Loretta Ross’ Calling In is a guide to “building bridges instead of burning them down” and seeking “power with, not power over” in the fight for justice.
Reproductive justice founder Loretta Ross has a groundbreaking new book: Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel. Ross draws on over 40 years of experience as a feminist activist to offer hope and guidance for how we can learn to communicate and work together across our differences of identity, political opinion and priorities. Calling In is part activist memoir, part how-to guide for calling in and part strategic plan for growing the human rights movement. Beautifully written and engaging, Calling In is a guide to “compassionate politics”—an antidote to infighting and calling out that is weakening the women’s movement and the left today.
Loretta Ross is one of the 12 Black women who founded the reproductive justice movement in a Chicago hotel room in 1994. Ross was the second executive director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center in the 1980s, then worked with the National Organization for Women to build bridges to women of color. She later worked at the Center for Democratic Renewal in Atlanta, fighting white supremacy, then co-founded and led the National Center for Human Rights Education. She also co-founded and was the first executive director of SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. A MacArthur “Genius” fellow, Ross is now a professor at Smith College in the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality, where she teaches courses on white supremacy and reproductive justice.
In Calling In, Ross admits to her history of calling out. As a Black woman in white America, Ross explains how she’s had little trust or patience for many people. She’s often reacted to others with fear or domination when they’ve said things she’s disagreed with or that offended her. This pattern tore apart personal relationships and movement spaces she was in—so she eventually sought a pathway for growing relationships rather than ending them over differences or conflict.
Ross shares several powerful stories of how she learned to call in.
When she worked at the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, an incarcerated man convicted of rape and murder of a woman wanted counseling about how not to be a rapist. Despite being a rape survivor, Ross said yes, teaching incarcerated rapists Black feminist theory.
When a white supremacist and Nazi reached out to the Center for Democratic Renewal where she worked in Atlanta, Loretta agreed to deprogram him.
When Loretta expressed concerns about coercive sterilization, which she had experienced, to NOW president Eleanor Smeal, who responded with her story of being denied a sterilization, she decided to call Smeal in rather than call her out.
We expect our allies to get everything right and to be perfectly aligned with our beliefs. But that’s just not realistic.
Loretta Ross, ‘Calling In‘
Ross locates the origins of much calling out and canceling in personal trauma. She explains that people who regularly engage in call outs are operating out of their own trauma. She argues that we have to start with ourselves, heal our trauma, let go of hate and lead with love. Ross argues that we need to work for change by channeling charged emotions without being overcome by them—to be “trauma informed, not trauma controlled.”
Ross defines a call in as a call out done with love—a response based in love instead of anger, that respects the human rights of others. Ross explains her five steps of calling in:
- assess whether you have the energy and desire to call in,
- calibrate the conflict by determining whether the harm was intentional or not,
- ask open-ended questions to start the conversation,
- accept the other person’s reactions by listening and being okay with disagreements, and
- reach a resolution by addressing the context under which the harm has occurred.
According to Ross, sometimes calling out and canceling are appropriate, but she also offers other options: calling on (without engaging) and calling it off (walking away).
Ross argues, “instead of seeking power over, we need to seek power with.” She says that deciding to “hold back a powerful tirade” is usually the “smarter, more strategic choice” to accomplishing your political goals. Ross invites us to release “zero-sum, prison-industrial thinking” and instead seek transformative justice by “modeling the world we desire.”
We can be politically correct and stunningly ineffective at the same time, losing on policy while we believe we are winning on politics.
Ross
Ross has long said that you can’t build a human rights movement by violating people’s human rights. In this time of intense political turmoil, we should take Ross’s message to heart: finding strength in difference within movements for justice, cultivating patience and treating each other kindly.
Wisdom from Loretta Ross’ Calling In:
“With truth, history, evidence, and time on our side, we hold the winning hand despite our fears of powerlessness and failure.”
(p. 4)
“Calling in builds bridges instead of burning them down so that we might walk together along the path toward collective liberation.”
(p. 5)
“A call in is a call out done with love.”
(p. 26)
The purpose of calling in is to “create the conditions for differences of opinion to be heard, to allow facts to be ascertained, and to avoid ideological rigidity and political bullying.”
(p. 31)
“A call out culture makes our tribes smaller and more impotent. Loyalty to the tribe becomes more important than coexisting peacefully with others in a pluralistic system.”
(p. 48-49)
“We expect our allies to get everything right and to be perfectly aligned with our beliefs. But that’s just not realistic.”
(p. 49)
“We created a cult of unforgiveability. Instead, we need to learn the power of forgiveness.”
(p. 62)
“When we point out mistakes not to rectify them but to punish others, we seek to shame others, masking a power play as a virtue, as a form of moral grandstanding.”
(p. 64)
“Don’t use your knowledge as a weapon.”
(p. 68)
“Language policing is sometimes unintelligible, even to the people we are trying to support.”
(p. 68)
“Constructive kindness is more effective than destructive criticism.”
—Walter Rhein (p. 70)
“We let minor differences distract us from the fights that matter.”
(p. 79)
“We can be politically correct and stunningly ineffective at the same time, losing on policy while we believe we are winning on politics.”
(p. 81)
“I’m particularly concerned about the way leftists put each other down for not being ‘woke’ enough, as though this were an effective anti-racist practice. This virtue signaling is just another expression of white supremacy: blaming and shaming are central to that ideology’s goal of dividing people and preventing unity across difference.”
(p. 81)
“I’ve seen many great organizations break down because they were great at poking holes but bad at filling them.”
(p. 108)
“If you want to accomplish anything of import, you need a positive vision.”
(p. 108)
“Punishment and purges might feel righteous, but that impulse doesn’t accomplish anything meaningful or moral.”
(p. 113)
“This is what calling in seeks to achieve. We seek to replace shame and fear with a sense of joy and purpose. We seek not just to tell people what they can’t do, but to show them what they can be a part of. When it all comes together, the experience is genuinely thrilling. It’s a way of thinking brilliantly together about the possibilities of making a difference in the world.”
(p. 124)
“To prevail, we need to lead a revolution of moral renewal, a revolution that encompasses a vast range of people with a common vision.”
(p. 135)
“Anger will always have a purpose in fighting injustice. It can be fueling, even liberatory. … We shouldn’t be afraid of our anger, nor should we be chastened into silence when there are justified reasons for outrage. But anger can also build up, like a static charge, demanding to be released. If we don’t channel it to a fitting outlet, our anger will fry us from the inside, or surge without warning. Then, we strike out at the people closest at hand… Anger clouds my thinking and stops me from processing what’s going on… I’ve determined that I no longer want to be drive chiefly by anger.”
(p. 142-143)
“Always try to make decisions you can be proud of.”
(p. 144)
“Anyone working for change need to be able to channel charged emotions without being overcome by them. Let’s learn to be trauma-informed, not trauma-controlled.”
(p. 144)
“Our larger goal when calling in is to persuade people to *be* with us, not to *agree* with us.”
(p. 169)
“One of the underlying assumptions of a call out is that the damage has been done and nothing can fix it—which is why we sometimes seek to punish or cancel the perpetrator. But that’s zero-sum, prison industrial thinking. When we move to the restorative framework of calling, we can move beyond that.”
(p. 174)
“When we move from a call out culture to a calling culture, we seek to embrace our ability to hold power with one another, not over one another.”
(p. 190)
