August 20, 2024 • 50 mins
Join us as we sit down with VISIONS co-founder, longtime consultant, and retired professor public health Dr. John Capitman! Dr. Capitman talks about how he specialized in eldercare and developed community interventions in public health, as well as how his background and the life experiences informed his commitment and his approach, including how a severe car accident and other trials deepened his empathy and understanding of systemic inequalities and the necessity of acknowledging multiple dimensions of oppression.
We also explore the formation of VISIONS and its mission to combat oppression, including memorable moments of creating VISIONS with his partner Dr. Valerie Batts. Dr. Capitman's story offers insight into the what is needed to continue this vital work in difficult times.
2024 is VISIONS 40th anniversary and we’re having a big celebration at the State Room in Boston on September 27th! Our guest speakers include Gloria Steinem, Verna Meyers, and The Rev. Dr. William Jay Barber II. Learn more here and join if you can!
If you’re interested experiencing our approach, VISIONS offers a 75-minute public workshop teaching our Guidelines for Effective Cross Cultural Dialogue on the last Wednesday of each month at 4pm ET / 1pm PT. It’s pay what you can, free if you want, and all are welcome.
See what's coming up at VISIONS!
About us
Into Liberation: A podcast about transformative change, equity, and liberation is a production of VISIONS, Inc, a non-profit that offers effective tools that help individuals and organizations communicate and forge connections across differences that drive collective success.
Since 1984, we’ve offered research-based, time-tested approaches to cross-cultural learning that invite participants to engage in equity and inclusion work, starting at the personal and interpersonal levels and expanding to include changes toward institutional and cultural levels.
VISIONS offers actionable approaches that empower people to identify actions, explore their motivations, and effectively move through complex situations with respect and humanity for others and their differences.
Any opinions and views expressed by the speakers are their own and do not reflect the positions of VISIONS, Inc.
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Music credit: Tim Hall @tv_hall
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (00:00):
Hello, you're listening to Into Liberation, a
podcast about transformativechange, equity and working
against oppression.
I'm Leena Akhtar, director ofPrograms with Visions Inc.
Welcome, hi, everyone.
Today I'm speaking to one ofVisions' founders, Dr.
John Capitman.
(00:21):
For those of you who don't know, visions was founded in 1984 by
three Black women from RockyMount, north Carolina, and one
white Jewish man, and that iswho I'm speaking to today.
In addition to being a Visionsconsultant, john is a
now-retired professor of publichealth, where he specialized in
elder care and communityinterventions, which he talks
about at the beginning of ourconversation.
(00:42):
I also asked him about hisbackground and the life
experiences which informed thedevelopment of his commitment
and his approach.
He is married to Vision'sfounding director, dr Valerie
Batts, and I appreciated hearingmore about the earliest days of
the organization in ourconversation.
John has been a frequentcollaborator and mentor to me,
and both Vision's founding storyand the way that we work in
(01:04):
cross-cultural teams illustratessomething that is really
fundamental to our approach that, at its heart, our model is
about bringing people intorelationship across difference,
something that we deliberatelylean into and really leverage in
our work.
All of the elders I've beenspeaking to in this series have
been doing this work for most oftheir lives and in this time of
chaos when things sometimesfeel quite bleak, I've also been
(01:28):
very grateful for the lessonand message to stay the course
and keep going, and we talkabout this at the very end.
All right, I'm really excitedto be here, my colleague and
friend, dr John Capitman.
John is one of the co-foundersof Visions and a longtime
professor of public health andalso a longtime consultant with
(01:49):
Visions.
John, thank you so much fortaking the time to talk with me
today.
Thank you For folks who are notso familiar with you and your
work.
Can you introduce yourselfbriefly?
Dr. John Capitman (02:01):
I'm 69, about to turn 70 in a month or so.
I retired up just about a yearago from California State
University, fresno, and I wasthere for about 15 years and
before that I was at BrandeisUniversity.
For a long time my work hasreally been about inequalities
(02:22):
in health and understanding whysome groups of people have
better health and get bettercare than others, and looking at
ways to improve care for peoplewho are at risk of not getting
it.
I did a lot of work about eldercare, even starting with my
dissertation research.
Starting with my dissertation,research was interested in
(02:44):
elders and the services they get, and then was what?
Actually the first people, assort of disparities in health
became apparent, wrote some ofthe first material about
disparities in health amongelders, and a lot of attention
had been focused on the idea ofweathering, that some older
(03:09):
African Americans just reallylived to be very, very old
despite the odds, and that'swhere the focus of attention was
.
And my work was about thelikelihood of becoming disabled
or the likelihood of having ahard time once you were disabled
, and, of course, elders ofcolor and low-income elders
(03:29):
other people in traditionallyoppressed groups as vision
language, and I did that work atBrandeis, and then I had the
great opportunity to go toCalifornia and work with a
community-oriented public healthinstitute and be among the
first researchers at thatuniversity and helping to build
its research capacity, and alsogetting to work in this area of
(03:55):
the San Joaquin Valley, which isone of the poorest and most
polluted and most unequal placesin the United States.
I got to do something that wasreally different than at
Brandeis.
At Brandeis, we talked to theworld about what they ought to
do.
In Fresno, I really was workingwith organizations to see what
(04:16):
could we do.
We pushed policy to allowresponding to people's needs.
How could we change things up?
Funny things though.
At Brandeis, one of my biggestpieces of work was about elders
of color and cancer.
I wrote a lot about the use ofpromotores de salud, community
(04:37):
health workers.
That ended up being suchimportant work in California's
Central Valley, and we were ableto make the public health
system, the community healthcenters and the other public
health programs much moreeffective by the greatest use of
promoters about any place inthe country.
So over that period of timethis was starting in 2015.
(05:00):
Over that next 10 years, whileI was in California, we built up
the capacity to use communityhealth workers to meet the needs
of low-income people,communities of color that were
underserved, and I got lots ofother chances to sort of work on
.
You know, how can we actuallyfix this at the local level even
(05:21):
if we don't have the nationalpolicy that supports it?
And I also got to work onnational policy.
By that time.
You know I had really beendeeply involved in visions and a
lot of my work in Californiaended up being interpreting,
translating, working in visionsto make it, you know, practical
(05:43):
training for public health andcommunity organization leaders.
How do they become moreeffective at moving forward
their agenda and how can we usethe skills and the techniques
that Visions had been developing, was still developing, to
support that.
And that was the work I reallydid there.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (06:04):
I spoke to Cassandra a few weeks ago.
She talked about how she alsobrought in visions to train many
people who did early childhooddevelopment work out there.
Dr. John Capitman (06:15):
And I attracted her to come out there.
I recruited her along withothers she mentioned.
It was so great to bringexpertise.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (06:22):
So that's your professional trajectory, and
I'm also curious because we'vetalked about this in passing I
don't know a whole lot about howyou grew up, how you ended up
in North Carolina.
Dr. John Capitman (06:39):
I'm the classic pink diaper baby were
very much leaders in theCommunist Party in the New York
City area in the period afterthe war, after World War II.
My father was a vet and it hadvery dramatic experiences as a
vet that he would never tell usabout but was one of the
(06:59):
organizers of veterans for theHenry Wallace campaign.
I was doing that work that hemet my mom who was the press
secretary for the communistparty at that point.
They were married very rapidlyand had two kids.
I'm the younger of two.
My father had gone to lawschool on the GI Bill and ended
(07:26):
up having a fight with gettingpast the board in New York State
because it was right the periodof the McCarthy Commission and
all that work and so in a way myparents kind of just sort of
separated from everything afterthat and moved further upstate
New York and ended up creatingthis business of the Center for
(07:49):
Research in Marketing, and theirbusiness was social science
research.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (07:56):
So wait, he did not pass the bar.
Dr. John Capitman (07:59):
He did not pass the bar.
Wow, okay, it wasn't about theknowledge, it was about the
politics.
At that point there was somegovernment interference against
him and other people who weresame period.
A lot of people have thesestories.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (08:18):
So they made another plan.
Dr. John Capitman (08:20):
They made another plan.
They moved upstate and theyeventually developed this
marketing research business.
And you know we lived on a lakeand I was a happy kid.
I had a happy childhood, verymuch in nature, skating on the
lake in the winter and playingin canoes and rowboats in the
(08:43):
summer.
Other kids around, my bigbrother was tough on me but, you
know, kept me safe at somelevel also.
Yes, I had a very nicechildhood.
We would go sneak away and gointo the woods to where there
was a big beaver dam and theywere involved in politics in
(09:04):
that small town and it got very,very nasty with the John Birch
Society versus the pro-schoolparents and weird symbolic
struggles over things likeshould there be cots for the
children to take naps on becamethe, you know, with the John
(09:26):
Birch parents not wanting netcots for the kids to take naps
on, you know.
So it was weird and there were acouple of years that things
were quite heated.
One year somebody dumpedseveral truckloads of pumpkins
on our yard and another yearnasty things were written on our
(09:47):
yard.
Thanks that Halloween wasreally a time for trouble making
.
That's a small town.
They ended up not feeling coolwith us going to the local high
school.
We went to Groton School inMassachusetts, which was we
really didn't understand howmuch this was going into the
(10:08):
center of WASP control in the US.
Right, he was, you know, one ofthe very few Jewish kids who
went to Groton School.
We weren't brought up to bereligious, but we grew up with a
lot of sense of a Jewishprogressive community.
That was the community myparents came from.
So it's a big, big shock.
(10:30):
By the time I went to MiltonAcademy, milton was somewhat
more open and progressivecompared to Groton and I guess
they were a little bit moreprepared.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (10:42):
How old were you when you went to school?
They were a little bit moreprepared.
Dr. John Capitman (10:44):
How old were you when you went to wait a
school?
I went to private school inninth grade for Milton and then
had a tough first year of highschool and problems with my eye.
I had trouble learning to read,got glasses and learned to read
very quickly once they kind ofgot what was wrong with my eyes,
but they deteriorated.
(11:05):
that first year at milt Icompeted so hard, I tried so
hard so I ended up going whatwas to be a year off and went to
parents, sent me to switzerland, to a school in switzerland
that was sort of verballyoriented, so I learned some
french and German and continuedto study Latin and, you know,
(11:28):
had a really wonderfulexperience.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (11:31):
Switzerland, so I didn't know you'd done it
here or there, okay.
Dr. John Capitman (11:34):
I ended up coming back early, not actually
finishing the school year,because it was the spring of the
Vietnam protests and my brotherwas at Yale getting in trouble
protesting the Vietnam War andmy parents were at that point
living in New York City and Ispent a lot of time going to
(11:56):
protest marches in that springand went back to Milton the next
year Credit for that year,which hadn't been the plan.
I learned enough, I guess thatyear.
Milton was a tough experience.
There was one other Jewish kidin my class but he was actually
also a Cabot.
The Cabots in the Lodges, thebig New England families, black
(12:21):
guy were first and second in theclass and a Catholic Italian
guy was third in the class andnone of us got any prizes at all
.
Went to all the prizes went topeople who were insiders and
there was always that sense thatit was OK for me to go to
school there.
But they weren't really.
(12:41):
They really weren't in favor ofme there, but they weren't
really.
They really weren't in favor ofme.
Many years later, when we werethinking about our son going to
private school, the sameadmissions officer was there who
had been there when I was there.
Wow, and he said God, we reallymistreated you, john, we don't
think you'll be happy here.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (13:03):
Wow, what a thing to admit.
Dr. John Capitman (13:05):
Yeah, it was rough as a senior.
I had really really good scoresand grades and I didn't get
into Harvard, yale or Princetonand I applied afterwards to Pitt
where my father was teachingthat year, having sort of gotten
tired of his business.
His business had gotten to betoo much work.
(13:25):
He really was doing a littleconsulting and he taught at Pitt
for a couple of years.
Then he moved to Florida.
But yeah, so I went to Pitt andthey wrote nasty
recommendations about me, that Iwas immature.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (13:37):
Milton did.
Dr. John Capitman (13:38):
Yeah.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (13:39):
Yikes.
Dr. John Capitman (13:40):
The next year I got into Harvard, yale and
Princeton as a transfer student.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (13:44):
Wow.
So where did you graduate fromYale?
Okay, that's right.
Dr. John Capitman (13:48):
Okay, so that's not.
Back then Val and I met at Dukeat graduate school.
She was one of the only, ormaybe the only, north Carolinian
in our program.
Everybody else was fromelsewhere.
I had thought I wanted to go toclinical psych graduate school.
I didn't get into any clinicalpsych graduate schools because I
(14:11):
hadn't been a psychundergraduate and I hadn't taken
the GRE or whatever test.
I hadn't taken any of the tests.
I just decided to apply and Iapplied really to Duke and UNC
randomly because my mother haddriven through those towns on
some trip and thought I wouldlike the area.
I was real ambivalent aboutgoing to graduate school and I
got into social psych at Dukeand thought, okay, well, that's
(14:34):
interesting, I'll do that.
I'm really glad I did.
It was a better fit for me as aprogram.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (14:39):
Than clinical.
Yeah, so did you apply to gradschool right out of undergrad,
or were you?
Dr. John Capitman (14:46):
was so.
I think my dad died on thesummer between my junior and
senior year of college and soafter my senior year my mom was
still living in Miami.
I went to Miami and I actuallywas there for two years doing
various things A year or twoyears, I think it was two years
(15:07):
before I went to graduate schooland I took a trip cross country
.
I took about three months todrove cross country before
starting at Duke at graduateschool and the social psych
program was interesting andsmall.
You know, there was a lot ofoverlap of the faculty, so some
of the clinical faculty taughtin the social psych courses and
(15:30):
vice versa.
We took stat together.
I think Val and I first reallymet each other in stat courses
and I had not takenundergraduate statistics.
I had taken quantum mechanicsbut I hadn't taken statistics.
I mean taking quantum mechanicsbut I hadn't taken statistics
and I found it very difficultand kept asking stupid questions
, things that everybody else youknow.
(15:51):
I think that it was assumedthat people knew and I later
learned that many of myclassmates appreciated me,
asking what is that, what isthat, what does that mean in
that class, and Val and Istarted hanging out after that.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (16:09):
That's class and what led you to your
interest in psychology.
Dr. John Capitman (16:23):
I was an undergraduate linguistics and
philosophy major, and I think itwas really.
This actually relates to somecontent that I hope we talk
about.
You know, coming from my father, my brother is an economist.
My father studied law, wasreally kind of a sociologist
more than anything else, but Idefinitely grew up with a bias
against thinking about thepersonal level.
The perspective that that wassilly, that things were shaped
(16:45):
at the macro-individual level bysocieties and systems and
structures, and linguistics isclearly what could be more of a
social phenomenon than language.
Language is about.
Interaction is the sort ofmodel for everything else.
That's macro-individual interms of shaping people.
(17:07):
So I got interested in the ideathat, yeah, maybe the most
important questions were at thesystems level, but somehow you
had to take into account thatindividuals were shaped by
systems and systems shapedpeople.
Both were the case, and Ithought that I didn't know
(17:29):
enough of that.
That's how I got intopsychology.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (17:32):
You've certainly corrected for that
bias now.
Dr. John Capitman (17:35):
You know that's really interesting.
A lot of my work in publichealth has been about
introducing the macro level intopublic health.
So we typically have studiedobesity, smoking, anxiety
disorders, all those things ascharacteristics of individuals
and we've tended to understandracial, ethnic and social class
(17:57):
differences in health outcomesas the behavior of individuals.
And so a lot of my work wasabout well, okay, what about air
pollution and what about thequality of life and what about
the opportunities available topeople?
Those were all macro,individual and were shaping
health, and so it's almostaccepted now.
(18:20):
It's almost accepted now.
If you were to look at a yearof random newspapers and pop
psychology things, you'd seejust as much about the
environment as individual.
But that's really a majorsocial change that you know I
(18:44):
and lots of other people got thechance to participate in.
You know, and so much of mylife has been about wanting to
sort that out, sort out the sortof individual system, how that
all worked.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (18:56):
One of the wonderful things about the way
that we work at Visions is weground our, I find I mean I've
certainly ground my relationshipto the model and to the work
that I do in my own experiencesand the transformation that
happened in me.
And one of the things I've beenasking our elders about, as
I've done these interviews, ishow they feel that their early
(19:19):
life experiences, theperspectives they developed,
maybe even like shock moments,shaped their view of the world
and decision to do this work andthe approach to this work.
So that's a question I want toask you.
Dr. John Capitman (19:35):
You know, having the education that I had,
I felt like an ultimate insiderand constantly reminded of my
outsider status.
So both and I felt both sovisibly.
I mean I understand.
You know how do you say thiswithout sounding terrible.
I understand I'm one of thebest educated people in the room
, almost always.
(19:55):
You know almost every setting.
I understand that I've hadopportunities to learn from
amazing people and opportunitiesto engage myself in learning in
a way that other people haven't.
So I'm really aware of thatopportunity, what that's meant,
you know.
I mean we've had shortages ofmoney, but I never felt really
at a deep level that I could getanother job in a minute, you
(20:18):
know, in a few days.
I never really felt like I wasgoing to be out on the street
and that.
I know that's a weird way toput it.
But that level of confidenceabout being successful in the
economy was something that Ireally got from that
establishment education and alsofrom my parents, who were just
endlessly hopeful, though alwayskind of worried they could all
(20:44):
fall apart tomorrow, that kindof perspective.
So I got that too, but thatdeep confidence that the society
does in fact work for me and Ialso saw, you know, shared a
couple of things.
I had lots of experiences thattaught me the other side,
including the car accident.
Val was on her way down toFlorida for us to have an
(21:07):
engagement party.
I was hit by a drunk driver.
This was in Miami.
I had a crush, fracture, threecervical vertebrae and other
damage.
Of course, terrible shock for ayoung couple and all that.
But it also gave me,unfortunately, just a tremendous
(21:27):
sense of my, but all of ourphysical frailty being among the
able-bodied is temporary.
I don't really know at whatpoint we came to the sort of
idea of understanding all ofthese patterns of oppression as
simultaneously and equallyvalued.
(21:48):
It was so much for hearingpeople not wanting to talk about
racism and wanting to talkabout their pain as a working
class person, as an Italian, asa person with disabilities, and
I think, at first by kind ofagri-action to all that, oh,
(22:09):
they're just avoiding talkingabout racism, they just don't
want to talk about that, andthat over time you have to
acknowledge that thoseexperiences are perfectly real,
that our society is structuredaround all these dimensions of
better than and less than,better than and less than, and
(22:31):
that you know if I could reallyget to understand what it feels
to me like as a person withdisabilities when there's when
space doesn't accommodate for meat all.
You know, in the earlier years,after my accident, I was a fit
young man but I also had a lotof pain and, you know, needed to
, needed not to be slouching ata chair, needed to be able to
get up, you know, and movearound, and I wasn't always able
(22:53):
to and you know you couldreally feel it.
Or spaces where there were onlydeep, low couches.
So you know, for me that sortof feeling of being not
accommodated in that way was soreal that it made me begin to be
able to see and listen to otherpeople's experiences of not
being accommodated.
The Jewish thing, you know, ina way not as meaningful, not as
(23:18):
emotionally charged for me asphysical pain and lack of
accommodation and that sort ofexperience of being just hit
over the head in the Boston area, in Miami, in North Carolina,
every place with you knowChristianity and the depth of
(23:38):
Christianity and the assumptionof just this idea we're going to
live forever.
You know we're going to have anafterlife.
You know, as a Jew, I don'tbelieve in an afterlife ever.
You know we're going to have anafterlife.
You know, as a Jew, I don'tbelieve in an afterlife.
You got one time.
You got one time to do the bestjob you can and to try and make
the world the best, better.
That's a really basic thing.
To have the world structured onthe idea that this is just
(24:01):
practice for the afterlife andI'll be forgiven anyway.
You know that's a perspectivethat when you don't have it,
it's quite overwhelming to bearound so much.
You know, I've always beendissatisfied with myself.
Physically, I wanted to be moreof an athlete, more fitting,
(24:22):
whatever it is I think my fatherwanted, although I don't really
know and that difference andrealizing how much pain other
people have even much more thanI do I'm not discounting them
around their physicaldifferences.
That's different from thedisability dimension, but it's
another dimension arounddifferences so powerful,
(24:43):
palpable and painful for peopleas I let myself be aware of it.
You know, I think this came toa deeper understanding of the
intention, the intention offreeing people from racism,
sexism, I don't know.
That's one part of the model Ithink is incredibly important
and so much based in my ownexperience, I think that this
(25:05):
you know, the whole notion ofthe levels, how the levels shape
each other and are shaped byeach other and interact
constantly in creating andsustaining inequalities.
Again, I think that level justthat came from I mean, my own
contribution to that really camefrom my cynicism about
psychology.
Cynicism about psychology, myparents and my brother and the
(25:28):
worldview of psychology.
But it's not the opiate of thepeople, that's religion, but
some similar kind of idea.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (25:39):
So this is something I'm quite interested
in.
So you and Val, you met in gradschool.
You were thinking about thesethings.
You were thinking about thesethings together, thinking about
them grounded in your ownexperiences.
Dr. John Capitman (26:08):
I'm curious about the trajectory when the
two of you met and how the workthat you did in that period you
know academically and thenafterward how that culminated in
the founding of thisorganization and the development
of the model.
I really think everything isabout Val's leadership at some
point.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (26:18):
I can remember , our honeymoon consisted of
driving cross-country.
Dr. John Capitman (26:19):
I don't know if you did that, I did not.
To begin her, we both hadfellowships in the Bay Area,
required residency for apsychology degree and for me it
was just a postdoc.
Anyway, on that trip we came upwith the acronym Visions.
Ah, amazing.
(26:43):
I remember us thinking a lotabout the acronym, joking about
that, as we drove through theColorado mountains.
So that's.
I really think that Val wasreally clear that she wanted to
have her to create her ownorganization.
She didn't want to.
She didn't want to work at ahospital or a university as a
(27:03):
full-time thing.
You know, after the internshipshe worked at medical College of
Virginia, vcu, virginiaCommonwealth University, in a
counseling psych program and Ithink it was in in that period
that we kind of thought aboutwell, we had this neat acronym
named for an organization.
Maybe we really needed to formthe organization.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (27:26):
That's when you knew Julian.
Dr. John Capitman (27:27):
You met Julian in Virginia, yeah, we met
Julian, big parts of it werealready in our minds.
I mean, at Duke we worked withsomebody named Joyce Landrum
Brown.
Anyway, I got a gig that gaveus the opportunity to rent an
office and very soon visionsformed.
(27:50):
It's funny.
I don't know how juliananswered this, but I don't
remember a specific moment wherewe decided go for it.
I remember when there was amoment where val had enough
consulting contracts and mary,julian's wife, had enough
clients that they didn't needthe health center anymore.
(28:12):
They didn't need VCU anymore.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (28:15):
Julian remembers an initial meeting
where he made the shrimp curry.
Dr. John Capitman (28:21):
Yeah, when we discussed the organization.
Sometime in there there wasthis meeting at Moten Conference
Center.
Did he tell you about that?
Dr. Leena Akhtar (28:32):
No.
Dr. John Capitman (28:33):
Conference Center is in Virginia.
It's where Martin Luther Kingsupposedly wrote the I have a
Dream speech and it's one of theoldest Black-owned conference
centers in the US and it's stillthere and we met there and my
mom was there, valerie's dad wasthere, several other elders
(28:54):
from her community, a couple ofour teachers were there, and
that was when we formally formedVisions.
That was the beating whereBarry, in front of everybody, in
front of a whole group ofpeople, told me to shut up and I
laughed and didn't shut up andother people were shocked that
(29:19):
we had that kind of relationship.
That would be okay.
Yeah, wow, almost all of theelders who were at that meeting
are gone now, but they gave usgreat and you know, they, they
it was really, you know, valerie, but it was them.
It was yeah, you can do this,you can take this idea and and
(29:42):
and go someplace with it.
We also had this simultaneousthing going on, which was the
Wright Center.
I don't know if we talked aboutthat, but that was taking a
property that had been in AngelaBryan's family but was
neglected.
That was an Art Deco gem,something my mom recognized and
(30:04):
got excited about where we couldmeet, and Angela's mom was
starting to have Alzheimer's.
Her father had died fromAlzheimer's.
I had been studying adult dayhealth centers we just had a
Vulcan mind mill there.
You know just that differentforces and had identified this
property and gotten support fromthe guy who's now the governor
(30:28):
Hooper, who was a representativefrom that area and a friend of
Valerie and Angela's fromgrowing up, from high school
days, I think.
He gave us financial supportand we got other financial
support and my mom produced anarchitect and that's how the
Wright Center developed.
So that was all going on rightat the early point, right around
(30:52):
the same time as we had theMoten meeting and talked about.
You know that we not onlywanted to do that, that our
vision was broader than that,that we not only wanted to do
the Wright Center thing.
We thought that was great, butwe wanted to more broadly take
our emerging ideas about racismand address them.
This was the period where peoplewere really you know this is
(31:15):
the late 70s, early 1980s.
That's a period where peoplewere really convinced that we
had not everybody but whitepeople were really convinced
that we had overcome racism,that the typical US resident
maybe held negative affecttoward people of color but
largely denied having racism andlargely denied awareness of a
(31:40):
history of inequalities and acurrent reality that was just
such a striking feature of themoment.
You know kind of the way thatthe emergence of Trumpism is so
much the striking feature ofthis moment.
If there's a lesson to ourstory, it maybe is that there
needs to be an emerging voice,just like ours was about wait a
(32:04):
second.
Racism is real.
It's not quite over yet.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (32:08):
So I have two questions for you, then.
One question is that I'mcurious what doing this work in
that kind of a climate was likeinitially.
How do you make the case forthis work?
Obviously, we are constantlyreinventing the language that we
use as we pitch our work and,you know, share with clients and
(32:32):
make the case.
And the other question I haveis now, 40 years on, or 35 years
on, when I first startedtraining.
The model is really tight.
It works.
The process is set up so thatit contains people as they go on
a journey with this, and I'mcurious what the early days were
(32:55):
like.
Dr. John Capitman (32:56):
Yeah, yeah, so I guess I learned most from
these circumstances that reallydidn't work.
And there are things that Ilearned a lot from what didn't
work.
I often tell this story ofbeing at a session in Richmond
(33:21):
with the utilities departmentand there are I don't know 40
men, all big and overweight andin their 40s and 50s, most have
not had a college degree.
That are the various officialsin this department and then one
very diminutive 28-year-oldAfrican-American woman, and so
(33:46):
here's the part of the storythey tell.
At some point she says wait asecond, we're not all the same.
I'm here, I'm different fromyou, and it was super revealing
for me about that concept, aboutthe several concepts.
So here's the part of the storythat I don't usually tell.
Over lunch they went out andgot drunk.
(34:07):
Most of the guys went out andgot drunk, and in the afternoon
one guy fell out, you know, hada heart attack or something in
the course of the meeting.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (34:17):
Like you're training with them.
Dr. John Capitman (34:19):
Yeah, Wow, Okay, Out for lunch.
They had several beers.
They came back they clearlywere inebriated as we continued
the training and just sort ofsoldiered through it and then
one of the guys fell out and hefell out.
You know just what I was sortof getting into, but high-budget
.
You know, just to the pointwhere I was sort of, I think,
(34:39):
firmly arguing with one of hiscolleagues about one of the
ideas and just as now you knowideas that affirmative action
meant that inferior people wouldbe hired.
You know, right, with thisyoung lady right there, this was
really where I learnedsomething about sensitivity and
(35:02):
about awareness that this is alldeeper and heavier and harder
than I think.
And I don't think we made themgo drink and I don't think we
made the guy fell out, butimagine it wouldn't have taken
much to feel like that's whathad happened, Do you mean?
Dr. Leena Akhtar (35:19):
that sounds like a very stressful
facilitation, John.
Dr. John Capitman (35:22):
Yeah, it wouldn't have taken much to feel
responsible and I knew I wasn'tand I just learned a lot from
that about how serious the workis and how emotional it is for
people and that the emotionalityis real and I guess.
So I have various stories ofthings that I didn't, that
(35:44):
didn't work and they learnedfrom and so you know I what's
that?
The vibe is much more capablelearning the you know when you
touch the stove than it is.
Rick Archer 1 session.
For some reason this was inBoston and I either didn't have
a female person of color trainer, female or person of color
(36:06):
co-trainer, or I think this isthe case.
I didn't trust the person, Ididn't know the person and I
gave some examples ofinternalized oppression and I
didn't phrase them.
I experienced this because ofmy disability.
I phrased them.
I've heard from anAfrican-American woman and
(36:26):
people were very upset and angry.
A negatively influenced womanand people of color in the room
wasn't my place to share thoseideas and I think that, for me
at least, that whole concept ofwhat we mean by internalized
oppression really got muchclearer to me in that moment.
Internalized oppression reallygot much clearer to me in that
moment and, most particularly,it's never my places.
(36:47):
Only the person can say whethertheir behavior is internalized
oppression.
Someone else can judge thatabout them, and I really didn't
understand that till then.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (37:02):
So those are trial by fire moments and I
deeply appreciate hearing thosebecause there are a lot of
experiences like that that I'velearned from the touching the
fire moments Absolutely how themodel, the intellectual and
(37:26):
theoretical underpinnings cametogether as you all were
starting to apply it in theongoing natural settings.
What was that like?
Pioneering the model,developing it, working with the
various pieces?
Dr. John Capitman (37:35):
I feel like it was developmental.
It was those experiences thatI'm talking about, or preparing
for conferences.
Val and Joyce Landrum-Brown andI did the multicultural process
of change picture the firsttime in preparation for a
conference.
I don't remember what theconference was and we were
(37:58):
trying to talk about this ideaof the four levels being
connected to each other and thatprocess of moving from a
monocultural perspective to amulticultural perspective.
And that model has been reallyworked on and fixed and made
much clearer and much morespecific over time and lots of
(38:19):
people contributed and I thinkthat most of the pieces are like
that.
The five modern racism behaviorswe originally had four and the
first couple of times we sharedpieces of the model shared about
this idea of modern racism.
In California we had people youknow say things like you know,
(38:44):
I had a taco for breakfast andsushi for lunch.
I love all the multiculturalismin California.
It's just wonderful andeverybody's got a fair shot.
So we really hadn't heard thatin the East or the Midwest, the
places where we grew up, theinequalities were people knew
(39:04):
they were there and knew youknow that wasn't the question.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (39:08):
So it developed as you, as you worked
with different groups anddifferent.
Dr. John Capitman (39:11):
Right, so so things came out as we talked
about them Makes sense.
And then I think the you knowthe internalized oppression work
to some extent comes straightout of Val's dissertation.
Internalized oppression were tosome extent come straight out
of Val's dissertation.
Oh, we also worked for one ofour mentors at Duke.
(39:33):
Anyway, his theory he had workedon the Bradley-Yorty campaign
and he had articulated an ideathat he called symbolic racism.
John Sears is one of the peopleinvolved in that and I'm still
blanking on another guy's name,john McConaughey and their idea
was that people would useabstract symbols instead of the
(39:54):
traditional language of racismso the streets are not safe
without a policeman really cameas a measure of racism from
their world, or Blacks aregetting too demanding in their
push for equal rights, and thatwas their idea.
So that was already, and theyhad articulated a kind of denial
(40:16):
of differences as part of thephenomenon.
And then you know, I don't seepeople as people.
You know I don't see people asblack and white.
I see people, people, thatstuff that was just so prevalent
in the society that thatclearly was one of the phenomena
.
I don't have a single story.
That's what I think is.
(40:37):
The story I want to share isthat each piece of the model
that came from trying to workwith people about their feelings
and their behaviors related torace, and we understood pieces
of it as we went along.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (40:53):
So, speaking of feelings, what you just said,
I think the thing that setsvisions apart we've talked a lot
about this is the astutenessaround and adeptness in working
with feelings.
Was that there from thebeginning, like most explicitly
in the feelings as messengerssegment?
Dr. John Capitman (41:13):
Feelings as messengers was my thesis.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (41:16):
Okay, there we go.
Dr. John Capitman (41:19):
And then the analysis of interactions came
from two different sources.
It's transactional analysis.
It's just basically what it is,and, having never heard of
transactional analysis, myundergraduate thesis was about
misunderstanding in conversation, and one of my key ideas about
(41:41):
misunderstanding in conversationwas that people often heard the
words rather than the affect orthe affect rather than the
words.
So that that's what I worked onas an undergraduate, and so, as
we started really focusing onthe transactions between around
race, both asking people aboutracial politics but also seeing
(42:06):
how people responded differentlyof race In my thesis we had
people.
We had white undergraduate womenworking with another woman who
was either white or Black andwho became increasingly
unpleasant during the course ofthe experiment, and we selected
(42:26):
women who said that they feltjust as comfortable towards
whites as Blacks and women whodidn't, and we also asked them
their attitudes about questionslike the streets are not safe
without a policeman, and what wefound was that modern racism
questions and the feelingthermometer both predicted
(42:47):
behavior and that the women whowere said they felt colder
toward Blacks actually got muchmore anxious when the Black
partner started to be mean tothem and took it much more
personally.
It's quite a social scienceexperiment that aren't even
(43:07):
allowed.
Yeah, and he were measuringgalvanic skin response and blood
pressure and a few other things.
And you know, show this, youknow, right now I think we would
want to measure some hormonesto see big spikes.
So this was the idea that,physiologically, people stated
(43:29):
views on race and racism, evenif they were indirect and
confusing, were still predictiveof a biological response to
being in a racial, in aninterracial situation.
So feelings thermometer that wasyour undergraduate research.
Feelings thermometer andcomplicated?
No, my undergraduate researchwas misunderstandings of daily
(43:53):
life.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (43:54):
Okay, and then this this was later Okay.
Dr. John Capitman (43:57):
A graduate, yeah Right, so that all kind of
like really fit awfully wellwith transactional analysis.
So that all kind of like reallyfit awfully well with
transactional analysis.
And so a lot of the ideasreally came from that sort of
intersection of a kind of socialscience view of the role of
feelings and attitude formationand expression and the way the
(44:19):
transactional analysis worked onthat Fantastic Seeing the
feelings is connected to sort ofdeeper messages about who I am
as a person.
Transactional analysis wasuncomfortable for Val and even
more so for me because it wasstill at that point apolitical.
And so you wanted to talk aboutnot just not just were your
(44:42):
folks mad at themselves and theworld or not and passed on
negative perception, but alsodid your folks have confusing
ideas about race that theypassed on directly or indirectly
?
It's really interesting.
I read pretty broadly inpsychology and there have been a
lot of efforts to understandracism and I think that our work
(45:04):
is consistent with the broadvariety of approaches.
That somehow has to add acomplicated story about how you
grew up and what you wereexposed to and what you know and
kind of what you imagine aboutthe other people and you know
what you actually know All thekind of mass of different
(45:25):
factors that we talk about kindof are the basis of the social
science account and at a certainlevel that social science
account is so uncomfortable itdoesn't work to just do
political science.
It's not just about big groupsof people and their interactions
, it's also about how peopletake that on personally.
(45:46):
That idea, that fundamentalpiece, is really different than
just about every other groupthat does consulting about
racism who either do one levelor the other.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (45:58):
The deeper elements of the work that we do,
where we see where people pickup and are emotionally impressed
with their ideas aboutoppression, about themselves,
about other people.
Again, I think that that's thething that differentiates
visions from other approaches.
So you know, this is Vision's40th year.
(46:21):
It's been 40 years since theinception.
The model's been evolving anddeveloping.
Now me and cohorts below me aretaking it on and using it and
implementing it out in the world.
What do you hope to see in theworld?
Dr. John Capitman (46:35):
In terms of hope.
I've been thinking a lot aboutHolly Neer's comments and Val
and I heard something quitedifferent Holly Neer speaking to
the Visions group and weactually heard something
different.
It's funny.
This is something that I hopefor, that I think is actually
there.
I think that when we startedout, we really thought that by
the time we got to be old, thatthings would be really different
(46:57):
, that the society would havebecome much more open, that
people would, you know, be okaywith themselves and be okay with
each other.
A little bit that was thearrogance of youth and a little
bit it was a worldview ofprogress, that societies make
progress, and I guess what we'veseen over our lives is that,
yeah, progress can be made, butso can moving backwards, and
(47:20):
that you know every little bitof progress is tentative, and so
, rather than being sad, andthat you know every little bit
of progress is is is tentative,and so, rather than being sad
about that, there's a part of methat's always known that the
work is the work, that theprocess is the process, that,
even if we don't get there, thatour purpose and being in life,
you know the reason we're here.
I'm laughing because it soundsso overblown.
(47:42):
But you know, you kind ofdecide that working to make the
world better, to make peoplekinder to each other, if I can
do something to make thatpossible, I want to do that and
I may only make a little bit ofprogress sometimes with some
people and I may even, you know,move communities forward.
(48:02):
I started out by telling thisstory of community health
workers in the Central Valley.
More people get better healthcare.
That's something that reallydid change.
Adult health centers are allover the country.
That was one of the first thingsI worked on.
That's something that made lifebetter for people.
So we can, you know we can makecontributions.
I think that the way in whichsome of the big companies we've
(48:25):
worked with are different isreal at Lafcine and yet making
sense of when that happens andwhen it doesn't, and how to
value when it happens and how tovalue the struggle.
So that's my hope.
My hope is that you know yourgeneration and the people that
come after you who do this work,do it with that understanding,
(48:48):
with some peace, having come tosome peace about that.
It's this process, it's theworking on it, it's the moving
it forward, it's the littlevictories that matter.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (49:00):
You know, val said something a couple of years
ago that's really stayed withme.
It was along the lines of ifthe people that preceded her had
given up, she wouldn't be there.
And that's really stayed withme, especially when I think
about staying in the work andexactly what you're talking
about, right, how to recognizethe victories, even if you know
(49:24):
we have not eliminated racism orsexism or any of the other.
Dr. John Capitman (49:28):
The big story ain't so great.
You know it's funny.
I guess it's very much my mom'sjob.
My mom said take care of thelittle stuff, the big stuff will
take care of itself.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (49:37):
Yeah, yeah, John, thank you so, so much.
It's always wonderful to talkto you and collaborate with you,
and this has been great.
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.
Yeah, likewise, as you may know, 2024 is Vision's 40th
anniversary and we're having abig celebration at the State
Room in Boston on September 27th.
(49:59):
Please join us if you can.
Please join us if you can.
Our lineup of honored speakersinclude Gloria Steinem, Vernee
Myers and the Reverend DrWilliam J Barber II.
There's a link down in the shownotes Now if you're interested
in getting a taste of ourapproach.
Visions also offers a 75-minutepublic workshop teaching our
guidelines for effectivecross-cultural dialogue on the
(50:20):
last Wednesday of each month at4 pm Eastern, 1 pm Pacific.
Upcoming dates this year in2024 include August 28th,
September 25th, October 30th andNovember 20th.
It is pay what you can, so freeif you want, and all are
welcome.
I hope we see you at one soon.
There are more Elder Stories inthe works, so stay tuned.
Thank you so much for listening.
(50:40):
Until next time.
Hello, you're listening to Into Liberation, a
podcast about transformativechange, equity and working
against oppression.
I'm Leena Akhtar, director ofPrograms with Visions Inc.
Welcome, hi, everyone.
Today I'm speaking to one ofVisions' founders, Dr.
John Capitman.
(00:21):
For those of you who don't know, visions was founded in 1984 by
three Black women from RockyMount, north Carolina, and one
white Jewish man, and that iswho I'm speaking to today.
In addition to being a Visionsconsultant, john is a
now-retired professor of publichealth, where he specialized in
elder care and communityinterventions, which he talks
about at the beginning of ourconversation.
(00:42):
I also asked him about hisbackground and the life
experiences which informed thedevelopment of his commitment
and his approach.
He is married to Vision'sfounding director, dr Valerie
Batts, and I appreciated hearingmore about the earliest days of
the organization in ourconversation.
John has been a frequentcollaborator and mentor to me,
and both Vision's founding storyand the way that we work in
(01:04):
cross-cultural teams illustratessomething that is really
fundamental to our approach that, at its heart, our model is
about bringing people intorelationship across difference,
something that we deliberatelylean into and really leverage in
our work.
All of the elders I've beenspeaking to in this series have
been doing this work for most oftheir lives and in this time of
chaos when things sometimesfeel quite bleak, I've also been
(01:28):
very grateful for the lessonand message to stay the course
and keep going, and we talkabout this at the very end.
All right, I'm really excitedto be here, my colleague and
friend, dr John Capitman.
John is one of the co-foundersof Visions and a longtime
professor of public health andalso a longtime consultant with
(01:49):
Visions.
John, thank you so much fortaking the time to talk with me
today.
Thank you For folks who are notso familiar with you and your
work.
Can you introduce yourselfbriefly?
Dr. John Capitman (02:01):
I'm 69, about to turn 70 in a month or so.
I retired up just about a yearago from California State
University, fresno, and I wasthere for about 15 years and
before that I was at BrandeisUniversity.
For a long time my work hasreally been about inequalities
(02:22):
in health and understanding whysome groups of people have
better health and get bettercare than others, and looking at
ways to improve care for peoplewho are at risk of not getting
it.
I did a lot of work about eldercare, even starting with my
dissertation research.
Starting with my dissertation,research was interested in
(02:44):
elders and the services they get, and then was what?
Actually the first people, assort of disparities in health
became apparent, wrote some ofthe first material about
disparities in health amongelders, and a lot of attention
had been focused on the idea ofweathering, that some older
(03:09):
African Americans just reallylived to be very, very old
despite the odds, and that'swhere the focus of attention was
.
And my work was about thelikelihood of becoming disabled
or the likelihood of having ahard time once you were disabled
, and, of course, elders ofcolor and low-income elders
(03:29):
other people in traditionallyoppressed groups as vision
language, and I did that work atBrandeis, and then I had the
great opportunity to go toCalifornia and work with a
community-oriented public healthinstitute and be among the
first researchers at thatuniversity and helping to build
its research capacity, and alsogetting to work in this area of
(03:55):
the San Joaquin Valley, which isone of the poorest and most
polluted and most unequal placesin the United States.
I got to do something that wasreally different than at
Brandeis.
At Brandeis, we talked to theworld about what they ought to
do.
In Fresno, I really was workingwith organizations to see what
(04:16):
could we do.
We pushed policy to allowresponding to people's needs.
How could we change things up?
Funny things though.
At Brandeis, one of my biggestpieces of work was about elders
of color and cancer.
I wrote a lot about the use ofpromotores de salud, community
(04:37):
health workers.
That ended up being suchimportant work in California's
Central Valley, and we were ableto make the public health
system, the community healthcenters and the other public
health programs much moreeffective by the greatest use of
promoters about any place inthe country.
So over that period of timethis was starting in 2015.
(05:00):
Over that next 10 years, whileI was in California, we built up
the capacity to use communityhealth workers to meet the needs
of low-income people,communities of color that were
underserved, and I got lots ofother chances to sort of work on
.
You know, how can we actuallyfix this at the local level even
(05:21):
if we don't have the nationalpolicy that supports it?
And I also got to work onnational policy.
By that time.
You know I had really beendeeply involved in visions and a
lot of my work in Californiaended up being interpreting,
translating, working in visionsto make it, you know, practical
(05:43):
training for public health andcommunity organization leaders.
How do they become moreeffective at moving forward
their agenda and how can we usethe skills and the techniques
that Visions had been developing, was still developing, to
support that.
And that was the work I reallydid there.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (06:04):
I spoke to Cassandra a few weeks ago.
She talked about how she alsobrought in visions to train many
people who did early childhooddevelopment work out there.
Dr. John Capitman (06:15):
And I attracted her to come out there.
I recruited her along withothers she mentioned.
It was so great to bringexpertise.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (06:22):
So that's your professional trajectory, and
I'm also curious because we'vetalked about this in passing I
don't know a whole lot about howyou grew up, how you ended up
in North Carolina.
Dr. John Capitman (06:39):
I'm the classic pink diaper baby were
very much leaders in theCommunist Party in the New York
City area in the period afterthe war, after World War II.
My father was a vet and it hadvery dramatic experiences as a
vet that he would never tell usabout but was one of the
(06:59):
organizers of veterans for theHenry Wallace campaign.
I was doing that work that hemet my mom who was the press
secretary for the communistparty at that point.
They were married very rapidlyand had two kids.
I'm the younger of two.
My father had gone to lawschool on the GI Bill and ended
(07:26):
up having a fight with gettingpast the board in New York State
because it was right the periodof the McCarthy Commission and
all that work and so in a way myparents kind of just sort of
separated from everything afterthat and moved further upstate
New York and ended up creatingthis business of the Center for
(07:49):
Research in Marketing, and theirbusiness was social science
research.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (07:56):
So wait, he did not pass the bar.
Dr. John Capitman (07:59):
He did not pass the bar.
Wow, okay, it wasn't about theknowledge, it was about the
politics.
At that point there was somegovernment interference against
him and other people who weresame period.
A lot of people have thesestories.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (08:18):
So they made another plan.
Dr. John Capitman (08:20):
They made another plan.
They moved upstate and theyeventually developed this
marketing research business.
And you know we lived on a lakeand I was a happy kid.
I had a happy childhood, verymuch in nature, skating on the
lake in the winter and playingin canoes and rowboats in the
(08:43):
summer.
Other kids around, my bigbrother was tough on me but, you
know, kept me safe at somelevel also.
Yes, I had a very nicechildhood.
We would go sneak away and gointo the woods to where there
was a big beaver dam and theywere involved in politics in
(09:04):
that small town and it got very,very nasty with the John Birch
Society versus the pro-schoolparents and weird symbolic
struggles over things likeshould there be cots for the
children to take naps on becamethe, you know, with the John
(09:26):
Birch parents not wanting netcots for the kids to take naps
on, you know.
So it was weird and there were acouple of years that things
were quite heated.
One year somebody dumpedseveral truckloads of pumpkins
on our yard and another yearnasty things were written on our
(09:47):
yard.
Thanks that Halloween wasreally a time for trouble making
.
That's a small town.
They ended up not feeling coolwith us going to the local high
school.
We went to Groton School inMassachusetts, which was we
really didn't understand howmuch this was going into the
(10:08):
center of WASP control in the US.
Right, he was, you know, one ofthe very few Jewish kids who
went to Groton School.
We weren't brought up to bereligious, but we grew up with a
lot of sense of a Jewishprogressive community.
That was the community myparents came from.
So it's a big, big shock.
(10:30):
By the time I went to MiltonAcademy, milton was somewhat
more open and progressivecompared to Groton and I guess
they were a little bit moreprepared.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (10:42):
How old were you when you went to school?
They were a little bit moreprepared.
Dr. John Capitman (10:44):
How old were you when you went to wait a
school?
I went to private school inninth grade for Milton and then
had a tough first year of highschool and problems with my eye.
I had trouble learning to read,got glasses and learned to read
very quickly once they kind ofgot what was wrong with my eyes,
but they deteriorated.
(11:05):
that first year at milt Icompeted so hard, I tried so
hard so I ended up going whatwas to be a year off and went to
parents, sent me to switzerland, to a school in switzerland
that was sort of verballyoriented, so I learned some
french and German and continuedto study Latin and, you know,
(11:28):
had a really wonderfulexperience.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (11:31):
Switzerland, so I didn't know you'd done it
here or there, okay.
Dr. John Capitman (11:34):
I ended up coming back early, not actually
finishing the school year,because it was the spring of the
Vietnam protests and my brotherwas at Yale getting in trouble
protesting the Vietnam War andmy parents were at that point
living in New York City and Ispent a lot of time going to
(11:56):
protest marches in that springand went back to Milton the next
year Credit for that year,which hadn't been the plan.
I learned enough, I guess thatyear.
Milton was a tough experience.
There was one other Jewish kidin my class but he was actually
also a Cabot.
The Cabots in the Lodges, thebig New England families, black
(12:21):
guy were first and second in theclass and a Catholic Italian
guy was third in the class andnone of us got any prizes at all
.
Went to all the prizes went topeople who were insiders and
there was always that sense thatit was OK for me to go to
school there.
But they weren't really.
(12:41):
They really weren't in favor ofme there, but they weren't
really.
They really weren't in favor ofme.
Many years later, when we werethinking about our son going to
private school, the sameadmissions officer was there who
had been there when I was there.
Wow, and he said God, we reallymistreated you, john, we don't
think you'll be happy here.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (13:03):
Wow, what a thing to admit.
Dr. John Capitman (13:05):
Yeah, it was rough as a senior.
I had really really good scoresand grades and I didn't get
into Harvard, yale or Princetonand I applied afterwards to Pitt
where my father was teachingthat year, having sort of gotten
tired of his business.
His business had gotten to betoo much work.
(13:25):
He really was doing a littleconsulting and he taught at Pitt
for a couple of years.
Then he moved to Florida.
But yeah, so I went to Pitt andthey wrote nasty
recommendations about me, that Iwas immature.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (13:37):
Milton did.
Dr. John Capitman (13:38):
Yeah.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (13:39):
Yikes.
Dr. John Capitman (13:40):
The next year I got into Harvard, yale and
Princeton as a transfer student.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (13:44):
Wow.
So where did you graduate fromYale?
Okay, that's right.
Dr. John Capitman (13:48):
Okay, so that's not.
Back then Val and I met at Dukeat graduate school.
She was one of the only, ormaybe the only, north Carolinian
in our program.
Everybody else was fromelsewhere.
I had thought I wanted to go toclinical psych graduate school.
I didn't get into any clinicalpsych graduate schools because I
(14:11):
hadn't been a psychundergraduate and I hadn't taken
the GRE or whatever test.
I hadn't taken any of the tests.
I just decided to apply and Iapplied really to Duke and UNC
randomly because my mother haddriven through those towns on
some trip and thought I wouldlike the area.
I was real ambivalent aboutgoing to graduate school and I
got into social psych at Dukeand thought, okay, well, that's
(14:34):
interesting, I'll do that.
I'm really glad I did.
It was a better fit for me as aprogram.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (14:39):
Than clinical.
Yeah, so did you apply to gradschool right out of undergrad,
or were you?
Dr. John Capitman (14:46):
was so.
I think my dad died on thesummer between my junior and
senior year of college and soafter my senior year my mom was
still living in Miami.
I went to Miami and I actuallywas there for two years doing
various things A year or twoyears, I think it was two years
(15:07):
before I went to graduate schooland I took a trip cross country
.
I took about three months todrove cross country before
starting at Duke at graduateschool and the social psych
program was interesting andsmall.
You know, there was a lot ofoverlap of the faculty, so some
of the clinical faculty taughtin the social psych courses and
(15:30):
vice versa.
We took stat together.
I think Val and I first reallymet each other in stat courses
and I had not takenundergraduate statistics.
I had taken quantum mechanicsbut I hadn't taken statistics.
I mean taking quantum mechanicsbut I hadn't taken statistics
and I found it very difficultand kept asking stupid questions
, things that everybody else youknow.
(15:51):
I think that it was assumedthat people knew and I later
learned that many of myclassmates appreciated me,
asking what is that, what isthat, what does that mean in
that class, and Val and Istarted hanging out after that.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (16:09):
That's class and what led you to your
interest in psychology.
Dr. John Capitman (16:23):
I was an undergraduate linguistics and
philosophy major, and I think itwas really.
This actually relates to somecontent that I hope we talk
about.
You know, coming from my father, my brother is an economist.
My father studied law, wasreally kind of a sociologist
more than anything else, but Idefinitely grew up with a bias
against thinking about thepersonal level.
The perspective that that wassilly, that things were shaped
(16:45):
at the macro-individual level bysocieties and systems and
structures, and linguistics isclearly what could be more of a
social phenomenon than language.
Language is about.
Interaction is the sort ofmodel for everything else.
That's macro-individual interms of shaping people.
(17:07):
So I got interested in the ideathat, yeah, maybe the most
important questions were at thesystems level, but somehow you
had to take into account thatindividuals were shaped by
systems and systems shapedpeople.
Both were the case, and Ithought that I didn't know
(17:29):
enough of that.
That's how I got intopsychology.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (17:32):
You've certainly corrected for that
bias now.
Dr. John Capitman (17:35):
You know that's really interesting.
A lot of my work in publichealth has been about
introducing the macro level intopublic health.
So we typically have studiedobesity, smoking, anxiety
disorders, all those things ascharacteristics of individuals
and we've tended to understandracial, ethnic and social class
(17:57):
differences in health outcomesas the behavior of individuals.
And so a lot of my work wasabout well, okay, what about air
pollution and what about thequality of life and what about
the opportunities available topeople?
Those were all macro,individual and were shaping
health, and so it's almostaccepted now.
(18:20):
It's almost accepted now.
If you were to look at a yearof random newspapers and pop
psychology things, you'd seejust as much about the
environment as individual.
But that's really a majorsocial change that you know I
(18:44):
and lots of other people got thechance to participate in.
You know, and so much of mylife has been about wanting to
sort that out, sort out the sortof individual system, how that
all worked.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (18:56):
One of the wonderful things about the way
that we work at Visions is weground our, I find I mean I've
certainly ground my relationshipto the model and to the work
that I do in my own experiencesand the transformation that
happened in me.
And one of the things I've beenasking our elders about, as
I've done these interviews, ishow they feel that their early
(19:19):
life experiences, theperspectives they developed,
maybe even like shock moments,shaped their view of the world
and decision to do this work andthe approach to this work.
So that's a question I want toask you.
Dr. John Capitman (19:35):
You know, having the education that I had,
I felt like an ultimate insiderand constantly reminded of my
outsider status.
So both and I felt both sovisibly.
I mean I understand.
You know how do you say thiswithout sounding terrible.
I understand I'm one of thebest educated people in the room
, almost always.
(19:55):
You know almost every setting.
I understand that I've hadopportunities to learn from
amazing people and opportunitiesto engage myself in learning in
a way that other people haven't.
So I'm really aware of thatopportunity, what that's meant,
you know.
I mean we've had shortages ofmoney, but I never felt really
at a deep level that I could getanother job in a minute, you
(20:18):
know, in a few days.
I never really felt like I wasgoing to be out on the street
and that.
I know that's a weird way toput it.
But that level of confidenceabout being successful in the
economy was something that Ireally got from that
establishment education and alsofrom my parents, who were just
endlessly hopeful, though alwayskind of worried they could all
(20:44):
fall apart tomorrow, that kindof perspective.
So I got that too, but thatdeep confidence that the society
does in fact work for me and Ialso saw, you know, shared a
couple of things.
I had lots of experiences thattaught me the other side,
including the car accident.
Val was on her way down toFlorida for us to have an
(21:07):
engagement party.
I was hit by a drunk driver.
This was in Miami.
I had a crush, fracture, threecervical vertebrae and other
damage.
Of course, terrible shock for ayoung couple and all that.
But it also gave me,unfortunately, just a tremendous
(21:27):
sense of my, but all of ourphysical frailty being among the
able-bodied is temporary.
I don't really know at whatpoint we came to the sort of
idea of understanding all ofthese patterns of oppression as
simultaneously and equallyvalued.
(21:48):
It was so much for hearingpeople not wanting to talk about
racism and wanting to talkabout their pain as a working
class person, as an Italian, asa person with disabilities, and
I think, at first by kind ofagri-action to all that, oh,
(22:09):
they're just avoiding talkingabout racism, they just don't
want to talk about that, andthat over time you have to
acknowledge that thoseexperiences are perfectly real,
that our society is structuredaround all these dimensions of
better than and less than,better than and less than, and
(22:31):
that you know if I could reallyget to understand what it feels
to me like as a person withdisabilities when there's when
space doesn't accommodate for meat all.
You know, in the earlier years,after my accident, I was a fit
young man but I also had a lotof pain and, you know, needed to
, needed not to be slouching ata chair, needed to be able to
get up, you know, and movearound, and I wasn't always able
(22:53):
to and you know you couldreally feel it.
Or spaces where there were onlydeep, low couches.
So you know, for me that sortof feeling of being not
accommodated in that way was soreal that it made me begin to be
able to see and listen to otherpeople's experiences of not
being accommodated.
The Jewish thing, you know, ina way not as meaningful, not as
(23:18):
emotionally charged for me asphysical pain and lack of
accommodation and that sort ofexperience of being just hit
over the head in the Boston area, in Miami, in North Carolina,
every place with you knowChristianity and the depth of
(23:38):
Christianity and the assumptionof just this idea we're going to
live forever.
You know we're going to have anafterlife.
You know, as a Jew, I don'tbelieve in an afterlife ever.
You know we're going to have anafterlife.
You know, as a Jew, I don'tbelieve in an afterlife.
You got one time.
You got one time to do the bestjob you can and to try and make
the world the best, better.
That's a really basic thing.
To have the world structured onthe idea that this is just
(24:01):
practice for the afterlife andI'll be forgiven anyway.
You know that's a perspectivethat when you don't have it,
it's quite overwhelming to bearound so much.
You know, I've always beendissatisfied with myself.
Physically, I wanted to be moreof an athlete, more fitting,
(24:22):
whatever it is I think my fatherwanted, although I don't really
know and that difference andrealizing how much pain other
people have even much more thanI do I'm not discounting them
around their physicaldifferences.
That's different from thedisability dimension, but it's
another dimension arounddifferences so powerful,
(24:43):
palpable and painful for peopleas I let myself be aware of it.
You know, I think this came toa deeper understanding of the
intention, the intention offreeing people from racism,
sexism, I don't know.
That's one part of the model Ithink is incredibly important
and so much based in my ownexperience, I think that this
(25:05):
you know, the whole notion ofthe levels, how the levels shape
each other and are shaped byeach other and interact
constantly in creating andsustaining inequalities.
Again, I think that level justthat came from I mean, my own
contribution to that really camefrom my cynicism about
psychology.
Cynicism about psychology, myparents and my brother and the
(25:28):
worldview of psychology.
But it's not the opiate of thepeople, that's religion, but
some similar kind of idea.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (25:39):
So this is something I'm quite interested
in.
So you and Val, you met in gradschool.
You were thinking about thesethings.
You were thinking about thesethings together, thinking about
them grounded in your ownexperiences.
Dr. John Capitman (26:08):
I'm curious about the trajectory when the
two of you met and how the workthat you did in that period you
know academically and thenafterward how that culminated in
the founding of thisorganization and the development
of the model.
I really think everything isabout Val's leadership at some
point.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (26:18):
I can remember , our honeymoon consisted of
driving cross-country.
Dr. John Capitman (26:19):
I don't know if you did that, I did not.
To begin her, we both hadfellowships in the Bay Area,
required residency for apsychology degree and for me it
was just a postdoc.
Anyway, on that trip we came upwith the acronym Visions.
Ah, amazing.
(26:43):
I remember us thinking a lotabout the acronym, joking about
that, as we drove through theColorado mountains.
So that's.
I really think that Val wasreally clear that she wanted to
have her to create her ownorganization.
She didn't want to.
She didn't want to work at ahospital or a university as a
(27:03):
full-time thing.
You know, after the internshipshe worked at medical College of
Virginia, vcu, virginiaCommonwealth University, in a
counseling psych program and Ithink it was in in that period
that we kind of thought aboutwell, we had this neat acronym
named for an organization.
Maybe we really needed to formthe organization.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (27:26):
That's when you knew Julian.
Dr. John Capitman (27:27):
You met Julian in Virginia, yeah, we met
Julian, big parts of it werealready in our minds.
I mean, at Duke we worked withsomebody named Joyce Landrum
Brown.
Anyway, I got a gig that gaveus the opportunity to rent an
office and very soon visionsformed.
(27:50):
It's funny.
I don't know how juliananswered this, but I don't
remember a specific moment wherewe decided go for it.
I remember when there was amoment where val had enough
consulting contracts and mary,julian's wife, had enough
clients that they didn't needthe health center anymore.
(28:12):
They didn't need VCU anymore.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (28:15):
Julian remembers an initial meeting
where he made the shrimp curry.
Dr. John Capitman (28:21):
Yeah, when we discussed the organization.
Sometime in there there wasthis meeting at Moten Conference
Center.
Did he tell you about that?
Dr. Leena Akhtar (28:32):
No.
Dr. John Capitman (28:33):
Conference Center is in Virginia.
It's where Martin Luther Kingsupposedly wrote the I have a
Dream speech and it's one of theoldest Black-owned conference
centers in the US and it's stillthere and we met there and my
mom was there, valerie's dad wasthere, several other elders
(28:54):
from her community, a couple ofour teachers were there, and
that was when we formally formedVisions.
That was the beating whereBarry, in front of everybody, in
front of a whole group ofpeople, told me to shut up and I
laughed and didn't shut up andother people were shocked that
(29:19):
we had that kind of relationship.
That would be okay.
Yeah, wow, almost all of theelders who were at that meeting
are gone now, but they gave usgreat and you know, they, they
it was really, you know, valerie, but it was them.
It was yeah, you can do this,you can take this idea and and
(29:42):
and go someplace with it.
We also had this simultaneousthing going on, which was the
Wright Center.
I don't know if we talked aboutthat, but that was taking a
property that had been in AngelaBryan's family but was
neglected.
That was an Art Deco gem,something my mom recognized and
(30:04):
got excited about where we couldmeet, and Angela's mom was
starting to have Alzheimer's.
Her father had died fromAlzheimer's.
I had been studying adult dayhealth centers we just had a
Vulcan mind mill there.
You know just that differentforces and had identified this
property and gotten support fromthe guy who's now the governor
(30:28):
Hooper, who was a representativefrom that area and a friend of
Valerie and Angela's fromgrowing up, from high school
days, I think.
He gave us financial supportand we got other financial
support and my mom produced anarchitect and that's how the
Wright Center developed.
So that was all going on rightat the early point, right around
(30:52):
the same time as we had theMoten meeting and talked about.
You know that we not onlywanted to do that, that our
vision was broader than that,that we not only wanted to do
the Wright Center thing.
We thought that was great, butwe wanted to more broadly take
our emerging ideas about racismand address them.
This was the period where peoplewere really you know this is
(31:15):
the late 70s, early 1980s.
That's a period where peoplewere really convinced that we
had not everybody but whitepeople were really convinced
that we had overcome racism,that the typical US resident
maybe held negative affecttoward people of color but
largely denied having racism andlargely denied awareness of a
(31:40):
history of inequalities and acurrent reality that was just
such a striking feature of themoment.
You know kind of the way thatthe emergence of Trumpism is so
much the striking feature ofthis moment.
If there's a lesson to ourstory, it maybe is that there
needs to be an emerging voice,just like ours was about wait a
(32:04):
second.
Racism is real.
It's not quite over yet.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (32:08):
So I have two questions for you, then.
One question is that I'mcurious what doing this work in
that kind of a climate was likeinitially.
How do you make the case forthis work?
Obviously, we are constantlyreinventing the language that we
use as we pitch our work and,you know, share with clients and
(32:32):
make the case.
And the other question I haveis now, 40 years on, or 35 years
on, when I first startedtraining.
The model is really tight.
It works.
The process is set up so thatit contains people as they go on
a journey with this, and I'mcurious what the early days were
(32:55):
like.
Dr. John Capitman (32:56):
Yeah, yeah, so I guess I learned most from
these circumstances that reallydidn't work.
And there are things that Ilearned a lot from what didn't
work.
I often tell this story ofbeing at a session in Richmond
(33:21):
with the utilities departmentand there are I don't know 40
men, all big and overweight andin their 40s and 50s, most have
not had a college degree.
That are the various officialsin this department and then one
very diminutive 28-year-oldAfrican-American woman, and so
(33:46):
here's the part of the storythey tell.
At some point she says wait asecond, we're not all the same.
I'm here, I'm different fromyou, and it was super revealing
for me about that concept, aboutthe several concepts.
So here's the part of the storythat I don't usually tell.
Over lunch they went out andgot drunk.
(34:07):
Most of the guys went out andgot drunk, and in the afternoon
one guy fell out, you know, hada heart attack or something in
the course of the meeting.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (34:17):
Like you're training with them.
Dr. John Capitman (34:19):
Yeah, Wow, Okay, Out for lunch.
They had several beers.
They came back they clearlywere inebriated as we continued
the training and just sort ofsoldiered through it and then
one of the guys fell out and hefell out.
You know just what I was sortof getting into, but high-budget
.
You know, just to the pointwhere I was sort of, I think,
(34:39):
firmly arguing with one of hiscolleagues about one of the
ideas and just as now you knowideas that affirmative action
meant that inferior people wouldbe hired.
You know, right, with thisyoung lady right there, this was
really where I learnedsomething about sensitivity and
(35:02):
about awareness that this is alldeeper and heavier and harder
than I think.
And I don't think we made themgo drink and I don't think we
made the guy fell out, butimagine it wouldn't have taken
much to feel like that's whathad happened, Do you mean?
Dr. Leena Akhtar (35:19):
that sounds like a very stressful
facilitation, John.
Dr. John Capitman (35:22):
Yeah, it wouldn't have taken much to feel
responsible and I knew I wasn'tand I just learned a lot from
that about how serious the workis and how emotional it is for
people and that the emotionalityis real and I guess.
So I have various stories ofthings that I didn't, that
(35:44):
didn't work and they learnedfrom and so you know I what's
that?
The vibe is much more capablelearning the you know when you
touch the stove than it is.
Rick Archer 1 session.
For some reason this was inBoston and I either didn't have
a female person of color trainer, female or person of color
(36:06):
co-trainer, or I think this isthe case.
I didn't trust the person, Ididn't know the person and I
gave some examples ofinternalized oppression and I
didn't phrase them.
I experienced this because ofmy disability.
I phrased them.
I've heard from anAfrican-American woman and
(36:26):
people were very upset and angry.
A negatively influenced womanand people of color in the room
wasn't my place to share thoseideas and I think that, for me
at least, that whole concept ofwhat we mean by internalized
oppression really got muchclearer to me in that moment.
Internalized oppression reallygot much clearer to me in that
moment and, most particularly,it's never my places.
(36:47):
Only the person can say whethertheir behavior is internalized
oppression.
Someone else can judge thatabout them, and I really didn't
understand that till then.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (37:02):
So those are trial by fire moments and I
deeply appreciate hearing thosebecause there are a lot of
experiences like that that I'velearned from the touching the
fire moments Absolutely how themodel, the intellectual and
(37:26):
theoretical underpinnings cametogether as you all were
starting to apply it in theongoing natural settings.
What was that like?
Pioneering the model,developing it, working with the
various pieces?
Dr. John Capitman (37:35):
I feel like it was developmental.
It was those experiences thatI'm talking about, or preparing
for conferences.
Val and Joyce Landrum-Brown andI did the multicultural process
of change picture the firsttime in preparation for a
conference.
I don't remember what theconference was and we were
(37:58):
trying to talk about this ideaof the four levels being
connected to each other and thatprocess of moving from a
monocultural perspective to amulticultural perspective.
And that model has been reallyworked on and fixed and made
much clearer and much morespecific over time and lots of
(38:19):
people contributed and I thinkthat most of the pieces are like
that.
The five modern racism behaviorswe originally had four and the
first couple of times we sharedpieces of the model shared about
this idea of modern racism.
In California we had people youknow say things like you know,
(38:44):
I had a taco for breakfast andsushi for lunch.
I love all the multiculturalismin California.
It's just wonderful andeverybody's got a fair shot.
So we really hadn't heard thatin the East or the Midwest, the
places where we grew up, theinequalities were people knew
(39:04):
they were there and knew youknow that wasn't the question.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (39:08):
So it developed as you, as you worked
with different groups anddifferent.
Dr. John Capitman (39:11):
Right, so so things came out as we talked
about them Makes sense.
And then I think the you knowthe internalized oppression work
to some extent comes straightout of Val's dissertation.
Internalized oppression were tosome extent come straight out
of Val's dissertation.
Oh, we also worked for one ofour mentors at Duke.
(39:33):
Anyway, his theory he had workedon the Bradley-Yorty campaign
and he had articulated an ideathat he called symbolic racism.
John Sears is one of the peopleinvolved in that and I'm still
blanking on another guy's name,john McConaughey and their idea
was that people would useabstract symbols instead of the
(39:54):
traditional language of racismso the streets are not safe
without a policeman really cameas a measure of racism from
their world, or Blacks aregetting too demanding in their
push for equal rights, and thatwas their idea.
So that was already, and theyhad articulated a kind of denial
(40:16):
of differences as part of thephenomenon.
And then you know, I don't seepeople as people.
You know I don't see people asblack and white.
I see people, people, thatstuff that was just so prevalent
in the society that thatclearly was one of the phenomena
.
I don't have a single story.
That's what I think is.
(40:37):
The story I want to share isthat each piece of the model
that came from trying to workwith people about their feelings
and their behaviors related torace, and we understood pieces
of it as we went along.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (40:53):
So, speaking of feelings, what you just said,
I think the thing that setsvisions apart we've talked a lot
about this is the astutenessaround and adeptness in working
with feelings.
Was that there from thebeginning, like most explicitly
in the feelings as messengerssegment?
Dr. John Capitman (41:13):
Feelings as messengers was my thesis.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (41:16):
Okay, there we go.
Dr. John Capitman (41:19):
And then the analysis of interactions came
from two different sources.
It's transactional analysis.
It's just basically what it is,and, having never heard of
transactional analysis, myundergraduate thesis was about
misunderstanding in conversation, and one of my key ideas about
(41:41):
misunderstanding in conversationwas that people often heard the
words rather than the affect orthe affect rather than the
words.
So that that's what I worked onas an undergraduate, and so, as
we started really focusing onthe transactions between around
race, both asking people aboutracial politics but also seeing
(42:06):
how people responded differentlyof race In my thesis we had
people.
We had white undergraduate womenworking with another woman who
was either white or Black andwho became increasingly
unpleasant during the course ofthe experiment, and we selected
(42:26):
women who said that they feltjust as comfortable towards
whites as Blacks and women whodidn't, and we also asked them
their attitudes about questionslike the streets are not safe
without a policeman, and what wefound was that modern racism
questions and the feelingthermometer both predicted
(42:47):
behavior and that the women whowere said they felt colder
toward Blacks actually got muchmore anxious when the Black
partner started to be mean tothem and took it much more
personally.
It's quite a social scienceexperiment that aren't even
(43:07):
allowed.
Yeah, and he were measuringgalvanic skin response and blood
pressure and a few other things.
And you know, show this, youknow, right now I think we would
want to measure some hormonesto see big spikes.
So this was the idea that,physiologically, people stated
(43:29):
views on race and racism, evenif they were indirect and
confusing, were still predictiveof a biological response to
being in a racial, in aninterracial situation.
So feelings thermometer that wasyour undergraduate research.
Feelings thermometer andcomplicated?
No, my undergraduate researchwas misunderstandings of daily
(43:53):
life.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (43:54):
Okay, and then this this was later Okay.
Dr. John Capitman (43:57):
A graduate, yeah Right, so that all kind of
like really fit awfully wellwith transactional analysis.
So that all kind of like reallyfit awfully well with
transactional analysis.
And so a lot of the ideasreally came from that sort of
intersection of a kind of socialscience view of the role of
feelings and attitude formationand expression and the way the
(44:19):
transactional analysis worked onthat Fantastic Seeing the
feelings is connected to sort ofdeeper messages about who I am
as a person.
Transactional analysis wasuncomfortable for Val and even
more so for me because it wasstill at that point apolitical.
And so you wanted to talk aboutnot just not just were your
(44:42):
folks mad at themselves and theworld or not and passed on
negative perception, but alsodid your folks have confusing
ideas about race that theypassed on directly or indirectly
?
It's really interesting.
I read pretty broadly inpsychology and there have been a
lot of efforts to understandracism and I think that our work
(45:04):
is consistent with the broadvariety of approaches.
That somehow has to add acomplicated story about how you
grew up and what you wereexposed to and what you know and
kind of what you imagine aboutthe other people and you know
what you actually know All thekind of mass of different
(45:25):
factors that we talk about kindof are the basis of the social
science account and at a certainlevel that social science
account is so uncomfortable itdoesn't work to just do
political science.
It's not just about big groupsof people and their interactions
, it's also about how peopletake that on personally.
(45:46):
That idea, that fundamentalpiece, is really different than
just about every other groupthat does consulting about
racism who either do one levelor the other.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (45:58):
The deeper elements of the work that we do,
where we see where people pickup and are emotionally impressed
with their ideas aboutoppression, about themselves,
about other people.
Again, I think that that's thething that differentiates
visions from other approaches.
So you know, this is Vision's40th year.
(46:21):
It's been 40 years since theinception.
The model's been evolving anddeveloping.
Now me and cohorts below me aretaking it on and using it and
implementing it out in the world.
What do you hope to see in theworld?
Dr. John Capitman (46:35):
In terms of hope.
I've been thinking a lot aboutHolly Neer's comments and Val
and I heard something quitedifferent Holly Neer speaking to
the Visions group and weactually heard something
different.
It's funny.
This is something that I hopefor, that I think is actually
there.
I think that when we startedout, we really thought that by
the time we got to be old, thatthings would be really different
(46:57):
, that the society would havebecome much more open, that
people would, you know, be okaywith themselves and be okay with
each other.
A little bit that was thearrogance of youth and a little
bit it was a worldview ofprogress, that societies make
progress, and I guess what we'veseen over our lives is that,
yeah, progress can be made, butso can moving backwards, and
(47:20):
that you know every little bitof progress is tentative, and so
, rather than being sad, andthat you know every little bit
of progress is is is tentative,and so, rather than being sad
about that, there's a part of methat's always known that the
work is the work, that theprocess is the process, that,
even if we don't get there, thatour purpose and being in life,
you know the reason we're here.
I'm laughing because it soundsso overblown.
(47:42):
But you know, you kind ofdecide that working to make the
world better, to make peoplekinder to each other, if I can
do something to make thatpossible, I want to do that and
I may only make a little bit ofprogress sometimes with some
people and I may even, you know,move communities forward.
(48:02):
I started out by telling thisstory of community health
workers in the Central Valley.
More people get better healthcare.
That's something that reallydid change.
Adult health centers are allover the country.
That was one of the first thingsI worked on.
That's something that made lifebetter for people.
So we can, you know we can makecontributions.
I think that the way in whichsome of the big companies we've
(48:25):
worked with are different isreal at Lafcine and yet making
sense of when that happens andwhen it doesn't, and how to
value when it happens and how tovalue the struggle.
So that's my hope.
My hope is that you know yourgeneration and the people that
come after you who do this work,do it with that understanding,
(48:48):
with some peace, having come tosome peace about that.
It's this process, it's theworking on it, it's the moving
it forward, it's the littlevictories that matter.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (49:00):
You know, val said something a couple of years
ago that's really stayed withme.
It was along the lines of ifthe people that preceded her had
given up, she wouldn't be there.
And that's really stayed withme, especially when I think
about staying in the work andexactly what you're talking
about, right, how to recognizethe victories, even if you know
(49:24):
we have not eliminated racism orsexism or any of the other.
Dr. John Capitman (49:28):
The big story ain't so great.
You know it's funny.
I guess it's very much my mom'sjob.
My mom said take care of thelittle stuff, the big stuff will
take care of itself.
Dr. Leena Akhtar (49:37):
Yeah, yeah, John, thank you so, so much.
It's always wonderful to talkto you and collaborate with you,
and this has been great.
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.
Yeah, likewise, as you may know, 2024 is Vision's 40th
anniversary and we're having abig celebration at the State
Room in Boston on September 27th.
(49:59):
Please join us if you can.
Please join us if you can.
Our lineup of honored speakersinclude Gloria Steinem, Vernee
Myers and the Reverend DrWilliam J Barber II.
There's a link down in the shownotes Now if you're interested
in getting a taste of ourapproach.
Visions also offers a 75-minutepublic workshop teaching our
guidelines for effectivecross-cultural dialogue on the
(50:20):
last Wednesday of each month at4 pm Eastern, 1 pm Pacific.
Upcoming dates this year in2024 include August 28th,
September 25th, October 30th andNovember 20th.
It is pay what you can, so freeif you want, and all are
welcome.
I hope we see you at one soon.
There are more Elder Stories inthe works, so stay tuned.
Thank you so much for listening.
(50:40):
Until next time.
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