democratic norms at a time of deep social fragmentation and dehumanization.

The panelists include Bassem Kawar, who is the political director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Lalo Montoya, who is the civic engagement director at Make the Road Nevada, Ashley Dixon, who is the Rural Georgia Campaign's lead organizer at Southern Crossroads, and Ponsella Hardaway, who is the executive director of MOSES. The panel was moderated by Mansi Kathuria, who is the field strategy and research analyst at OBI. Mansi and OBI's network for transformative change curated this session. You can find more episodes from this series on our website at belonging.berkeley.edu/whobelongs.

Mansi Kathuria:
Thank you so much for joining us this morning for Democracy in Crisis: The Courage to Re-humanize One Another. I'm going to pass it off my colleague, Ponsella to get us started.

Ponsella Hardaway:
Good morning.

Audience:
Morning.

Ponsella Hardaway:
My name is Ponsella Hardaway, she/her/hers. I am the director of an organization in Detroit called Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength, called MOSES. And for description, let me just talk a little bit about... I never did this before, so my first time. But you see I am a Black woman, a thick Black woman, proud, thick, Black woman in the prime of her life. I have naturally curly hair. I have some new specks, I like them. And I am wearing Whoopi Goldberg design called DUBGEE, a black jacket. So that's my description. Can't miss me.

You know, today we face a critical moment in our nation's history, right? Democracy as we know it is under attack. You agree?

Audience:
Yes.

Ponsella Hardaway:
Many of us are concerned about the direction this country is headed. It isn't just a fleeting worry, it's a deep-seated alarm about the very foundation of our democratic system. I can't see the slides. I don't know where the slides are, okay.

Mansi Kathuria:
Is that right?

Ponsella Hardaway:
That's right, yeah. Go back. Go back the other side.

Mansi Kathuria:
Go back?

Ponsella Hardaway:
Yup. Okay. Recent statistics reveal a stark reality, only 4% of Americans believe in our political system... I'm sorry, believe our system is functioning effectively, which we just saw in the word cloud, right? Trust in government have plummeted to as low a point in seven decades. The political climate is affecting Americans' emotional wellbeing, with 65% reporting frequent feelings of exhaustion toward politics, and 55% often feeling angry. Alarming, nearly a quarter of Americans now believe that true American patriots may need to resort to violence to save our country. This marks the first time that support for political violence has surged above 25%. Next slide.

You know, to counter this division, we must re-humanize one another by deeply engaging and listening beyond the political rhetoric. We just heard Scott talk about the curiosity. He really just talked about our workshop in the other session, right? Our nation's been polarized by political and corporate interests that profit from chaos diverting attention from substantive issues that affect us all. We listen deeply. Putting political differences aside, we discover shared concerns and common impacts on whether a rural or urban setting, such as issues like water quality.

So if we learn to listen to one another... So, for example, people know about the water issue in Michigan, in Detroit. They know about Flint, right?

Audience:
Mm-hmm.

Ponsella Hardaway:
The interesting part about that water issue, we were fighting it in Detroit, we were fighting it in Flint, the cleanliness, the affordability, the system itself. But what was interesting was when we went to rural Michigan, they say, "Well, that's Detroit. That's the Black people. That's the people of color, that's their issue. We don't have that issue." They were in such denial about they were in a good space, when we went out and talked to them about their water, they had the same issues. But we bought into this political soundbite of life that we feel that we other people because we're been rocked to sleep that we're okay, right?

We're not aiming to change people's minds, but listen to their stories. A method of disruption that I love, soft disruption, but just having some deep conversations that we challenge the norms that they're expecting conflict when we have these conversations. So having soft, soft disruption, we have experience that have shaped our views, people have different stories. We want to be able to tell those stories, so how do we disrupt the hard fragmentation that we're experiencing by just having conversations with one another, by understanding the other person's story?

Such dialogues can be transformative, challenging expectations, breaking the cycle of othering that has become normalized in our society. We have to be careful that we're not othering that hard fragmentation small group of people, right? This approach combats a hard fragmentation out of society where dehumanization and normalization of others have not taken root, even among those who believe that we're on the right side of the issues. So we're in the room, are we othering and not knowing it? Are we part of the problem? Right?

So we talk about winning, and dehumanizing people through these politics that we have, but we want to win, so we have to re-humanize people by having these conversations. We aim not to persuade people. We're not going to try to convince people of anything. We had a conversation with a group and they want to say, "Well, why are they voting for Trump?" No, that's not the conversation. We want to have a conversation about who they are, why they believe what they believe. What has happened to them? What is their story that got them to that particular point?

My mother, I hate to even say it, she's a Trump supporter. But there's a story about why she feels that way. There's something there that caused her to believe that this country is not giving her what she want. And some crazy person has allowed people to actually walk into this othering space, right? So how do we begin to look at people's stories and why they are important to us in our own communities regardless of what their political ideology is?

So we want to use a soft disruption for conversation that we stop these hardened divides. In doing so, we fight against pervasive fragmentation, strive to build a broader and more inclusive we where everyone is seen, heard and valued. So we have three hypotheses about why these deep conversations are really important, right? Scott's story was so good, I just really... People, who were there when Scott was talking, wasn't that powerful?

Audience:
Yeah.

Ponsella Hardaway:
He set it up for us, right? So just remember what he said. But the reason why we're doing this is because of what Scott said in the previous session, right? We want to have democratic norms and make sure humanization is a normal part of our lives, right? So we want to actually experience of mutual humanization through these conversations that will impact all of our work on the ground as we do the issue work that we're working on. Developing and supporting canvassers who also go through a transformational experience by working, doing the canvassing, experiencing it, debriefing what they experienced during those canvasses and how we develop the process going forward in terms of what it means to bridge in these conversations.

Resources and capacity needed for long bridging. This is not about doing this up to the election, but this is about a way of our organizing and work beyond and in between elections, in between any political conversation. It is, of course, we want to get people to actually act on democracy, but we want them to understand how we do it together. We're creating the bigger we. So that's our hypotheses. The next slide, our pilot guidelines. I'm going to read this. I'm sorry, John, didn't want to read off slide. I'm going to read off this one.

There should be bridging happening in and through the scripts, and each one is reaching out and listening to constituencies that the organization doesn't usually engage, or that is across a recognized divide between the organization and the constituency. Seeing one another as full across the divide is both means and an end. This mutual humanization will change our organizations for the better. It is a skill, a science and an art that we are trying to learn through the pilot, and the scripts should reflect that. Affirming across the divide and share instinctive norms around democracy and all of us having a voice. Those are the pilot guidelines.

I pass it over to Bassem.

Bassem Kawar:
All right. Good morning everyone. My name is Bassem Kawar. I'm the political director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Give it a clap. Give it a clap to ISIRR. For my description, I am a 35-year-old Arab immigrant. Came to this country in '99 and I am wearing a black shirt because I love the color black. I love everything that's black. I'm bald. I have a red beard with a few gray hairs on the side and I'm wearing an Apple Watch and I'm wearing a necklace.

So just to kick us off, thank you, Ponsella, for kind of giving an overview. It's always nice to talk theory, to talk about what we believe in. But for the next five minutes I want to walk everyone through the practice. Theory is good, reading books is good, but if we don't put it to practice, we're missing out. And this is what our pilot program... We wanted to pull everything that we learned into test. What does the practice look like?

So I just want to sum up the guidelines and the way that we understand it that Ponsella just spoke about. So when our groups that you see on this panel came together, we came around three guiding principles. The first one that we all shared, democracy is in a major crisis. But we wanted to come around for this pilot project, and hopefully the project long-term that you all can join us in. And don't worry, we have walk sheets for everyone. We're going to go knock doors after we finish this session. I'm kidding.

But the three guiding principles that we really ran off of as, one, for this pilot, we want to talk to people that we usually exclude when we do our traditional civic engagement. Imagine how you build a universe, 200,000 doors and then you start taking people out because we became so good at targeting. Let's take these people out, they don't agree with us. Why waste time and capacity? And let's get the 50% plus one. Overtime, our universe started with 300,000, it became good. It became to 250, 200, 150. Our universes are getting smaller. The people that we other are getting larger.

So one of the guidelines for this pilot is how do we bring people that we exclude and make them our target for these conversations. So that's guideline number one that our organizations agreed on. Two, we want to see people as humans and we want to engage in conversations. We want to become good at doing this, because this is what is going to save our democracy. And then third guideline is democracy can only work when we are all involved. And that's the third guiding principle that we all agreed on, despite of our differences. We can disagree, that's completely fine, but you need to be heard just like I could be heard.

So how did we go about making all of this into teams going out, knocking doors and having these conversations? First component... Next slide, please. ... research. Hopefully there could be some follow-up. I wish we had a little bit of time to talk about some of the research, the focus groups, the conversations that we had with the targeted communities across the six states, where hopefully our project in the four states where our pilot took off. Research, listening sessions, let's just talk about the differences.

Step number two, training. Training was so important. Bridging conversations are nothing like our traditional canvassing. They are nothing like the traditional deep canvas that we're all familiar with. It does not talk about issues. We talk about our differences, accepting one another and then talking about democracy. Who wants to talk about democracy, right? We did. But the training was different. This is not what our canvassers, our committee, our leaders were used to, so training was essential. Scripts. I come from a tradition, the scripts are so simple. Hello, quick intro, get people talking for a little bit, hit them with the issues, "Do you support my person?" "No." "Thank you. Have a good day." "Yes." "Okay, when are you planning to vote? Okay, let's get a vote plan. Okay, perfect." Ask, ask, ask, ask, after ask.

Our scripts had no asks in it. Very simply. And it took a lot of struggle back and forth to come up with these scripts because we're not used to them. So scripts was the third biggest thing that we worked on for quite some time. Prepping our canvassers. Our canvassers were not ready for these projects. We did surveys that we'll talk a little bit about, but this was just as transformative for our communities and the people that we've othered, as it was for our canvassers. So we had to prep our people.

I remember when we launched our canvas in Chicago, one of my canvassers, lead canvassers, she is a rockstar, her picture will be up in a second, she said, "Why are we doing this? Aren't those the people that we always want to clean out of our universe? Why are we talking to them? We don't need them to win." So this was a struggle with the canvasser. We had to prep our people. Who are we talking to? Why are we talking to them? And the fifth thing that we all love, practice. Take it to the field. And this is exactly what we did.

Next slide, please. We could leave this up for a second here. But just to give people an idea of who we were talking to. So at ICIRR, we're a statewide coaliltion. We wanted to focus our canvas on the southwest side of the city, Latino, independent, conservative leaning. If you look on our map, every single election, this is the wave that votes with the conservative. So that was the area that we've targeted. This is the second time that we even considered talking to voters in that area. But the universe looked different, so we were excited about that.

If you look at Make the Road Nevada, they decided to go into the rural areas in Nevada. If you look at SURJ, Showing Up for Racial Justice, and Southern Crossroads, their work in Georgia and Tennessee, also in the rural areas. The Workers Center for Racial Justice, their target community was a conservative base in Wisconsin. MOSES in Michigan, also suburban congregations of Metro Detroit. So the three groups that we launched this pilot with was ICIRR, Make the Road Nevada, and SURJ. Next slide, please.

Look at our beautiful canvassers. Come on. Give it up for all our canvassers. Give it up. Give it up. Give it up. So, are you all ready? You read the numbers, right? Nice numbers. In six weeks, we knocked over 22,000 doors and had 2000 deep conversations, bridging conversations across four states. Imagine if we all would have left after this session, all knocked on doors. How many doors would we knock in about a week? Okay, just think about it. That's the ask at the end, for all of you to join us. Next slide, please.

This is something that's very deal to me, that I really... I mentioned about the impact on the communities. But this is what the impact and numbers look like on our own canvassers, keeping in mind that our canvassers are community members, leaders, people that we invest in, people that we love, people that we work with, rub shoulders with every day. But the increase in confidence was a key component. If you think about leadership development, community development, 22% of our canvassers... We did a pre-survey, post-survey. 22% said, "I am more confident today than I was day one." Those conversations were different. We're not talking to supporters. We're talking to the opposition, so look at the confidence level.

We're talking about 11% increase in commonalities. "I thought I had nothing in common with these folks." And keep "these folks", the people that we've been othering, 11% increase in, "No, there are things in common. They love their neighborhoods just like I do. They care about the potholes just like I do. They might disagree with the new arrivals coming to Chicago, but they believe they have a solution just like I do. They believe that they're not being heard, just like I am." So 11% commonalities, 12% increase in feeling like bridging is possible. For all of us in this room, let's not bullshit one another. We all believe that we need to destroy the opposition, erase the opposition. But 12% increase that are like, "Hey, we might be able to bridge."

And then 12% increase in feeling like we could break down the barriers through canvassing. Through conversations and listening, we could break down walls and barriers. So for me, this is dear to me because this is the impact on the leaders that we organize, the people that we live with, our neighbors, our friends, people that we break bread with. And hopefully we can keep this going and continue to develop our teams.

And, Mansi, I'll pass it back to you. But before you do that, next slide. Give it up to my team, y'all, and all the teams out there.

Mansi Kathuria:
Thank you so much Bassem. I'm going to pass it to Ashley now to talk about deep curiosity.

Ashley Dixon:
Hi, everyone. My name is Ashley Dixon, pronouns she/her. I'm the lead organizer at Southern Crossroads and Showing UP for Racial Justice. I'm a white woman with long, red hair. I'm wearing a pink blazer, a black shirt, a black skirt and my very favorite red boots. I come from a working class background in rural Kansas and I now live in unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, right outside of Atlanta. And I am so excited to be here with you all today.

So what we're going to do today is we're going to take a few minutes to practice some deep listening. And you may have done a similar exercise to this with Scott Shigeoka this morning, if you were in that session. But we cannot have too much curiosity and this is an opportunity for you to get to know another one of your neighbors. I had the joy in the exercise of connecting with someone else from Kansas. So hopefully you will find a new connection.

And so we're going to have to turn to the person, preferably a stranger sitting next to you, and ask them a question, which we'll give you. And then you're going to dig deeply and you're going to ask questions and you're going to ask even more questions and follow-up questions. And we ask that you be curious and vulnerable and listening and keep asking open-ended questions. This is always the most important element of any conversation.

We make connections by taking our time, by listening, by being curious and asking more questions. So behind me you will see a tool, I think, yes, that we use for this called the cone of curiosity. And so you'll listen to the person for a hint of a story, and then you'll ask your partner to tell you more. We think of it as digging one seven-foot hole instead of digging seven one-foot holes. So you're going to go really deep. Often while canvassing, canvassers get so caught up in the scripts and in trying to convince people to vote a certain way or in persuading them to take action in some way, and we forget the importance of also really actively listening to people and being genuinely curious about the new person that's standing in front of us.

So if you'll go to the next slide. So this is the question that we're going to be asking our partners, "What has been your role in getting us to this political moment that we are in?" And I'd like for everyone to listen for a story, be genuinely curious, dig deep. And if someone is struggling to give an answer immediately, or gives a very brief answer, it's okay to pause for a bit and just ask more open-ended questions to encourage them. And then just make sure to affirm or echo something that you hear your partner hear they value. So I also put some examples of potential follow-up questions up there. "You mentioned X, can you tell me more about that?" Ask for details. Who, what, where, when and why? What was the situation? Where did that happen? What did you do? What would you do now? How did that feel and why did it feel that way?

So you're going to have five minutes each, so go ahead and find a partner.

Mansi Kathuria:
We now get to transition to the panel discussion part of our breakout, so get to hear a lot more from all of these fantastic folks on the stage that have been hard at work making this project a reality over the past several months from the inception, to actually getting out in the field during these pilots.

And what's really special for me is this is the first time we've all actually been in the same room together, so we've been doing this work and prepping this... not only the project but for this panel of Zoom for the past several weeks. So I feel like this is also the first time we really get to talk about what's been going on, and you're all invited to come listen in as well.

So, just want to start by introducing the folks you haven't got a chance to meet yet. So Lalo, from Make the Road Nevada.

Lalo Montoya:
Hi, everyone. Thank you so much. It's so exciting, like Mansi said, to be here after so much months of work. I'm Lalo Montoya, pronouns him/el. I'm the civic engagement director at Make the Road Nevada. I am a Latino man, 37 years old, wearing a gray blazer and a Make the Road Nevada blue shirt. I'm also wearing... you can't see them, but I'm wearing some leather boots and denim pants. So I am wearing pants here, behind this.

DeAngelo Bester:
Unlike on Zoom.

Lalo Montoya:
Unlike on Zoom, yeah, DeAngelo.

Mansi Kathuria:
I don't need to know that.

Lalo Montoya:
But just being here from Las Vegas, it just feels really good to be here in this Belonging Conference for the first time. Growing up undocumented is a constant struggle. But I am reminded at this conference that we do belong, that there's other people that think we can change the world and y'all are here, and so excited to share this day with you. Thank you for having me.

Mansi Kathuria:
Thank you, Lalo. And DeAngelo.

DeAngelo Bester:
Good morning. Yeah, it's still morning. Good morning, everyone. DeAngelo Bester, he/him pronouns. I'm with an organization called the Workers Center for Racial Justice. We work in... Thank you. We work in Illinois and Wisconsin and I am an old, fat, Black man wearing a blue button-up shirt, gray jeans and some blue and white Dunks. And I'm bald too, sorry.

Mansi Kathuria:
Beautiful. Thank you. So we have a number of questions to get this conversation started, and for most of them I'm going to be asking specific panelists to kind of speak to them, because we've all been working on different parts of this and in different regions across the country. So to kick us off, Lalo, you get this first question. What were the tensions or hesitations that you had when you first heard about this project? Right? This is pushing out of our comfort zone. And how did those evolve over the course of the pilot. And just a reminder to folks, you have about two, two and a half minutes for each question. So we'll start with Lalo, and then, Bassem, pass it to you on the same question.

Lalo Montoya:
Thank you so much. Make the Road Nevada, has offices in Las Vegas and in Reno. Nevada. And this was the first time where we had the opportunity to go and listen to folks in northeastern Nevada. And if you've never been to Nevada, or if you have been, the drive times between cities is very long. From Las Vegas to Carson City, the capital where our members go and are part of the legislative session, we have to take bus trips of 8 hours and overnight stays to be able to participate in the legislative process. So it's really tough, this rural city divide. And we found that out first hand by doing a rural tour. Our co-deputy, Blanca Macias, is from Wendover in Nevada, and grew up there. And her family showed us so many things about these areas.

A lot of her family's from Zacatecas, which is where I'm from. And I was really surprised by that. I went to this one restaurant where they had the salsa that tasted just like my home town in Jerez, Zacatecas. And I think going to Wendover first before we went to Elko, Nevada, where we did the project, was a good idea because it really helped me feel more comfortable before being in somewhere very new, and helped motivate the team that you saw the cowboy hats, who's very diverse. We were all very concerned about how our differences would be... what our differences would do at the door.

But I think we really ensured that we had a lot of self-care. For at least two weeks of canvassing, we all lived in the same house in a beautiful area there in Elko, Nevada, which is a mining town. We visited three different types of areas. They very rural, where the cows are and the horses, to the more affluent area, to the more low income area. So I think, yes, we were very nervous and hesitant. Being stopped seven times by police in six days was very tough. But I think we remained genuinely curious and excited to learn from the folks there. And once we got through those differences and people understood why we were there, it was very validating to hear that the same issues they're dealing with there, we're also dealing with them in Vegas and that there is a need and a hunger for an inclusive space to talk about these things, regardless of all the decked out Trump and MAGA support that we would see in the neighborhoods and in the grocery stores.

Our group was very diverse. We had someone from Vietnam, we had someone from Columbia. We had a Latina mom, two DACA recipients, Native American white man. We were all from all walks of life. But the training, the purpose of this project and what it's calling us to do was what kept us going regardless of the police, and hindrance and them infringing on our rights. We got through it and we are now trailblazing, setting an opportunity to continue going back, and now having a rural organizing actually happen for the future.

Bassem Kawar:
Thanks, Lalo. So just to go back to the question, tensions or hesitations. So I just want to talk people through the tensions that we're dealing with in Illinois. When you hear about a state like Illinois, you just think about the blue state with super majorities, everything is nice. You want anything done, progressive, you move it, you win it. But that's not true. Outside of the city of Chicago and suburban Cook, our map is red. Redder than you think.

Yes, there is representation in the city of Chicago. Yes, suburban Cook where there are progressive values. But once you move outside of those areas, it's completely conservative. And then if we look at the census, where is our community moving? They're moving to the outskirts because our city's becoming expensive. You don't have affordable housing, so everyone is getting pushed to the outskirts, to vacuums that are easily organized by the conservative values. There are no institutions.

So for us, as an organization, we made a shift to do our organizing in those outskirts because that's where our community is. But last year, in August, the governor of Texas decided to start sending buses to progressive cities with new arrivals, people seeking asylum. And Chicago was one of those cities that started receiving buses over a year ago. These buses that came into our city really created a divide between the Black and the Brown community. But even it created divides within the immigrant community itself. Recent immigrants, the new arrivals, then a question of resources, historic disinvestments really surfaced, right?

And this was a critical moment for us that really made this program, this pilot, one of the most important projects in our, probably, last five years. DeAngelo can say a little bit more about that. We could dive deeper into that. But I think the importance of this project is even within the city of Chicago, we targeted the southwest side of the city where we had a lot of contradictions about the tent cities that they wanted to build, that the actually community rejected. Where our focus group said that people wanted to close the door, just to close the door behind us, like "We're here." From the rhetoric that like, "People are taking our jobs. They're bringing crime." And this is coming from the community that we hold dearly that identifies with us.

These are part of the tensions. Part of the hesitations is we have a lot of important work to do. We don't have unlimited time. So the hesitation was where do we allocate time? But internally at the organization, we recognize that this is an important project. We need to allocate time for it. How did this evolve? The more conversations we had, the more we were reminded and convinced that we need to be doing this right. This is not replacing the traditional work that we do, but this has to be an additional component to the work that we're doing. Because if you don't bridge our universe back again, it's going to keep getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller. We're going to continue to other and we cannot move forward alone.

And back to you, Mansi.

Mansi Kathuria:
Thank you, Bassem. So like you've kind of heard a few times through this presentation, everyone at this table has been doing canvassing, civic engagement for a while. But in this project we've really been challenging that conventional wisdom and building out a different kind of canvas program. So Ashley, we'd love to start with you and hear what it's been like to prepare for and carry out this canvas program that's really focused on deep listening, on listening to people that maybe completely disagree with us and to not be doing persuasion.

Ashley Dixon:
Yeah, so at Southern Crossroads and SURJ, we knock doors on poor and working class, mostly white, rural communities in Georgia. And I'm from a very similar background myself, so this train was not really unfamiliar to me. As an organizer, it's always difficult to not try and move people immediately into action and make an ask. So that was difficult at first. But this project just reminded us how important it is to listen, and that sometimes with deep listening, persuasion is not even needed. You know, you would often spend an hour listening to someone's story about how they can't afford to pay rents, they don't have health insurance and what that means for their everyday lives. And you may not agree with them on everything, but most people were really acutely aware of the shared struggles that they had with their neighbors.

And I walked away from most conversations feeling like there was a lot that we agreed on. And it really affirmed my belief that people are ready to be in a relationship and to continue to meet and to take action. And I think it's through that collective action, I think that's how we build trust.

Mansi Kathuria:
Hmm, thank you. I love that line that people are ready to be in relationship, yeah. And I think a big part of this is also that we have to be ready to be in that relationship with them.

Ashley Dixon:
Mm-hmm.

Mansi Kathuria:
Lalo, same for you. What was it like to do this whole other kind of canvas that's not about persuasion?

Lalo Montoya:
As someone that's directly impacted, with my parents being undocumented, and I remember someone named Rebecca that was just so adamant about the hate that... just literally about the hate that it was so easy for her to hate on immigrants. But once we got through why I was there and just got back to basics, we left in a relationship, like a good relationship, and her wishing my parents well. I think the hate comes from somewhere, but our humanity is already here. And when you're letting this person know who you are and what your story is and who... You're there in front of them. There's no screen, there's no keyboard, you're just there as a regular person who traveled from far away to appreciate their community and to really, genuinely appreciate that community and talk about how beautiful it is to... the night sky is there and connect on human things.

And once we did that, and we kept doing that over and over with more and more people, the relationships started to build. Even the opportunity when we were doing the research as to what are these communities going through, there's a lot of tension around quinceaneras being celebrated in Carson City, and how quinceanera the family has almost like a parade in the main of the city, and how they... It's seen as foreign. It's seen as strange, different and they don't want it. And those comments are made. And hearing those stories in the research as we were going to go up there, I thought, "Let's see how this humanization process is going to impact those things for the future." So maybe they'll be invited to the [foreign language 00:36:57]. Maybe we'll start seeing communities being strengthened because the issues were very similar, and they are tight-knit, but they were all impacted differently.

So I think, yes, when we go and persuade and have an agenda, there's already something there that's going to create tension. But when you don't, and you can get that across clearly with the person, there's an opportunity that comes up to build that relationship.

Mansi Kathuria:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So I've heard a few of you already start to talk about this. But why do this? Like we said, we did all of this research, built out a whole new training program and scripts. This is a pretty serious investment, and I'm sure folks in the room know, non-profits and organizers are often already strapped for time, capacity, money, all of it. So why challenging this conventional wisdom and expand the idea of who we're talking to and what our civic engagement work looks like? And we're going to start with DeAngelo on this one.

DeAngelo Bester:
Yeah. Thanks, Mansi. To put it simply, we're not really winning. We fight, we claw just to get 50% plus one. 50% plus one. 50% plus... that's it. That's all we really have been focused on. What happens when we don't get 50% plus one? Or better yet, what happens when we do get 50% plus one, but then the other side, the opposition, still challenges that? We saw that in 2020, where folks stormed the capitol because they couldn't wrap their mind around the fact that their guy, their guy, whatever they think about him, that he didn't win.

And so, we came to the realization that we cannot continue doing the work the way we've been doing it, where we're just focusing in and talking to our base and not talking to other people. Do folks watch movies here? Raise your hand if you saw this movie called Creed II. I said this the night before. All right, the scene in Creed II after Creed just got his ass kicked, excuse my language, by Drago's son, Rocky's talking to him and he told him, "Your natural fighting style is not going to work against a guy this size, against this opponent." The way we have been organizing for the past 40 years is not going to work against the opportunity that we have.

And so we decided to really think through what would a project look like where we begin to engage, not just our base, but everyone, and we try and transfer them from being the opposition to one of us. We, in this field, we... Bassem said it before, our base seems to be shrinking. Some of us seem to be allergic to talking to real people, everyday people. Again, love everyone here. There's 1500 of us, but we all basically think the same way, have the same politics, have the same values. It's easy to talk to you guys. I can talk to anyone here, do one-on-one, have drinks, it'll be fine.

How do you have a real, meaningful conversation with someone who doesn't think the same way that you do, and in some instances may even hate you for who you are? Those are the conversations that we need to have. That's what this project is about. It's about, A, thinking about those folks as not our opposition but as other folks who are just like us, who have similar beliefs, who love their families like we do, who want good schools, who want safe communities. We have to engage those people, and that's what this project is about. So that's why at least for us at the Workers Center, and everyone else at the table, that's why we decided to do this project.

Mansi Kathuria:
Yeah, thank you, DeAngelo. I hear you on that line, the way we've been organizing is not enough to win. Yeah. Ashley, I'd love to hear from you as well.

Ashley Dixon:
Yeah, echoing all of that, that we're not winning. And it's true that many people have stereotypes of these folks. Southern Crossroads is a little different because a lot of our canvassers come from the same communities and backgrounds as the folks that we're talking to. And we do do bridging work, but we do it as we're engaging people in material struggle that often leads then to multiracial coaliltion work. And it's through the struggle that we offer and receive political education and are able to build power.

So these folks are often ignored by the political establishment and many of them don't vote, but these are exactly the people that we need to be talking to, not just people that we already think will vote the way that we want them to.

Mansi Kathuria:
Yeah. Thank you. So over the past two months, like you saw before, we knocked on over 22,000 doors and had over 2000 deep canvassing conversations. And when we say deep canvassing, some of these conversations are like 30, 40 minutes long. So we're really getting to know folks, connect with folks. And I want to hear from y'all, the folks that were part of this first round of pilots, we can start from the end and come this way, do Bas, and Ashley, and then Lalo, what did you learn about these constituencies, communities that you had previously othered or taken out of your target universe, or just kind of written off as them not being with us? And how was that transformative?

We saw a little bit from the surveys, how that impacted our canvassers. But if you all have personal reflections about how it impacted you or your organizations, I would love to hear about that. How is this now informing your power building work?

Bassem Kawar:
Yeah, one thing I mentioned earlier, I came from the training, the school of thought is that the opposition, white supremacy, Trumpism cannot be reformed, it had to be eradicated. So I just want to start with that. What this project showed me is that that line of thinking is incorrect. Our canvassers really struggled. We were in one of the wards of the city which employs many city workers, many law enforcement cops. We come from the school of thought that we don't engage law enforcement, right? They're the opposition.

But one of the conversations that one of our canvassers had with a cop in front of their door was one of the best conversations reported in a debrief today. This cop has this conversation, even though there was a lot of disagreements, "Hey, I disagree with you, but I'm here to listen to you. I disagree with your approach to how we fund our schools, but I respect your opinion on that." We were in the midst of a Bring Chicago Home campaign to raise taxes based on home sales, even though it failed. But this law enforcement agent had a different perspective on this issue than the canvasser. They disagreed, disagreed, disagreed, but they still had a good conversation.

We disagreed on schools. This cop believed that we need to leave the cops in schools. My canvasser said, "Absolutely not. We don't need cops in schools. Let's disagree and move on." Gun violence, how we approach it. Complete disagreements. Streets and sanitation, how we handle it, complete disagreements. But what they can agree on is the need for mental health support. And then their conversation that was about seven minutes, about all their disagreements, ended up being a conversation around why we need mental health clinics in the communities, the benefit of having that.

So this, to me, just proved that all the people that we've othered, we could find everything that we disagree on. There is that one thing that we might agree on. And if we go back to building the bigger we, we know that we can't win alone, but when we win, we don't want the opposition to say, "They did not win, we need to destroy them," like we think we need to destroy them just to believe that it's okay to lose, it's okay to win sometimes, but we need to move forward together. This was a big lesson that we're going to carry with in our program, in our civic engagement program.

We're not saying, once again, that this going to replace a traditional work that we do. Because we need to still run these campaigns. They get us 50% plus one. But what we do know is moving forward, the 50% plus one alone is not the way to move forward. DeAngelo said it best, we're fighting a fight, we're fighting a person that this strategy is not going to work any more. So keep these bridging conversations alive. Let's reverse this idea of shrinking universes to more expanding universes, because there is support. There are things that we can agree on. And it's a challenge. Humanizing folks is a challenge, and I think we've taken a step too far from the humanization. I think we need to start walking that back a little bit.

Ashley Dixon:
So yeah, what really stood out to me is just how much people who care about justice have in common with these folks. People from the rural United States really want to talk about issues and they also want to take action. They would often even ask me for advice, "Okay, well how can we take action on this," at the end of the conversation. People have turned away from a political establishment that offers only transactional conversations, if any, in order to secure a vote, and they're waiting for an invitation to build something real and powerful with their neighbors and something that has potential to actually change their material lives.

And in terms of how this actually impacts our power building work, this has been an wonderful opportunity to just really get to know what's on the hearts and minds of people across communities in rural Georgia. And after deep listening and building these genuine connections, we now have the opportunity to revist these communities and invite people into larger group discussions with their neighbors and explore what we might do to take action on these issues that people were really excited to talk about.

And from people in rural areas that are saying they want shuttle services and rides to their medical appointments, to people dealing with unresponsive landlords, people not being able to afford their rent, now we get to explore what is that will make people take action and what are the next steps in making that happen?

Lalo Montoya:
For Make the Road Nevada in Elko, we were surprised that there are many people of color living there. They're cleaning homes, they're taking care of the ranches. They're there. They're running grocery stores. We were able to eat really good while we were there, and we were surprised by that. But I think what was very interesting was the top issues around healthcare access. Literally not having a doctor to go to being a concern across the board, as well as people falling into bankruptcy because of medical airlifting companies in emergencies. Over $80,000 for a helicopter ride. And just the overall monopoly of power, because these communities have... These people in power in these seats of power have held onto it for so long that it's the same vein of people that monopolize that power, and there's no economic opportunities for them.

So it was refreshing for them to be able to say these things out loud and to see that there's organizations that create a space of advocacy. These folks in these rural areas have been left out of the legislative sessions in Nevada. They used to have opportunities for people to go and testify, and now they don't. They just took them away. So what Make the Road Nevada is very excited to do now is we're onboarding an outreach organizer for rural Nevada, to have a team of outreach organizers, provide opportunities, real job to folks here, and build trust. Build trust, and it gives us the ability to do that and actually a sense of how we're going to do it because of this project. So we're really excited.

Mansi Kathuria:
So that's after a six-week pilot. There's already this very tangible impact of Make the Road Nevada being like, "Yeah, actually we need to be here. We're going to hire a whole rural organizer and keep getting to know these folks. Keep bridging, keep humanizing and then also building power." I'm just kind of blown away by how transformative this has been in a short amount of time, and just really wanted to emphasize Lalo's point there.

Ponsella, I know a few other folks have spoken to this, but would love to hear from you about why this work is something important for our movements and what's at stake if were not out here doing this kind of bridging.

Ponsella Hardaway:
Well, I think the biggest piece right now is that we're going to keep losing and our communities are going to be much more polarized. And big corporations and politicians, particular politicians, benefit from our divide. So it is in our interests to really begin to move on some of these things that are uncomfortable to us. So MOSES, we're affiliated with the Gamaliel Network, so we organize congregations as our first base. And we've had many congregations, what we're calling purple congregations. They are divided, and the pastors, the clergy are like... They don't know what to do, some of them. Because it's so politically divided within the walls of the congregation itself, right? So we're going to start there.

Just how do we have the conversations within our own congregation to actually understand what it means to build deep relations with each other. Because beyond the pulpit, we're talking about people's lives. The people that sit in the pews are the ones that matter. They're the ones that are suffering at the hands of a lot of this polarization and victimization and dehumanization that consistently happens. So they're hungry. They're reaching out and they want to figure this out.

So I feel like that is an opportunity for us to really get into some spaces that we might not even think about going into, right?

Mansi Kathuria:
Mm-hmm.

Ponsella Hardaway:
I think there's also a generation thing of how we're othering in certain areas. So we're starting to look at how do we bridge traditional ways of organizing with a new generation of people coming up who are very different. Because we do, we say, "This is how you do it. This is how you do it." There's an othering there. How do we begin to actually have new ways of creating spaces for people to really engage and build community, and really look at how we win together and that it is possible, that we're creating an... We're imagining what is possible, versus this is not going to happen. We're not going to allow people to take the hope of us building and being a part of a community where we are connected to each other.

We were designed to be interconnected. We're not designed to be interdependent, right? And so people need spaces, they need hope. And we talked about mental health earlier. People are forced into isolation, and this is what this... People watch TV all day long. They watch the FOX News channel, right? I mean, that's what happens. But they think that their world is just that. But when you go into community, it's a whole nother atmosphere that opens up for them. How do we create that... Knock on their door, have a conversation. They come away from the FOX TV station and talk about the issues that they care about. That is transformational right there. The connection's just a valuable piece that people will never forget.

Mansi Kathuria:
Okay, Bassem, we're going to end with you. How do you want to see this work grow? Where do we grow from here?

Bassem Kawar:
Yeah, one thing I just want to flag here. Thank you for that, Ponsella, but as our movement others, the other movements other too. Just talk about the response to our movement, how militarized the responses have been to the organizing that we do. If we look to the response to the movement that Black Lives and their demands, it was faced with military responses. If we look at the students across campuses as we sit in this conference, how they're being treated. If we look at the protests in Chicago, Baltimore, Ohio. These are accountability marches, how the response is.

So while we other, the other side others too. And the way I would like to see this work grow is to change the concepts around othering, make sure that we all being. We could disagree, but can we agree to disagree in a very way where we humanize one another and just agree that we just have different approaches, different ways to resolve the issues and the contradictions that we deal with on a daily basis. So there's an institutional component, there's a committee component, but we need to start closing the gaps. Because the more we other, the more they other. The more we don't belong, the more they don't belong. And if that response is going to continue to get militarized, I believe that our movement's survival, our people's survival will be depending on this.

And that's why we all need to be doing this work. It's about closing these gaps. And I'll pass it to you, Mansi, and I said I will not end on a note of fear. I was the one that-

Mansi Kathuria:
It's not over yet.

Bassem Kawar:
... disagreed with Ponsella on that, but this is something for us to think about. Let's agitate ourselves on this. Let this agitation move us to action, not the fear around it.

Mansi Kathuria:
Yeah. Thank you, Bassem. And just another round of applause for all of our panelists, for the many months of work that led up to this and especially all of those hours out knocking doors, yeah. It's really amazing to see and to be here with all of you. Thank you.
So we're going to invite you in to think about the same questions that we've all been wrestling for the past few months. And I'm going to hand it over to Lalo to lead us through this.

Lalo Montoya:
So as you've heard throughout the panel, it took us months to prepare our people and our staff to be able to get out there and do this work. A lot of self-care and a lot of confidence building was needed, right? But we first had to ask ourselves these questions in preparation for this. And now you get a chance to do it yourself with a partner. So if you could get with one to two people where you are and answer this question, which is what groups have you othered? Oh yeah, before we go into groups, just you're doing it right, keep positing that up.

What groups have you othered? What communities or geographies do you never reach out to? So as we start to build this world cloud here, please keep adding to it. Now I would like you to get with a partner or two and there's two questions I would like to ask you. What about these groups that you have othered, what about them feels to different? What do you expect their views or reactions to be? And what questions do you wish you could ask them? And it's just a discussion, and then after we have... It's a quick like five minutes?

Mansi Kathuria:
Seven minutes.

Lalo Montoya:
Seven minutes to answer these three questions. When we come back after those seven minutes, we'll answer one more question on the Slido based on your conversation that you had.

All right, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having these awesome conversations. We are at five minutes left to our panel. And to finalize this portion of our conversation, I would like you to again go to Slido and put those questions that you would like to ask as you discussed with your partners. Write down the questions of what you would like to ask these communities.

Do you see my humanity? Do you feel your own? What can I say to connect with you? What are your fears about where this country is heading? What brings you joy? Our first question in Elko was, "What do you like about Elko, Nevada?" And yeah, it was also, "What do you care about the most?"

When do you feel most human? When I was struggling through this, being so far away from family for already... It was my third week. I had a conversation with my dad and he said, "Everyone brushes their teeth in the morning and puts on their pants the same way you do. Remember that hate comes from somewhere, but when they meet you, they're going to be very happy to meet you." And it kept me going, those conversations with my dad about being human.

So as we put those up, and to wrap up, I was just thinking about this this morning, that the possibility of a multiracial democracy, it does hinge upon how inclusive our movement is and the work that is needed to make that a reality every single day. Our work here, and as you've seen here today, it's not due in tomorrow or next year, it's long-term. It's for the long run. This project, I hope you saw what's possible and what binds us together is the work to strengthen our democracy. So thank you everyone for participating in this exercise, and I'll now give it up to Mansi.

Mansi Kathuria:
Thank you, Lalo. And thank you all for being so present with us. You're almost free to go get lunch. But I thought so many of the questions that were on here so beautiful, and I'm honestly going to save a lot of them in the back end, right? I think a lot of these can become a part of the next round of our scripts, the next round of our trainings, like really digging into that curiosity and humanizing. And I really appreciate that y'all were able to go there with us today too and think about what this might look like in your life, or your community, or your work, wherever you are in the country.

So, again, we appreciate you all being here today. I hope that there's something from this that you will take back and actually bring into the work that you're doing going forward, thinking about this idea of building a bigger we. And we didn't today get to have Ashley's colleague, who is leading one of the canvasses in Tennessee. So I just want to leave you with a few things she shared with me during one of our debriefs that have really stuck with me through this project.

What she shared from the reflections of her canvassers is that the façade is often harsher than their heart is. And yeah, just let it sit for a minute. So her and her canvas team are also out canvasing in rural Tennessee, mostly in majority white, low income areas. And she said they're having a lot of conversations where they get to the door and someone is really steeped in the MAGA, FOX News talking points that we've referenced, I think that we're all familiar with, and then the canvasser's also trying to make a decision in that moment of, "Is this person actually dangerous? Where's this conversation going to go? Is there an opportunity here for us to connect?" And she said, if they're able to get past the first five minutes, that this is often their reflection, that the façade is often harsher than their heart is.

But one of her canvassers, as they were wrapping up the project and kind of talking about their reflections, what beliefs they came into it with and how they're leaving, said that, "Yeah, I did have stereotypes about what these towns are going to be like, even maybe being from the region." But that walking away, she had a canvasser tell her, "These people are more like me than not like me." So I'll leave you with that. Enjoy lunch. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1:
And that concludes this episode of our special series of Who Belongs, a podcast from the Othering & Belonging Institute. For more episodes from this series featuring discussions from our Othering & Belonging Conference in April, visit our website at belonging.berkeley.edu/whobelongs. Thank you for listening.