Common Good Podcast

john a. powell: Future of Spirituality & Belonging (part 2)

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The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and the structure of belonging.  In this episode, Rabbi Miriam Terlinchamp and Reverend Ben McBride speak with john a. powell. Greg Jarrell also jumps in to ask a couple questions.

john a. powell is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights, civil liberties, structural racialization, racial identity, fair housing, poverty, and democracy. He is also the founding director of the Othering & Belonging Institute, a UC Berkeley research institute that brings together scholars, community advocates, communicators, and policymakers to identify and eliminate the barriers to an inclusive, just, and sustainable society and to create transformative change toward a more equitable world. The unique spelling of his name is john’s way of signifying that we humans are part of the universe, not over it.

Excerpts and Works Referenced in the Conversation:

Also, check out our previous episode with Ben about his new book, Troubling the Water: The Urgent Work of Radical Belonging.

You can also pre-order Greg's new book, Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods.

This episode was produced by Joey Taylor and the music is from Jeff Gorman. You can find more information about the Common Good Collective here. Common Good Podcast is a production of Bespoken Live & Common Change - Eliminating Personal Economic Isolation. 

Let's stay with this bigger table. I love thinking about it. John, your language of like, there is no other was really resonant to me because I was thinking about this concept in the Bible of ger, which is often the other stranger or the convert, but it really just means not yet us.  And we never use that. We just call it like the righteous other or you have the righteous Gentile, right? We have these ways of sort of figuring out this, but maybe there is this piece that's connecting. I firmly believe in a radically inclusive table. And yet I do think it's a struggle to figure out what boundaries need to exist in order to  cultivate a spirit of imagination, I think maybe more than safety. How have you two done that in a way that has been productive that we want to really be inclusive. And yet  perhaps there are red lines. I'm curious if you don't think they are either. That'd be interesting.

I think it would be irresponsible of us not to acknowledge that we're talking about very difficult things and we're not talking about flipping a switch. We've all had  times we wish we had behaved differently. We've all had times where out of fear, anger, frustration, ego, we've said and done things that we later regret so I think in terms of growing into grace with the other also means growing into grace with ourselves. And that doesn't mean not holding the other quote unquote accountable, or ourselves accountable, but holding us accountable out of love, out of our human frailty, out of our similarity.  I sort of hit the sweet steak in terms of the family I was born in. I was born to a wonderful family. I can only take so much credit because so much was given to me, and being born into that family and raised in that family. My father was a Christian minister. I spent time with the Bible, but more importantly with my father, with my mother, with my siblings, my brothers and sisters, and the story of the Good Samaritan. who is the stranger? And it's like, aren't you afraid to help that stranger on the road? What might happen to you if you stop and help that stranger? And the response is, what would happen to me if I don't?  So while this work may be hard and challenging, it's not like, well, so I'm not going to do the work, I'm just going to live my life in peace and harmony and ignore all these, this is what life is and we talked earlier in terms of spirituality and structure, from my perspective, spirituality is about openness, and so while we're constructing walls and boundaries, to me that's an antithetical really to spirituality and yes, sometimes we're gonna be hurt,  period.  We can build a wall. We're still gonna be hurt. We can not build a wall. We're still gonna be hurt. Maybe, to turn the corner on this huge pandemic called COVID, if it taught us anything, And it can only teach us if we're willing to learn, is that you can ground the planes, you can build walls, you can track people, the virus keeps moving, the virus keeps spreading. Because we as human animals, as social animals, are in each other's lives, we're inextricably linked to each other and it's a lesson that comes over and over and over and over again. It's not that I learned it the first time, the second time, the third time. It's not that I won't have to learn it again. But each time that I embrace that lesson, I feel like I grow. I become more grounded. I become, in a sense, less afraid. I'm outside of Santa Cruz now at a retreat. I was driving here yesterday from the Bay Area. Literally, a guy in a pickup truck cut me off. have no idea why. And then started yelling obscenities at me.  It's like, am I safe? I certainly didn't feel safe. And I was annoyed. I was more than annoyed. That can happen unfortunately, anytime, anyplace, especially in the United States. So,  I think we're safest when we turn toward each other instead of toward each other. We're safest when we're respecting each other. And even in our safest moment, in our safest community, we still will get, if we're lucky, old and die.  I'm not I'm not advocating violence. I'm not advocating trauma. I'm not advocating what I call surplus suffering. People need to have a place to live. People need to know that kids will come home from school intact without worrying about gunshots. But even if all those things are taken care of, life will still throw many things that are hard for us to deal with. And we're better at it when we do it together. So, again, I feel fortunate that Some of these things I came at just by being born in a family where my mother, my father, and my extended family exhibited many of these behaviors.  Well, one other thing, growing up I thought my father in particular was kind of a, what we would say in the black community, a chump. Because he was always doing things for people,  and there was no return. He would help people with  He would loan people money that everybody knew wasn't coming back. And it's like, why does he do this? And sometimes my mother would get annoyed. We didn't have very much. And as I've gotten older and reflected on my father, I feel like he was the first bodhisattva that I really knew. And I feel like in some ways I'm becoming more and more like him. As I age. 

That's so powerful. And I just will say,  I know that the bridging work works because I've seen it work. And I think it's less about whether this turning to each other works. And to me, it's more about our willingness to learn how to take care of ourselves and become the kind of human beings that can stay involved in the work of turning to folks. I've seen it happen in very practical ways, whether that is police sitting down at the table with mothers who've lost their kids to violence. Down at the table with people who've been shooting at other folks. And when people are turning to one another, we widen the circle concern. I just think the low hanging fruit has been picked. And in the moment that we're living in, it's actually really going to require a deeper kind of humanity that we all have to commit ourselves to.  That I am going to make a choice to see you. As human and I've, I say often and I take some flack for it and that's probably good. Maybe I need to think about it more, which is, I say, I think that we have to find the humanity to actively work to widen the circle of human concern. That includes people who are working actively to constrict the circle of human concern that affects us and the people that we love. And, I said it in one space and people were like, wait a minute, what are you talking about? That's some Uncle Tom type theory, you know, and I told him, I said, I hear you, but I said, well, what's the alternative if we're not working to widen the circle of human concern to include those who are currently trying to constrict it? We are subsequently just becoming caricatures of the very behaviors and attitudes that we see are broken in the world. So becoming these deeper versions of being human doesn't mean we all have to do the same thing, but we can do the something that's within our reach. And I love the kind of anecdote that you put out, John, that, you know, like a real bridge, you can't build a bridge everywhere. But just because you can't build it everywhere doesn't mean you can't build it some places and so instead of thinking of the hardest person in your life to bridge with or the greatest difficulty to widen your circle or to build a bigger table. How about looking at something that's a little bit more reachable? And I think if we can do that, then we build muscle memory. We build faith in ourselves. We get more stories. And then we can go deeper in our practice. 

 Thank you to both of you. And Greg wants to share a story. And then hopefully Ben and John could react to it. 

So I wasn't gonna so much share stories. Just try to ask a question as I'm sitting and listening. John and Ben, I hear you both calling for I think acts that require significant courage  and this is brave work and you've spoken a lot about the personal discipline that it takes in this, kind of bridge building work. But  I'm also thinking about, the necessity of that to happen at a structural level. I'm wondering if you could maybe just talk a little bit about that is having a handful of people, who are willing to make the sort of risk that you're talking about.  Does that get us to the structural places that are necessary? Do we need some further structures or systems that can help us to do the brave kind of work that you're talking about?

Great question. we need to attend the structures. Structures are really ways of habituating things. So at a deep collective level. So you get on a freeway, you drive,  you don't think, well, I'm going to Ben's house. I'm going to cross this field and go into this bridge. And I think it's over here. Let me get out my compass. You get on the street and just follow the structure, the structure in a sense, is a way to collectively habituate certain norms and activities and structures take on a life of their own. They're not the same as people.  And they almost always carried values with them. And so part of it is to be aware of the work the structure is doing, whether we intend for it to be doing that or not. So a concrete example, we in California are suffering from a huge housing crisis. Both lack of housing, lack of affordable housing, as well as housing that is deeply segregated by opportunity. So some houses have no supermarket within striking distance. No cleaners. Some houses have no public transportation. Some houses have no parks. Those are all structural. So I live in a place where relatively close to public transportation and across the street from a park. That's not something that I made myself. So my point is, is that if we're going to make structures work for us, and I say be hard on structures. and soft on people. We're going to make structures work for us we have to look at the work they're doing. So one of the things we did is look at zoning and many areas in the country. Although this is changing, and it's not a complete solution, are zoned for single family houses. the cost of single family houses in a place like the Bay Area or Seattle or New York is prohibitive which means if you can only build single family houses, you're not going to build affordable housing for the most part. That's a structural thing. So we have zoned housing to be economically And by association, racially segregated, even though we say we should have inclusive housing and racially integrated housing, the structure is doing the work to keep us apart. And Miriam talked about not knowing a neighbor. Well, we've structured our society, so that our neighbor is more likely to look like us, more likely to Be like us in important ways, including politically, that's the work that structures are doing. So, to answer your question more directly. Yes, we need to pay attention to structures and we don't naturally get there. In fact, there's one colleague at Berkeley who's since passed away, who says we are methodological and individualist. We see everything at the individual level. We don't see things at the collective or structural level. We talk about, in the context of race, being colorblind, which we're not, and can be because of the way the unconscious works, but really we're largely structurally blind. We don't see what structures are doing, and they're doing a lot. So  efficiency of racial segregation could not happen without The structural interventions,  it couldn't happen simply on a one on one basis,  so we need to sort of do an inventory, an assessment, not only of what our structures are doing to  undermine our coming together, but what we can affirmatively do in terms of creating structures that bring us together. How do we affirmatively organize structures? To promote the outcomes. And again, I've used the example earlier, the military has done that a lot. Now we're not civil society is not the military, but they said how do we design our structures so people have an experience of each other as human beings.  And this is Alper's work, The Nature of Prejudice, Winged Under Contact Theory, saying that under certain conditions, if people have a common goal, relative equality, and leadership, and we might add a decent story, and you bring them together, really powerful, positive things happen. But those conditions are not met. Those conditions are largely structural. 

It's so interesting to me that twice now the example that you've pointed us to of  a structure that creates the sort of belonging is the military, whose overarching goal is this massive scale violence, but who understands really well the way that you knit a group of people together towards a common goal.

Somebody said I use that. example deliberately because I think we can't be purists.  We have to, as Ben was saying, bring people together. There's so many wonderful examples. I'll give you one more that's not the military. There are about 145 countries that have eliminated the death penalty. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were four. Now, it's more than half the countries in the world have eliminated the death penalty. If you go back and read the debate and the conversation about should they or should they not have the death penalty in a given country, there were many reasons given. The efficiency of the death penalty, the safety of the country. But two arguments showed up a lot. One was deeply spiritual and the other one was deeply moral. Basically saying we, as a country, don't believe we have the right to, for the state to take another human's lives. And that's a policy decision. So in that sense, it's structural. It's not saying, Greg, what do you think? It's saying, as a society in Canada, we refuse to take someone's life. Now, the average Canadian doesn't have to think about that. And the United States is like, well, you know, if the guy's a bad person, then he or she deserves to die. That's really a fundamentally different approach. And the approach of saying we're not taking each other is actually going back to what Dan was saying about the circle of human concern. We're saying every human being, even those human beings that hate us, that would kill us, are still human and still deserves human dignity and that act according to human dignity is according our own and underlying our own human dignity. They're just hundreds of examples. And one more, which is Canadian, Canada funds their schools at a federal level. They take all the money, property tax and redistribute it so that no school district is devoid of resources. That's not perfect. No country is perfect. That's a structural decision, They decide that low income cities should not be left on their own to fund critical human services. Like schools, or like health care. That's something that the whole country should participate in. That's not how we do it in the United States. the point is, we structure it in the United States, so not only are we segregated from each other, but then we segregate resources, so those with a lot of resources get to hoard those resources, and those with few resources, I left without those resources. And that's not because people living in those communities that hoard are necessarily bad people but they live in these structures that create these outcomes and they're largely oblivious to them, but the effects of them are real. 

That's why to me also the stories that you're lifting up, John, are so important. Us having a story that connects us because structurally, if we're going to make change and really make belonging, something that's not just cultural, but it's also structural  targeted universalism that you talk about a lot is super important that we actually allow the people who are most being othered. segregated and kept out of resources and opportunity, we solve their problems as a way to actually create universal benefit for everyone. But I think the challenge, it was not the challenge, it's the opportunity. We have to have a story that is constantly being told that this other person who has a different human experience for me is still deserving of the same things that I desire. And if I have that story, then I don't see ensuring that Access to education and health care and food and medicine, right, like  I am not at risk by ensuring that those who have less right now get enough so that we all can benefit. And I just think in this moment, even some of the social change and organizing practices that I've engaged in the past. One of the reasons I shifted to much more of a belonging construct Was even in the Alinsky model of structural change and organizing, which was, there are no permanent allies. There are no permanent enemies. There are only permanent interests. And I began to say to folks, I hear that, but that actually just leads me to only transactional relationships with people. And I think the invitation to powerfully is collective interests that we are more in each other's story than just transactions.  If we can really understand our deep connection and relatedness, then we can even make decisions that don't always have to benefit us in a material way. They might benefit someone else, but we recognize that collectively, we all benefit when we are acting in those ways. 

I think that's completely right. Just a few quick points to add to what Ben just said. Robert Putnam in Bowling Along talks about this as general reciprocity as opposed to specific reciprocity, where specific reciprocity is completely transactional. I do something for you, you do something for me. I give you something, you give me some money. You know, what's in it for me? That's always the question for specific. Reciprocity. General reciprocity is you do something for society, and it helps society generally, and it may come back to you in some diffuse way, but, or it may not, right? And you're saying societies can't really thrive just on specific reciprocity. Societies can't really be healthy just through transactions. And our society is sort of deeply steeped in transaction. What's in it for me? And belonging takes us beyond that and there's a book called Spirit Level, and it talks about inequality. And the gist of it is that at a certain point, the more inequality is,  the overall health of society, including those who are at the quote unquote top of the pyramid, start to deteriorate. That is that extreme inequality actually depressed the health outcomes for the entire society, especially those at the lower end of the economic spectrum, but even those at the top of the spectrum. The system is not working, right? The healthcare system. So you can have money and you can sort of opt out. But only sort of but if you think of the social determinants of health, you can't opt out of road rage on the freeway. You can't opt out of people being rude. You can't opt out of going to a movie worried about someone having a gun. You don't opt out of the entire society, the things that causes us collective stress is still in the mix and this goes back, Maryann, to what you were asking about earlier, we try to build safe compounds, we build gated communities, we imprison ourselves to try to be safe because we know society is not safe, and when you look at safety  different nations, I think the United States is 147 out of 200, 147, one of the richest, if you look at health, Look at life expectancy. All the money and resources we spend does not produce the outcome that we think it will. And part of it is that we're trying to make individual interventions to collect the problems.  It doesn't work. 

I'm sure that everyone listening probably feels something that I feel in this moment, in some kind of collective spark, spiritual way that it feels like a, a vision. A vision for another world. And I. I know that I've been hitting hard on the tropes of religion today, but  it's evocative of this moment of, I don't think that any prophet really speaks in his or her time in a way that actually can be heard, that we only sort of see the results of that prophecy much later when it doesn't feel as antagonistic, there's a truth to the story of the prophecy. So I'm, I'm wondering if I can turn to the two of you and ask sort of the same questions that Moses might've asked, that if you see your own prophecy, the work that you're doing in this world around belonging and re imagining society and the collective, that if you were to visit your classroom a couple hundred years from now, is there something that you would hope to be seeing in your work that is being lived out in a full way? Tell me a little about your promised land. 

Wow, what a, what a question.  It's such a beautiful question. You asked such a beautiful Deep, thoughtful questions. This is something I got to go write about because it actually fuels me. It makes me a little emotional in a moment to think about it. What is my promised land? I think if I were to go into the future, I'd want to see people using the lessons that we've learned and are learning to resolve the current conflicts of their day but the promised land for me is not a day without conflicts. I feel like as long as you have human beings, there will be conflicts. It's a part of who we are, but I'd love to see them engaging those conflicts without so much violence and I I'd love to see the spirited wrestling of ideas to, to widen that circle, but in ways that we're rooted in love over fear.

 Ben, I just want to lift up. I mean, the wisdom that you share in terms of, I talk about people trying to get away from fear, trying to get away from suffering. Understandably, none of us wants to suffer. But on the other hand, I distinguish what I call surplus suffering. All of us are going to die, but not all of us will be hungry in the streets at night. I'll be in a warm bed tonight,  so there's surplus suffering, and so I don't want to glorify suffering,  it's here, but I do think if we run away from it and try to create complete safety, that that becomes demonic in and of itself. Similarly, I think with conflict.  I'm going to Ireland shortly to talk about violent conflict around the world, some UN and nation states, so there's more conflict than needs to be, but if we could end all the wars today, if we could cut the military budget by 90%, if we could stop police shooting of unarmed people, there still would be conflict but it would be at a different order and so, in some sense, even as we try to lower the conflict, as I said, try to shift the suffering, we also have to have the skills, the stories, and the reason to actually be with conflict. Because when we are with conflict, when I was suffering, one impulse is to run away. So part of my promised land people would be skilled at dealing with conflict. Skilled. Dealing with suffering, the people would actually know and tell each other's stories, that people would have a chance to try on different things, that travel would be much easier, that hunger  for food would be largely a thing of the past, people would still struggle, but they wouldn't struggle to eat, people would still struggle, but they wouldn't struggle for housing and people's voices, there'd be mechanisms in place for people to really effectively Participate and co create and people's identities will not only be multiple, they'd be fluid so you wouldn't have to be the same person today as you were yesterday. That may sound strange, but we all carry multiple identities. So sometimes you're a father and sometimes you're a son. Sometimes you're head of your company. Sometimes you're just a pedestrian. Sometimes you're a scared little boy, a little girl. Sometimes you're not any of those things. And so space to actually explore our multiple identities, I think is actually one sign that society is healthy, that people don't feel like they have to carry on a single identity their entire life.  people would be aspiring to and talking about not only expanding the circle of human concern but looking at who's outside the circle and make sure they're brought in. And the last thing I'll say in terms of my promised land is that the land itself would be part of it. I talk about co creation, but we'd only not only co create with our own group, way too small, we co create with those who we disagree with, still too small, we co create with the earth itself, that the earth, other life expressions, participate in that emergent co creation and co creation doesn't mean we control, this means we effectively participate and participate with dignity, We Both for ourselves and others