#125 Building Bridges: john a. powell
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Good morning, good afternoon, and greeting wherever you are in the world. My name is Maurizio Benazzo.
Zaya Benazzo: My name is Zaya Benazzo.
Maurizio Benazzo: Welcome. We are talking to you from the unceded territory of the coastal Milwaukee, south pomo indigenous population called Sebastopol, California in the Sonoma County, so called. We are excited today to have john with us and they're gonna do you want to introduce the, should I read the bio?
Should I read the bio? Let's intro. Just introduce john briefly with a short bio. John a. powell is renowned scholar and advocating civil rights structure, erasing constitutional law, housing, and belonging. He's the Director of Gathering and Belonging Institute at uc, Berkeley Powell has worked as a consultant to government in Mozambique and South Africa, and it started several law schools, including Harvard and Columbia.
It's such a joy and an honor to have you with us. john.
Zaya Benazzo: Welcome john. Thank you. Thank you. And your work and your book feels so timely at this times where so much breaking is happening. So much uttering is happening and we are all feeling heartbroken and disoriented and so your book, reading your book, felt like a medicine for my heart.
It felt, it gave me. Hope. I don't like the word hope, but it gave trust. It gave me trust that other ways are possible. Welcome, and it's an honor to have you with us today for this conversation.
john a. powell: Thank you. It's great to be here and I think one of the things, part of the medicine for this time is to commune with each other and Yeah.
See each other and and I know that zoom is not the same as being in physical contact, but it's a decent approximation. So thanks for what you do and thanks for having me.
Zaya Benazzo: Thank you. It's
john a. powell: joy.
Zaya Benazzo: And john, like for me, I always, when I reflect on belonging, nature is the first thing. And I always wonder like, why do I belong more to nature than humans?
And you both gave me some insights. I did experience a lot of breaking in my early childhood, and I think that's partially why nature feels safer and it's more inviting. And so I wonder if you could share with the, with us, like how your early childhood experiences of breaking with your family with the church inform what you do today, what you offer, and how did, how it informed your spiritual journey.
john a. powell: Thanks for the question. I feel very fortunate, very blessed to be a, been born into the family that I was born into. My mom and dad really taught me so much and exemplified love and connections and care. And I'm six of nine. My parents moved from the south. I was one of the first of the nine children born in the north.
My parents were sharecroppers and my dad was a Christian minister for the Church of Christ. And so I was born into the church and didn't know of any of the world for my first 10 or 11 years. And it wasn't just something we do on Sunday or once a week. It was, we go all the time and we read the Bible and sit together and, in many ways, my family exemplified, I think was the best of parts of the Christian faith. But they also had some hard edges. So one of the teachings in the Church of Christ was that unless you were baptized in that church under that doctrine you were going hail for all eternity. And at some point I started reading about people from different parts of the world, including Chinese.
And it became clear to me when I was 10, 11 that they were not likely to be Christian somewhere, but they certainly were not gonna be members of the Church of Christ, which meant they were gonna go to hell. And so at the Sunday service, when the minister would speak. Sometimes my dad, sometime a different minister this day was a different minister.
They would close the service by saying, asking the question does anyone have any questions? And it had never occurred to me that no one had ever asked a question. But this Sunday when the minister said that I stood up and there was an audible gas and the minister who was Brother Manuel, he said, that's okay.
That's okay, brother Powell, what is your question? And I said, what's gonna happen to the Chinese? Now you have to understand, I grew up in Detroit in a place called Black Bottom. It was called black bottom in part because it was poor. But also there were no Chinese. There were no white people. It was basically all black community.
I'd never really even seen a Chinese. But I was reading about 'em and I knew there were a lot of them, and I knew they were not members of the Church of Christ. And it just struck me that was incredibly problematic. That you're gonna take a whole people, children men, women, and consign them to be in hell with all eternity.
How could that be? So the minister took me to different parts of the Bible and none of them really answered the question. He was getting flustered and I was getting flustered and fine. He said, just don't worry about it. But I couldn't take his advice. I left the church and never went back. And another teaching in the church was that if someone falls away, those who had not fallen away was not to have fellowship, but the fallen.
Zaya Benazzo: Wow.
john a. powell: And so my dad. For the most part, stop speaking to me for the next five years. And not only was it a loss and a break with my family, but it was a loss and a break with God. 'cause I was a believer myself. And so I had many conversations when I was 11 and 12 with God. And with this trepidation and fear in the background that I too now was gonna go to hell and burn for eternity.
And yet some people say how did you make that choice? It wasn't a choice.
It just seems everything in my core seemed that this was wrong and I couldn't be complicit in it, even if it meant being complicit with God. So that started me on and in that process, my dad not speaking to me and breaking with my family, it was complicated because my mother was working tirelessly.
Just to bring us back together. She'd never stopped. So it was very hard, but it was also, there was always the tent of love being present and even when there was deep sadness and in a sense of loss.
Maurizio Benazzo: Wow.
Wow. What a beautiful story.
So deeply.
Zaya Benazzo: What, what can you share? Oh God. So many questions about what have you learned in the process of repairing the break. Love is the ground. That's what I hear, and Yeah. Yeah.
john a. powell: One thing, we all have our experiences and I've said many people. I. Have an experience of actually fracturing or breaking from something that's intimate.
Now, sometimes breaking does not envi involve that kind of intimacy. But in the sense, our first place of belonging for most of us is the family. And yet for many of us, there's sometimes a rupture. And it's really hard 'cause it's not just breaking, like the political breaking, we'll probably talk about what's happening in the world today, but starting with the family, it's starting with people who know you, people who touch you, people who are you, and every sense of the word.
And there's one of my favorite writers is a Brazilian named Roberto Unger. And he says, we are all homeless here looking for a home. And he's suggesting that in different respects, we're all trying to belong, trying to reconnect. And for some they've achieved that, but for most of us, we've not.
And part of it, as you suggested is we've also not just broken with our families, we've broken with the earth, we've broken with each other. Yes. And we have all of these breaks and all these separations which you can call trauma, you can call whatever, but they, it means we're not whole. It means we're not alive.
It means we're constantly driven by anxiety and fear. So that's what I've learned is that, and when I asked my dad after we came back together, what is death and what is sin? And he said it's separation. It's separation. It's the, and so that the breaking exacerbate the sense of separation.
And it's, I think it what's driving so much and I. Have dinner with friends and we sit around on the table and almost everyone's talking about trying to heal some traumatic break in their life with their family, with their partner with their community. And so I think this is a, it is a, in a sense, a universal problem.
And it's a little bit counterintuitive, right? Because some people think we naturally are separate. In a sense, you could say when I left home, when I was pushed outta my home I started on a journey of trying to find a home. And then at some point I shifted and realizing not only was I home, but I was also had some respo responsibility for helping to make this sense of home for myself and others.
So it was not simply finding it is actually helping too. As I talk about in the book, co-created how do we reclaim our connection with the earth, our connection with each other because it's actually already there. And that's the maybe most profound shift in my thinking and teaching is that even though there's all this pain and all this denial and all these structures and all these stories about how we are all different from each other fundamentally we are, it's not even the belief we are a part of each other.
It's James Baldwin says Hopelessly and forever, we are part of each other. We don't live that way.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you like, it does feel like breaking, like it comes from. Breaking from the Earth and beginning to live as our friend CCA says on the earth, not with the earth. And for many of us who have been forced to live our ancestral lands, that break carries that sense of separation.
And at the same time, nature is everywhere. She's everywhere. It's home. We are nature. We are nature, we are na. It's not,
Maurizio Benazzo: nature is not outside of the door. What are we made of? Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah.
Yeah. So what are your reflections for this time where we are seeing so much othering happening in, in our collective sphere?
What, why now? What has led to these times?
john a. powell: So I think there are a couple of things. We are, we've organized this ancient society because we've organized this society around breaking. We've and in the United States, I know some of your listeners may be outside the United States, but in the United States there are about 330 million people.
We have, outside of the military, we have over 400 million guns. So it means we have more than one gun for each person. And some of those people are just 18 months old, or two years, they don't, so some people, which means that some people have two or three guns, and it's not because we are a great society of hunters is we're afraid
Zaya Benazzo: driven by fear.
john a. powell: And so it's I'll need, I need more guns. That's how I'm gonna deal with this fear. So part of what's happening and is we break from things and in a sense that we're afraid of. And so how do we deal with that fear? We try to dominate or control the thing that we're broken out from.
So if we break from the earth then we have to control it and dominate it. And I remind people think about a park. Most people like parks. You go to a park and there's a beautiful garden and there's a tree, a plant over here, and there's a Rose Bush over here. And then there are, there's grass and there's a pond.
And it's all constructed by us. And if it gets outta place, we have a garden who comes and put things back in place. So everything is orderly, everything is under our control. Everything is under our dominion. And we feel at peace at some sense, right? But now think about a forest. Just think about literary writing hood and all the stories about the deep dark forest, and it's wild and it's uncontrollable.
And so our way of dealing with things once we separate from them is to control and dominate 'em. So once we think of ourselves as separate from the earth becomes something to be exploited and dominated. Once we think of ourselves as, we used to talk this way, right? Is that a man is supposed to control his wife.
It's like you need to control her. Otherwise she'll have you eating, wicked root. In some sense the need for control is a reflection of already a psychic and emotional harm, and the world is changing very fast. Our lives are changing very fast. Yes. The demographics are changing very fast, and so people feel outta control.
And so what you are offered or we're offered is oftentimes more than not a strong person, usually a strong man who promises to restore control.
I order. And and in that story, there's the other that's situated at the heart of the disorder. Why am I feeling anxious? I'm feeling anxious because those other people are in some way changing my world.
And so if you look at demographic changes around the world, if you look at the rise of authoritarian leadership, the story is always about the other. Even though the other may not oftentimes don't exist, it's a myth. It's a story. It is a story. The change is happening is gonna speed up. And so we have not learned to relax into uncertainty, relax into change.
And we're this anxiety that's associated with change that we can't control is part of the reason that we break. The interesting thing about breaking is that a lot of breaking, a lot of othering is really in service to belonging. Hmm. So I, other people, in order to belong, if you wanna be part of my group, you have to hate the other group.
That's the price of the ticket, the price of belonging. Is to put other people down.
Zaya Benazzo: Mis misunderstood. Belonging. Yeah.
john a. powell: So belonging is already there. Even so even in our midst of all this othering and breaking there's a belonging for belonging. Yeah. And so we talk about belonging without othering.
Zaya Benazzo: Yes.
john a. powell: Yeah. Because if you look at any major religion, they talk about belonging. Yeah. My, my father's church was about belonging. Yeah. Not if you're Chinese, not if you are other. So it created like a sense of belonging, which was real. My, my father's church was a community where people belong. And if you're outside the church, you now didn't belong.
You were a sinner. And so that's true in most of, Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, so it's it's true in most philosophical teachings of this is your community. You have to guard against those others.
And of course, really there is no other
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah.
Maurizio Benazzo: Relative belonging. Yeah.
Instead of absolute belonging, because we all belong to each other. But if you start to Yeah. The capitalist society, individualism, the religion and yeah. It's absolute. I love what you said. Beautiful. Thank you.
Zaya Benazzo: And if, I would think for this specific time where many of us are coming together to connect because we are ready to stand for what we believe in.
So that gives us a sense of belonging. But at this specific time, that comes also with a lot of rage and a lot of othering, right? That's right. So how can those of, and many activists are. Living in fear because they don't know who will be arrested next. Like we are living in anxiety and fear. So how can one be with the anxiety?
Because it's real. We cannot deny it. And at the same time, be aware of not creating more othering. I, it's such an interesting tension because in Spain they fear that you can't de we can't deny those. And the they drive othering as well.
john a. powell: No, it's true. And part of your, if I understand it, part of your program is looking at non-duality.
Yes.
Zaya Benazzo: So
john a. powell: once we're in those bin, we're already in, we're already in deep problems. So I remind people that belonging and bridging. Not, it's not a purity, it's not predicated on Yes. Getting rid of fear. It's not predicated on getting rid of anxiety. Belonging is and bridging and love is big enough to hold all of that.
Sometimes we think of it this impossible task, right? It's after I cleanse myself of all negative thoughts, after I have rooted out all my fears, after I've gotten rid of all my anger, then I can really create a space of belonging and bridging. No, that's, it is in the midst of the anger, the fear.
In fact I remind people fears of human emotion, or not just human, but certainly human emotion, it's there for a reason. It's don't turn it into something bad, but neither do you want it to give it. The keys to the car and let it drive you all around. It's a place for it. Think about a young child.
You wouldn't let a young child drive your car. Not because the child is bad, but because the child doesn't know how to drive. They'll quickly get into an accident. So it's not that fear is bad, it's not that anxiety is necessarily bad, it's that when it becomes dominant, when it actually dictates everything else, when it drives out, everything else drives out.
Love drives out connection. So when people, this is, I just got back from India myself, and went to the Gandhi Museum, and one of the things that people misunderstood about Gandhi was when he talked about nonviolence, they said, passivity. He said no. This is not passive. I am not neutral.
But I am not. Yeah. And so can we hold on to other people's humanity and their belonging even when they disagree, even when we disagree with them, even when we're mad at them, even when we're angry with them, even when we're afraid of them. And most of us will have, that would be a challenge. But that's a good challenge.
And the person that oftentimes on the other side of our anger, on other side of our fear is looking at us with anger and fear. We're reflecting that back in each other and we can't control other people. We can even can't really control ourselves, but we can begin to actually accept it. We can begin to accept that everyone belongs, everyone.
And belonging doesn't have a precondition. There's not, if you can do 50 pushups. You can, if you become a Christian, if you become a Republican, if you become a Democrat, no. You're, we're part of the earth. We're part of each other, not because we share the same ideology. That's a different question.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah. Like the heart and the lungs, they belong to my body. They have completely different function. Exactly. Exactly.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. Yeah. And I love, in your book you speak about simplicity. So the proce in the process of gathering, you're saying too much in our culture pushes a towards simplicity. Of course, we all want to pull of the, and be the good guy and condemn the evil one, but.
This life and other people are not straightforward.
john a. powell: So
Zaya Benazzo: why complexity can promote more bridging versus simplicity. And also there's Yes.
john a. powell: They stop there. So one of the problems with we oftentimes conflate or we narrow the other to one dimension. What do I know about that person?
I know that they voted for a different person for president than I did, and they're, and then we fill in the blanks. They're racist, they're woke. There's, it's like labels. And we, and that becomes all we see of them. We don't see their fears, we don't see their suffering. We don't see their aspiration.
We don't see, Bob Marley says to paraphrase him, every person thinks his burden is the heaviest. So we know our own suffering. We don't know the suffering of others. All we know about them is their threat. That they somehow, and the threat that they pose, the most serious threat that they pose is that their behavior existence threaten our belonging.
And so we need to then threaten their belonging. And again, we're back to a sort of a downward spiral. And there's actually very good scientific research on this. There's a part of the brain that lights up when we see another human being. It doesn't mean we like them, it doesn't mean they're gonna come home with us.
It just nature thought it would be cool that we recognize our fellow species, so we just recognize them. When you deeply other someone, that part of the brain does not light out. And so when you think about when there's deep weaponized, othering, we describe the other. In non-human terms as a cockroach, as a vermin, as a snake, as something that's not deserving of any recognition.
And we have all of these things nu which is a Zulu words, which means I see you, which means it also means to divine in me. Sees the divine in you tu, which is I am because you are now that's true. I am because you are. What does it mean when I cut you off? Means I've cut off part of myself.
And so we, we construct stories. We construct practices to cut people off. We forget at the height of the civil rights movement, there was a famous protest and. State troopers, which virtually all white, and the protestors were mainly black, but other people of color, and they were being beat, the protestors were being beat by the police.
And at one point during this exchange, the protestors nailed down and start praying and singing gospel songs, and the police couldn't beat them anymore. At that moment, they became human again. And a woman with the just protestors they're the other
Zaya Benazzo: there.
john a. powell: But in that moment when they start singing and praying, the police couldn't beat them anymore, that he came human again.
So this is partially what we're talking about, is restoring the practice of our humanity. We're all human, but we forget that not we're all human, not just me and my group. And so it is hard practice and can't give guarantees. It's not if you do this, you'll win, or if you do this, we're gonna get back our democracies.
It's you can't make deals like that. It's not just transactional. I want us to get back our democracy. I want us to stop the violence that's going on. But again, belonging and bridging, there's no precondition. We act, in the book, I talk about transactional bridging, which is where you're constantly making a deal.
And that's understandable. But at fundamental level, bridging is spiritual and we're not making deals. Wow.
Maurizio Benazzo: And how do you see the difference between belonging and inclusion or diversity? For example, inclusivity, inclusion belong because it can, I feel, yeah.
john a. powell: The way that most people think of inclusion is that there's something there, whether it's a school or a neighborhood or a church community, you're inviting people in, but you're actually saying that the norms, the rules, the culture is already there and they're being invited in as a guest.
So I sometimes use the example that I'm gonna give a party and all of you and their listeners and viewers aren't, will be invited. But it's my party. I grew up in Detroit, so there'll be a lot of Motown. Diana Ross is Stevie Wonder. I'm vegetarian, so there won't be any meat. And, a long ways on the other side of 50 now.
So the party will end at nine. May come and you may not come, but it's like this. You may say this is a lame party, but this was john's party. And I hope you have a good time. You come to my party as a guest and as a guest, you don't get to decide the music, you don't get to decide the food.
You don't get to decide who the other guests will be. That's inclusion. You are included. Belonging says, we are given the party. It's not my party. It's not your party. It is our party. And we co-create and co-design the party. We co-create and co-design the party. And so when we recognize the belonging of other people, of other entities, they participate in the co-creation.
So what do we want? It's great question. But also, what does the earth want? Exactly. What do the animals want?
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah,
Maurizio Benazzo: exactly. Yeah. Concrete does. It doesn't this idea of belonging doesn't end to the human realm. It cannot end. 'cause in the moment when you were saying, oh, you are a vermin, you are a snake.
Sorry, what's wrong with this snake again?
john a. powell: They're beautiful creature. Exactly right. In fact, you're insulting the snake, right? Yes.
Zaya Benazzo: Poor snake
john a. powell: like,
Zaya Benazzo: yeah. Yeah.
john a. powell: So I say something just consistent what you're suggesting. I'm not a humanist because that don't believe the humans are the center of the universe.
We are we're in a relationship with everything else. Not that I don't care about people. I do, but also I do care about, as you say, the earth and the animals, and. Other expressions. So that's the difference between belonging and inclusion. Yeah.
Maurizio Benazzo: And as human, we are made of trillions of bacteria, viruses, and microbes.
Anyway, trillions of them. So those, so Yeah. What's human anyway?
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah, exactly.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah. Thank you.
Zaya Benazzo: And so many of us do come from lineages that have experienced pain because of othering. So that leaves in our DNA, science is saying now we carry the wounds of ancestors for six, seven generations, if not more.
How can we, and this comes when we are in fear or when we are in pain. This comes first, that protective mechanism of our ancestors is in us.
How can we keep that awareness? Not bypass it and allow bridging to happen, not to stop there with those survival strategies that we have inherited.
john a. powell: Right. I think it's actually complicated in multiple ways. I described, my parents were sharecroppers growing up. I literally have had family members who were killed by white supremacists or by callousness. I remember being a kid in Detroit and my father having grown up on a farm and being low income, you do everything.
You don't call a plumber, you don't call an electrician. You do everything yourself. And so he was trying to fix the furnace in Detroit and it blew up and it cinched all the hair on his body. And we were driving around Detroit trying to find a hospital that would accept a blackmail. While he was in excruciating pain and were being turned away over and over again.
So this is part of our lineage, part of my memory, uh, we do wanna hold onto those, but not
to the exclusion of everything else. I talk about in the book that if I describe all the stuff that my parents went through it would sound like they had a really hard life and they did. There were times when we didn't have enough. There were I remember going to school in Detroit in snow with where you had holes in your shoes and you put paper on the bottom of the shoes to try to keep the snow out.
And yet. Yet, that's not my story. And so we have to be careful not to get stuck on one aspect of the story. Because when I think of growing up in my family, even when I think about that break with them when I was 11 years old, what I really think about is just how much love and joy and fun and care there was.
And and that's what I miss. My mo Both my parents have since passed. I felt like I had the luckiest the luckiest person in the world to be born in that family. And so if I get stuck on the story about a hose in my shoe that was there but. I'm not now telling you the story about my mom laughing so hard from a joke that she's crying.
Or I have a picture in my house when I'm 11 years old and my arms are on my mom and I'm just completely in love. In a sense our lineage has pain in it, but it also has joy. It also has resilience. It also has possibilities. And so I'd say you don't let go of that, but you hold onto other things as well.
And I feel, I'll tell you, when I was working on this book, one of the things that was challenging is at one point I was working with an editor who was very keen on me telling the story of the difficulties growing up as a black man in America in the 1950s and sixties. And there were difficulties.
I got kicked off of buses and got beat up. But that's not my story. That's a piece of my story, right? But I feel not just then, but today, and this is not what's called a spiritual bypass. I feel so blessed in so many ways. I have, so much love in my life. I'm in touch with the fact, not all the time, but I'm in touch with the fact that I belong.
I have a, I'm sitting here in my house. I'm looking at this beautiful garden in Berkeley. Yeah. So I, in a sense, as the Nigerian writer tells us, don't get stuck with a single story. Be aware of the danger of a single story. We have multiple stories. We have multiple aspects of ourselves. This goes back to what you were saying earlier, right?
Holding onto our own complexity. I'm not. One of my favorite is strange, but remember that incident where the black guy was in Central Park and he was challenged by this white woman? 'cause she had a dog up the lease and the law. The lawyer said, you have to have a dog on the lease. And he said, would you put your dog on a lease?
And she turns to him and says, you are threatening me. He says, no, I'm just, I just wanted to talk the police. She says, I'm gonna call the police and tell him, and tell them that there's a black man here in Central Park threatening me. That's bringing in all of our history of how black men in the police, the, that's the story in Unfolds.
What was he doing in Central Park? He's there birdwatching. And who is this guy anyway? Yes, he's a black man, but he's also a Harvard graduate. And at one point he says, here's my phone. Go ahead and call them. And my point is that he has a complicated story we wouldn't have seen, we wouldn't anticipate it.
Black guy, bird watching really? We have to hold onto that complicated story. In that story, there will be pain. Pain is not bad in of itself. Fact, in one of my books, I wrote a chapter called Lessons from Suffering. Lessons from Suffering and Suffering often oftentimes entail deep, profound lessons if we can be present with them.
But too often we're just pushing the suffering away, which means we can't learn from it. But if you think about all the great religions they're rooted in, but profound suffering, and I grew up as a Christian. So I think about Jesus before he is being crucified. When he's out and he's saying, I don't wanna be crucified.
I can see that coming. I, I don't want that. I'm 33 years old, but he ends by saying, but not my will, but thy will be done. Not my will of it, but you, whatever you want will be done. I surrender to that. And of course, Islam means surrendering. So there's, and again, not to make light of suffering and it's what I call surplus suffering.
'cause we all suffer 'cause we're born and we watch people we love die and we die ourselves. So there's suffering associated with just being alive. But then we visit more suffering with each other. We don't have to be homeless, we don't have to be hungry, we don't have to be cold. We don't have to be disrespected.
We should try to get rid of that surplus suffering. But I'll stand by just saying yes, the suffering in some ways, when I think of my own life, I can't say I would get rid of any of it. Yeah. Every aspect of it. When you ask, help me become who I am today. And their sadness. I wish my parents were still here, but I.
So anyway I don't think we should wait to heal our trauma, wait to heal our suffering, to claim that we all really belong.
Maurizio Benazzo: So you also the belonging become a personal, the belonging to your story, the belonging to your experience with all the aspect of Belong is not just an external thing, my body belongs to your body, or we went to the animal world, but also we talk about your history, your thoughts.
I belong. Oh God. So beautiful. So complete. Thank you.
Zaya Benazzo: And I feel like this is such an important invitation for this time also, politically. It's so easy when I read the news to get in this kind of very narrow story that brings anxiety and fear and to keep remembering to opening the lens and to, and
john a. powell: it's happened before, in the United States.
When they think about United States and the proud with a lot of pride, a lot of people will go back to Rosa Parks and Reverend Dr. King they helped open up our heart. When King talked about the beloved community he was being shot at, it wasn't 'cause he was, in a tri called place meditating.
He was in a world where people were spinning on him, where people were literally s stabbing him with knives. And he still talked about the beloved community and what was happening in the country at the height of King inviting us into love was Jagar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. The country was under kind of dark place, and yet when we think of that period, we forget about Jagar Hoover and McCarthy, who we think about is Rosa Parks in King.
They were just slippers of light. And they were being constantly threatened by the apparatus of the government. And again, so it's not saying to make light of it or that it's gonna come out right or but when we think of our people that we oftentimes look up to, they went through some pretty dark times and still held on and offered us a beloved community in the midst of deep fear, segregation, clam racism.
So in a sense, this is the time to actually really dig deep into belonging, loving and bridging.
Zaya Benazzo: Beautiful. Yeah. This one is a hard one because in your book you mention feeling the pain in the Middle East and for many of us who are in tune with what's happening in Gaza, and we've been watching the genocide live stream now for 16, 17 months, year and a half.
Yeah. How might the framework of bridging apply to groups that face existential threat, extinction, face extinction? And perhaps the question is like the groups that are immediately involved, but also for us that are in the periphery, witnessing and asking what solidarity and how can we make a stand for justice without further creating othering feeding the othering.
john a. powell: Those are great, really important questions and questions we certainly grapple with. And I, as you said, I teach at Berkeley and I say to my students, really good questions oftentimes don't have answers that they live with, that we struggle with. They're going back to complexity. But we start with, and we put up a statement, which is not perfect and we're about to revise it.
But we start from our deep core values, which is that everybody belongs which us obviously means Palestinians belong, which means that Jews belong which means the Israelis belong. And it's complicated. So a reporter calls me up and says, so do you accept the right of Israel to exist as a state?
And I said, that's a complicated question. It really is. I said, what I do accept is that Jewish people is Israelis. Palestinian people Arabs have a right to exist. Full stop. They belong. Do I believe that all the nation states belong? That's more problematic. And I have a special concern when nation states are organized around the proposition that a certain group of people, because of their religion, because of their race, because don't belong.
Yeah. Yes. So to me, ethnic nationalism is a kind of national othering. Now, there's a whole story of, again, we need this because the Jews have had a long history of suffering and they have, and I should say, I have part of my family's Jewish but that's the Jewish story. What about the Palestinian story?
And when I talk to my Jewish friends who are. Sympathetic I said, tell me now the Palestinian story.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah.
john a. powell: Everybody has suffered and my suffering can never justify visiting suffering on you. I don't know what that means in terms of an answer, but it does mean that for the people who are suffering surplus suffering, who are being killed, who are being victimized in the Middle East rather to Palestinians or Jewish, that's, we have to say no.
And we certainly have to say no when our government engaged in that. We're looking at Columbia right now being losing money supposedly because of the antisemitism.
Postures I haven't heard anyone talking about an institution in the United States losing money because of this Islamophobia.
We're concerned about the suffering of Jews. I can accept that, or we're not concerned about the suffering of Palestinians or Muslims that I can't accept.
Zaya Benazzo: In your book you speak about, uh, repairing breaks and you give a, maybe you can mention the powerful story of Sally, the Native American activists who couldn't go forward with an agreement that was made among the groups because she needed an acknowledgement of historical harm.
john a. powell: Yes. So there's all kinds of harm and one of my favorite writers is teach down Stanford named Robert Ky, and he reminds us that.
Much of our many wars are fought of what we call sacred symbols. And what makes a symbol sacred is that some way it contains part of our being. So we're not just material animals, we're also spiritual animals. And and as part of what we need to have full expression of our humanity is recognition, is acknowledgement.
I worked with a woman in Turkey and she talked about interviewing Turkish women who were struggling who had sometimes inadequate food, watched their kids go hungry. And she said all, many of them said the most difficult thing was the complete lack of dignity that society acknowledged on them. And so we were in a process of working, trying to address some of the problems dealing with.
Environment and stolen land from indigenous people here in the United States. And there was some tension between the environmentalists, which were primarily white, and the people who were concerned about the stolen land, which primarily Native Americans. And we got close. And so there was a list of things that the Native Americans wanted.
This one woman was the chief negotiator for Native Americans, and I was involved in that process. And so we got people to agree to virtually everything she'd asked for. And I was really happy, I was like, yes, we're gonna resolve this problem. And I took it to her and she said, no. She said she was wanted, no part of it.
She was pulling out of the negoti negotiation. She was angry and I was confused. It's wait, everything you asked for, you received. And a lot of those material things in terms of land being set aside and money. And then at one point it became clear, she said what she was concerned about is that no one had recognized the harm that had been visited upon them.
In a sense. No one really recognized them, and in a sense, reducing the harm that they experienced just to money right, was again, an insult. And she wanted people to see her and to see her people as people. She wanted to be acknowledged as a human being with pain, with with fractured dignity. And we actually eventually did that and she came back to the table.
But it was a really important lesson for me that sometimes we get focused on, what do you need in material sense? And we do need things material. We need a house, we need food, but we also need to be seen, we also need to be recognized, including our pain.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah.
john a. powell: Sometimes we won't recognize each other's pain.
And when your earlier question, I think one of the things in the Middle East is so hard is that sometimes there's a demand of recognizing my pain and ignoring, belittling someone else's pain. And we can't do that. We can't belittle anyone's pain.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. Yeah. It almost feels like always before we attempt to build a bridge, we have to recognize the pain that is there.
Without that, it's almost like bypassing something and it's gonna fracture because the pain will come. We want to be seen. Yeah,
john a. powell: that's right. That's right. And it's interesting. We think about sometimes we have whole programs around bridging and we have something called targeted universalism.
But sometimes people say there's not enough stuff. You can't give everybody everything they want. It's like we only have so many houses. We only have so many slots in school. We only, there's only, there's a limited amount of stuff. And I said that may or may not be true. I don't think that's necessarily the big problem.
I think we have more than enough stuff, but there's not a limited amount of dignity. Dignity is not a zero sum gain. So to recognize you and recognize somebody else to recognize you does not mean I can't recognize somebody else.
Zaya Benazzo: Yes. Yes.
john a. powell: So if we start with full recognition, we start with full acknowledgement.
If we start with really seeing people you're right then. I think we're halfway there. More than halfway there. And people are willing to put up with, okay, I can't have everything I want once themselves are problematic, but I can't have everything I want. But what I need is to be seen.
Yeah. Is to be recognized.
Zaya Benazzo: Okay. One last question. Very practical, if two people or two groups are in severe pain, so there is no space for seeing the other, because the pain. What do you advise? What is the best thing to do? Yeah.
john a. powell: We have there are these wonderful examples of people in pain finding a way to each other.
And the reason that we think highly of of Rosa Parks or Nelson Mandela is that while Nelson Mandela is in Robin Island, in prison. And the young people are in Soweto rioting because they don't want to be instructed in African language. Nelson Mandela is asking his captors to teach him African, to teach him the language of the captors.
He's recognizing their sacred symbols even while they are imprisoning him. And I'm not Nelson Mandela, I don't know if I could do that.
But there are people who can build these bridges in the worst circumstances and they become beacons of light. And so sometimes we can think about how do we create a situation where people can see each other and it's actually.
Not all that difficult and it's not been done many times. Think about Ro Rhonda where you had a genocide where people literally killing people with machetes and then they find out a way to come back together. Think about the troubles in Northern island where people are blowing each other up, but 30 years and then the mothers led the way to peace.
The mothers who basically said, your son may be Catholic, or your son may be Protestant. That's still your son pain you experience. And the pain I'm experiencing is really not that different. So someone has to be willing to break this cycle and it helps if you can have people who are in a influential leadership role, excuse me.
It helps if we have better stories because sometimes people can't imagine being attention to someone else. So part of it's a lack of imagination. Part of it's a lack of practice, right? Sometimes we can do things like simple things. So one of the big changes in the Civil Rights movement in the fifties and sixties was cultural.
It was music. We're celebrating complicated life of Sly Stone. Sly Stone was the first major band in the United States that was multiracial. He tried to put out an album and put his picture of the band on the album, and the music company refused. So you can't have multiracial people on an album in the United States.
Chuck Berry was arrested because he was having. Dance concerts. And he became a big fan of white people, a big fan of black people. But there was a line in between the Black Swan on one side, the white swan on the other side, Chuck Berry blurred that line, which made him dangerous. He ended up being arrested and under frame charges.
So there's risk involved people who are invested in keeping us apart, people who are invested in people who we call conflict entrepreneurs. People who benefit from us being a part will threaten the people who try to pull us together. Why was King so dangerous? He was teaching love. Why was Jesus so dangerous?
Yes. So there are examples and I think we can do little things and big things. And I think one thing I would say this time, do something. It doesn't have to be. Changing the world in one fell swoop. They say, how do eat a big meal or some kind? They say eat elephant.
I don't like that 'cause I'm vegetarian. But they say one bite at a time. Just do something. It doesn't have to be the biggest thing right away. And it doesn't have to be a long bridge. It doesn't have to be with the person who you think of as your mortal enemy, right? It can be cousin or your brother or your niece, someone who work that's slight at you that you haven't talked to for too much.
So start with something small and as you become more comfortable bridging then you can think about what we call the long bridge.
Beautiful. Yes.
Maurizio Benazzo: Beautiful.
Zaya Benazzo: Thank you for holding the space and thank you for everyone who joined today.
May we continue carrying bridges within ourselves and with each other? Yeah. So there is more belonging in our world. To remember our belonging.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah. Yeah. And not only to the human. We are never alone. We are never alone. We are never alone.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah.
Maurizio Benazzo: Thank you. Thank you.
Thank
Zaya Benazzo: you. Thank you. Be well.
