Live with Oscar Abello & Vanessa Roanhorse! (EP.39)
Last Updated
July 1, 2020
Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guests Oscar Abello & Vanessa Roanhorse. [Live show recorded: June 5, 2020.]
Guests: Oscar Abello & Vanessa Roanhorse
Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin
Guests
OSCAR PERRY ABELLO is Next City's senior economics correspondent. He previously served as Next City’s editor from 2018-2019, and was a Next City Equitable Cities Fellow from 2015-2016. Since 2011, Oscar has covered community development finance, community banking, impact investing, economic development, housing and more for media outlets such as Shelterforce, B Magazine, Impact Alpha, and Fast Company.
VANESSA ROANHORSE is an inclusive solutions-driven problem solver committed to liberating all peoples and delivering impactful mechanisms for social, environmental and economic change. She launched Roanhorse Consulting (RCLLC) in 2016, an indigenous women-led think tank. RCLLC works with unheralded communities, businesses, organizations, and individuals to achieve and aspire their self-determination through forging communities of practice, strengthening indigenous evaluation methods, creating equity through entrepreneurship, and encouraging economic empowerment from within. RCLLC co-designs wealth and power building efforts that directly invest in our leaders, support meaningful data collection informed by indigenous research approaches, and helps build thoughtful community-led projects that enforce values that put people at the center. Vanessa is a 2020 Conscious Company Media’s World Changing Women in Sustainable Business awardee and is a 2020 Boston Impact Initiative Fund-Building Cohort fellow. She is a retired member of the ABQ Living Cities leadership table and is a Startup Champions Network member. She sits on the boards of Native Community Capital, Zebras Unite and the New Mexico Association of Grantmakers. Vanessa is one of 8 co-founders of Native Women Lead, an organization dedicated to growing Native women into positions of leadership and business. She is a mom of one, living with her family in Albuquerque, NM. Vanessa is a citizen of the Navajo Nation.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to part one of our special two-part series of the Work Shouldn't Suck Live Morning(ish) Show. On today's episode, Lauren Ruffin and I are joined by Oscar Abello and Vanessa Roanhorse. Let's just jump right into the action. Oscar and Vanessa, welcome to the show.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
Thanks.
Oscar Abello:
Thanks [inaudible 00:00:24] Good morning.
Lauren Ruffin:
Good morning. When we first started this show we were really talking about work and leadership among the pandemic. The pandemic continues to drag on, and now we have the additional burden of carrying and speaking out about how black lives matter, police brutality, and it feels like people are really, really feeling all of this pressure. With all of that being said, how are you doing, both of you?
Vanessa Roanhorse:
I'm okay. I'm okay this morning. It's like, it depends, right? How do you wake up... I think that waking up, side of the bed thing really matters. Today is a good day, it's Friday, it's beautiful, some good stuff happened this week, some sad stuff happened this week, with work and family and... I don't know, I guess it's just overall exhaustion, just general tiredness, trying to do all of that. But also just really happy to have this opportunity to just be in this group of four, to get to catch up with Oscar, who has been killing it with articles lately, and then get to see your face, Lauren, and just kind of have a different way of waking up, which I'm grateful for, or else I would just be still in my room working my way at the computer, nicely showered and dressed, like back in the day when we used to do that.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. And Oscar, how are you doing?
Oscar Abello:
I am also excited to be with you all this morning, and talking with Vanessa. I'm also, I guess, focused in terms of what I have to do today, just because generally speaking journalists are always on deadlines. And so today I have to be writing about the first worker-owned holding cooperative, that recently made it's first acquisition as a holding cooperative. It's based in Baltimore, and it started out with a bunch of formerly incarcerated workers who created a staffing company. There's a whole story, you can read it on Tuesday or Thursday. But, I'm really fortunate, or privileged in some sense, that those are the kinds of stories I generally write about. So, in this time, I don't have to shift my focus, it just becomes even more urgent, and the context becomes even more powerful. And these folks with these ideas are pushing forwards. Even that, everything that's happened.
Lauren Ruffin:
During this time, I keep saying this time, we all kind of know what that means, we didn't share your bios with the audience, because I think it's important for you to talk about the work you're doing right now, and if that work has shifted. I know, Vanessa, you and I stay in touch a little bit more closely, but I know the work that you've been doing with Roanhorse Consulting has shifted in a number of different ways. Do you want to share a little bit about your bio, your background, and the types of work that you'll typically do?
Vanessa Roanhorse:
Yeah. So, Vanessa Roanhorse, I'm [inaudible 00:03:18] from the Nation, the Navajo Nation, grew up here. Live here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. So, we have a small, indigenous women led consulting company, and we've been really trying to push at the boundaries around creating products, programs, supports to help move and curate meaningful, relevant resources to communities of color. We have a pretty strong focus in Indian country, and that work, for us, has been a variety of things, from policy to working with folks to systems map where they fit in the problem that they're looking to solve, to working with the State of New Mexico to really ensure that we get our census count for urban natives. Oscar and I have actually had a number of conversations around Co-op Capital, which is a character-based lending initiative for under banked entrepreneurs, particularly [inaudible 00:04:12] entrepreneurs.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
So, we do a lot of interesting things, but because we work at such a hyper-localized way, and still kind of can pull up to that 30,000 foot systems view, when Covid happened, just naturally, because the team is native, all of us are Navajo, we knew immediately that it was going to get bad. We saw it with the Hantavirus virus when that came in and happened. We lived it, right? I grew up on the reservation, I know what that's like. So, our team completely... Almost 50 percent of our time went full-volunteer, essentially trying to map what was happening. A lot of it was like, who's on the ground working, what [inaudible 00:04:57] organizations are moving forward, how have they shifted their original work to now just be Covid relief, which was making sure there was PPE, people had food, they were delivering water, medicine, diapers, tampons, people were actually out there paving the damn roads themselves so that we could make sure supplies were going through. And so that was our charge, was we immediately went in, and then the last part was trying to make sure we could connect it to people with money, who had money to give. That's really a huge lift that we've been taking on since Covid started, really.
Oscar Abello:
Yeah, so for me, I'm the senior economics correspondent at Next City, which is a non-profit publication founded in 2003. The CliffsNotes version is, back in 2003, the narrative about cities was still very much, there's so much crime and drugs, and all the problems were because of cities. Smog, and all those older narratives about cities, generally. And our founders said, we don't want to create a publication that would look at cities as the places where solutions would come from, and we would go out and find folks in cities, living in cities, who are trying to solve problems.
Oscar Abello:
Over time, as the narrative shifted around cities to become, now cities are the cool place to be, now we shifted our focus, narrowed our focus even more on those neighborhoods, those parts of cities that, again, are still seen as the places where there's crime, there's drugs, all of the problems in society, the violence. We looked at those neighborhoods and we say, what are they doing about economic development? What are they doing about housing? What are they doing about education? And what models are they using? What allies are they bringing to the table? And, what work are they getting done? Those are the typical kinds of stories that we'll cover in any given sphere, and as the economics correspondent, I'm using writing about access to capital or access to jobs, and different business models or programs or policies that are effecting the economies of those neighborhoods. Who is driving access to capital, access to jobs, and how is it happening? For me, the systems piece that has come to it in terms of, there's no... I have to write a story. Someone has to have an idea, it's usually a group of people, that have an idea, and they have to bring other people [inaudible 00:07:27] that idea, and build something. And the more that happens, the more I get to write. And so, I've written 400 stories since 2015 about that.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
I just have to say, if anyone doesn't follow Oscar on Twitter, they need to. Because there's literally history threads that Oscar will put down, where he'll be like, here's what we think the problem is, now I'm going to take you on a journey in 140 characters, and we're going to go through in the Twitter thread. I have learned more in the Twitter threads on the history of certain things than I have, probably if I tried to read the whole, like, any kind of book. So, I just have to say, Oscar-
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, I check in with Oscar every day, and Micheal Harriett. Those are my-
Vanessa Roanhorse:
I do too. No, I'm like, what's happening, what do I need to be focused on, or what not. Oscar is one of those threads I go to.
Tim Cynova:
And Oscar, your Twitter handle is @oscarthinks, right?
Oscar Abello:
Yeah, it's Oscarthinks. I really appreciate you sharing that, because as a journalist, we're supposed to think of ourselves as serving the public in some way, and not enough of us think enough about what does that mean. Who is the public, and what service are we providing? And, yeah, I think about Vanessa, I think about Lauren, I think about Jessica Norwood, or [inaudible 00:08:50] or Camille Kerr, or a lot of the folks that I end up writing about. Next to the aims of being sort of a trade publication in a sense that, the people it writes about tend to also be part of it's audience. Because we're trying to either transfer knowledge from one place to another, or at least transfer some kind of inspiration. I know that the fact that Vanessa is kicking ass in Albuquerque and Navajo Nation and other tribal nations, I know that that brings a lot of inspiration to others in different situations, but facing a lot of the same systemic barriers. Because, let's face it, if you don't look a certain way, if you're not a certain gender, in this country, we're all fighting that same, that beef with supremacy. And they have different contexts and different experiences of what it means, and that's why I end up having the opportunity to write all these stories, is because everyone's got their own way of responding and trying to tackle the beast that's in front of them.
Tim Cynova:
Oh yeah, when you said 400 pieces, Oscar, Lauren and I are just trying to write one. It's like four weeks on-
Lauren Ruffin:
I fail every day at writing the one thing I'm supposed to write. That's one of my few guarantees in life.
Tim Cynova:
We even teamed up to make it easier, and it's like, twice as slow.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, exactly. I think most of us woke up this morning to alerts on our phones saying that the unemployment rate had dropped to 13 percent. Is that what... Have you seen that yet?
Tim Cynova:
Yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
So, I have so many thoughts around data and our unemployment numbers in the United States, but would love to hear your two particular reflections on, perhaps, who is now employed again, and how in the middle of a pandemic and massive, massive street protests of unemployed people who are being brutalized by the police every day, how is it possible that we get an alert like that on our phones? I love that that's like, "Gotcha." It's not... I'm just like, how did this happen? It doesn't make any sense to me.
Oscar Abello:
Well, it makes perfect sense.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yes, it does. It makes perfect sense.
Oscar Abello:
The billing reserve balance sheet went from less than three trillion to almost eight trillion in about a month. So, that's six trillion dollars, literally out of nowhere, that went somewhere. Where does it go? Well, you can take three guesses, and I'll give you one guess, where does it go? It goes to the places that... To the default. What is the default? We know what the default is. And those are the companies that are suddenly able to start employing folks again, and we know who they employ. We know what it was like the last time, 10 years ago, we know what it was like the recession 10 years before that, we know what it was like the financial crisis 10 years before that, we know what it was like in the oil crisis 10 years before that. We can go all the way back 400 years in time and know what the pattern is, who gets the benefit first. And when I hear... When I think about an employment specific number like that, how it went down, I'm like, well, shit, someone had to get [inaudible 00:12:15] that's six trillion dollars out of nowhere, that had to go somewhere. And I'm not surprised that that's where it's going.
Lauren Ruffin:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). V, anything to add?
Vanessa Roanhorse:
Nope. Just how much that bit of information is so not reflective of what we're seeing, and so not like what's happening. It's just, it's all made up. At some point we just kind of laugh, and just kind of say this is not for me. This is not useful for me, this is not about me. I don't know, there's just a certain manner of like, mystical wizardry [inaudible 00:13:03] It's just sometimes, listening to Oscar, and trying to not get angry. I don't need more blood pressure issues. I don't need more... But it's just like these hits keep coming, and it's about, for me at least, trying to survive information. Trying to survive information, and pick what I can do within my hands around this stuff. And when I think about unemployment, I think about what we're seeing for our community members. It's bigger than just a job, at this point. We're just sitting here trying to figure out how do we make sure we get some money to pretend to try to put together water infrastructure? I mean, that is six trillion dollars itself, right there, just to do water infrastructure. So, I've just got to keep remembering, I am the prize, you know?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I feel like it took me a long time to understand what my grandmother used to say, which was, "Don't be somebody who's always working but not employed." And we would look around neighborhoods in Baltimore, where there were people working hard, who were never actually employed. And I just keep thinking about the number of people that I know, who haven't had a job in 15 years. Like, have not had a stable full-time job, since I've known them. And it's just, whenever I see those unemployment numbers, I think about just who is not being counted, and whose voices, and whose numbers just aren't even there any more because they've been trying to get a job for so long they no longer count as being unemployed, which is just this wild thing that our government does.
Lauren Ruffin:
V, you talking about water infrastructure makes me realize that a lot of the folks on either coast probably aren't aware of the unique situation. I shouldn't say... It's not. It is a situation that is shared by communities all over the US. You've got Flint, which is not far from a huge source of fresh water, which is just mind-boggling, and then Newark, which is also close to a fair amount of water, but a lot of folks don't know about the Navajo Nation's water infrastructure issues. Can you talk about that a bit?
Vanessa Roanhorse:
Yeah. Definitely can share. I'm not an expert, but I can be an expert because I grew up with water issues. So, Navajo Nation is, in terms of size, is close to the same square footage as the state of West Virginia. It's a sovereign nation, which means it has a relationship with the federal government, which is nation to nation. The states in which it sits on, which is the State of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah, actually don't have any rights to tell that nation how and what to do. Through treaties, we are to be supported and cared for as needed, as other folks in the country should have access to certain things. But if you can imagine, when Covid-19 hit, one of the statistics that people really freaked out about was, for that size, for close to 150,000 Navajo folks living on the nation, there was 13 hospitals, in total.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
And most of those hospitals were small hospitals, most of them were clinics, and there was just no way they could actually serve. We also have a police department that has to serve the State of West Virginia, and it's less than a hundred people, I believe. And those are just some of the human infrastructure pieces that we don't have. But when you get down to it, a lot of our community members have been hauling water, have been reliant on wells, and have to go and get their water to shower, to bathe, to clean, to wash their hands. And so when Covid-19 hit, we saw such a quick acceleration of cases, really because people have to go somewhere common to get water, and you have to use that... That water is so fricking precious, to have to wash your hands 500 times a day doesn't make any sense.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
Additionally, on top of that, we're a multi generational living community. Which means you're living with your great-grandmother, your grandmother, your mother, your aunt, your niece, your daughter, your granddaughters. And so we were seeing this challenge of, how do we still support this multi generational living? How are we going to help our community members who are the most rural be able to deal with trying to stay and use the stay at home orders, and be able to wash your hands and all of those things, when the other part that we were fighting is because we also lack internet infrastructure. People weren't able to get up to date information. There was a period in which there was a lot of people in Navajo Nation who had no idea there was a pandemic going on.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
And so between healthcare infrastructure, public health infrastructure, water infrastructure, internet infrastructure, road infrastructure, the thing that sucks is we have been living like this since we signed our treaties over 200 years ago. We have been demanding water probably since the time we started having to live on the reservation. And as everyone is just like, "Wow, that's so terrible. Why don't those folks wash their hands? Oh my god, how is that possible?" I'm sorry, America, but you all need to wake up. We have developing world conditions in our backyards, and we've always had them. And we need to stop denying and assuming that we are the most wealthy, the most cared for country, because we're not.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
And so that's been the big struggle for me, is having to keep having that conversation with people who are trying to blame us for the pandemic, who are trying to say, "Well, you guys should know better. You just need to do this, this and that." And it's just like, well, you haul water.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. It's wild to me that when I talk to people who've never really given much thought to what it's like to be disenfranchised, it's like they feel like the water pipes haven't gotten there yet, instead of realizing that they're not there on purpose. There was a system that made that the last place to get water infrastructure, or internet infrastructure. No, this is all happening on purpose. So I think flipping that paradigm is going to be really... It's so important.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
It is. And the last thing for me that I'm struggling with is, so we have Covid-19, I think we as indigenous people are trying to make sure we figure out how to show up for our black relatives, also our black indigenous relatives, and working, doing the internal work with us on our own people, and then this morning I wake up and Trump is moving forward to continue doing the fracking around Chaco, which is one of our sacred sites. So that's continuing. And it's just like, god damn. You can't hold it all up all the time.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I did not see that.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
Yeah. They're open to a public period right now, but they're moving so... 91 percent of the San Juan Basin has already... Have gas oil leases. There's nine percent left, and this nine percent is what people are trying to save and protect right now. It sucks.
Tim Cynova:
Get Oscar in the green room, to Lauren's point that this is on purpose. We were talking about The Power Broker, New York City, LaGuardia, and how cities, New York city, where we both live, there are certain things that happen on purpose. And now even that is changing a bit. Can you talk a bit for the audience as to recommendation there, for those who haven't read The Power Broker, that maybe Chapter 18 is just the one chapter to read, since the book is more than a thousand pages long, there's a pro tip from Oscar.
Oscar Abello:
I'm going to make sure I give credit to Cea Weaver, the head of our board. What some remember as the [inaudible 00:20:39] State Housing coalition, now it's Housing Justice For All, Cea Weaver is the head organizer that basically put back rent regulation from the real estate industry last year. This tenant coalition, the state-wide tenant coalition eliminating some loopholes in New York State's rent regulation laws that allowed 200,000 or more rent-regulated units to be regulated out of rent regulations, so they became market rate. That's like a third of what... We have, like, two million rent regulated units, I think, in the city, and a third of them were lost since the mid-90s when those loopholes were put in place. So, Cea Weaver recommends, I think it's chapter 18, she recommends to read, in The Power Broker.
Oscar Abello:
And the reason she recommends it is, I'm not actually sure what is in the chapter, but the whole book Power Broker, which has been flying around circles in urban policy for years, and for some reason, I guess everyone has their book... I have my bookcase behind me over here, everyone else seems to have a copy of The Power Broker on their bookcase in my world of urban policy, yes. [inaudible 00:21:46] It's about Robert Moses, and who is Robert Moses? Robert Moses, let's say, he... Let me sum it up this way. Robert Moses in the 50's had many titles in New York City, one of which was the Chairperson of the Title 1 Slum Clearance Committee. And this committee primarily-
Vanessa Roanhorse:
Hell of a name for a committee.
Oscar Abello:
Hell of a name for a committee. And they summarily picked areas of the city and just said, these are the areas we consider slums, and we're going to provide federally subsidized capital to developers to bulldoze these neighborhoods and build all kinds of things. A lot of it was public housing, but some of it was Lincoln Center, some of it were highways. They bulldozed, was the Savoy Ballroom, where Harlem's rock community invented the Lindy Hopp. They bulldozed that neighborhood and put in a massive housing complex that today is privately owned, and recently was rebranded as Savoy Towers, like some sort of sick joke on Harlem. That's who Robert Moses was.
Oscar Abello:
If you want to read a story that lifts up Robert Moses as a hero of urban policy, you can read the Power book, but if you want to read a story of Robert Moses decimating communities of color and [inaudible 00:23:11] communities in New York, you can walk down the street in Harlem and ask people about Robert Moses. Or you can read The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jane Jacobs talks about it too. Why is that perspective in Jane Jacobs book? People don't realize, I mean, Jane Jacobs being a white woman, wrote this book about this white man, or about white men, architects and urban planning. Here's one takeaway I take from Jane Jacobs book, she walked around Harlem and she talked to people about what it was like. The book is basically a reflection of, yeah, you know what, all these other people have the same thoughts I did. This Robert Moses is a piece of shit that we've...
Oscar Abello:
And the first couple of chapters of The Death and Life of Great American Cities is, yeah, you know, I walked around uptown, I walked around in these black neighborhoods in Pittsburgh and, yeah, everyone was saying the same thing I was thinking. How about that?
Vanessa Roanhorse:
You know, what's so funny about that book for me is, when I was living in Chicago, I had a colleague, I worked in a sustainability company, was a bunch of planners. They kind of approached sustainability through very much from an urban planner lens, and it was a very white organization. And I remember a colleague decided to have a lunch and learn, and he did a lunch and learn presentation on that book, and actually the book I have is from him, because he's like, "You have to read this. This is..." He gave it to me because he said he was so inspired by this guy, and he was like, "There are so many good tenets on how we should all think about power and leadership."
Vanessa Roanhorse:
And I've never read it, it's just been sitting there because it was a gift from him, and I will never read it now. And I'm so glad, because his version of this is everything that book was trying to do. I'm going to have to send this clip of this podcast to him, actually.
Lauren Ruffin:
Little moments of resistance, I love it. Oscar, you recently did a thread that educated me, of course, around the economic justice struggle in black communities, and how black communities have been innovating their own capital for a really long time. Can you talk a bit about that, because I just love how you put together... And again, how do we begin to shift the narrative around how black and brown people survive economically in the United States, because there is this idea that we aren't innovating, that we're not struggling, that we're lazy, and that people like me, who are able to be successful here are sort of a one-off, as opposed to the fact that I'm able to swim up-stream in white water. Just the sheer effort it takes. But I really appreciated that thread, and shared it pretty widely, so can you talk a bit about it?
Oscar Abello:
Yeah. It was Saturday, and I woke up thinking about the scale at which the uprisings had reached nationally. And I was seeing on Twitter, on... But mostly on Twitter. I'm a journalist, and we spend all day on Twitter. The headlines about the destruction going on, and some of the shade thrown at people, you know, some people were saying, "Oh, why don't they just protest peacefully?" And like, first of all, they have been protesting peacefully. Some folks were saying, "Well, if there's problems in the community, why don't they do something about it?" I'm like, they have. They've been protesting peacefully, and they're doing so much more.
Oscar Abello:
And how do I know that? Because I keep the receipts, and I have stories, and I check the demographics of every source I quote in my stories. I started doing that in 2015, and so I can tell you that I wouldn't... As of the end of 2019... I haven't redone the totals yet, but at the end of 2019, I had written 392 stories for Next City, and 180 of those stories quoted at least one black person. I had interviewed 897 people by the end of 2019, or quoted 897 people, and 279 of those people were black. I have it also broken down by gender, so if you want to know, 897 people total, 144 black women, 133 black men, two black gender non-conforming individuals.
Oscar Abello:
I started keeping those demographics because I just wanted to know as a journalist, was I contributing to the continued stereotype of white saviors, or would I be able to look back and say, no, I'm lifting up stories and sources and leaders and communities that look like the studies that I was writing about. Over time, it's... I had read a little bit about red-lining in college, but when you talk to 279 black people about economic development in their cities, you learn a lot about [crosstalk 00:28:26] and you learn a lot about how they view themselves in their communities as carrying on the tradition, sometimes spiritually, the tradition of resistance and rebuilding and regeneration, sometimes it's literally the family tradition. There are black CDFI leaders, black leaders of Community Development and Financial Solutions. Their parents worked for HUD in their early days. They might not have been so proud of the work they'd done for HUD, but they were working in community development in the 60s, they had kids, and now their kids are working in community development. They're trying to fix a lot of the problems left over from before.
Oscar Abello:
Then there's generations, examples of black community or black urban real-estate developers who's parents were in real-estate, or maybe they were a banker or something. For me, I'm drawn to stories about access to capital and managing capital, capital flows and how historically marginalized communities retaking power over capital. And so it was very powerful for me, to come across Collective Courage, the book by Jessica Gordon Nembhard a few years ago. And this was the book of the history of black cooperatives, written about black women, who herself was like, I didn't even know until someone flagged it for me when I was doing some research, and when I started reading about all these stories in the crisis, edited by W.V.[inaudible 00:29:52] about black cooperatives. And she started doing the research and she wrote a book about it. And one of the things that resonated for me was, what was one of the first, earliest examples of a cooperatively owned black institution? Insurance company. It was a cooperatively owned insurance company in Richmond Virginia.
Oscar Abello:
So to me, the tradition of black communities trying to regain power over capital, not to replace what has been stolen but just to survive. Because that's always the temptation to think about, if you're a historically marginalized community and you're retaking power over capital in some way, is that all you need? No, it's not. You had capital stolen, extracted. You've had oil, as well as capital, you've had that extracted from... You've had land taken away from you.
Lauren Ruffin:
I mean, yeah, I think about how Shirley Sherard and certain black farming coops, and literally having white people using capital systems to take land from black farmers.
Oscar Abello:
Yeah. And what it amounts to is, like, sometimes the response of policy makers or the ivory tower researchers is like, "Well, you know, we've got to teach black people, we've got to teach the native communities how to manage land and money." No. No, you don't.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
Or it's like, "Let's do another research. Do we have enough data?" Do we know this is what they need? Let's ask that question again. And between that and them moving capital to do more research, to make sure our numbers are right-
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, I feel like the funder who's funding research right now for anthropological or societal studies of where they could direct their money should get pilloried in their community.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
They should be. I am a hundred percent with that.
Lauren Ruffin:
[inaudible 00:31:34] go there. When the world opens up let's take tomatoes to their office and throw them.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
I'm going to give them paper cuts and squeeze tomatoes on top of them.
Lauren Ruffin:
Paper cuts and lemons for you.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
Paper cuts and lemons for you, that's where we're going with this. Absolutely. I mean, I recently had someone say, "Can you put an assessment together for me on what we think the Covid-19 impact has been for native Americans?" I just sent them the death toll and presented per capita, and I was like, "There's your report."
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. That's it. What else do you need?
Oscar Abello:
Did you bill for that? Please tell me you billed for that?
Vanessa Roanhorse:
I did not, it was just a simple quick email. I cut and pasted it and I just responded and said there you go. And they've not returned my email.
Lauren Ruffin:
Well, good. Good. You didn't need them anyway. That's the beautiful thing.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
"What would this look like Vanessa", and I was... And they even suggested a three-phased approach.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh no. Oh god. That's embarrassing.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
Anyways-
Lauren Ruffin:
Another clip to send to somebody, V. Oscar, when you share your demographics about the number of non-white men that you talk to, do you get the pipeline question? Like, where do you find all these people to talk to [inaudible 00:32:47] like that?
Oscar Abello:
Oh, I see them. Which I do.
Lauren Ruffin:
I know you do. Where do you find them?
Vanessa Roanhorse:
Like, god, yeah, Oscar, where do you find all of these great people?
Oscar Abello:
Well, I met both of you at one of those places. Sometimes I'm hesitant to say specifically where, because then I'm like, well, I've got a [inaudible 00:33:05] to protect. But [inaudible 00:33:08] I can't... But then I also flick back and I think, wait a minute, even though I need to keep my own pipeline of stories going, there's always more in those spaces than I'm able to cover. There's always more happening. Like, coming out of... I met Lauren and Vanessa at COCAP, [inaudible 00:33:26] organized by Common Future in a space in West Oakland that they've recently changed it's name, but it will forever in my heart be known as Impact [inaudible 00:33:35]
Oscar Abello:
It was a convening held by Common Future, led by a black male, Rodney Foxworth, with women of color were a majority of people who work at Common Future, and the convening, it must have been the fourth or fifth time for this convening, I can't remember how many times. But people of color like to gather in spaces too. If you want to find them and you want to listen to them, they're out there. They're going to community meetings, they're going to the city council meeting and testifying, they're having open meetings in their own neighborhood about, like, here's what's fucked up right now, and what we're trying to do about it. And it is not that hard.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I feel like those spaces, Vanessa and I both, I think that we did the, let me go to SOCAP and be in this really white space, and feel depleted, and then let me go back across the bay to Oakland to just have my soul replenished again. I feel like that week is always a bit of, like, just whiplash.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
Yeah. I would agree with that. It was also that last round of SOCAP, COCAP, well, SOCAP, not COCAP, oh my god it's a mouthful, it was also the 40th year for the taking over of Alcatraz by the American Indian movement was that same week. Because it was 40 years that week when that happened. And you're in that SOCAP weird space, and you get to see Alcatraz, it's just a surreal experience. But I think a lot about, for me, the folks who are doing the coolest and the baddest work, thank god for the internet, you can find them. They're there. That's the other part that's so frustrating, is how many times people reach out to me, and I'm like, am I literally the only native person you know?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yes.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
Probably.
Lauren Ruffin:
I'm the only black person people know. That's why they call me.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
And we're just like, come on now. There's so many ways to do research, there's so many ways to find out what people are doing, and I think that's the part, is you know it's just laziness.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Well, I also-
Vanessa Roanhorse:
It's just lazy.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I also feel like I can't give you permission to access my community. I feel like inherent in that is this... And it's like, you actually have to go do that, and I can invite you into communities that I've created, but I can't give you access to all black people that I know, because they might not want you, or they might not want you today, and at a later time you're welcome. But I do think that's such a... The pipeline question, and how... I've also been thinking a lot about the work both of you... There's something different happening, by the way, right now, around this uprising. Because it's the first time that I've...
Lauren Ruffin:
And just what I'm saying on Twitter is white people aren't necessarily asking us to make ourselves legible to them, like ourselves, our history, our... And I felt like in a lot of the work in the organizations that I've been involved with, it's always us trying to figure out how do we have our narrative be legible to white people, how can we say what we do in a language they understand, or connect it to an experience they understand. And I feel like I'm now seeing white people to a certain extent start to pick up history, whether it's written history or oral history, and they're starting to process it and try to understand it for themselves, and then other white people are serving as translators. Which is just, it's a really interesting moment for, like, how is American history being rewritten in real-time right now?
Oscar Abello:
One of the headlines I woke up to this morning was apparently anti-racist books are selling out [inaudible 00:37:16]
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. It's a weird time. The number of white people who don't know about Fred Hampton, if you don't know about the MOVE bombing, who just don't... If you have not been paying attention, it's your own fault, but I'm kind of glad you're waking up now.
Oscar Abello:
Yeah. Every year it's an annual... The incarceration every year... It's about a month ago, right? It was the anniversary. They did this story in 2014, I think, and they said why don't more people in Philly know about the MOVE bombing? And they tweet it out on the anniversary every year, and every year there's a bunch of people responding like, "Yeah, why didn't I know about the MOVE bomb in Philly?" I didn't know until college. You know how I found out? This is another thing [inaudible 00:37:56]
Lauren Ruffin:
How did you... First, where did you go to college?
Oscar Abello:
Oh, it was just funny. I went to a predominantly white institution in suburban Philadelphia. It's nickname is Vanillanova. [inaudible 00:38:08] University.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yep, you did.
Oscar Abello:
Even there, you will find about eight black professors who are like, you know what, we're going to be here and educate these white folks about our history. I had five of those eight professors, by the way.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh good.
Oscar Abello:
But it was a white professor who had a class, a liberation theology class, that she taught in conjunction with prisoners, at the time, life inmates, at [inaudible 00:38:35] State Prison, further out in the suburbs. So we got to go take classes with them in [inaudible 00:38:43] State Prison. One of those classmates was Michael [inaudible 00:38:46] who was [inaudible 00:38:49] was let out recently, but passed away or had a fa- I believe he was let out in... There was a loss in the family, might have been... Oh, I'm blanking out right now on the story [inaudible 00:39:03] but anyway, that's how I found out about the MOVE bombing. I was in class, I was in the liberation theology class, [inaudible 00:39:10] I was a kid at the time-
Lauren Ruffin:
One of the kids, yeah. Yeah. The article for this year that I read that stayed with me was someone posting, the MOVE bombing happened when a bomb fell out of a military helicopter. And I'm like, it didn't fall out of a... How are we giving the bomb more agency than people? What happened? Yeah, just wild. So much, so, so much in my head. Vanessa, are you going to say something? Now?
Tim Cynova:
I think for those white people who are unable to get print copies of the anti-racist books, Audible and eBooks, there's so many out there that are available in electronic format, but buy them out, because they'll get reprinted, and that's a good problem to have.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. This has been really, really good for my soul in a real way, and I think it's a really good starting point. Well, actually, it shouldn't be a starting point for anyone in our audience, they should already be doing the work, but I think this is just a really important wrinkle to add to the conversations that are happening right now, from both of you. So, I guess we'll start to land the plane, and I'll land it with the suitcase question, which is, throughout your life you've been carrying around a suitcase, backpack, something like that with you, with a whole bunch of behaviors and beliefs and thoughts and actions that you did regularly, and the question is, what's one thing that's been in your backpack for a really long time that's never going back in post-pandemic, post... If there is a post-pandemic. If there is ever an end to the sort of uprising that's currently happening as well, at the same time. And what's one new thing that you found that you're going to hold onto forever?
Oscar Abello:
I'll go first and give Vanessa time to think about it.
Lauren Ruffin:
That's kind. That is so kind.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
Thanks Oscar.
Oscar Abello:
I was talking about this yesterday with my sister actually, and it was the first time I have actually vocalized this. The thing that I am leaving out is, being a journalist, I do worry or think about... I used to worry about how many people are going to read my work. I think the impact of my work is limited if not enough people read it, if it's not good enough, if it doesn't reach enough of an audience. I used to worry about that. But yesterday, talking with my sister, something came up both that I've never vocalized before, but it didn't feel like an epiphany, I just had never said it. And the thing that I realized and I said for the first time yesterday was, I shouldn't worry about if my work is popular in this culture that is so toxic with racism and patriarchy and heteronormativism. I shouldn't worry about it because in some sense, what is popular is what appeals to what is the dominant culture, and I shouldn't worry about that anymore. I still want to be a better writer, and I still feel like I'm getting better every day or week thanks to my editors and thanks to feedback I get from lots of different folks, including Vanessa and Lauren and others, be it, sometimes, the feedback comes from Twitter, sometimes it comes from my DMs on Facebook or Twitter, or Instagram sometimes, even.
Oscar Abello:
So, I'm taking out permanently the idea that my work needs to be super popular in order to have an impact. And I guess what I'm putting into that, back to my backpack, is, maybe leave more from others to support me in material ways, because as a journalist you don't get to, it's shit. And it's hard. I was one of those folks, I'm a firstborn child of a Filipino mother, which means you don't ask for help, it just happens to you. So I don't know how to ask for help, and that's something that... I don't know if it's in my backpack yet, but I'm trying to find an asking for help tool and trying to get that into my backpack.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Well, I know that you weren't fishing for a compliment, but your work has been tremendously impactful on my work, and most certainly I felt like I have spent a lot of time learning all the history I didn't learn in Catholic schools, and all the history I didn't learn in public schools that are predominantly white institutions. And your work has greatly accelerated my process of unlearning a number of the things that I have learned. So, thank you for that.
Oscar Abello:
You're very kind, and thank you for that.
Lauren Ruffin:
Vanessa, how about you. You've had plenty of time to think, so this better be dazzling in it's brilliance.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
I will greatly disappoint. I just have double down on what Lauren said, Oscar. I mean, your feed is the go-to feed, and damn it, I want you to get more work. So, I'm going to sit on that in my head for a little bit. So, what I think I'm going to be leaving behind, which is a whole lot of decolonization of myself, I went to an all pretty, white, very white girl boarding school in Connecticut that kind of messed me up for a really long time. But I think what I took from that was, I cared more for my white peers feelings, and I've carried that with me. I'm leaving that shit behind, because I can't do that any more.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
And my putting in, I'm trying to put into my bag care for myself. Someone who I have great esteem for who, she recently shared that she had had a stroke, and she wrote this beautiful piece, just about how her heart was literally and figuratively broken, and a whole piece about self care.
Oscar Abello:
I read that as well. And actually, that's a good... There are two people that I wanted to shout out in this space, one is Melissa Bradley who wrote the article that Vanessa just spoke about, who has done so much amazing work, and wrote a beautiful piece, you can find it on Medium. And then Rodney Foxworth, who this week put out a call for... announced at Common Futures, was immediately distributed $750,000 to communities in need, and called on other funders to do so. So, those are two Medium posts, as well, to leave people with as we close on this episode, which has been exactly what I needed to... Selfishly, again, but I don't hide the fact that I am a grabber of brilliance. I'm greedy for brilliant people.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, if we can't do this for their own livestream, then when can we do this? So, Oscar and Vanessa, thank you so much for being with us today.
Oscar Abello:
Thank you Lauren, thank you Tim.
Vanessa Roanhorse:
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.
Tim Cynova:
Continue the Work Shouldn't Suck Live adventure with us on part two of our special series, when we're joined by Ashara Ekundayo, Esteban Kelly, and Syrus Marcus Ware. Miss us in the mean time? You can download more Work Shouldn't Suck Live episodes from your favorite podcasting platform of choice, and rewatch Work Shouldn't Suck Live episodes over on workshouldntsuck.co. If you've enjoyed the conversation or just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up or five stars or phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. If you didn't enjoy this chat, please tell someone about it who you don't like as much. Until next time, thanks for listening.
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