Is There Room for Redemption in Our Cancel Culture?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: So, for our next conversation, we turn to Loretta J. Ross, a visiting professor at the Smith College in the U.S. whose teaching focuses on white supremacy in the age of Donald Trump. Here she is with our Michel Martin on whether restorative justice could actually work in the United States.

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MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Christiane. Professor Ross, thank you so much for talking with us once again.

LORETTA J. ROSS, VISITING ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, SMITH COLLEGE: Thank you for having me.

MARTIN: I just wanted to situate in this moment. I mean, we are acknowledging both loss of one the giants of the 20th century, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, but we’re also, in the United States, acknowledging the anniversary of this mob attack on the U.S. capitol, which was mounted with the intention of overturning a legitimate election and handing it to the person who lost. So, I just wanted to start by asking you what does this bring up for you?

ROSS: Well, it bookends how precarious our moment is right now. Whereas, you know, we lost one of the great leaders of human rights and hope and justice. And at the same time, we have people who dedicated to the overthrowing of democracy so that they can remain in permanent minority power. It’s almost like they want to reestablish in the United States an apartheid system that Desmond Tutu fought to deconstruct. And so, we’re bookended by history in a very remarkable way when we bring those events two together.

MARTIN: What’s some ways forward that you see here? Some of the data suggests that this — the big lie, as what’s it’s being called, has taken root among a significant portion of the American people who just want to believe that the election was stolen from them because they want to believe it, despite the fact that, you know, the people who have administered these elections, even though they’re politically sympathetic to them, had said it isn’t true. So, what do we do with that when you have people who intentionally refuse to acknowledge the facts as they are understood by other people?

ROSS: Well, I’ve always had sympathy but also recognition and understanding that America’s built on a lot of big lies. This is not a new thing for the American public. We lie about our — to ourselves about what we did to native American people, we lie to ourselves about the legacy of the struggle against slavery and the civil war, we lie to ourselves about the damages that runaway capitalism has done to our economy and everyday working-class folks. So, we lie to ourselves quite convincingly very well. We made an art form of it. So, the big lie about the election, this falls into that same category. Now, I’m not as concerned about the people who perpetuated the lie because I have a different strategy and I’m not at all feeling like forgiving them, then I am the people who are manipulated by the lies. Those people, I think, are redeemable. Those people are probably very good people inside and their exterior behaviors don’t match what they believe about themselves, and those are the people I would give my kind and loving attention to because people who are manipulated, they believe that they’re doing the right thing, and I want to build on that impulse to do the right thing that they all feel.

MARTIN: So, there are two issues here. One is the question of accountability, and the other is the question of forgiveness, I guess, for want of a better word. What role does accountability play? Because as you’ve already seen, there are people who are arguing that it’s time to move on from January 6th. I mean, even people who you might not expect who claim the conservative mantle which has always been identified with the rule of law as it were. So, what role does accountability play? What does that look like here?

ROSS: Well, I was one of the people involved in the democratic transition in South Africa. And one of the things that South Africa have that we lack is a morally strong leader like Nelson Mandela who can persuade our country to say that, first of all, we’ve got to face the truth without flinching. We’ve got to hold people accountable who committed grave wrongs against each other, but we also have to reconcile as a country. We lack that kind of leadership right now because too many people on both sides of the aisle just want to pretend that we can go back to business as usual without accountability. But any kind of truth and reconciliation process doesn’t work without accountability. Now, forgiveness is different. Even if a person is not held accountable, forgiveness still works for the person being harmed. Because when you forgive someone, the wrong they’ve done whether it’s to you or the society at large, you’re choosing not to let them have a permanent place in your heart or your mind. You’re reclaiming your dignity. You’re reclaiming your honor. And you’re deciding that they need to figure out how to live with themselves while you figure out how to live with yourself by taking back the power to harm you. And so, forgiveness really works as a restorative justice process if you really mean it and you don’t try leave your rooms or your hurt to cause hurts to somebody else.

MARTIN: You have a remarkable personal connection to the story. Would you share whatever portion of that feels right to you?

ROSS: When I was 25 years old, I was the director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center. And while I was the director, I got this letter from this guy who was incarcerated for raping and murdering a black woman. His name was William Fuller. And his letter basically said outside, I rape women, inside, I rape men. And I don’t want to be a rapist anymore. And at first, I was totally repelled and angry about this letter because I can’t believe that this rapist is asking us that Rape Crisis Center to come help a perpetrator. That was my first calling out kind of response to him. But I sat on my desk and finally, I went to visit him at the Lorton Reformatory, which was D.C.’s prison at the prison at the time. And I went there expecting to challenge him, to change him, probably to make him hurt like me as a rape survivor was hurting, because I had been raped when I was 11 and incested when I was 14. And I’ve had all of this compounded trauma. But when I got there and I started hearing his story and not only that, the stories five other guys that they had formed prisoners against rape with, I found that they were victimized violators. They were people who did violate other people like raping and murdering women, but they also have their stories of being violated as children themselves, of being overlooked and forgotten. Being harmed and thinking that harming others was the way to address their pain And so, it’s happened frequently in my life, once I got to know them, I couldn’t hate them anymore. And so, instead of changing them, I ended up being the one changed.

MARTIN: First of all, that’s a powerful testimony in and of itself. So, thank you for that. But how do you extrapolate that to the broader sort of public sphere? Because we are in a moment in this country where there are people who are actively campaigning against being taught the truth of other people’s hurts, right? I mean, we see, for example, people, you know, storming to school board meetings objecting to, you know, books about, you know, slavery or, you know, the reconstruction period or civil rights being taught in their schools. And so, if you’ve got people who don’t want to know what other people’s truths are, what do you do with that? Like how do you extrapolate that experience to the broader public discourse we’re having right now?

ROSS: Well, obviously, we have a society that tries to practice different forms of denial. I mean, we wouldn’t have all of these confederate statues littering our landscape if there wasn’t a suppression of the truth about the civil war, about 30 years after the civil war had taken place. It was reframed as a battle of states’ rights when it was a battle to preserve slavery. We wouldn’t have — you know, Nazi Germany held its racist accountable and we allowed our country to build statues to ours. And so, we have always been in a battle for truth in defining whether or not America is going to live up to those ideals that we bravely stated in the constitution in the U.S. Bill of Rights or are we going to be a country built on genocide and enslavement and devoted to white supremacy? Because we did not definitively answer that question with the end of the civil war, we’re still in an unending civil war over that same question. So, there are always going to be people, at least as far as I can tell, who are denying the truth that America has never become the thing, the country that it promises to be, but we have that potential. But I’m not into giving up on people, as you can tell. If my friends were (INAUDIBLE) wondering if I can forgive rapist and murderers, I can certainly forgive the people who have a different political perspective because I know how many multigenerations of brainwashing has taken place. I mean, it’s not necessarily their fault that they don’t know the truth. I teach young people in my classes at Smith College every day who are angry about how they were not talking truth about American history. And once they know, they are eager to do something about it.

MARTIN: Professor Ross, this is something that you’ve written about and spoken about before, that the U.S. has a punitive culture. This is a culture that highly favors incarceration. For example, I mean, we’ve got, you know, the highest number of incarcerated people in the world. And, you know, as a culture, as a society, we tend to favor incarceration and punishment as a solution to any number of social problems, right? On the other hand, Archbishop Desmond Tutu embraced a philosophy of community accountability as a restorative measure, as a part of restorative justice. Is there any way in which you can see the United States moving toward a model like that? Like what would that look like?

ROSS: Well, Archbishop Tutu taught us all about the African philosophy of Ambutu, which is community accountability and forgiveness, but it really emphasizes human inner independence and inner connectedness. The most famous Ambutu saying is, I am because we are. In other words, I can’t define myself outside of the context of my community and my people, my tribe, my world. And so, what that means is that when a harm is done in a community broadened by Ambutu principles, you hold the harm doer accountable by both appreciating what they did well and how they served the community and then, what they did that harmed the community. You don’t flatten the person down to the worst thing they’ve done in their life and then dispose of them. You create a process so that they can repair the harm that they’ve done to the community while not disposing of them, not kicking them out, not exiling them. Because if they still may be a great shoe maker, even though they might have stolen somebody’s car or something like that. And so, you work very deliberately to see people in the wholeness of their humanity and recognizing that despite our judgmentalism, we’re all capable of doing good things and bad things. And we need to be held with love, appreciating the complexities of our lives. The same way you don’t dispose of great art by someone who was a problematic person, you know, in their personal life. I mean, you have to be able to hold the complexity of humanity. And I think that Ambutu philosophy that Archbishop Tutu taught us is worth considering as a way to guide our moral decision-making today.

MARTIN: One of the things that you’ve been talking about, teaching about and writing about is so-called cancel culture. Now, I know that (INAUDIBLE), you know, we could spend a whole conversation just talking about cancel culture, a lot of people don’t even think it exists and will tell you that cancel culture is a myth. But you’ve been working to kind of help your students understand that could cancel people, de-platforming people sort of is not a productive strategy either.

ROSS: Well, I try to teach people there’s a more effective way to get people to reconsider their words and their actions. Because when you publicly call people out and you shame and humiliate them, you basically invited them to a fight, not to a conversation that can lead to change. And so, if you choose to approach them, in my mind, with love and respect, you increase the likelihood that you will be heard and that they will consider or reconsider their perspectives, their words, or their views. And that’s why I think calling in is a much better and much more effective strategy at creating change in people than calling them out or shaming them. Because when you’re publicly humiliated, all you want to do is fight back. People are tired, oh so tired of the bitter fights we’re having. Not only within our politics but in our family dinner table. With our neighbors. At the grocery store. People are exhausted by being permanently on and ready to fight. There are more people who do not want that than who do benefit from the chaos.

MARTIN: Loretta Ross, thank you so much for talking with us today and Happy New Year to you.

ROSS: Oh, Happy New Year to you and thanks for having me on your show.