Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel by Loretta Ross
“Our opponents are simply pimples on the ass of time. But my biggest fear is that despite our winning hand, we’ll be defeated — at least in our lifetimes — because we can’t stop calling each other out
How, in times when dialogue seems impossible, public discourse is reduced to name calling and cancel culture, and nations, communities, institutions, and families are hopelessly polarised, might we find our way back to tolerance, civility, and co-operation? As crucially, how are we to transcend our many divides to build the movements needed to build the world that we know is possible? Is it futile to even ask those questions anymore?
Two weeks ago, I encountered Loretta Ross, Associate Professor of the study of women and gender at Smith College, and lifelong advocate for reproductive justice, gender equality and human rights. Her keynote address at the opening plenary of the Resource Alliance International Fundraising Congress in the Netherlands, was, for me, and the thousands listening in person and online, mind opening. She introduced us to the concept of Calling In as an alternative to the pervasive culture of Calling Out.
Her book, Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel, delves further into the concept. Politics, society and civil society today are all too often framed as being divided between those who are for and those who are against us. In civil society, especially, we seek ideological purity and lockstep consensus with little if any room for dissent, disagreement or even learning. Within our movements one misjudged or misinformed phrase is all that it takes to be cancelled, demonised and forever dismissed.
Loretta invites us to frame the world as being composed of proven, problematic, and potential allies, and to seek to engage wherever the possibility of enlisting support for our cause exists, rather than excluding anyone who is not in 100% agreement 100% of the time. She builds on Ngoc Loan Trân’s original framing of calling in as “a practice of pulling folks back in who have strayed from us… a practice of loving each other enough to allow each other to make mistakes, a practice of loving ourselves enough to know that what we’re trying to do here is a radical unlearning of everything we have configured to believe is normal.” She reminds us of Alicia Garza’s words that “movement building isn’t about finding your tribe — it’s about growing your tribe across difference to focus on a common set of goals.”
We’re all familiar with the practice on the progressive end of the ideological spectrum of finding myriad ways to find fault with each other rather than focusing on our shared goals. We often envy, albeit tinged with some disdain, the relative unity and singleminded focus of our counterparts on the right. We can split hairs with fellow anti-facists with greater ferocity than we confront the fascists. Appeals to unite across our many divides – race, class, caste, gender, faith, nationality, and cause — sound naïvely utopian. Why is Loretta’s call any different?
In part her credibility stems from her lived experience of abuse, exclusion, discrimination and worse. As a survivor of rape and its rippling consequences, she has battled demons, inner and outer, to lead multiple successful movements for reproductive justice, racial equity, and human rights, working alongside feminist and civil liberties legends. She has more reason than most to resort to anger, bitterness, and hate. She chooses, not serenity, acceptance or to simply turn the other cheek, but to “be precise with her anger,” quoting Aristotle, “Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.” Hers is not a demand that we suppress righteous anger or that we ignore the harm we experience. It is to deploy anger strategically, without meanness or disrespect. To seek accountability rather than unforgiving condemnation. She is most definitely not advocating for civility at the expense of justice. Or that we accommodate people with privilege and perpetrators of injustice by presenting ourselves inauthentically. Her invitation is to use our differences strategically rather than to burn ourselves out in a quest for perfect ideological unity. There are situations when calling out, even calling off, are warranted. Call outs, she says, are most effective when they target powerful people beyond our reach and when public scrutiny is a strategic weapon we deploy against the unreachable powerful. This “democratisation of justice” can help people facing structural inequalities overcome their sense of powerlessness. Equally, when serious harm has been done, when further harm can be prevented, when other means of recourse have failed or are inaccessible, and when trust and good faith have been exhausted, calling out is justified.
Particularly compelling is Loretta’s account of her work with a Ku Klux Klan leader seeking redemption. Her initial revulsion, and gradual understanding of what it takes to bridge the seemingly insurmountable divide, also highlights a key gap in approaches to changing hearts and minds. What pathways do we provide for those seeking to relinquish hate, bigotry and division? She recounts the advice of C T Vivian, whom Martin Luther King Jr. described as the greatest preacher to ever live, “When you ask someone to give up hate, you need to be there for them when they do.”
The book’s detailed guide on how and when to call in family members, colleagues, comrades, potential allies and when and how not to, is accompanied by stories from Loretta’s life — within her family, her victories and failings at the DC Rape Crisis Center she led, at the National Organisation of Women, in academic institutions and civil society organisations, as well as the contestations involved in convening large national coalitions for policy change. University administrators, in particular, could benefit a great deal from this book.
Her own struggles to overcome the urge, even compulsion, to resort to clever comeback, penetrating barb, spirited defence or retribution in the face of injury —perceived or real — resonate strongly and lend her advice compelling authenticity.
Her most powerful argument: “People opposed to human rights — opposed to ending poverty, addressing racism, or accepting women’s rights to control their bodies — think they’re fighting the human rights movement but I believe they’re wrong. They’re fighting truth, history, and evidence. Most importantly, they’re fighting time. These existential forces are beyond their power to command. With truth, history, evidence, and time on our side, we hold the winning hand despite our fears of powerlessness and failure. Our opponents are simply pimples on the ass of time. But my biggest fear is that despite our winning hand, we’ll be defeated — at least in our lifetimes — because we can’t stop calling each other out.”