On January 22, 2025, john spoke at the NorthSound ACH 2025 Partner Convening about the importance of bridging to belonging, in times of crisis and in times of collaboration. Bridging is applied in the context of relationships and groups of people within organizations--where people are working within and towards a shared mission, but also are tied to other differences and misalignments outside mission-related work.
Transcript
Liz Baxter:
So, we are incredibly honored to have Dr. John Powell here with us. I should tell you, you're going to get access to all the slides and everything. So, I know I'm often in rooms where people are taking screenshots and they're trying to write everything down. You're going to get a copy of everything, including this bio, which is not what I'm going to read out loud, but it is here. Instead, I wanted to tell you a story about how it is that John Powell got connected to North Sound ACH. So that the ACH started with this Medicaid waiver where we had to write a bunch of stuff. I mean, I think every six months we were writing two or 300 pages of documents, and Nicole and I got charged with writing how were we going to address inequities and disparities. It was one of the five objectives of Washington's first waiver.
And a colleague of mine who Emily, who's here in the room also knows Ben Duncan from Multnomah County, came up to do a meeting with partners and it was about the intersection between race and equity. And Ben has this slide about targeted universalism, and Nicole and I... Hey, there you are. Nicole turns to me and she says, "Oh my God, we're going to put targeted universalism in every place where the healthcare authority asks us about how we're addressing equity." And for those five objectives, which I'm not going to bore you about, every six months for five years, we produced about a 200-page document. But at no point in time have we ever been asked to produce a document about that fifth objective. How did we reduce disparities? So we've turned in this report, we thought people would ask us questions like, "What do you mean they didn't?"
And the following spring was the equity summit in Chicago, and John is doing this keynote in front of like 10,000 people or something. So I walk up on the stage and I say, "So what would it take to get you to come to the farthest northwest corner of the United States and talk to us about this targeted universalism?" And John says, "Oh, I'm in Seattle all the time. I'll just let you know when I'm here." And for about, I want to say like three or four months, our team based in Bellingham would get a phone call, "Hey, John's doing a presentation in Bellevue. He has two hours before he has to go to the airport, or is your team interested in meeting with him?" And we would all get in cars. We would drive to a vegan restaurant in Bellevue and get to spend this amazing time doing some deep dives into this work.
And it's been such an amazing journey and we've learned a lot, and it's part of what grounds us. We have this set of intertwined frameworks that we use. And I said one time to John that you get to join this group of people who have stickiness with me and with the ACH. And I believe what you said is, "No, we're stuck." And that was incredibly honoring to me. But I also realized that I haven't told you who I am. So, I'm Liz Baxter. I have had the honor of serving as the CEO at North Sound for now, eight plus years. So now you know who I am for anybody who wants to find me and talk to me. But John, thank you. I welcome you up here to the stage, and Alfredo is going to come and swap slides and stuff, but I know that this week you could have been a lot of places and I'm just still stunned that you're here with us here. So, thank you.
john a. powell:
So while Alfredo is swapping the slides, this is right. So this week I could have been many places and she's even more, right, I am many places this week. So this is just one of them. So I apologize beforehand because I have to run out right after the presentation to go to another place. I'm actually meeting with the president of the Gates Foundation for lunch. So, it's been a delight being in the company of Liz Baxter. We do really, I think, innovative work in terms of looking at things when I was much younger, and I know it's hard to believe that I was ever much younger. And my kids would say, "What do you do all day?" And I say, "I go to work and I play conceptual Legos."
And I think it was a pretty accurate description, taking ideas apart and putting them back together in different ways. But those ideas are just ideas until someone takes those ideas and put them into practice. And that's what North Sound has done. You've taken those ideas, you've taken that Legos and turn it into something more than play. So I just want to acknowledge you and thank you, and it's been a delight.
And the main reason I'm here is because of Liz, and because of North Sound. So, it's like one of those bad things when you say, "I wish somebody was here." And they pop up next to you, say, "Ooh. Whoa." So Liz, if you wish I'm there, I'm going to be there. So you better be careful what you wish for. So I'm going to be talking to you today about Bridging and Belonging. I'm actually going to talk on three different topics. I'm talking about bridging, belonging, and targeting universalism. I'm going to focus more on bridging because I can't cover everything an hour. And I've talked to some of you before about targeting universalism, but they all go together. So, you can think of bridging and targeting universalism, the pillars to produce belonging.
But first of all, to sort of share with you the obvious, what's happening right now. What's the problem of the world today? And there's many different things, but one way of thinking about it, it's the problem of the world today is othering. And we are incredibly creative in ways in which we other people, race, gender, sexual orientation.
Per capita, the largest genocide in the 20th century was Rwanda. Numbers was the Holocaust with Jews, but per capita small country in Africa, Rwanda. It's interesting if you go doing interesting things there now, but if you go there and ask people what happened, people had lived together for decades if not centuries, in the same house, the same religion. They were the same race, the same language, the same food, the same customs. You couldn't tell one person from the other. And so, what was the thing that allowed for people to be not just other, but to be weaponized in such a way that they were cutting each other up with machetes? Somebody came up with the bright idea that two people, two groups couldn't be the same if they have a different number of cows. "You got three cows, oh man, you're not really human."
And when we look at the process of othering on his face sometimes it's like that doesn't even make sense, and it never makes sense. And yet, othering is happening all over the world today, and we've just inaugurated a president who weaponized othering to a high level, not building bridges but building walls. So this problem is happening all over the world. And we know that the opposite of othering is not same-ing. Sometimes that's what we do. We say, okay, those people are different than us. If they were just like us, we could stop othering. If we could tell these indigenous people to stop their traditions that we don't understand, if we could take their children and teach them not to be indigenous people, then everything would be fine. That's same-ing.
And that's not what we're talking about. That's not the solution to othering. It's making a number of critical mistakes. It's assuming that the problem is with the group you've othered. If you just got one more cow, we'd stop killing you. That's not the problem. Othering is a process that a dominant group usually impose on another group. Is the othering processes the problem, not the group itself. And we see that, how do we fix Black boys? How do we fix gay man? How do we fix trans? It's like, "Wait, who's the we, that wants to do all this fixing and in the name of same-ing?" So that's not what we're calling for. We're calling for belonging. And belonging accepts that we are multifaceted, that we have deep interconnection, that we're both each other and sovereign at the same time. So, why is this happening now? Why so much othering today? And it's not happening just in the United States, it's happening all over the world.
It shows up in very concrete terms. For the last several years, every time we have an election, we're not talking about just winning or losing election, we're talking about winning or losing our democracy. We're talking about winning or losing core things that we thought would never be on the table, and that's happening all over the world. So why is that happening? Well, one reason is change. When change happens at a rapid speed, humans and other mammals can't process that change without creating anxiety.
Now, I want to talk about it when he talks about survival of the fittest, fittest of what? Fitting the environment. When your environment change and you can't adapt to it, it creates stress. And what's happening now in all over the world is our environment is changing very fast across several different axes, across... We call it globalization. We call it economics. We just maybe came out of a pandemic. We're worried about the next one. There are fires in LA. When we're not playing with our phones, we're worried that they're playing with us. We're worried that AI is hacking our brains. We're worried about will there be jobs in the future?
We're worried that the world is changing, and part of that change is demographics. So no matter what you look like today, you will look different tomorrow. There are people moving all over the world. Here's an interesting fact. Most of the North Europe, the United States, maybe include Japan, maybe that's the north, maybe not, but are aging. So we have basically older people, mainly white aging, not reproducing themselves. And every other week in the newspaper, you can read about the declining population in China, the United States, Europe, Canada. What are we going to do about that? But then you turn the page and you read about the exploding population and the young population of Africa, of Nigeria. Seems like a simple solution. Take the old people and young people and put them together. No, no, no, no, no. Wrong kind of people. We want immigrants said number 47, in case you don't know, that's Trump. But they need to be from Finland, Norway. What the? Norway has 5 million people. I have more people in my family than they have in Norway. Not a solution.
Nigeria now, well, Nigeria has some people, but the demographic change is scaring people. And so, we're talking about literally changing the constitution so that people who aren't like us, the other don't have birthrights in the United States. Again, we can do this based on all kinds of things. There's no one way in which we other. And one way of thinking about where we're going, and we just had the celebration of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, and this is a paraphrasing him. He says, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." And I put parenthetically, "It bends toward belonging." When you look at it historically, it's not just a statement, it's actually true, historically, but it's not automatic. That arc goes up and down. And right now, as you can see in the slide, there's a lot of people trying to bend it in the different direction.
So if the arc bends toward justice, if the arc bends toward belonging, it's because of you, it's because of Liz Baxter, it's because of North Sound. Now, we're in a space right now where we're trying to bend one way, and some people are trying to bend the other way. We're in a space where we'll talk in a little bit about, we're trying to build bridges and some people come to the bridge building the [inaudible 00:13:51] session with dynamite saying, "We're not building bridges, we're building walls." And so that's hard, because not everybody's on the same page and we have to deal with that, and we'll have to deal with that for a while. And one response to that intensity is when people say to you, to me, to your family, to your friends, "You don't belong here because you're too, whatever. You're too tall, you're too black, you're too loud."
The impulse is to say, "You too." But we need to resist that impulse because we can engage in that process of othering and then everybody's othering. We used to say when we were kids, if you excuse my French, "If you get into a pissing contest, no one comes out smelling well." So yeah, when people are on you, it's very tempting to say, "I'm pissing on you back, but we have stop." So what we call for is belonging without othering, there is no other. That's a heavy lift. We know that.
But that's the lift that we've been inching toward for hundreds if not thousands of years. And we've had all these expressions of belonging, and they're expressed in terms of philosophy, they're expressed in terms of nation building, they're expressed in terms of religion. Almost all major religions embrace the notion of belonging. Who belongs, who's God chosen people? Who are the children of God? We keep saying, "Well, you are, but not them." So what we've done is we've embraced some notion of belonging, and it's actually been quite beautiful. But then we stop short and say, "But those people are not." So if you're Christian, great, but if you're a sinner, you're going to hell.
If you are a servant of God, Muslim, great. But if you're not, you're an infidel. So, we've always had building spaces of other with real practice, with real institutions, with real reverence, but at the same time, demising, demonizing the other. And so we're calling for is belonging without othering. Someone should write a book with that title. Oh wait, I just did. So, what is belonging? How is belonging different than inclusion? And you can see here, first circle is there's some people who just kept out.
And in my lifetime, formal segregation was a real thing. Now, it's informal segregation. It's still a real thing, but it's a different title. In all of our lifetime, we witnessed apartheid or we said some people, the majority of people, the indigenous people in the South Africa don't belong because they have the wrong, whatever. Apartheid means separation. And it's interesting when you study apartheid, the Dutch which introduced apartheid in 1948 got it from the United States in terms of how the United States wasn't treating indigenous people here in the United States. So, the United States is really smart. They're ingenious all the ways the other people, we can learn from them. That's what the Dutch [inaudible 00:17:34]. They changed the name from the Dutch to the Afrikaner. Just a footnote, the richest man in the world grew up in South Africa under apartheid. That might influence some of his sensibilities, just saying. Some of you may know, I have a Tesla. What you probably don't know is for sale.
Actually, I think I should get a rebate, but anyway. So how is belonging different than inclusion? Well, inclusion, as you can see in the middle slide, you bring people in but you bring them into an existing structure, institution norm. You can come in, but you have to behave just like the people who are already here. Well, what if I have a different religion? What if I leave it at the door? So belonging says, you don't just join something to belong. It says, you co-create the thing you're joining. You don't get to create it by yourself, you get to co-create it. You engage with other people and saying, we are constituting something different. We have to make space for those who worship differently, who eat differently.
We need a vegetarian option on the menu because John's coming. Yes, I'm vegetarian, it's all true. There was a nasty blog written about me recently. It said, I'm this communist left-wing professor from Berkeley who hate America. I don't hate America. I hate some of the things America stand for. He hate white people. I don't hate white people. I do feel like all people engage in terrible acts, not just white people, but I don't hate them. It said, I want to tear down our country. And then the end of the blog is saying, and he's vegetarian. All right, you finally got something right.
So belonging is about co-creating and co-owning the structures you belong to. So you're doing great work here, and I know there's some tension. And the tension might be, they're doing it differently, they're doing... It's not they, it's your community. How do you participate? In participating, how do you not only advance the things that are important to you, but respect the things that are important to other people? It's not just about you and it's not just about them. It's co-creating, you're doing it together. And anybody who's been in a relationship know that you never get everything you want. And if you did, you find out you didn't want it. I thought I wanted it just like this and now it's not just like this.
So co-creation becomes important. So it's not just removing barriers when you think of structures, it's actually designing structures, making them something for everyone. And I'll say more about this in a little bit, but I want you to take 90 seconds at your table and either think or discuss. Think of a time where you experienced belonging. What did it feel like? Where was it? Okay. So 90 seconds, think of a time where you experienced belonging. What did it feel like and where was it? Okay, go. Okay, if we can come back together. I know that wasn't long enough.
In fact, I can feel and hear the room getting louder more into the 90 seconds, but the 90 seconds are now over. So, let's come back together. But I want you to think about that, not just here, but in other contexts, where do you feel like you belong? Where do you feel like you don't belong? How do you extend those conditions to belonging to others? So there's a lot of practice that you can be involved in.
And anyway, this is just a tease. So one of the ways we create belonging is bridging. So there are two concepts here. Bridging and breaking, and bridging is basically when you turn towards someone, when you're curious about them, when you're listening, not with your mind, but with your heart, what we call sometimes compassion or empathetic listening. I want to know your story. I want to know who you are, not what's your position on this issue. Will you support my candidate? That's maybe important, but that's not bridging. Bridging is actually having a sense of shared humanity, is summed up by the South African word in the Zulu language called Sawubona, which is interpreted to mean, "I see you." It's also interpreted to mean, "The God in me sees the God in you." I see you. And the response is, "I am here. I am present."
The opposite of bridging is breaking. Instead of turning toward each other, is turning on each other, is blaming each other. That anxiety that we feel because of all the change, what breaking says is their fault. So bridging and breaking are carried in terms of our practice, but also carried in terms of stories. What are the stories we're telling both about ourselves and about the other? And generally, when we break the story about the others, is one or two-dimensional. What do we know about this person? They're homeless, they're gay, they're Black. Okay, I can see that there. Maybe they're Black. What else do we know about them? What kind of vegetables does that homeless person like?
Homeless people like vegetables? It's being curious. So bridging is open, telling stories, having interest in other people's stories as human beings. Breaking is like, "I don't even care. All I know is they voted against my thing or they're eating our cats." Is that true? Who cares? It's a good story. They're the other. We can't trust them. We should be afraid. So breaking is about taking the anxiety and telling stories to turn it into fear, to turn them to disgust. Bridging is about listening and engaging with others to turning the other into the larger we. And we know that we're complex. We know that we're subtle. We know that there's a lot going on.
So bridging is a companion to belonging. One of the ways we help someone belong is to invite their story into the conversation. So without bridging is not possible to create belonging. Bridging is intentionally engaging across difference, empathetic listening, narrative sharing to connect, to understand. Bridging is not compromising. So because I listen to you, it doesn't mean I'm compromising my values. Bridging is not agreeing. That may be important, compromising may be important, but that's not what bridging is. And bridging is not abandoning your values. Sometime we're afraid to listen to someone else because we say, this is my position. That's great. We know your position. What's their aspiration? What's important to them? I don't know. I just know they don't agree with me.
So breaking, group turn inward. Bonding is when you connect with a group. And bridging is when you turn and listen to the apparent other. Now, there are many kinds of bridges. There're short bridges and there're long bridges. Some bridges require more work to build and maintain. Other bridges are relatively short. And my friend Bell Hooks will remind us that bridges are made to walk on. Bell, what do you mean by that? Well, what Bell meant by that is that when you bridge, when you connect to the apparent, other people are not going to necessarily celebrate you. They're probably going to castigate you. Why are you talking to the other? Why are you talking to those people? Are you a traitor? Why don't you stick with your own? It doesn't feel good, and yet it has to be done.
And what's the short bridge? Well, short bridge we would think was Rwanda. When people have the same language, when they have shared values, when they have shared religion, there's a lot to draw on. In your own family, you might say, "Well, we grew up in the same household." Okay. So it's not a short bridge, but I can't stand my brother. Why not? Amanda Ripley wrote a book called High Conflict, and she chronicles a real fight that went on by the McCoys. You may have heard that famous fight which went on for generations. And when people went back after 80 years of fighting and said, "You can't stand the McCoys. That's right. We hate the McCoys. They did something terrible to us. What was it? I can't remember. I don't need to. All I know is I hate them." So we have short bridges, which looks like you have a lot to draw on, and yet in the midst of a fight, it feels intractable.
Ezra Klein wrote a book called Why We Polarize, and he talks about a short bridge, the fight between vegetarians and vegan. See, most people laugh at that, right? It's like, is there even any difference? Most of us don't know why the Shiites and Sunnis Muslims are fighting each other. Aren't they all Christians? Yeah, just like Catholics and Protestants. So short bridges can be difficult. Now we get to long bridges, that same totally impossible. I have nothing in common with those people. They vote differently, they watch different television. They don't wear a mask or they do wear a mask.
They want something different for the country than I do. So long bridges are harder. And so, we have to actually learn to do both. And what we say is that before we engage in long bridging and we have a long bridging project with several groups around the country bringing people who are thinking they have nothing in common with each other together. But before doing that, people need to learn the short bridging, they need to learn some of the practices. If you're going to run the San Francisco Marathon next year, start by going for a walk around the block tonight. Don't put on your clothes and for the first time in six months say, "Okay, I'm going to go out and run 13 miles." You'll hurt yourself. So start with the short bridge. Just start with what's doable. And oftentimes when people hear bridging, they go to the most difficult. And some of you've heard me say, and I talk about this in my book, when I say talk about bridging to Pastor Michael McBride, he asked me in public, "Are you telling me I should bridge with the devil?"
And my response is, "Probably not a good place to start. But also, be careful who you call the devil." And bridging is not going to solve all problems. It's not always the thing to do. I was talking to some people from the Middle East and they were asking me, "So are you telling us how should we bridge when bombs are being dropped?" It's probably not a good time to bridge. "What should we do when bombs being dropped? Go to air-raid shelter." So there are times when other things are called for other than just bridging. But I say to people, even when you can't bridge, try to avoid breaking. Even if you're not in a position to bridge, try to avoid breaking.
Bridging doesn't just happen between individuals, it also happens between groups. And it's a different process at the group level, in part because the group you're part of constrains you. If you bridge, you might get kicked out of the group. And so you have to sort of think about bridging differently when you're thinking about at the group level. It can still be done, but it's a different process. So I'm going to give you some extra time this time. I'm going to give you 92 seconds. What bridges have you crossed in the past? What bridges do you think would be useful to build? Again, what bridges have you crossed in the past, and what bridges do you think would be useful to build? 92 seconds go at it. All right, so I hope you'll actually again, engage in this practice more. Let me see how we're doing here. Okay, just maybe take two 32nd comments. What did that feel like for you? If anyone want to share just a couple of comments if you have them. Over here, and tell us your name.
Molly:
My name is Molly. I use she/her pronouns. At our table we were sharing a little bit that right now, honestly, the second question is a hard one for us. And we were just recognizing that the urge to sort of dig in our heels and not build bridges right now is feeling really strong. And then, I am part of a family that crosses a lot of different demographics of people and different beliefs. And I've been really humbled where people that I have been judging have been the ones to really try to build bridges back in our family and to say, how can we have these conversations? We do still, we care about you, and we want to know what matters to you. And we want to share what matters to us, and we want to find that common ground. It's been incredibly humbling not to find that I'm on the higher ground, actually. I don't love it.
john a. powell:
Thank you. One more share.
Speaker 1:
Two of us at this table are immigrants and we think that being an immigrant is a powerful bridge. And if I would build new bridges, I would ask everyone to learn a new language.
john a. powell:
Thank you. Okay. Well, food for thought going forward. Let's move on. Thank you though. So Molly's question, how do you bridge in a fragmented environment? It's easy to bridge when everything is going well, but it's much harder when bombs are falling, and sometimes not even appropriate. But again, can we avoid at least from breaking? When there's a crack in the container, bridging becomes much harder. And I want to suggest there are many cracks in the containers, institutions and structures that we depend on, we don't trust them anymore. We don't trust the press, we don't trust the church. Some of us don't trust science, we don't trust each other. And those containers are important. So those containers are often in the background. Normally, we don't think about, is everybody lying? Are all the scientists crooks? Are all the preachers, thieves, all the imams?
So one of the containers for you here is North Sound. North Sound has played a role in terms of helping to convene many of you who don't always agree. That's the purpose of a container. It's not to pick sides, it's to say, "Can we have a space where we can at least talk to each other?" Very important role, you may have to create new containers and be clear that part of what you're doing is creating a space where everybody can belong. And so, you don't necessarily create that container all by yourself. You co-create the container with the different groups. You think about sharing experience and sharing power.
The bridging can be transactional or it can be transformational. Transactional is not technically bridging. When I'm just talking to you to get something from you. We're trading horses. I'll give you two of my horses if you give me four of your pigs, can you compromise on this? That's transactional, important, but it's not what we call transformational bridging. Transformational bridging is about relationship. What you're building is a relationship. What you're building is trust. And it turns out that that's very important for actually solving problems, but it's not the same as solving problems. And we sometimes conflate the two. Some of you may know the story. Milley, who was the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest military person in the United States. There was over the last number of years, he had been in contact with his Chinese counterpart. And at some point there was some chatter on the web that the United States was planning a sneak attack against China.
This was when Trump was leaving the White House the first time. And Nancy Pelosi got involved, but General Milley got involved. And what he did, he has a government phone that he's supposed to use when he's conducting government business. He put that phone down and got... It's like a spy movie. He got a burner phone and he called his counterpart in China and he said, "We're not getting ready to attack you."
Now, the reason this was important for many reasons, one reason was that the Chinese felt like if the United States getting ready to attack us, we need to preemptively attack them. They're going to other us. We're going to other them. They're going to blow us over nuclear weapons. We're going to blow them up first. This is real. This is real stuff and you can read about it, Bob Edwards on his new books. Milley calls his Chinese counterpart and says, "We're not going to attack you. You have my word. Your word? You're head of a powerful military that's our enemy." And Milley said, "Yes. And if I hear of any credible movement to attack you, you have my word. I will call you personally."
When people on the hill found out about it, some of them were pissed. And President Trump had talked about forcing Milley, he's now a civilian, he retired, back in the uniform to court-martial him, and try him for treason which carries the death penalty, right? He was bridging. And the fact that the Chinese stood down because he trusted Milley. They weren't friends, they're institutional enemies. But if I say something to you, you can believe it. So, the relationship created the conditions for bridging and an outcome that all of us I think are happy with. We didn't have a nuclear war with China. And power matters, sometime power can distort the capacity to bridge.
I also was told that I have five minutes, I'm about halfway through my slides, so I'm going to speed up a little bit. There's some risk in terms of bridging, and we know that. You have to be willing to take some risks, but there are reasonable risks. And so sometimes people say, I'm not going to bridge until everything is addressed, until we end capitalism, until we end sexism, until we end racism, then I can bridge. It's like why? You don't need to bridge after all that's done.
So we have to be willing to take risks. And part of taking risks is vulnerability. So a lot of times when we engage with the other, we say, we want to create a comfortable safe space. Bridging is not taking a nap. It's not get out your pillow and your comforter. We talked about rest for a little while. Bridging is not that. And so there's a second zone, which is a learning zone, which is reasonable tension. You're not going to be shot, but it's not taking a rest. It's taking some chances. And then there's the panic zone. So that middle zone, the learning zone is where you want to be.
That's where the creative stuff comes from. And you can create guardrails. And I've done this, I've talked to people all over the country, and one of my conditions is no violence. You don't have to agree with me. Sometimes I say, I don't want to be yelled at, but "Okay, you can yell at me, but you can't hit me." But sometimes, Liz, I say, "No, you can't even yell at me." I've literally walked out of the meetings. "Get back here. Nope, not to the volume comes down." That's reasonable. You decide what your guardrails goes, but it's not taking a nap.
So building is inter-group, not just intra-group. Building is not same-ing. And bridging is building on connections that require empathy, listening, rather than evaluated listening sharing stories rather than sharing facts and ideas. These are some of the things that we're doing on campus, and I'm going to keep moving. So one of the things, there's a lot of fear. To bridge, you don't have to get rid of the fear. You actually have to name the fear. And in some ways even legitimize it, not legitimizing that the thing you're afraid of is real, but the fear is real. So, I think your little kid, "I think there's a monster under my bed. You do? That must be frightening. It must be hard for you to sleep. Thank you. Or we could [inaudible 00:42:51]. Come on, there's no monster under your bed. Let's look." So bridging and storytelling is not factual based, it's empathy. Setting the stage for psychological proximity. I'm just listening to you, and being soft on people and hard on structures.
I think something on public radio on the 20th. One of the things they wanted to talk about, I haven't listened to the program, but they interviewed me. So I don't know what actually got on the show, but they wanted to talk about someone, the fight between the conservatives and the liberal. The conservative was attacking the liberal because the liberal was talking about white supremacy and implying that all white people were racist. The conservative was saying, "That's racist and really we should be colorblind." And so they wanted me to be the arbitrator of this fight. And what I said is that we could have structures that are organized around supremacy, male supremacy, white supremacy, but it doesn't tell us about the people. So we live in a society, I believe that's misogynistic. I hope and try not to be myself. I have two daughters, but even if I didn't, I have one mother.
So knowing that society engaged in certain things, knowing that our structures promote certain things, doesn't really tell you about the people, but oftentimes we conflate those. So if society promotes white supremacy, our structural practices, then we're saying people who are feeling typically white are also white supremacists. That's a serious mistake. So I'm not going to have you do your 90 seconds because I only got 90 seconds. But think about this, what can you do to promote belonging? Who have you othered implicitly or explicitly? And how could you build a bridge toward them? How does a wood bridging change your interaction at work and at home and with your neighbors? Okay. And close to the end, so I have about three more minutes of slides if I'm fast. And she's saying, I'm okay. So I've talked to you about bridging. I just want to introduce the concept again.
Some of you already know at targeted universalism. Liz talked about that earlier. It's a simple concept. Typo here, it's not I simply, but it's a simple concept, but it's full of nuance. So you have universal goals. The goals are not tied to any particular group in terms of setting the goals. The goals is not, "I want what you got." That's not universal. It may be true, maybe I do want what you have, but the universal goal is saying something that we all share in terms of we believe is important. I want all of our communities to be healthy. Which community is healthy? Is the white community healthy? I don't think so. Is the Black community? I don't think so. Is the native community? So we can set a universal goal and our strategies are targeted based on how we're situated. So the health or lack thereof, that's part of the Black community may require a different strategy than the lack of health the native community and the lack of health in the white community. The goal is to get every community to that universal goal.
Not Universal Strategies. Universal strategies are necessarily discriminatory. Universal strategies, it's like, going into a store and says, "Liz, I'm so glad that you're here. We have one size. Oops, it's not your size." It's discriminatory. Universal strategies ignore the fact that people wear different size clothes, nor is it just targeted for one group. We're not just concerned about indigenous populations or Black populations or what we call marginal populations, we're concerned about everybody, but we recognize that people are situated differently. And so people are not the same, but everybody need support to get to and maintain the universal goal.
Targeted universalism is problematic and a communication practice. The practice is we're saying we care about everyone. Everyone matters. Again, the goal is to get everyone not just one group to that universal. And then stories. And this is really coming to an end. Stories matter. Facts are important, but stories matter more. Stories are about meaning. Something happened, January 6th happened, we know that. The proud boys was there, the Oath Keepers was there. What does it mean? Some people said, it means we had patriotic Americans having a love fest. Some people say it was an insurrection.
Stories tell us the meaning of the facts. And so, we have to participate in stories. It's important to think about who's telling the story. Who's left out? Who is the audience of the story? Who are we talking to when we tell the story? And one of the groups that we're talking to is the lizard. Question, does everybody know the lizard? If you know who the lizard is, raise your hand. Okay, about half of you know the lizard, maybe more than half. All right. The lizard is the old part of the brain. The lizard is the amygdala. The lizard does not read footnotes. The lizard likes stories. And the lizard is very activated around fear. And what is the lizard most afraid of? Not belonging.
Again, the lizard you tell there's something that sounds crazy. The solution is not to go back and say, "That's crazy. Why did you believe that?" Instead, the solution's to say, "Sawubona, I see you. I see you're afraid. That must be hard." When is your amygdala activated? When does your lizard show up? And how is it quiet? And Bob Marley, "Each person thinks his burden is the heaviest." Each one of us know our own story. We don't know other people's story. How do we actually listen to other people's story? And how do we tell a story, not just about me and mine, but about us and ours?
These are some examples. I would rather have two more slides. Structures are not neutral. Structures are always doing work. And they enhance one group, hurt another group. Be aware of what structures are doing. So airplane, luggage racks, there's certain people who are shorter than other people. Who are those short people? Anyone know? Say it out loud.
Audience:
Women.
john a. powell:
And women as a group have less upper body strength. And as a group, some of you know this, although some people will contest it, as a group, women carry more luggage. So who designed the luggage racks for these short people would lower up a body strength with a lot of luggage? I don't know, but it is a bias toward women. And what do women do when they face this bias? They don't organize. They check their luggage, which means you have to get to the airport 45 minutes early and you leave 45 minutes later than your male counterpart sometimes without your luggage. That's an analogy, a story. When you try to address structural things at individual level, you pay a tax. It's not efficient. Structures matter. And if you want to read more about this, there are two books that I would recommend Belong without Othering and The Power of Bridging. Thank you.
Liz Baxter:
So, we actually have John until 11:15. And this amazing person here, Devin Nixon has agreed. Why are you surprised I say that? Has agreed to moderate a Q&A. And so, I wanted to introduce Devin to you all, for anybody who doesn't know Devin, and John knows you're going up there with microphone. And Devin is going to have the permission to be... We should have said this earlier. The reason why the mic runners are not going to hand the microphone to you is because the epidemiologist on our team says, "We're not going to be a germ spreader." So anybody who's going to be asked a question, the mic runner is just going to hold the microphone in front of you. They're not going to hand you the microphone, because we want you to go home healthy. You are an exception, we just sanitized the microphone. So go on out there.
Devin Nixon:
I have children in school, so staying healthy is kind of funny. Thank you for that wonderful, wonderful talk.
john a. powell:
Thank you.
Devin Nixon:
I know that there's some questions stirring, and while you all get your questions together, I have a question for you. I've read your book. Thank you for all of your work. You say in the preface that when I say belonging, what I mean is being seen, knowing that I matter, knowing that I'm with people who care deeply about my well-being. One of the things that your work has always done for me is helped me to hold up a mirror to myself and stop looking at these others and wondering what their issue is. But really, looking at myself.
And something that I came to grips with very recently was, I talk a lot about proximity. I talk a lot about us being a culmination of our programming and experiences, but in my personal life, my world is black and I engage with people of different races and ethnicities at work and in these other spaces, but I have a really deep fear of not mattering. And I don't want to put myself out there and engage and build bridges because I have all of these other stories about myself that I've internalized. So my question to you is how do we get past our internalized apartheid? All the other stories that we believe about ourselves that prevent us. Not that we're not curious about other people, but we're so afraid that we don't matter to them.
john a. powell:
That's a really important question, and it's something I think certainly a lot of people, "Who are minorities." Whether that minoritization happens around race, around gender, around sexuality, around disability. Part of our self-segregation is for protection. But just like with women on airplanes, it pays an exact the cost because in part, your role is not to just... First of all, your safety is limited. And a lot of people have written about this.
Douglas Massey said, "One of the most effective ways of promoting racial dominance in our society is segregation apartheid." If you know what all the people are and you keep them, redlining becomes possible. Redlining is much harder when people are distributed across. But also, your job is not just to adjust to this, right? And again, it's strategic. So sometimes you may need to be by yourself, but not as an ongoing practice. And the great sociologist Max Weber not talking about race, he talked about withdrawing from public space to private space. He said that space gets smaller and smaller and smaller. You become less of an agent in the world. You become trying to protect your corner. When you are relatively successful of producing something that looks really good. The dominant society takes it over anyway.
The Tulsa massacres. It's like, okay, we have Black Wall Street. No, you don't. And of course, then the last thing I'll say is two things. Last two things. Part of the thing is we have broad stories about each other. Let me tell you the story about white people and you say, "Wait a minute, that's not my story and I'm white. That's not my story and I'm white." I wrote this book, The Power of Bridging, and again, 92nd synopsis of how this went. So Sal and Tru came to me and said, "We need a book on bridging. You do a lot of work on bridging, which you write." And they said, "But we know you don't have any time. So we're going to give you a ghostwriter." You just download and the ghostwriter write it, then you edit it. Boom. Two months, three months is done.
So they gave me a ghostwriter. First ghostwriter they gave me was very talented white woman. She just didn't get the essence of what I was saying. So basically we said, "Okay, we'll go with somebody else." So now we found the second ghostwriter who was a Black woman who had closely written some really prominent books. And she said, "Yeah, growing up in the 1950s and '60s, you must have been really pissed, and your parents were poor, sharecroppers. You must have been really angry and traumatized by growing up like that in Black bottom in Detroit."
And I said, "I could see how you would deduct that from the facts, but that's not my story. My story is a story of love. I hit the jackpot for parents." I mean, all of you I'm sure you got cool parents. My parents were the top of the heap. I can just tell you that. So we had to let her go too. And why? The reason I shared that is that she had a Black story. Black people are traumatized, Black people are victims, Black people... And there's some of that, there's real trauma. There's real trauma about to be visited upon Americans of all different kinds of races. But that's not my story. My story is I feel good about myself. I think I'm all that in a box of chips.
Devin Nixon:
We agree.
john a. powell:
So what I'm saying is that part of the fear is like fear of white people, not simply fear of white supremacy. So, that fear of white people cuts us off from being able to have discerning. Who are the white people? And this is the data, now stop. 10% of the white people actually do believe in white dominance. Another 22% believe are embroiled in white resentment. That's about a third. Then 10% are what I call the John Brown types. They actually will go down with Black people, they'll go down and fight the fight. Now you got to find them because they're not everywhere. But then the majority are just confused, right? And we lump them all together. Those are four different categories of behavior, and it's probably four more. So if you have fear, the fear is probably being propagated by the 10% that believe in white dominance by the Steve Bannons who says, "I'm coming to get you," but it's not being propagated. But you then don't get to know the John Browns.
Devin Nixon:
That's right.
john a. powell:
One of my favorite writers says, excuse me if you're Hindu, he says, "A good life is one, you only have to die once." So I don't want to walk around life being always fearful. I'm going to get hurt. I'm going to fall down. I watched my children fall down and... You have children?
Devin Nixon:
I do.
john a. powell:
When my son was learned to ride a bike, he fell. He was seven years old. His response was, "You know what..." This is true, true story. Now, his mid-40s, "When I grow up, I'm going to drive a car. I don't need to ride a bike. I'm good."
Devin Nixon:
[inaudible 01:00:29].
john a. powell:
No, you got to ride a bike. It's not riding a bike that's the issue, it's actually learning how to engage with hard things in your fear so you can grow.
Devin Nixon:
Thank you. Oh, boy. I met Bo. Where's Bo? Earlier today we were talking... Hi. And you said to me, "I'm so surprised I've never run into you." And I'm going, "I'm not surprised, I'm [inaudible 01:00:50]." So thank you for that. I'm looking for you all's hands. We've got mic runners. Because you know I can talk and I've got all kinds of questions, so I'll keep going if nobody raises a hand. Okay. Well, my next question for you then, John. He said, I could call him that. Yes.
john a. powell:
So when the group was up here earlier, indigenous population, they talked about the fear of public speaking. I just want to make sure that we've been talking a lot about fear. So I don't want this to be when it's over, and this happens all the time, people have no questions. I come off the stage, it's like 50 people come up to me. I have a question. So if you have a question, please ask it now and-
Devin Nixon:
Please do. There we go. There's a hand. Is that Molly? Hi Molly. There's a mic coming your way. I hope you all caught that. We're not doing 50 questions afterwards.
Molly:
Yeah. John, I'm curious, just where do you find hope right now in your life? Where are you seeing things that give you hope?
john a. powell:
Great question. Quick answer. I don't organize around hope. I have a placard in my house that says similar. It says, "I'm not an optimist, nor am I a pessimist. I'm a possibilist." I believe what we do matter. And we don't know how it's going to turn out, but we do know if we don't engage, it's probably not going to turn out well. So most people do organize around hope, I don't. But I also find that there's a lot of othering going on. But here's the bad news, the good news is almost all the othering that's going on is in service of belonging. People other in order to try to belong, and they get the wrong message. If you want to belong to this community, you got to hate that community. But they're still yearning for belonging. To me, that's really beautiful. It's like a jujitsu. You don't have to start from ground zero. People know in some deep, deep way that belonging is important.
Footnote, I read an article this morning, I was trying to find it, that in Japan, older women are starting to commit crimes, right? They're literally, and this happened actually here. I think one guy, older guy, went to a bank and said, "This is a stick-up, call the police." True story. What they wanted was community. They're doing it because they're lonely. I mean, that's like checking your bags, right? It's like, this is deep structural problem. If I go to prison, I will have friends, right? I mean, we are yearning to be connected to each other. We just don't know how we're trying to do it by ourselves, which is in and of itself a contradiction. How can you be with people by yourself, right? So to me, that's that yearning, that desire, that recognition that we need each other is actually quite beautiful. But we have to do it, we have to create that space without creating a demon, without creating the other.
Scott:
Yeah. Hi John. My name is Scott. My question is, without this common framework of belonging, it's easy to find myself in situations where the other party's coming at me from an othering point of view. What advice would you give to me to help start that belonging conversation when the other party isn't there?
john a. powell:
Right. Well, two things. So, some of you may know I've become public friends with people like Pastor Roberts, who's a famous evangelical conservative with others. And Isabel Wilkerson in her book Caste, she talks about a mega guy coming to her house. Isabel Wilkerson is a shortish African-American woman, and she also wrote a book called Warmth Above the Suns, but she has a plumbing problem. So she caused the plumber, and this mega guy who's big white and exuding all the things that he's part of that initial 10% of despise, and he won't help her. He's in her house and she's uncomfortable. First of all, having this big guy in her house, the two of them by himself, and this water spilling on the floor, and he won't even respond. And she's getting frustrated, but also a little nervous. So at some point she turns to him, she says, "I don't know why." And I said to him, "How's your mother?" And she watches this guy start to tear up.
And he says, "My mother died two years ago." And she said, "So did mine." Now, they're two human beings. Now, they're not voting the same. My guess is he voted for Trump. My guess is she voted for Kamala, but they're experiencing some part of life. And she recounts this in the book. By the time the guy leaves, he's like, "I have a truck full of tools. What else do you need done in the house?" So you can't make it happen, right? But King, when someone asked him about this, "What do you do with the segregationists?" And he says, "I don't chase them, but I leave my light on and the door open with an invitation." So again, you can't make someone come to the table. But here's the thing, the vast majority of Americans want to come to the table. So, don't start with the most difficult. And if you can, leave your door open and the light on.
Devin Nixon:
Wow, wow. Thank you.
john a. powell:
Thank you.
Devin Nixon:
I really believe that alignment is when our nature and our being become one. And I'm hearing you say so much about the nature of humanity, but having our being having in these ways that separate us from ourselves and from each other. So, I want to thank you for some tools so that we can better align with ourselves and bridge with one another. We're at time you all, so how about a round of applause for John Powell.
john a. powell:
Thank you. Thank you.
