September 14, 2023 • 18 mins
The recent episode honoring bell hooks with Darnell Moore and Imani Perry got Laverne thinking even more about ideas around privilege. Just because you have it, doesn’t make you bad. Just because someone else has it doesn’t make them an oppressor. Privilege is relative. You can be the most privileged person in one room and the least privileged person in the next. Perhaps it’s time to stop blaming other people, look also at ourselves, and move forward together. Just some thoughts.
Please rate, review, subscribe and share The Laverne Cox Show with everyone you know. You can find Laverne on Instagram and Twitter @LaverneCox and on Facebook at @LaverneCoxForReal.
As always, stay in the love.
Links of Interest:
After Racist Tweet, Roseanne Barr’s Show Is Canceled by ABC (NYT, 2018)
Privilege and Intersectionality (Rider University)
Other Episodes Mentioned or Relevant:
Beauty as Capital w/ Kimberly Foster
Black Women Are Enough w/ Sarah Adeyinka Skold
CREDITS:
Executive Producers: Sandie Bailey, Alex Alcheh, Lauren Hohman, Tyler Klang & Gabrielle Collins
Producer & Editor: Brooke Peterson-Bell
Associate Producer: Akiya McKnight
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to The Laverne Cox Show, a production of Shondaland
Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show.
My name is Laverne Cox. I've been thinking a lot
(00:26):
lately about privilege, and it's such a interesting, tricky conversation
to have.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
These days.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
You can see people online saying check your privilege, and
in people getting into fights around privilege and not feeling
privileged because they've had struggles in their lives. You know,
when we talk about something like white privilege, for example,
there are a lot of working class white people who
don't feel privileged because they've had to struggle in their
lives and they're still struggling. A lot of men, when
(01:01):
we talk about male privilege, they're going through struggles and
they don't feel particularly privileged. And the way I like
to think about privilege is that privilege does not mean
that you have not struggled. It just means that there
are some things that you don't have to think about.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
So you could be the most privileged.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Person in one room and change rooms and be the
least privileged person in that room. And when I talk
about a privilege, I love telling this story I was
giving a lecture in South Carolina around twenty fourteen, and
before the lecture, I got to meet with a group
of students from the university and they had sat themselves
in a semicircle in this sort of conference room. And
(01:47):
I go around and I want to meet the students
and I ask them, you know who they are?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
And they were all sort of student leaders.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
They were representing different organizations and I am meeting. To
my left was the president of the LGBTQ Student Alliance.
And I go around the table and the students hit
sat themselves in an interesting way where they the students
were like white to Asian to Latino or Hispanic to black.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
That's how the students were seated.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
And so as the students went around, they told me
who they were, and I asked them some things they
may have been struggling with around identity or you know,
education or whatever they might have been struggling with at
the university. And I remember getting to the last student
who was who was a black student. He talked about
being black and gay and that as a member of
(02:37):
the Black student Union, he's often felt like he's had
to choose between being black and gay. When he's in
black spaces and when he's at the lgbt Alliance in
that group, that he has to sort of leave his
blackness behind and that he can't bring both those identities
into the queer space, or can he bring both those
(02:58):
identities into the black space. And so having the president
of the LGBTQ Student Alliance sitting right next to me,
I turned to the to the president and said, well,
what do you think about what he said? And he's like,
I don't know, I've never thought about it. And I
was like, that's this is privilege. I was like, this
is a privilege. It is not like he was a
(03:19):
bad person. This, this kid who's the president of you know,
LGBTQ Student Alliance, is not a bad person because he's
never thought about this.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
It's just it's a privilege to.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Not have to think about leaving parts of yourself behind
when you go into a room because you inhabit multiple,
you know, sort of marginalized identities, and privilege just means
there's something that you don't have to think about and
it is not an indictment on you to have privilege.
(03:50):
I am a black, transgender woman from a working class background,
right like all of those identity categories aren't necessarily thought
of as privilege. Yet I sit here in a lot
of privilege. I sit here in quite a bit of
class privilege. And the class privilege is recent, you know,
over the past, you know, within the past decade. And
(04:12):
I'm fifty years old, so most of my adult life
I've been working class, working poor, however you want to
describe it, but still fly and now I'm sitting in
a lot of class privilege. Being famous and a public
figure is a tremendous privilege. Fame mitigates so many of
(04:34):
the struggles of being black and trans and a woman
doesn't mitigate all of them, but it mitigates some of them.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Education.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Having a mother that was a teacher was a tremendous
privilege of mine. Having a mother who corrected my grammar
and wanted to make sure that I spoke properly. That
I went to Bethel ami Church or Bethel African Methodist
Episcopal Church was a tremendous privilege because every Sunday I
summarized the Sunday School lesson, so weekly I was standing
(05:04):
up in front of a room full of people speaking,
and that would serve me later in my work as
a public speaker, going to the Abams School of Fine Arts.
Education is a huge privilege. So there's different kinds of privileges.
And all those privileges did not mean that I have
not had a life of struggle. It just means that,
like those privileges were things I didn't have to think
(05:25):
about and gave me entree into spaces that I maybe
wouldn't have gotten entree into if I didn't speak a
certain way and if I didn't have the education that
I have. And so, what I would love to invite
people to think about when they think about privilege and
ultimately when they think about racism or transphobia or sexism
(05:49):
is so I think so two things. When we think
about our own levels of privilege and the ways in
which we're privileged, it does not mean that we are
necessarily an open right. Being able to critically engage with
our privilege doesn't mean that we're a bad person and
that we're like oppressing someone. And I think that we
have to understand that ourselves. And then when we talk
(06:11):
about other people's privilege, we should be careful not to
paint them as an oppressor because they have maybe not
thought critically about their privileged or quote unquote checked their privilege. Right,
So just because someone is privileged doesn't mean that they
are a bad person. And maybe if they haven't thought
critically about their privilege doesn't mean they're a bad person.
(06:32):
All of this should be an invitation. We all grow
up in a world where we internalize certain ideas. And
I've said this many many times, if I can be
I'm a black transfer to woman from Mobile, Alabama, I
internalized negative ideas about black people, and I'm a black person,
(06:53):
I internalize white supremacist, racist ideas about my own people
and myself that because we live in a white supremacist,
anti black world, I internalized negative ideas about myself based
on class. We had an episode in the last US
season of the podcast about class shaming. I internalized negative
ideas about myself as a trans person. Because we live
(07:15):
in an anti trans world. I had to unlearn all
of those negative things about myself. And so if I
can internalize negative things about myself as a black person,
as a trans person, as a woman, as a person
from a working class background, because we live and what
Bellhus calls imperialists, white supremacists, capitalist patriarchy, we live in
(07:37):
a system that.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Is racist, that is sexist, that is cis.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Noormative, heteronormative. So then we all internalize these things. And
so if I'm internalizing it, even if you're a cis
gender person or a white person or a man, if
you likely internalize those things too. And so we're all
in the same boat. So calling someone racist, it's like
(08:04):
not it's not even really useful, I think anymore, because
we're all racist. We've all been sort of you know, God,
indoctrination is such a loaded word right now, but we've
all sort of internalized.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
We've all been raised in a world.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
That devalues blackness, whether you're black or not, we all
live in a world that this celebrates on a systemic
level whiteness over other things that like devalues womanhood, femininity,
that devalues trans people and LGBTQ plus people, and we
all have to unlearn that. And so if we can
(08:41):
begin to envision a world where we're all in the
same boat, it's like the transphobia thing or the racist thing,
like even calling someone I think the problem with just saying, oh,
this person is racist doesn't allow the space for transformation,
and the conversation about Bell Hooks with Darnell and Inmani
we talked about creating space for transformation, and when we
(09:04):
just say that someone is racist and that becomes their identity,
that doesn't open up space for transformation. Now, some people
are not interested in being transformed. Some people are not
interested in, like you know, interrogating the ways in which
they've internalized racism.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
It's very uncomfortable.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
It's been very uncomfortable for me to sit with the
uncomfortable feelings of like how I've internalized racist ideas about
myself and about my people, the internalized transphobia.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
I don't know if I've told the story on this podcast,
but there was a moment when I was working at
Lucky Chang's, which is a drag queen restaurant in New
York City, which was and there was a woman named
Verra who had a school called Miss Vera's School for
Girls who want to be Boys, sort of a charm
school for cross dressers, and most of her clients were
straight identified CIS gender men who enjoyed cross dressing and
(09:59):
a sort of itishistic way. They were often married to women,
and they would go to Miss Vere's charm School and
get lessons in femininity, and then sort of their graduation
would be getting dressed up on film and going out
for a night on the town. And often she would
bring them to Lucky Changs. And so one night, some
of the students from Mis Severe School that come into
Lucky Chang's and some of the girls who work at
(10:21):
Chang's found themselves so sort of saying really disparaging things
about the students from Miss Vera School who were very
obviously cross dressed men and who weren't the most feminine
or elegant or whatever. And I found myself joining in
with these other queens who I worked with, some of
whom were trans women, and then I had to check
(10:42):
myself and I was like, Laverne, what are you doing?
This is the same stuff people say about you. And
I realized in that moment, looking at these you know,
students from Miss Vera's school who were these sort of
cross dressed men really probably for the first time out
in the world in drag, and the awkwardness of that
and the you know, the vulnerability of that moment, and
(11:06):
I had to confront my own sort of anxieties around
being seen that way by the world. My fear of
being seen is this sort of awkward cross stressor and
knowing that often when people find out I'm trans, I'm
viewed that way anyway. And so there were so many
levels of internalized transphobia that were operating in that moment
(11:27):
as I found myself joining in on making fun of
these students who were being really brave that night to come.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Out for the first time, and I had.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
To interrogate the way in which my internalized transphobia was.
You know, I hopefully I don't think they heard us,
but that was really not cool, and that's not the
kind of person I want to be. I don't want
to be making fun of people because of the way
they look, and that's not how I want to proceed
in the world. So I had to check myself in
that moment, and I had to like say that I
(11:59):
don't want to behave this way and I don't want
to be this way in the world, and why am
I doing this? And I'm doing this because of my
own feelings about myself that I need to get better
with myself and okay with myself, and so much of
that for those of us who are from marginalized groups
who are internalize transphobia and sexism.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
That's the journey that we have to have.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
And if we're not from a marginalized group, if we are,
that cis white man that feels like they're being attacked
on a regular basis, Like the work is different. But
if I can be raised in a culture where I've
internalized racism and sexism and transphobia, it's probably likely that
(12:45):
you also internalize some of those ideas and it's not
and you're not a bad person if you're willing to say, yeah,
I have, and how do I work on this and
how do I get better? How do I acknowledge that
(13:06):
there are certain things I haven't had to think about
around privilege, or things that I've taken for granted or
things that I've thought I knew or assumed.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
And it should be a privilege to.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Even when it's uncomfortable, to be lovingly called out. And
it's been uncomfortable for me when I've been checked around things.
It has been, but hopefully, like there are people in
your life who love you, who care about you, who
can lovingly say that's not it, and then hopefully you
can hear them. This is a good time to take
(13:45):
a little break. We'll be right back though, Okay, we're back.
I think we're all I think we're all racist. I
think we're all transphobic. I think we're all sexist because
we've you know, grown up in a culture that has
(14:08):
sort of taught us all those things, and it's our
job to unlearn all that if we're interested in on
learning all those things, Like, maybe maybe a different way
to frame it. Instead of saying you are a racist
or you are transphobic, maybe like say, this language or
(14:29):
this approach is consistent with a history of transphobia, or
consistent with history that devalues the womanhood of trans women
or suggests that trans people aren't real. And when I
say transphobia, really just you know, most transphobia is about
sort of degrading trans people, saying that we're not real,
(14:51):
saying that we're mentally ill. Ultimately, the core of transphobia
is that like trans women aren't trans women, that transmen transman,
and that non binary people don't exist. Like that's the
core of transphobia, or saying that, like, you know, the
Roseanne Barr moment, I think is a really good example,
like a really good example because it's just so blatant
when oh, I still can't say what she said about
(15:14):
Valerie jareded but you can google it. But after Roseanne
Barr tweeted what she tweeted about Valerie Jared and many
hours later would go on Twitter and say I'm not
racist when she said one of the most racist things
that somebody could say about a black person, It's like,
it's like, okay, what And I think she believes that
(15:34):
she's not racist, right, I think she can make a
statement like that and believe she's not racist. And so
I think having the discussion around like, well, what you
said is consistent with a history of how black people
have been talked about in America in a racist context,
So the accountability would be acknowledging that these comments are
(15:57):
consistent with that history. I didn't realize that, or I
realized it, and I was angry, and I said, who
knows how that came out or why you know it?
I extended as much grace as possible, But I think
it's more to focus on the behavior and not the person.
Is another way to kind of have the conversation maybe
(16:19):
about the ways in which we might discriminate or buy
into this normative, heteronormative imperialists, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. Maybe
focusing on the behavior and not the person, so it
doesn't become that person's identity the racism, but the racism
becomes a behavior that they can change.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
If they choose to or not. Just some thoughts, Just
some thoughts.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
I'd like to think that everyone is redeemable, that everyone
is human and can be transformed. So you know, some
people demonstrate over and over again they're not interested in that,
and we have to believe them when they tell us
that through their actions. But I want to be perceived
from a place of love and empathy at all times.
And I think that starting with we all have internalized
(17:11):
the values of this normative, heteronormative, impeerless, wide supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
It is a great place to start, so we're all
in the same place, and then we can begin to
do the work together and it doesn't become like you
did this to me, or you're a bad person, but
you've just gotten the wrong information. And here's different information
(17:33):
that you might want to consider so that you can
see the full humanity and not discount the full humanity
of the person standing next to you, or the person
on the other side of the screen, or any of that.
So we can see each other better, see ourselves better,
acknowledge our shared humanity better. That's what I'm interested in
(17:55):
as an artist, as a human rights activist, that we
can acknowledge each other's humanity more fully.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Just some thoughts. Thank you for listening to The Laverne
Cox Show.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Please rate reviews, subscribe and share with everyone you know
if you can find me on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and
on Facebook at Laverne Cox for Real. Until next time,
stay in the love. The Laverne Cox Show is a
(18:36):
production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to The Laverne Cox Show, a production of Shondaland
Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show.
My name is Laverne Cox. I've been thinking a lot
(00:26):
lately about privilege, and it's such a interesting, tricky conversation
to have.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
These days.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
You can see people online saying check your privilege, and
in people getting into fights around privilege and not feeling
privileged because they've had struggles in their lives. You know,
when we talk about something like white privilege, for example,
there are a lot of working class white people who
don't feel privileged because they've had to struggle in their
lives and they're still struggling. A lot of men, when
(01:01):
we talk about male privilege, they're going through struggles and
they don't feel particularly privileged. And the way I like
to think about privilege is that privilege does not mean
that you have not struggled. It just means that there
are some things that you don't have to think about.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
So you could be the most privileged.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Person in one room and change rooms and be the
least privileged person in that room. And when I talk
about a privilege, I love telling this story I was
giving a lecture in South Carolina around twenty fourteen, and
before the lecture, I got to meet with a group
of students from the university and they had sat themselves
in a semicircle in this sort of conference room. And
(01:47):
I go around and I want to meet the students
and I ask them, you know who they are?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
And they were all sort of student leaders.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
They were representing different organizations and I am meeting. To
my left was the president of the LGBTQ Student Alliance.
And I go around the table and the students hit
sat themselves in an interesting way where they the students
were like white to Asian to Latino or Hispanic to black.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
That's how the students were seated.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
And so as the students went around, they told me
who they were, and I asked them some things they
may have been struggling with around identity or you know,
education or whatever they might have been struggling with at
the university. And I remember getting to the last student
who was who was a black student. He talked about
being black and gay and that as a member of
(02:37):
the Black student Union, he's often felt like he's had
to choose between being black and gay. When he's in
black spaces and when he's at the lgbt Alliance in
that group, that he has to sort of leave his
blackness behind and that he can't bring both those identities
into the queer space, or can he bring both those
(02:58):
identities into the black space. And so having the president
of the LGBTQ Student Alliance sitting right next to me,
I turned to the to the president and said, well,
what do you think about what he said? And he's like,
I don't know, I've never thought about it. And I
was like, that's this is privilege. I was like, this
is a privilege. It is not like he was a
(03:19):
bad person. This, this kid who's the president of you know,
LGBTQ Student Alliance, is not a bad person because he's
never thought about this.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
It's just it's a privilege to.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Not have to think about leaving parts of yourself behind
when you go into a room because you inhabit multiple,
you know, sort of marginalized identities, and privilege just means
there's something that you don't have to think about and
it is not an indictment on you to have privilege.
(03:50):
I am a black, transgender woman from a working class background,
right like all of those identity categories aren't necessarily thought
of as privilege. Yet I sit here in a lot
of privilege. I sit here in quite a bit of
class privilege. And the class privilege is recent, you know,
over the past, you know, within the past decade. And
(04:12):
I'm fifty years old, so most of my adult life
I've been working class, working poor, however you want to
describe it, but still fly and now I'm sitting in
a lot of class privilege. Being famous and a public
figure is a tremendous privilege. Fame mitigates so many of
(04:34):
the struggles of being black and trans and a woman
doesn't mitigate all of them, but it mitigates some of them.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Education.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Having a mother that was a teacher was a tremendous
privilege of mine. Having a mother who corrected my grammar
and wanted to make sure that I spoke properly. That
I went to Bethel ami Church or Bethel African Methodist
Episcopal Church was a tremendous privilege because every Sunday I
summarized the Sunday School lesson, so weekly I was standing
(05:04):
up in front of a room full of people speaking,
and that would serve me later in my work as
a public speaker, going to the Abams School of Fine Arts.
Education is a huge privilege. So there's different kinds of privileges.
And all those privileges did not mean that I have
not had a life of struggle. It just means that,
like those privileges were things I didn't have to think
(05:25):
about and gave me entree into spaces that I maybe
wouldn't have gotten entree into if I didn't speak a
certain way and if I didn't have the education that
I have. And so, what I would love to invite
people to think about when they think about privilege and
ultimately when they think about racism or transphobia or sexism
(05:49):
is so I think so two things. When we think
about our own levels of privilege and the ways in
which we're privileged, it does not mean that we are
necessarily an open right. Being able to critically engage with
our privilege doesn't mean that we're a bad person and
that we're like oppressing someone. And I think that we
have to understand that ourselves. And then when we talk
(06:11):
about other people's privilege, we should be careful not to
paint them as an oppressor because they have maybe not
thought critically about their privileged or quote unquote checked their privilege. Right,
So just because someone is privileged doesn't mean that they
are a bad person. And maybe if they haven't thought
critically about their privilege doesn't mean they're a bad person.
(06:32):
All of this should be an invitation. We all grow
up in a world where we internalize certain ideas. And
I've said this many many times, if I can be
I'm a black transfer to woman from Mobile, Alabama, I
internalized negative ideas about black people, and I'm a black person,
(06:53):
I internalize white supremacist, racist ideas about my own people
and myself that because we live in a white supremacist,
anti black world, I internalized negative ideas about myself based
on class. We had an episode in the last US
season of the podcast about class shaming. I internalized negative
ideas about myself as a trans person. Because we live
(07:15):
in an anti trans world. I had to unlearn all
of those negative things about myself. And so if I
can internalize negative things about myself as a black person,
as a trans person, as a woman, as a person
from a working class background, because we live and what
Bellhus calls imperialists, white supremacists, capitalist patriarchy, we live in
(07:37):
a system that.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Is racist, that is sexist, that is cis.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Noormative, heteronormative. So then we all internalize these things. And
so if I'm internalizing it, even if you're a cis
gender person or a white person or a man, if
you likely internalize those things too. And so we're all
in the same boat. So calling someone racist, it's like
(08:04):
not it's not even really useful, I think anymore, because
we're all racist. We've all been sort of you know, God,
indoctrination is such a loaded word right now, but we've
all sort of internalized.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
We've all been raised in a world.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
That devalues blackness, whether you're black or not, we all
live in a world that this celebrates on a systemic
level whiteness over other things that like devalues womanhood, femininity,
that devalues trans people and LGBTQ plus people, and we
all have to unlearn that. And so if we can
(08:41):
begin to envision a world where we're all in the
same boat, it's like the transphobia thing or the racist thing,
like even calling someone I think the problem with just saying, oh,
this person is racist doesn't allow the space for transformation,
and the conversation about Bell Hooks with Darnell and Inmani
we talked about creating space for transformation, and when we
(09:04):
just say that someone is racist and that becomes their identity,
that doesn't open up space for transformation. Now, some people
are not interested in being transformed. Some people are not
interested in, like you know, interrogating the ways in which
they've internalized racism.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
It's very uncomfortable.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
It's been very uncomfortable for me to sit with the
uncomfortable feelings of like how I've internalized racist ideas about
myself and about my people, the internalized transphobia.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
I don't know if I've told the story on this podcast,
but there was a moment when I was working at
Lucky Chang's, which is a drag queen restaurant in New
York City, which was and there was a woman named
Verra who had a school called Miss Vera's School for
Girls who want to be Boys, sort of a charm
school for cross dressers, and most of her clients were
straight identified CIS gender men who enjoyed cross dressing and
(09:59):
a sort of itishistic way. They were often married to women,
and they would go to Miss Vere's charm School and
get lessons in femininity, and then sort of their graduation
would be getting dressed up on film and going out
for a night on the town. And often she would
bring them to Lucky Changs. And so one night, some
of the students from Mis Severe School that come into
Lucky Chang's and some of the girls who work at
(10:21):
Chang's found themselves so sort of saying really disparaging things
about the students from Miss Vera School who were very
obviously cross dressed men and who weren't the most feminine
or elegant or whatever. And I found myself joining in
with these other queens who I worked with, some of
whom were trans women, and then I had to check
(10:42):
myself and I was like, Laverne, what are you doing?
This is the same stuff people say about you. And
I realized in that moment, looking at these you know,
students from Miss Vera's school who were these sort of
cross dressed men really probably for the first time out
in the world in drag, and the awkwardness of that
and the you know, the vulnerability of that moment, and
(11:06):
I had to confront my own sort of anxieties around
being seen that way by the world. My fear of
being seen is this sort of awkward cross stressor and
knowing that often when people find out I'm trans, I'm
viewed that way anyway. And so there were so many
levels of internalized transphobia that were operating in that moment
(11:27):
as I found myself joining in on making fun of
these students who were being really brave that night to come.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Out for the first time, and I had.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
To interrogate the way in which my internalized transphobia was.
You know, I hopefully I don't think they heard us,
but that was really not cool, and that's not the
kind of person I want to be. I don't want
to be making fun of people because of the way
they look, and that's not how I want to proceed
in the world. So I had to check myself in
that moment, and I had to like say that I
(11:59):
don't want to behave this way and I don't want
to be this way in the world, and why am
I doing this? And I'm doing this because of my
own feelings about myself that I need to get better
with myself and okay with myself, and so much of
that for those of us who are from marginalized groups
who are internalize transphobia and sexism.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
That's the journey that we have to have.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
And if we're not from a marginalized group, if we are,
that cis white man that feels like they're being attacked
on a regular basis, Like the work is different. But
if I can be raised in a culture where I've
internalized racism and sexism and transphobia, it's probably likely that
(12:45):
you also internalize some of those ideas and it's not
and you're not a bad person if you're willing to say, yeah,
I have, and how do I work on this and
how do I get better? How do I acknowledge that
(13:06):
there are certain things I haven't had to think about
around privilege, or things that I've taken for granted or
things that I've thought I knew or assumed.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
And it should be a privilege to.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Even when it's uncomfortable, to be lovingly called out. And
it's been uncomfortable for me when I've been checked around things.
It has been, but hopefully, like there are people in
your life who love you, who care about you, who
can lovingly say that's not it, and then hopefully you
can hear them. This is a good time to take
(13:45):
a little break. We'll be right back though, Okay, we're back.
I think we're all I think we're all racist. I
think we're all transphobic. I think we're all sexist because
we've you know, grown up in a culture that has
(14:08):
sort of taught us all those things, and it's our
job to unlearn all that if we're interested in on
learning all those things, Like, maybe maybe a different way
to frame it. Instead of saying you are a racist
or you are transphobic, maybe like say, this language or
(14:29):
this approach is consistent with a history of transphobia, or
consistent with history that devalues the womanhood of trans women
or suggests that trans people aren't real. And when I
say transphobia, really just you know, most transphobia is about
sort of degrading trans people, saying that we're not real,
(14:51):
saying that we're mentally ill. Ultimately, the core of transphobia
is that like trans women aren't trans women, that transmen transman,
and that non binary people don't exist. Like that's the
core of transphobia, or saying that, like, you know, the
Roseanne Barr moment, I think is a really good example,
like a really good example because it's just so blatant
when oh, I still can't say what she said about
(15:14):
Valerie jareded but you can google it. But after Roseanne
Barr tweeted what she tweeted about Valerie Jared and many
hours later would go on Twitter and say I'm not
racist when she said one of the most racist things
that somebody could say about a black person, It's like,
it's like, okay, what And I think she believes that
(15:34):
she's not racist, right, I think she can make a
statement like that and believe she's not racist. And so
I think having the discussion around like, well, what you
said is consistent with a history of how black people
have been talked about in America in a racist context,
So the accountability would be acknowledging that these comments are
(15:57):
consistent with that history. I didn't realize that, or I
realized it, and I was angry, and I said, who
knows how that came out or why you know it?
I extended as much grace as possible, But I think
it's more to focus on the behavior and not the person.
Is another way to kind of have the conversation maybe
(16:19):
about the ways in which we might discriminate or buy
into this normative, heteronormative imperialists, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. Maybe
focusing on the behavior and not the person, so it
doesn't become that person's identity the racism, but the racism
becomes a behavior that they can change.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
If they choose to or not. Just some thoughts, Just
some thoughts.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
I'd like to think that everyone is redeemable, that everyone
is human and can be transformed. So you know, some
people demonstrate over and over again they're not interested in that,
and we have to believe them when they tell us
that through their actions. But I want to be perceived
from a place of love and empathy at all times.
And I think that starting with we all have internalized
(17:11):
the values of this normative, heteronormative, impeerless, wide supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
It is a great place to start, so we're all
in the same place, and then we can begin to
do the work together and it doesn't become like you
did this to me, or you're a bad person, but
you've just gotten the wrong information. And here's different information
(17:33):
that you might want to consider so that you can
see the full humanity and not discount the full humanity
of the person standing next to you, or the person
on the other side of the screen, or any of that.
So we can see each other better, see ourselves better,
acknowledge our shared humanity better. That's what I'm interested in
(17:55):
as an artist, as a human rights activist, that we
can acknowledge each other's humanity more fully.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Just some thoughts. Thank you for listening to The Laverne
Cox Show.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Please rate reviews, subscribe and share with everyone you know
if you can find me on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and
on Facebook at Laverne Cox for Real. Until next time,
stay in the love. The Laverne Cox Show is a
(18:36):
production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Laverne Cox
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