September 1, 2024 • 57 mins
Writer and activist, Africa Brooke, used to call people out on the internet all the time - because this is what the culture wars told her she needed to do.
Until one day - she suddenly stopped.
In 2021, Africa wrote an open letter and posted it online. She called it: “Why I’m Leaving the Cult of Wokeness” and it immediately went viral. The letter changed her life, but not in the way she expected it to.
So what did she write in that letter? And how did she become unafraid? Was she cancelled?
In this bold and timely interview - Africa Brooke and Mia Freedman discuss the pressures, expectations and risks of living in the Age of Intolerance.
You can find out more about Africa Brooke here.
You can follow Africa on Instagram here.
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CREDITS:
Host: Mia Freedman
You can find Mia on Instagram here and get her newsletter here.
Executive Producer: Naima Brown
Audio Producer: Thom Lion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to a MoMA Maya podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Mama Maya acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast is recorded on.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
So the risk that I was taking was will I
be betraying the black community? Will I be betraying women?
Will I be betraying other left leaning people? Am I
betraying my audience and friends and people that think they
know me and my partner and whatever else? But also
I was at such a point of the rage, if
you will, because suddenly I couldn't unsee how many people
(00:41):
were monetizing from people's shame. And the truth is, I
was not afraid of cancelation. I was not afraid of
the exile.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Welcome to no filter from Mamma may I'm me afraidman,
and I am afraid of being canceled every day in
every way. But as you just heard, my guest today
is not afraid, not anymore. Because in twenty twenty one,
writer and activist Africa Brook wrote an open letter and
posted it online. She called it why I'm Leaving the
(01:17):
Cult of Wokeness, and it immediately went viral. She was
twenty nine years old at the time, and that open
letter changed her life but not in the way she
expected it to. So what did she write in a
letter and how did she become unafraid and also why
she canceled. Africa believes that we are living right now
(01:39):
in the age of intolerance. Hard agree. And she also
believes that what the culture was demand of us is
to pick aside and post loudly and incessantly about it
on social media. And so for a long time, that's
what she did until suddenly one day it made her
feel sick. You're about to hear what happened that day,
(02:00):
but before you learn what made her quit the so
called cult of wokeness, you need to know how and
why she joined in the first place. Africa's story actually
begins back in twenty sixteen when she had a severe
drinking problem. So I started by asking her how her
alcohol addiction turned her into an activist.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
I was twenty four years old and I was trying
to get sober. But I was struggling, struggling to let
go of alcohol, and it was pretty bad. It wasn't
sort of like a oh I take it a little
bit too far. Sometimes it was alcoholism. So I was
a blank out drinker, a bench drinker, very specifically, which
I think the British and Australians understand that very well
(02:45):
and know exactly what that is because it's embedded in
our culture. I have always been a writer, I've always
been in the creative world. So when I realized that
this problem wasn't going to be going anywhere anytime soon,
I started sharing online. I had relapsed seven times before that,
and I really knew that if I don't find a
(03:07):
way to get sober, going to be dead before I
turned twenty five years old. So I started an Instagram account,
which was anonymous at the time, still the same one
that I have today, and I started sharing sharing as
a way to keep myself sober, sharing as a way
to see if my you know, cries for help would
land with anyone out there. There was no plan to
(03:28):
build any sort of platform in the way that I
do now. None of that was part of the plan.
I just needed to get well and I had no
other space to do it offline. That was it. And
then what happened is that my story got picked up
pretty quickly by the UK media because of my age,
because of the way that I spoke about it, but
also it was just a sort of compelling story as well.
(03:49):
And I was immediately. When I say immediately, I mean
maybe six to eight months in, I was labeled as
a sobriety advocate. And the thing is, when you become
labeled as an advocate, you are also then labeled as
an activist, you know. So that's an important piece of
the story for me. Pretty early on into my recovery,
(04:10):
me just sharing about recovery and my findings and you know,
speaking in the way that I do now, but just
in a very different way. It was very recovery specific
at the time. I then became labeled an activist. And
once you get labeled an activist, you're not only expected
to speak about the specific thing you talk about. Now
you have to activate for everything else. So now I
(04:32):
can't just speak about recovery. I have to speak about
recovery through the lens of being a black woman. And
then after I do that, I have to speak about
recovery through the lens of a black immigrant woman, and
then so on and so on and so on. Right,
But then it doesn't just stop with me. I have
to start advocating for other people. And to be honest,
I actually, how do I put this? Not even just
(04:56):
on a credibility level, if I'm to be completely honest,
I think on an egoic level, it felt quite good
for people to think that I am someone that is
worthy of taking up all of these causes. So I
never really questioned it, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
It's like, not all heroes wear capes. Some of them
have a social media account, yeah, some of some of them.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Post on Insta, they do, some of them make infographics,
you know. So I think that part of the story
is quite important because then twenty sixteen, especially with everything
that happened in the US with Trump being elected, and
then I would say that for me and actually most
people that I speak to you, that's when we started
to notice the sort of just how much our most
(05:36):
intimate lives were being politicized. I don't remember before then
people looking at every fucking thing through the lens of politics.
I just don't, you know. Yeah, So twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen,
twenty eighteen, I started to go sort of deeper into
social justice spaces, but I truly believed I still had
my autonomy. I didn't believe that I was a social
(05:58):
justice warrior or anything like that, but I supported anyone
that was doing anything under social justice, because it's still
a value that I hold closely to this day. It
just looks very different to what I thinkt what it
needed to look like. And I realized that even though
I was a very confident, outspoken person and I'd been
speaking publicly around very challenging things for a time, I
(06:22):
just thought I'd feel very afraid in my own mind
first to begin with. And I can realize it now
more in retrospect, but I recognize what that feeling was.
Where I felt that I couldn't ask questions was the
first one, or that I couldn't point out any contradictions
that would kind of poke holes in whatever the mission was,
(06:43):
whether it was to do with race or gender, or
sex or identity, anything that didn't quite make sense to me.
I felt as if I just needed to keep it
to myself. You know that I'm not allowed to talk
about it because if I talk about it or ask
the questions, I might seem as if, how do I
put it, it felt like a betrayal. If I'm to
(07:03):
put it very simply, It's not a logical thing. It
just felt like I'm betraying black people if I ask
these questions or point out these contradictions, or I'm betraying
women if I say, actually, I don't think we should
live in such a fearful way, or to believe that
all men are just so many things that I just thought, okay,
but how is this applicable? Is it applicable to every
(07:25):
single situation? Just any critical thinking was sort of not
allowed by myself but also by the environment around me.
That was just the reality of it. So this suppression
of my voice and my inner thoughts especially, it just
started to come to a head around twenty nineteen because
I felt that I wasn't being in complete integrity with
(07:47):
my work. My work is about understanding self sabotage. My
work has always been around self expression and taking emotional
conversational risks. It's always been about having the conversations that
no one wants to have. But I realized that there
was an ever growing list of things that I was
not allowed to say, you know, because.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
It did go with the correct opinion on that topic
according to activists. Absolutely yeah, right, So like if you
questioned the idea that say all men a rapists, and
you said, well, hang on, not all men, right, or
if say you believed. I don't know if this is
something you believe or not, but if you believed in
abortion but didn't feel comfortable with late term abortions for
(08:31):
non medical reasons, for example, but you couldn't say those
things publicly because the activists on those issues insisted you
or either with them or you were an enemy, and
you had to choose. There was no room for nuance.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
There you go, there you go, one hundred percent. And
I think that was in the defense of men without
taking the nuance of well, when we talk about men,
we're also talking about boys, So how is it for
boys to be hearing us speaking of that? There was
just you can't, you can't. It just is what it is.
So for me, all of that over the course of
two to three years felt like a huge integrity breach massively.
(09:08):
I just couldn't keep up with it any more internally
for myself. And by the time twenty twenty comes around
and George Floyd is murdered in the States, like anyone else,
I was absolutely horrified. I felt just a level of
sickness I've never felt before around the situation like that,
(09:29):
And I think a lot of it is to do
with the fact that we were all online and we
will never experience well I hope we'll never experience anything
like that again. But it was just a very different time. Psychologically,
we were all very different. But there was something about
that specific case and the way that it sort of
just exploded all over the world, and how regardless of
(09:52):
where you were in the world, you were supposed to
behave and speak and respond to it in a very
specific way, very specific way. I even write about it
in the book and I say that even if you
were a shepherd in rural Guero, which is Zimbabwe, you
were expected to speak about this and to post the
(10:12):
square and to atone for your sins if you happen
to be white. For me, in the beginning, I felt
that sort of, I'm black, I'm supposed to respond to
this immediately. I'm supposed to call other white people in,
you know, this idea, which I think is so self righteous.
You know that I have to call people in, you know,
(10:33):
But that's what it was. That's what I felt like.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Can you explain the difference between calling someone out and
calling someone in and how those two things have sort
of seen differently.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Well, first of all, I personally don't think there's any difference.
But the idea of calling someone out, for example, is
that you notice a problematic action or some kind of wrongdoing,
then you have a duty to name whatever the harm
that's been done, and you have a duty to use
pretty much any means necessary apart from let's say, extreme
(11:04):
physical violence, to shame the other person and to make
them see what they have done so that they decide
that they will take accountability for whatever the harm is.
And the idea is that calling someone in is supposed
to be you might notice, even in the way that
I said it, it's supposed to be a more gentle
approach of highlighting the harm that someone might have done.
(11:28):
But you're approaching it like a good faith They're supposed
to be a good faith approach around it, right. You're
not supposed to assume that the other person did this
maliciously and consciously. You're supposed to assume that maybe they
just didn't realize what they were doing, So yeah, call
them in, And you're supposed to do it privately before
you do it publicly, and if the person doesn't want
to respond privately, then your hand has been forced, and
(11:51):
then you can do it publicly. But even publicly, it's
supposed to be a little bit more gentle. But the
reason why I say I don't think there's any difference
because I don't think I've ever seen it executed in
that way. Really, I just haven't seen that.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
And is that something that you did. Would you call
people out and call them in and try to shame them.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
No, I never did anything like that. I never called
anyone out or tried to call anyone in. I think
I was just sort of sitting on the sidelines co
signing that behavior. But I think I was co signing
that behavior out of fear because if I have empathy
for that person, then am I on the side of
(12:31):
the harm doer? You know what I mean. That's the
sort of sinister way all of these things work because
it starts to act as almost cancelation by proximity. If
I defend this person, I might get canceled too, So
I just have to let it happen. So twenty twenty
was very similar. In the beginning. I also was overwhelmed
with emotion because a black man has been killed by
(12:53):
the hands of the police. So it's a very specific Again,
there's a truth, but there's a way that the truth
is being put forward. That means that you all have
to be in a state of fear. It's kind of
like as if black people are being lynched type of
thing without any any need to know what the details
(13:14):
of it was. Because if you're curious about what the
details are, that means you are siding with whatever the
thing is. So in the beginning I pretty much joined
the cause. I was horrified. I then was doing callouts,
but not even specific people. It was mainly saying you
need to be speaking up about this. It was a
(13:35):
very silence is violence energy, That's how I would put it.
It was very silence is violence. If you are not
speaking out about this, then you are on the wrong
side of history. Blah blah blah, blah blah blah, all
the all the scripts that you can expect. Then I
was applauded very loudly for it, very very loudly. It
was like, how do I how do I put this?
(13:58):
It was like you get a sort of rush off
for adrenaline because it's also happening in an environment that
is so abnormal. It's not actually normal for you to
put out a thought and in me imediately it's co
signed by thousands and thousands of people telling you that
you've done a good job. The same thing can never
happen offline. It just can't.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
It would be like getting a standing ovation, like going
out into the street and saying something and having everyone
just stop what they're doing and just turn to you
and applaud.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Yeah, that's exactly what it was, And I could see
just how easy it is to get drunk on that
level of validation and affirmation. But again, I use the
language of integrity breach, and that's very specific language that
I use for myself because my sobriety forced me to
really think deeply about what my values actually are, to
(14:48):
think about the kind of person that I am, So
it's very easy for me to notice when I'm operating
completely out of integrity, so that in that moment, I
think it was about a couple of hours or something
like that, all of this was happening in so I
didn't sort of lean into this silence as violence energy
for a prolonged amount of time, but for me was
(15:09):
long enough because I had never really participated in anything
like that before, So it was very sort of shocking
to the system to see myself behave in this.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Way, and there was a particular twenty four hour period
during that time in twenty twenty when Black Lives Matter
content completely dominated social media and where it seemed like
the whole world was posting a black square in solidarity
with the BLM movement, and also because people were scared
of being canceled if they didn't post one, and then
(15:38):
the active is canceled everyone anyway, because the black squares
were apparently flooding feeds, and they said that it was
preventing people from getting information from black creators about the
movement Africa. Did you post the black Square?
Speaker 1 (15:52):
No? I didn't. I didn't. I was very close to
posting the black square because even I, as a black person,
felt pressure to post it. Because again, I really want
to make it clear that there's so much nuance in
what we're speaking about. So many conversations that were happening
at the time were really necessary, and I think they
have really transformed the way people understand race in a
(16:15):
useful way. However, it then started to go to an extreme,
to an extreme that I believe had this sort of
religious undertone to it, the idea that if you are
a white person, then you are pretty much born with
original sin that is white supremacy, so you have to
spend the rest of your life atoning for it through
an anti racism course. You might notice that also in
(16:37):
that year, all books to do with anti racism absolutely exploded, exploded,
They did so so well. Other people got book deals
because of that because they did something that went viral.
So to me, there is an anti racism industrial complex.
But that's a completely different conversation. But this is just
(16:59):
the thing that I started to notice. But I had
more questions because I started to think, well, how is
a let's say, a young black girl who was adopted
by white pairs supposed to feel about everything that we're
saying right now? Is she supposed to start questioning her parents?
Like I just didn't understand how a lot of what
(17:21):
was being said is applicable into real life and the
damage that it actually causes when we start interrogating every
white person we've ever interacted with to see if any
of maybe the conflicts that we had or disagreements were
because of some kind of racial intent. There were things
that I just didn't feel comfortable with over time, so
(17:41):
I didn't post the Black Square because also I didn't
understand the origin of it. I was hearing that it
had come from the music industry and it was specifically
for musicians, but then also so many black squares, it's
actually blocking out the information for people to meet up
and organize. So again, logically it just didn't make sense.
But I did keep the mob away, if you will,
(18:05):
by calling people out in a different way. So, if
I'm to be honest, it's as if I found another
way to be like, Okay, I'm not going to do
that thing, but I'll do this instead. I'll use my
platform to call everyone else out. So that's what I did.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
There was a man that slid into your DMS to
question quite politely, I believe, what did he say to you?
And what did you do in response?
Speaker 1 (18:29):
So this is when I was choosing my plan B
of not posting the Black Square and then kind of
just going hard and saying that everyone needs to be
posting gosh. And you know what, even when I think
about it, I'm like, oh my god, really really?
Speaker 2 (18:45):
So then you had a surreal situation where all these
white people who were trying to be allies to the
black community started panicking because they didn't know whether the
best way to do that was to post the black
square or delete the one that already posted. And suddenly
it wasn't even about George Floyd anymore or fighting racism,
but it suddenly became about cancelation by this group of
(19:07):
vigilantes who were policing what everyone was doing.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
You just named it, That's exactly it. It stopped becoming
about the thing. The intent just became very different. It
just became very different. So that's what I was doing.
Everyone should be talking about this. Why is no one talking?
Blah blah blah? And then this man sends me a DM,
which it was really polite. He was just curious about
my approach. He had been someone that had been following
(19:32):
my work for a while, so I think the way
in which I was approaching this conversation was just very
different from what he would have expected of me, understandably so,
so he was pretty much just asking, do I really
think this is the right way to be going about this.
I'm saying that I want people to come together, people
to be talking about this, So do I think that
(19:54):
this is the right approach for it? And I didn't
even respond to him. I screenshotted the DM. The conversation
posted it onto my Instagram feed, and then again immediately
because already I was getting cheers and validation from the
calling out people calling in every self righteous action possible.
You know, I was getting applauded for it. And when
(20:18):
I posted that screenshot immediately again because you have to
think back to the time, everyone is on their phones, yes,
and everything would explode at that time, and that's exactly
what happened with this post. And I think it was
up for all of twenty minutes, but it had tens
of thousands of likes and comments and well done. And
(20:40):
he shouldn't be speaking to you in this way, you know,
all of those ego stroking things, no one asked for
any context. Actually, I think there were some people that
were commenting saying that is a valuable thing to ask,
you know, but I didn't. I didn't want to see
any of that. I didn't want to see anything that
would sort of break me out of this chance.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Did it feel good those twenty minutes?
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Oh? Absolutely, are you kidding me? It feels like the
thing that I was saying before. It's exhilarating, you feel powerful.
It's like an arousal of all of the senses because
you're getting an insanely abnormal amount of validation and affirmation
from all corners of the globe. At the same time.
You know, you can see actually how people easily become
(21:27):
caricatures of themselves based on a moment in time. You
see it. You see it because they want to repeat
that same thing again and again and again. It's almost
like taking drugs for the first time.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
And that becomes their identity exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
And you're chasing that same feeling, so you're reading the
same thing, and in that moment, it's about twenty minutes,
I had this experience where I sort of zoomed out
of myself. You could call it dissociation or whatever, but
I think I had just hit my max of trying
to of wearing the mask, if you will, of wearing
the mask when actually had all of these questions. I
(22:03):
somewhat agreed with this man, and I knew that he
was saying was valuable, but the cognitive dissonance was so intense. Hence,
and to be honest, I think it was shame. I
felt ashamed because he was right. I felt ashamed because
everything that I was doing in this moment in time
was so directly opposing the work that I'd been doing
for the past five to six years. I was ashamed
(22:25):
because I had been called out. To be honest, I
would say what this man did with the truly calling in,
calling someone in saying hey, coming into me privately and
saying hey, I've been following your work for a while
and I respect what you do. So I just wanted
to know, do you genuinely believe that this is the
right approach? You know? So it's almost as if that's
(22:45):
what it was, cognitive dissonance, which was wrapped in shame
and embarrassment and having to look at myself, you know,
so instead of taking the time to respond to him,
I was going to publicly shame him instead.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
You know, why did you take it down?
Speaker 1 (23:01):
I took it down because I had that experience of
seeing myself behaving in this way, and I felt sick.
I don't I have many moments in my life where
something has happened psychologically that has actually made me feel
so sick, and that was one of those moments. And
I immediately deleted the post and I logged out off
(23:22):
Instagram I think for a day or a couple of days,
and in that time I just started journaling. I just
started writing everything, everything that I had felt afraid to say,
everything that I had seen in myself, everything that I
had been writing over the past couple of years, because
I've always journaled, so all of those moments that I
(23:43):
felt I needed to speak and think and behave in
a specific way, because I'm Black, because I'm supposedly left leaning,
because of all of these identity things. I wrote it down,
and that is what inspired the open letter that I
would then write in early twenty twenty one, which was
called why I'm leaving the Cult of Wokeness. So that
(24:04):
open letter didn't just sort of happen. I wrote it
in two hours. It was four thousand words. I wrote
it in a couple of hours, but it was a
build up from twenty eighteen. As I was saying to you,
of just suddenly realizing that I have been betraying myself
without even realizing, I have been self editing and monitoring
my language and replacing my language with scripts and things
(24:27):
that I don't actually believe in, because I thought if
I truly say what I think, or I truly just
generally express curiosity in a way that is not so
called allowed, that I'm going to be canceled, that I'm
going to be punished for it, that I'm going to
be exiled by my community, That i will lose my audience,
that I will lose my clients, that I will lose opportunities.
(24:48):
All of these things. I associated speaking the truth with loss.
There was no other way around it. It was just like,
if I ask questions, if I speak the truth, if
I point out contradictions, there will be loss. There was
no you know what I referred to as the third perspective.
There was no kind of nuance, There was no grade.
There was no well, I'm lose these people, but what
(25:10):
if I gain all of that, or actually I don't
need an audience that expects me to perform a very
specific version of myself. There was just no option of
any other way to be apart from compliance. So twenty
twenty was really big because of that. And then shortly after,
(25:31):
you know, the racial uprising then became the are you
vaccinated or not vaccinated conversation, which then became another whole thing.
So all of that is for me what inspired me
to write that open letter and to just make the
declaration that whatever, whatever this thing is, whatever this game
is I just refuse to do it. I won't do
(25:53):
it anymore.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
After this shortbreak. What happened after Africa shared her views
with the world was she canceled? Did you regret it? Africa?
You begin your open life with the words, if there's
one thing I'm not afraid of, it's being canceled. If
being canceled means me living in integrity as a human
(26:16):
being who thinks for themselves, cancel me today. I repeat,
I am not afraid. Were you really not afraid? Because
I think everyone today, whether or not they're a public figure,
is pretty afraid of being canceled, right because it can
feel like we're all one misstep away from cancelation. And
(26:37):
we've seen it happen to enough people now to know
how brutal it looks. So how did you become unafraid
of that?
Speaker 1 (26:45):
You know? What I think, if there's anything that I've learned,
is that fear never absolutely goes away. It's just a
different quality of fear. I think. So for me, I
did have that undercurrent of fear, which is absolutely normal,
because I was doing something that was so high risk
(27:05):
for a lot of reasons, for a lot of reasons,
because I felt that me pressing published was again, all
of it was based on identity, because we're in such
an identity obsessed world, and when you are a racialized
person that has been labeled an activist and all of
these other things, there are expectations off you. So the
(27:26):
risk that I was taking was will I be betraying
the black community, Will I be betraying women? Will I
be betraying other left leaning people? Am I betraying my
audience and friends and people that think they know me
and my partner and whatever else? But also I was
at such a point of almost like a rage, if
you will, because suddenly I couldn't unsee how many people
(27:48):
were monetizing from people's shame. I couldn't unsee how many
people were actually making this a business. They didn't want
racism to go away, you know, because then they're out
of pocket. They're out of a book deal, they're out
of a brand deal, they're out of all of these things.
So they're constantly creating problems. I couldn't unsee the people
(28:10):
or the activists that are constantly keeping women so afraid,
you know, never making women feel empowered about the realities
of the world. But there was just so much fear
that was being sold as progress and empowerment, and that
enraged me to the point of actually not allowing what
of a fear that I felt to consume me because
(28:31):
I had realized that I had been such a coward.
I had been a coward and I didn't even know,
and I had so much compassion and empathy for that coward.
But I needed this version of Africa to step forward
and to say this is what we're doing now. So
I was not The truth is I was not afraid
of cancelation. I was not afraid of the exile. I
(28:52):
was afraid of the uncertainty because there's so much unknown
once you liberate yourself, there is so much that is unknown.
But in writing those words, even when I read them
back now or someone reads them back to me, I
feel a sense of so much power. That's exactly how
I felt in that moment. I didn't feel consumed by
fear at all. I didn't, But I think it's because
(29:14):
being consumed by fear was just no longer a choice
at that time.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Your open letter went viral. It's currently been read by
I think around twenty million people. Were you canceled?
Speaker 1 (29:27):
No what happened quite the opposite. Actually my letter, I
realized here's the thing. By the way, can I ask
you a question, how do you define cancelation?
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Yeah, it's a great question, isn't it. I mean, I've
been canceled so many times, over so many years before
it was even called that. It used to be called
a pylon or backlash or outrage culture. But I think
a pylon is probably the best description of what it
feels like when it happens to you. And it's very
different to criticism. I always try to explain that to
(30:03):
people that can be constructive. Criticism can always be helpful
and well meaning. But cancelation is such a horrible word
because it's so dehumanizing. It's so dehumanizing, like you cancel
a flight or you cancel a meeting. You don't cancel
a human being, And yet people try to because the
(30:27):
thing is that you can reschedule a flight or a meeting,
but there's no formal process for being uncanceled, and that's
kind of the point to it, to delete you as
a person, which is just so awful. And the other
thing about that word is how it's applied to such
a wide range of people, for such a wide range
of things. So like everyone from Harvey Weinstein, who was
actually a serial rapist who went to jail for his crimes,
(30:52):
to someone who used a word that maybe they didn't
realize was no longer acceptable because I don't know, they're
seventy years old, or maybe they just don't mix in kind.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Of woke circles. So I guess with.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
Cancelation, the big difference to me, besides the fact that
Harvey Weinstein committed actual crime, is that he didn't do
them by accident, and the person who used the wrong
word probably wasn't trying to cause harm. You know. I
know this is general, but in most cases when someone's canceled,
they didn't intend to be offensive or cause harm. And
(31:26):
that doesn't mean that they didn't offend people and they
didn't cause harm. But cancelation is the total flattening of
intention and effect. So that's kind of how I've come
to understand it. How do you think of cancelation?
Speaker 1 (31:40):
I love that so much, I think, and I'll just
say this as well, even when you think of Harvey Weinstein, right,
he still received due process. Right, he did still receive
due process. So I asked that question, and it's a
question that I now ask a lot of people because
I genuinely believe that a lot of the posarization that
(32:02):
we continued to experience and just never getting anywhere in
conversation is because we have definition issues. If I think
cancelation is simply accountability and allowing for people to see
the harm that they've done so they can take responsibility
for their actions, sure I would be on board with
(32:22):
that too if that was actually true. But if another person,
and I'm the other person in this case, if another
person believes that cancelation is a combination of public shaming, pylons,
virtual stoning, that it's doxing, that it's anti social behavior,
it's cyberbullying, then we're working with completely different definitions, so
(32:44):
we'll never agree on what it is. So I always
like to ask people how they do define it after
having studied this for the past five to six years
and really understanding the nature of cancel culture, which I
prefer to call it collective sabotage. And the reason I
do that is because I've been studying self sabotage for
the past eight years. Self sabotage being and this is
(33:07):
how I describe it in the book. When you are
the one poking holes in your own ship when what
it is that you say you want is in direct
conflict with your behavior. You're saying you want progress, but
you're using extremely regressive methods to get there, you know,
and you're pulling the plug on your own cause. So
when you have individuals that are already in a state
(33:29):
of self sabotage and then we come together as a collective,
we're quite literally acting against our own best interest. Because
if you are part of a mob and you get
your exhilaration and fire and charge from that, you better
believe that same mob is going to come after you
the moment you get any step out of line, and
(33:49):
the same thing will happen to you. But we don't
think that far. We have very sort of short term
thinking in this mindset. So for me, I haven't been canceled,
whether it's in my open less or my work from then. Sure,
I've had people. I remember someone at and I thought
(34:10):
this was so hilarious. I think it's when I wrote
my open letter, and then this woman sent me. She
was a black American woman. She sent me this long
email about how she's been following my work for such
a long time, and she's so disappointed that I have
decided to become a bed wench for the white man.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
And I wow, a bed wench for the white man. Wow,
what an insult. It's very creative.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
It's seen how much I was laughing. I could not
stop cracking up. I was like, that takes time to
write an email, and it was very well listened to. Honestly,
I've never received any sort of trolling or any cancelation,
or any call outs or anything like that. And I
think it's because when you actually read my open letter,
(35:02):
it's very easy to see the word wokeness on the
title and to make so many assumptions about what will
be in there. But I think I'm quite fair, so
I've never experienced cancelation. And I think it's because this
kind of like a mindset thing. And it might sound
really abstract, but I think there's something about it. Even
happens with bullies in the playground, right. If you show fear,
(35:23):
you become more attractive. That's just how it works. If
you don't allow for your convictions to be shown. And
I'm very good at being convicted, but I'm still open,
I'm still very warm. I'm not cynical. I am able
to look at things differently if someone offers me new
information that I wasn't aware of. So I think my
open letter served as a point of just relief for
(35:45):
so many people, especially other racialized people, who didn't know
that they could or who had forgotten rather that they
could ask questions that they can say I don't agree
with that.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Or I agree with parts of it, but there are
other parts I'm not willing to sign up for.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
That's exactly it, to say this works for me, but
this doesn't quite work for me, you know.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Or I'm unclear about that. I see it in a
more nuanced war exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
And also for people that have been racialized as white,
that were made to believe that they have this original
sin that they need to I just don't believe in
any of that. I just won't stand for it. And
I think it just offered as a point of relief
for people. And I think because of my genuine curiosity,
but also my expertise as a developmental coach, as a researcher,
(36:35):
as a consultant, as a writer, it's allowed me to
continue exploring the conversation in a way that isn't sensationalized.
You know, I'm not doing this so I can be
a talking head, So I can kind of, as we
were saying before, hone in on just one thing. So
I'm not anti woke, for example. I haven't made anti
woke my identity and sort of become like a caricature
(36:57):
of myself. That's not what I'm doing. So I think
my work is easily received by people because they can
feel that it's not some kind of what's the term.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
For this, Well, you're not scolding people. It's not about scolding.
It's about it's about refusing to be part of a
polarized system who insists that you pledge complete allegiance to
a particular team. Yes, after this break, I'm going to
(37:29):
ask Africa about this current moment in the news and
how it's playing out on social media. And I'll be honest,
this is the part of the conversation I'm most nervous
about Africa. Since October seventh last year, we've seen a
similar situation play out on social media as we saw
(37:50):
after George Floyd's death, in that the world's been really
shocked and really distressed by truly horrific news and images
of the war in the Middle East, and there has
been a similar attempt by some people to kind of
police what isn't isn't being posted about the war, just
as the black square turned out to be, I guess,
(38:12):
an imperfect expression of solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
We saw a.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Similar phenomenon a couple of months ago where in a
twenty four hour period, millions of people on social media
all around the world posted that image with the words
all eyes on RAFA to show their support for Palestinian civilians.
And at the time there was a lot of surveillance
around who had and who hadn't posted it, and then
(38:37):
it emerged that the image had been generated by AI,
So then people started yelling about that. And meanwhile the
war continues and Palestinian people are still being killed and
the hostages are still being held. And then some people
believe if you don't post about those things, then that
means that you don't care, so they start questioning other
people's humanity. Right, how did you read that moment when
(39:01):
everyone was posting and then deleting that tile about raffa.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Gosh, and thank you for bringing that up. I can
imagine that so many people listening will resonate with that.
The interesting thing about this is that even if someone
is listening to this in six months time or a
year or two years, three years, there's going to be something.
It's going to be something that is happening culturally that
will be very reminiscent of this. Always something, And that's
(39:25):
what I like to keep in mind, by the way,
and I would invite anyone listening to this or watching
to keep that in mind too, that there's always going
to be something. Try and notice the patterns in terms
of how you're expected to respond and the time in
which you're expected to respond. So for me, when I
saw that, exactly as you said, it was like immediate flashbacks.
(39:46):
It was the same mechanics, same mechanics. This thing comes out,
no one asks where it's from in terms of its origin. Again,
we do need urgently actually more media literacy for people
wondering where things are actually coming from and who are
they coming from, because again, things just come out and
we see, we tend to see a number Okay, twan
(40:09):
and people have shared this. Ten thousand people have shared this,
two hundred and fifty thousand people have shared that means
I should also be sharing because there is that thing
where it's contagious. We don't ask any questions. We just
trust that the data being higher means that it's the
right thing that we need to be sharing. And for
many reasons it could have been because exactly as you said,
(40:29):
it makes people aware of what is going on. So
I understand that awareness peace offered in terms of that
being an objective. But within twenty four hours, actually people
were already being shamed for posting it exact same as
the black square, the exact same thing. To a t
it is uncanny, right, And then now people are feeling
(40:52):
ashamed of being like, do I delete it? But if
I delete it, people might see that I've deleted it
becomes a whole thing. But then for me, the biggest
thing is and this is why I remember recording a
specific podcast episode on this maybe three four years ago,
on why you don't have to speak up on every
social issue, and it all rings true today. This idea
(41:15):
that every single thing people are doing or thinking they
are putting online is something that we need to realize
is very, very very limiting. In many ways, someone could
have been marching for the past ten months, you know,
in their hometown or sending letters to their local MP
(41:35):
or donating hundreds, maybe even thousands, maybe even more. Some
people are having real world conversations. Some people are actually
holding people who are being harmed by this every single day.
Some people are seeing what they can do in their community.
Some people are making phone calls. Some people are dealing
with another war happening in their country, another reality we
(41:56):
have to accept. And again this is just opening up
the nuance in the grave for people to understand that
things are not as simple as oh, if this person posts,
then that shows that they care. That shows that they're
doing something. Because I could post an infographic from bed
and not even really care, but just post it to
say that I've done something. I think it's such a shame.
(42:16):
It's such a shame that we have come to this
point where we believe that if someone doesn't post something
quite literally by the way, that something could be anything.
There's never any detail on what it could be. It
could be anything doesn't even have to actually be a
link that sends maybe something more tangible to where the
conflict is happening. It could be anything. It could be
(42:37):
a photo, it could be a slide, it could be
just one word. People prefer the performance more than whether
something is actually changing fundamentally, because I think where in
such a trance when we're online that we don't even
think that people could be doing something else that isn't posting.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
You know, what's the reason for that, Because it's not everybody,
but the people who speak loudest online often around these
things have become like vigilantes. It's like there's self appointed
shareefs of the internet surveiling what everyone else is posting
and calling out people that they think are posting not
(43:18):
in the right amount or not in the right way.
Isn't narcissism?
Speaker 1 (43:22):
I mean, I guess they.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Think they're doing the right thing. Do they actually think
that what they're doing by centering themselves and shouting at
everybody else is helping or is it just that they
get sort of addicted to the attention or the head rush?
I mean back in the day when I used to
be a lot more outraged online, there is a bit
(43:43):
of a head rush, as you spoke about before, about
when everyone agrees with you and you get lots of
likes and you go girl kinds of comments. Is that
why there's just this intolerance for nuance because being extreme
gets more collapse. To me.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
I don't have one answer, but I think it can
be a combination of different things. I find that a
lot of the time, when we find it so difficult
to hold our own contradictions, we just won't be able
to hold other people's. That's just that's actually just the
reality of it. Because if I can't see myself as
(44:19):
both good and bad, as both manipulative but also very thoughtful,
but also very kind, but I can also be very rageful,
I can also be very impatient, but I can also
be very sweet, and I can also be ground. If
I can't see all of those things about myself, and
especially be able to name the shadowy parts of myself,
(44:39):
I will never be able to do that about someone else.
I just won't. And even worse, if I then encounter
someone who's able to hold those truths about themselves, they
will always be a trigger for me. So something that
I always think about it in the context of self
censorship is that when you become very well trained at
censoring yourself, you will find people that are not just
(45:03):
uncensored to the extreme, but people that allow themselves to
actually speak their minds, or to ask questions or say
I don't know agree with that, or to say I
know everyone agrees with this, but this is what I
think you will feel. That it's actually a threat to
your sense of self and it's very illogical, but it's
people feeling like your worldview isn't actually just yours. It's
(45:24):
now a threat on my sense of self. So I
have to do everything I can to take it down
and to somehow give you mine so then I'm safe.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
You're right. So when I was a couple of years ago,
I was diagnosed with ADHD and I wrote about it,
and I wrote about how there was nothing good about
it for me, like it had only made my life harder.
And there was huge pushback from the neurodivergent community saying,
you can't say, how very dare you say that? You're
(45:55):
not allowed to say that. You've got to be a
role model for young people. And of course there were
other people saying, oh, thank god, I'm so glad you've
said it, because I said, I don't feel like it's
my superpower. Maybe some people feel like it's their superpower.
I don't feel like it's my superpower, Like it's made
my life harder. I wish I could give it back.
But I had strayed from the party line and this
(46:16):
orthodoxy of no, you can only.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
Be positive about it, right.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
And I was I agree. I just went, well, no,
forget it, like I'm not interested in that.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
That's that's exactly it. It's like it's group think essentially. Yeah,
this idea that we only have safety if we all
think the same way, and anything that gets in that
opposes that is a threat and we have to get
rid of it.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
It feels like a threat, right, because what people, I
think often miss is that the people who are most
likely to cancel you, or who are most likely to
call you out or pile on you or whatever, are
people who you are ideologically very similar with. They're part
of the people that you agree with most things. Yes,
Whereas I once spoke to someone who is like a
(47:04):
very right wing commentator and I was asking her, oh,
do you get a whole lot of shit from these
particular people on the left who like to cancel me,
And she's like, oh, no, they completely ignore me. I
get it from the right. So she got canceled from
the right, and the right leaves me alone. I get
canceled from the left. Gosh, why is that, why do
(47:25):
we cancel people that are more likely to cancel people
that are most like us.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
It's like, to me, that's just tribalism. I always laugh
at how we think. Because we wear clothes now and
we have all of this technology whatever, we can override
our primal nature, but it's never going to go anywhere,
and we are tribal creatures. There was definitely a point
in time where if you stray from the tribe, whether
(47:50):
it's through actual action or thought, there's danger. There's danger
if you are cast out by the tribe, you will
be dead, you know, within a few hours. So I
think we still have that biological wiring, and I write
about it in the third perspective. We need to understand
our biology and our human nature so we can see
it at place because we will always have that thing
(48:12):
where our safety is determined by the people around us.
And that also means intellectual safety. Right. I can't feel
that safe if I don't know where to place you.
That's why I think identity has its uses, because it's
not about getting rid of identity completely. It just allows
us for us to understand each other. Even someone saying
(48:33):
I'm British, I'm Zimbabwe, I'm Australian, I'm this, and that
it gives you an idea, and that gives you a
bit of safety. Whereas when you don't know someone's name,
or their age, or where they're from or who they
actually are, How can I trust you when I don't
actually know you? So we take that a step further
with ideology, How can I trust you when you don't
think and feel exactly like me? So where I have
(48:56):
a lot of empathy and compassion actually for all of
this is that asking people to face their discomfort when
they're confronted with a different worldview, etc. It's a very unnatural.
It's a very unnatural thing to ask someone to hold
that contradiction and for it to not feel completely threatening.
(49:17):
But that is our work to do as people, to
surround ourselves not to an extreme, because this is why
people have to say, well, so what I should just
be friends with biggots and white supremacy? Why do we
have to go to those extremes. There are many things
in which you disagree with someone else on, but we're
building such a level of intolerance where even with the
most basic things people can't deal with it anymore. You know,
(49:42):
that's so true.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
Just finally, Africa, your wonderful book. The third perspective, the
subtitle is Brave Expression in the Age of Intolerance. I
want to ask you about intolerance and why you think
we've become so intolerant, because I've worked in media for
thirty years and it used to be just understood that
you could disagree with someone, right, I don't agree with
(50:04):
your opinion. I don't agree with that story you published.
Now people have become so intolerant. It's I disagree with
your opinion. I'm unfollowing you, I am blocking you, or
I don't like that story. You need to take it down.
I can't handle that it even exists in the world.
Speaker 1 (50:25):
What's that about?
Speaker 2 (50:26):
Why have we become so completely intolerant?
Speaker 1 (50:29):
Gosh? So I think that's a big question, and I'm
sure there's a big answer to it. But again, I
think there's a lot of different things, but I like
to kind of bring it back to the self, and
it's what I do in the book as well, because
I think these things can feel so big. Whether we're
talking about cancel culture, identity, politics, the politicization of absolutely
(50:51):
every single thing, even your food choices. It's political in
some way, even what you wear on your body, it's political?
Is it fast fashion? Is it you know, independent brands?
Who has more money to everything is political? But I think,
to me, the intolerance, there's kind of something and I
wonder what you but there's something sort of childlike about
(51:11):
it that everything is sort of me me, me. There's
been like an infantilization of people. People treating themselves like
sort of infants that need to be wrapped in cotton wool,
you know, in case something rubs onto them. So I
find that a way that I'm able to sort of
deal with this without it feeling so big is to
(51:32):
realize that I'm kind of dealing with sort of infants almost.
So I'm not going to let them run the show.
I'm not going to let them tell me what I
can say and not say. I'm not going to allow
for them to say you need to behave in this
way when a lot of the time it's people that
are so out of control in their personal lives, but
then they get this sense of control online. Now they
(51:54):
tell everyone else what to do. When you can barely
have a conversation with your own family, when you can
barely have a conversation with your partner or your sibling.
So I like to think of it in that way,
that it's people trying to gain a sense of control
they don't have in their own lives. So there's something
quite childlike. It's like a toddle.
Speaker 2 (52:14):
That makes so much sense now I understand a couple
of people so much better. It's like a toddler stamping their.
Speaker 1 (52:18):
Foot, absolutely absolutely, And I think you have to think
about it in that way, as in, how would you
respond to a toddler who is stamping their foot and
saying post this and do that and share this. Why
have you done that? It's insane.
Speaker 2 (52:33):
You wouldn't be scared of them, you wouldn't listen to them.
Speaker 1 (52:36):
So I think we need to sort of understand that
we're dealing with something a little bit unnatural here in
needing to lean in instead of leaning out of the
discomfort of being confronted with a different worldview or a
friend of yours changing their mind you know about something,
or saying, you know what, I used to agree with this,
but I don't actually agree with that so much anymore,
(52:56):
And for you to feel like you can still love
and appreciate that person and not apply so much meaning
to it, so I think we've kind of lost this
ability to be able to hold contradiction. But I do
think it starts with our selves. Otherwise, I promise you,
as much as you would like to think you'll be
able to do it, you will never be able to
hold contradiction in someone else if you can't do it
(53:17):
for you.
Speaker 2 (53:22):
That makes so much sense, the idea of holding contradiction
in yourself and being open to the idea of changing
your mind or having nuanced views about things because most
of our views aren't completely polarized, and listening to Africa's
story and her wisdom, I can really understand how she's
(53:45):
become unafraid of cancelation and the online mob, especially through
that framework of someone behaving a bit like a toddler.
And that's not to be trite, because I do believe
that everybody thinks that they're doing the right thing. They
honestly do believe. I have to think this right. I
have to believe that they have good intentions if I
(54:07):
want that same consideration given back to me every time
I make a mistake or do something that people don't
agree with. But I think what's important is to pause
and ask yourself what do we actually owe the Internet?
What do we owe social media? What do we owe
to the strangers who follow us? Is it the only place,
or even the right place to engage in really complex
(54:28):
ideas and situations that require critical thinking and nuance and
where we might change our mind. The truth is, you
don't owe the Internet anything. What we do in our
actual lives, what we stand for in our communities and homes,
in our workplaces, and in our hearts, in our wider society,
(54:51):
that is always going to matter more than what you
do or don't post to the world. I don't post
about my kids online. Do you think that means I
don't care about them? And, as Africa says, in the
eyes of the Internet, you'll never get it right. So
maybe the best way to protect ourselves and each other
is to live our core values more than we post
(55:13):
about what we want people to think our core values
are or what we feel that their core values and
their posts should be. And look, I feel like I've
said that a lot in this podcast. I'll be honest
with you, there were moments I was really afraid to
even have this conversation with Africa or share my own
experiences and ask my own questions, because well, you know,
(55:36):
I know what cancelation feels like, and it is life changing,
not the good kind of life changing. And even saying that,
I'm scared that people will try to weaponize those words
to cancel me. But you know what, I can't let
that fear run my life and I can't let it
determine the kind of conversations that I want to bring
you here on No Filter. I want No Filter to
(55:57):
be a place where you can hear from people you
might disagree with, or feel your own positions challenged a bit,
and remember how to actually have conversations in a good
faith way. And that's what this show is about. And
as you heard, that is certainly what Africa is about.
What strikes me most about her, I mean all the things,
(56:17):
but it's her lack of righteousness. It is her openness,
her ability to listen, and her willingness to embrace nuance,
an uncertainty and contradiction. You probably want more of Africa.
Who wouldn't Lucky for you. She's a consultant, a coach,
a strategist, a speaker. She's magnificent on social media, and
(56:38):
we will pop all the links that you need to
become the Africa Brooks super fan that you should be,
and like we all are here at No Filter, will
pop them in the show notes. The executive producer of
No Filter is Naima Brown. Give her a big, hard,
thorny conversation any day over small talk. Our audio producer
is Tom Lyon. He's learning how to meditate and will
(56:59):
not engage in online drama. And I'm mea friedman. I'm
gonna have a big cup of tea and a very
big lie down. I'm your host. Be kind to each other.
I think twice before you jump into a pylon. There's
a real person on the bottom of it. Cancel reservations
and meetings, not.
Speaker 1 (57:15):
People love you.
Speaker 2 (57:17):
See you next week.
You're listening to a MoMA Maya podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Mama Maya acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast is recorded on.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
So the risk that I was taking was will I
be betraying the black community? Will I be betraying women?
Will I be betraying other left leaning people? Am I
betraying my audience and friends and people that think they
know me and my partner and whatever else? But also
I was at such a point of the rage, if
you will, because suddenly I couldn't unsee how many people
(00:41):
were monetizing from people's shame. And the truth is, I
was not afraid of cancelation. I was not afraid of
the exile.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Welcome to no filter from Mamma may I'm me afraidman,
and I am afraid of being canceled every day in
every way. But as you just heard, my guest today
is not afraid, not anymore. Because in twenty twenty one,
writer and activist Africa Brook wrote an open letter and
posted it online. She called it why I'm Leaving the
(01:17):
Cult of Wokeness, and it immediately went viral. She was
twenty nine years old at the time, and that open
letter changed her life but not in the way she
expected it to. So what did she write in a
letter and how did she become unafraid and also why
she canceled. Africa believes that we are living right now
(01:39):
in the age of intolerance. Hard agree. And she also
believes that what the culture was demand of us is
to pick aside and post loudly and incessantly about it
on social media. And so for a long time, that's
what she did until suddenly one day it made her
feel sick. You're about to hear what happened that day,
(02:00):
but before you learn what made her quit the so
called cult of wokeness, you need to know how and
why she joined in the first place. Africa's story actually
begins back in twenty sixteen when she had a severe
drinking problem. So I started by asking her how her
alcohol addiction turned her into an activist.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
I was twenty four years old and I was trying
to get sober. But I was struggling, struggling to let
go of alcohol, and it was pretty bad. It wasn't
sort of like a oh I take it a little
bit too far. Sometimes it was alcoholism. So I was
a blank out drinker, a bench drinker, very specifically, which
I think the British and Australians understand that very well
(02:45):
and know exactly what that is because it's embedded in
our culture. I have always been a writer, I've always
been in the creative world. So when I realized that
this problem wasn't going to be going anywhere anytime soon,
I started sharing online. I had relapsed seven times before that,
and I really knew that if I don't find a
(03:07):
way to get sober, going to be dead before I
turned twenty five years old. So I started an Instagram account,
which was anonymous at the time, still the same one
that I have today, and I started sharing sharing as
a way to keep myself sober, sharing as a way
to see if my you know, cries for help would
land with anyone out there. There was no plan to
(03:28):
build any sort of platform in the way that I
do now. None of that was part of the plan.
I just needed to get well and I had no
other space to do it offline. That was it. And
then what happened is that my story got picked up
pretty quickly by the UK media because of my age,
because of the way that I spoke about it, but
also it was just a sort of compelling story as well.
(03:49):
And I was immediately. When I say immediately, I mean
maybe six to eight months in, I was labeled as
a sobriety advocate. And the thing is, when you become
labeled as an advocate, you are also then labeled as
an activist, you know. So that's an important piece of
the story for me. Pretty early on into my recovery,
(04:10):
me just sharing about recovery and my findings and you know,
speaking in the way that I do now, but just
in a very different way. It was very recovery specific
at the time. I then became labeled an activist. And
once you get labeled an activist, you're not only expected
to speak about the specific thing you talk about. Now
you have to activate for everything else. So now I
(04:32):
can't just speak about recovery. I have to speak about
recovery through the lens of being a black woman. And
then after I do that, I have to speak about
recovery through the lens of a black immigrant woman, and
then so on and so on and so on. Right,
But then it doesn't just stop with me. I have
to start advocating for other people. And to be honest,
I actually, how do I put this? Not even just
(04:56):
on a credibility level, if I'm to be completely honest,
I think on an egoic level, it felt quite good
for people to think that I am someone that is
worthy of taking up all of these causes. So I
never really questioned it, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
It's like, not all heroes wear capes. Some of them
have a social media account, yeah, some of some of them.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Post on Insta, they do, some of them make infographics,
you know. So I think that part of the story
is quite important because then twenty sixteen, especially with everything
that happened in the US with Trump being elected, and
then I would say that for me and actually most
people that I speak to you, that's when we started
to notice the sort of just how much our most
(05:36):
intimate lives were being politicized. I don't remember before then
people looking at every fucking thing through the lens of politics.
I just don't, you know. Yeah, So twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen,
twenty eighteen, I started to go sort of deeper into
social justice spaces, but I truly believed I still had
my autonomy. I didn't believe that I was a social
(05:58):
justice warrior or anything like that, but I supported anyone
that was doing anything under social justice, because it's still
a value that I hold closely to this day. It
just looks very different to what I thinkt what it
needed to look like. And I realized that even though
I was a very confident, outspoken person and I'd been
speaking publicly around very challenging things for a time, I
(06:22):
just thought I'd feel very afraid in my own mind
first to begin with. And I can realize it now
more in retrospect, but I recognize what that feeling was.
Where I felt that I couldn't ask questions was the
first one, or that I couldn't point out any contradictions
that would kind of poke holes in whatever the mission was,
(06:43):
whether it was to do with race or gender, or
sex or identity, anything that didn't quite make sense to me.
I felt as if I just needed to keep it
to myself. You know that I'm not allowed to talk
about it because if I talk about it or ask
the questions, I might seem as if, how do I
put it, it felt like a betrayal. If I'm to
(07:03):
put it very simply, It's not a logical thing. It
just felt like I'm betraying black people if I ask
these questions or point out these contradictions, or I'm betraying
women if I say, actually, I don't think we should
live in such a fearful way, or to believe that
all men are just so many things that I just thought, okay,
but how is this applicable? Is it applicable to every
(07:25):
single situation? Just any critical thinking was sort of not
allowed by myself but also by the environment around me.
That was just the reality of it. So this suppression
of my voice and my inner thoughts especially, it just
started to come to a head around twenty nineteen because
I felt that I wasn't being in complete integrity with
(07:47):
my work. My work is about understanding self sabotage. My
work has always been around self expression and taking emotional
conversational risks. It's always been about having the conversations that
no one wants to have. But I realized that there
was an ever growing list of things that I was
not allowed to say, you know, because.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
It did go with the correct opinion on that topic
according to activists. Absolutely yeah, right, So like if you
questioned the idea that say all men a rapists, and
you said, well, hang on, not all men, right, or
if say you believed. I don't know if this is
something you believe or not, but if you believed in
abortion but didn't feel comfortable with late term abortions for
(08:31):
non medical reasons, for example, but you couldn't say those
things publicly because the activists on those issues insisted you
or either with them or you were an enemy, and
you had to choose. There was no room for nuance.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
There you go, there you go, one hundred percent. And
I think that was in the defense of men without
taking the nuance of well, when we talk about men,
we're also talking about boys, So how is it for
boys to be hearing us speaking of that? There was
just you can't, you can't. It just is what it is.
So for me, all of that over the course of
two to three years felt like a huge integrity breach massively.
(09:08):
I just couldn't keep up with it any more internally
for myself. And by the time twenty twenty comes around
and George Floyd is murdered in the States, like anyone else,
I was absolutely horrified. I felt just a level of
sickness I've never felt before around the situation like that,
(09:29):
And I think a lot of it is to do
with the fact that we were all online and we
will never experience well I hope we'll never experience anything
like that again. But it was just a very different time. Psychologically,
we were all very different. But there was something about
that specific case and the way that it sort of
just exploded all over the world, and how regardless of
(09:52):
where you were in the world, you were supposed to
behave and speak and respond to it in a very
specific way, very specific way. I even write about it
in the book and I say that even if you
were a shepherd in rural Guero, which is Zimbabwe, you
were expected to speak about this and to post the
(10:12):
square and to atone for your sins if you happen
to be white. For me, in the beginning, I felt
that sort of, I'm black, I'm supposed to respond to
this immediately. I'm supposed to call other white people in,
you know, this idea, which I think is so self righteous.
You know that I have to call people in, you know,
(10:33):
But that's what it was. That's what I felt like.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Can you explain the difference between calling someone out and
calling someone in and how those two things have sort
of seen differently.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Well, first of all, I personally don't think there's any difference.
But the idea of calling someone out, for example, is
that you notice a problematic action or some kind of wrongdoing,
then you have a duty to name whatever the harm
that's been done, and you have a duty to use
pretty much any means necessary apart from let's say, extreme
(11:04):
physical violence, to shame the other person and to make
them see what they have done so that they decide
that they will take accountability for whatever the harm is.
And the idea is that calling someone in is supposed
to be you might notice, even in the way that
I said it, it's supposed to be a more gentle
approach of highlighting the harm that someone might have done.
(11:28):
But you're approaching it like a good faith They're supposed
to be a good faith approach around it, right. You're
not supposed to assume that the other person did this
maliciously and consciously. You're supposed to assume that maybe they
just didn't realize what they were doing, So yeah, call
them in, And you're supposed to do it privately before
you do it publicly, and if the person doesn't want
to respond privately, then your hand has been forced, and
(11:51):
then you can do it publicly. But even publicly, it's
supposed to be a little bit more gentle. But the
reason why I say I don't think there's any difference
because I don't think I've ever seen it executed in
that way. Really, I just haven't seen that.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
And is that something that you did. Would you call
people out and call them in and try to shame them.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
No, I never did anything like that. I never called
anyone out or tried to call anyone in. I think
I was just sort of sitting on the sidelines co
signing that behavior. But I think I was co signing
that behavior out of fear because if I have empathy
for that person, then am I on the side of
(12:31):
the harm doer? You know what I mean. That's the
sort of sinister way all of these things work because
it starts to act as almost cancelation by proximity. If
I defend this person, I might get canceled too, So
I just have to let it happen. So twenty twenty
was very similar. In the beginning. I also was overwhelmed
with emotion because a black man has been killed by
(12:53):
the hands of the police. So it's a very specific Again,
there's a truth, but there's a way that the truth
is being put forward. That means that you all have
to be in a state of fear. It's kind of
like as if black people are being lynched type of
thing without any any need to know what the details
(13:14):
of it was. Because if you're curious about what the
details are, that means you are siding with whatever the
thing is. So in the beginning I pretty much joined
the cause. I was horrified. I then was doing callouts,
but not even specific people. It was mainly saying you
need to be speaking up about this. It was a
(13:35):
very silence is violence energy, That's how I would put it.
It was very silence is violence. If you are not
speaking out about this, then you are on the wrong
side of history. Blah blah blah, blah blah blah, all
the all the scripts that you can expect. Then I
was applauded very loudly for it, very very loudly. It
was like, how do I how do I put this?
(13:58):
It was like you get a sort of rush off
for adrenaline because it's also happening in an environment that
is so abnormal. It's not actually normal for you to
put out a thought and in me imediately it's co
signed by thousands and thousands of people telling you that
you've done a good job. The same thing can never
happen offline. It just can't.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
It would be like getting a standing ovation, like going
out into the street and saying something and having everyone
just stop what they're doing and just turn to you
and applaud.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Yeah, that's exactly what it was, And I could see
just how easy it is to get drunk on that
level of validation and affirmation. But again, I use the
language of integrity breach, and that's very specific language that
I use for myself because my sobriety forced me to
really think deeply about what my values actually are, to
(14:48):
think about the kind of person that I am, So
it's very easy for me to notice when I'm operating
completely out of integrity, so that in that moment, I
think it was about a couple of hours or something
like that, all of this was happening in so I
didn't sort of lean into this silence as violence energy
for a prolonged amount of time, but for me was
(15:09):
long enough because I had never really participated in anything
like that before, So it was very sort of shocking
to the system to see myself behave in this.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Way, and there was a particular twenty four hour period
during that time in twenty twenty when Black Lives Matter
content completely dominated social media and where it seemed like
the whole world was posting a black square in solidarity
with the BLM movement, and also because people were scared
of being canceled if they didn't post one, and then
(15:38):
the active is canceled everyone anyway, because the black squares
were apparently flooding feeds, and they said that it was
preventing people from getting information from black creators about the
movement Africa. Did you post the black Square?
Speaker 1 (15:52):
No? I didn't. I didn't. I was very close to
posting the black square because even I, as a black person,
felt pressure to post it. Because again, I really want
to make it clear that there's so much nuance in
what we're speaking about. So many conversations that were happening
at the time were really necessary, and I think they
have really transformed the way people understand race in a
(16:15):
useful way. However, it then started to go to an extreme,
to an extreme that I believe had this sort of
religious undertone to it, the idea that if you are
a white person, then you are pretty much born with
original sin that is white supremacy, so you have to
spend the rest of your life atoning for it through
an anti racism course. You might notice that also in
(16:37):
that year, all books to do with anti racism absolutely exploded, exploded,
They did so so well. Other people got book deals
because of that because they did something that went viral.
So to me, there is an anti racism industrial complex.
But that's a completely different conversation. But this is just
(16:59):
the thing that I started to notice. But I had
more questions because I started to think, well, how is
a let's say, a young black girl who was adopted
by white pairs supposed to feel about everything that we're
saying right now? Is she supposed to start questioning her parents?
Like I just didn't understand how a lot of what
(17:21):
was being said is applicable into real life and the
damage that it actually causes when we start interrogating every
white person we've ever interacted with to see if any
of maybe the conflicts that we had or disagreements were
because of some kind of racial intent. There were things
that I just didn't feel comfortable with over time, so
(17:41):
I didn't post the Black Square because also I didn't
understand the origin of it. I was hearing that it
had come from the music industry and it was specifically
for musicians, but then also so many black squares, it's
actually blocking out the information for people to meet up
and organize. So again, logically it just didn't make sense.
But I did keep the mob away, if you will,
(18:05):
by calling people out in a different way. So, if
I'm to be honest, it's as if I found another
way to be like, Okay, I'm not going to do
that thing, but I'll do this instead. I'll use my
platform to call everyone else out. So that's what I did.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
There was a man that slid into your DMS to
question quite politely, I believe, what did he say to you?
And what did you do in response?
Speaker 1 (18:29):
So this is when I was choosing my plan B
of not posting the Black Square and then kind of
just going hard and saying that everyone needs to be
posting gosh. And you know what, even when I think
about it, I'm like, oh my god, really really?
Speaker 2 (18:45):
So then you had a surreal situation where all these
white people who were trying to be allies to the
black community started panicking because they didn't know whether the
best way to do that was to post the black
square or delete the one that already posted. And suddenly
it wasn't even about George Floyd anymore or fighting racism,
but it suddenly became about cancelation by this group of
(19:07):
vigilantes who were policing what everyone was doing.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
You just named it, That's exactly it. It stopped becoming
about the thing. The intent just became very different. It
just became very different. So that's what I was doing.
Everyone should be talking about this. Why is no one talking?
Blah blah blah? And then this man sends me a DM,
which it was really polite. He was just curious about
my approach. He had been someone that had been following
(19:32):
my work for a while, so I think the way
in which I was approaching this conversation was just very
different from what he would have expected of me, understandably so,
so he was pretty much just asking, do I really
think this is the right way to be going about this.
I'm saying that I want people to come together, people
to be talking about this, So do I think that
(19:54):
this is the right approach for it? And I didn't
even respond to him. I screenshotted the DM. The conversation
posted it onto my Instagram feed, and then again immediately
because already I was getting cheers and validation from the
calling out people calling in every self righteous action possible.
You know, I was getting applauded for it. And when
(20:18):
I posted that screenshot immediately again because you have to
think back to the time, everyone is on their phones, yes,
and everything would explode at that time, and that's exactly
what happened with this post. And I think it was
up for all of twenty minutes, but it had tens
of thousands of likes and comments and well done. And
(20:40):
he shouldn't be speaking to you in this way, you know,
all of those ego stroking things, no one asked for
any context. Actually, I think there were some people that
were commenting saying that is a valuable thing to ask,
you know, but I didn't. I didn't want to see
any of that. I didn't want to see anything that
would sort of break me out of this chance.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Did it feel good those twenty minutes?
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Oh? Absolutely, are you kidding me? It feels like the
thing that I was saying before. It's exhilarating, you feel powerful.
It's like an arousal of all of the senses because
you're getting an insanely abnormal amount of validation and affirmation
from all corners of the globe. At the same time.
You know, you can see actually how people easily become
(21:27):
caricatures of themselves based on a moment in time. You
see it. You see it because they want to repeat
that same thing again and again and again. It's almost
like taking drugs for the first time.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
And that becomes their identity exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
And you're chasing that same feeling, so you're reading the
same thing, and in that moment, it's about twenty minutes,
I had this experience where I sort of zoomed out
of myself. You could call it dissociation or whatever, but
I think I had just hit my max of trying
to of wearing the mask, if you will, of wearing
the mask when actually had all of these questions. I
(22:03):
somewhat agreed with this man, and I knew that he
was saying was valuable, but the cognitive dissonance was so intense. Hence,
and to be honest, I think it was shame. I
felt ashamed because he was right. I felt ashamed because
everything that I was doing in this moment in time
was so directly opposing the work that I'd been doing
for the past five to six years. I was ashamed
(22:25):
because I had been called out. To be honest, I
would say what this man did with the truly calling in,
calling someone in saying hey, coming into me privately and
saying hey, I've been following your work for a while
and I respect what you do. So I just wanted
to know, do you genuinely believe that this is the
right approach? You know? So it's almost as if that's
(22:45):
what it was, cognitive dissonance, which was wrapped in shame
and embarrassment and having to look at myself, you know,
so instead of taking the time to respond to him,
I was going to publicly shame him instead.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
You know, why did you take it down?
Speaker 1 (23:01):
I took it down because I had that experience of
seeing myself behaving in this way, and I felt sick.
I don't I have many moments in my life where
something has happened psychologically that has actually made me feel
so sick, and that was one of those moments. And
I immediately deleted the post and I logged out off
(23:22):
Instagram I think for a day or a couple of days,
and in that time I just started journaling. I just
started writing everything, everything that I had felt afraid to say,
everything that I had seen in myself, everything that I
had been writing over the past couple of years, because
I've always journaled, so all of those moments that I
(23:43):
felt I needed to speak and think and behave in
a specific way, because I'm Black, because I'm supposedly left leaning,
because of all of these identity things. I wrote it down,
and that is what inspired the open letter that I
would then write in early twenty twenty one, which was
called why I'm leaving the Cult of Wokeness. So that
(24:04):
open letter didn't just sort of happen. I wrote it
in two hours. It was four thousand words. I wrote
it in a couple of hours, but it was a
build up from twenty eighteen. As I was saying to you,
of just suddenly realizing that I have been betraying myself
without even realizing, I have been self editing and monitoring
my language and replacing my language with scripts and things
(24:27):
that I don't actually believe in, because I thought if
I truly say what I think, or I truly just
generally express curiosity in a way that is not so
called allowed, that I'm going to be canceled, that I'm
going to be punished for it, that I'm going to
be exiled by my community, That i will lose my audience,
that I will lose my clients, that I will lose opportunities.
(24:48):
All of these things. I associated speaking the truth with loss.
There was no other way around it. It was just like,
if I ask questions, if I speak the truth, if
I point out contradictions, there will be loss. There was
no you know what I referred to as the third perspective.
There was no kind of nuance, There was no grade.
There was no well, I'm lose these people, but what
(25:10):
if I gain all of that, or actually I don't
need an audience that expects me to perform a very
specific version of myself. There was just no option of
any other way to be apart from compliance. So twenty
twenty was really big because of that. And then shortly after,
(25:31):
you know, the racial uprising then became the are you
vaccinated or not vaccinated conversation, which then became another whole thing.
So all of that is for me what inspired me
to write that open letter and to just make the
declaration that whatever, whatever this thing is, whatever this game
is I just refuse to do it. I won't do
(25:53):
it anymore.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
After this shortbreak. What happened after Africa shared her views
with the world was she canceled? Did you regret it? Africa?
You begin your open life with the words, if there's
one thing I'm not afraid of, it's being canceled. If
being canceled means me living in integrity as a human
(26:16):
being who thinks for themselves, cancel me today. I repeat,
I am not afraid. Were you really not afraid? Because
I think everyone today, whether or not they're a public figure,
is pretty afraid of being canceled, right because it can
feel like we're all one misstep away from cancelation. And
(26:37):
we've seen it happen to enough people now to know
how brutal it looks. So how did you become unafraid
of that?
Speaker 1 (26:45):
You know? What I think, if there's anything that I've learned,
is that fear never absolutely goes away. It's just a
different quality of fear. I think. So for me, I
did have that undercurrent of fear, which is absolutely normal,
because I was doing something that was so high risk
(27:05):
for a lot of reasons, for a lot of reasons,
because I felt that me pressing published was again, all
of it was based on identity, because we're in such
an identity obsessed world, and when you are a racialized
person that has been labeled an activist and all of
these other things, there are expectations off you. So the
(27:26):
risk that I was taking was will I be betraying
the black community, Will I be betraying women? Will I
be betraying other left leaning people? Am I betraying my
audience and friends and people that think they know me
and my partner and whatever else? But also I was
at such a point of almost like a rage, if
you will, because suddenly I couldn't unsee how many people
(27:48):
were monetizing from people's shame. I couldn't unsee how many
people were actually making this a business. They didn't want
racism to go away, you know, because then they're out
of pocket. They're out of a book deal, they're out
of a brand deal, they're out of all of these things.
So they're constantly creating problems. I couldn't unsee the people
(28:10):
or the activists that are constantly keeping women so afraid,
you know, never making women feel empowered about the realities
of the world. But there was just so much fear
that was being sold as progress and empowerment, and that
enraged me to the point of actually not allowing what
of a fear that I felt to consume me because
(28:31):
I had realized that I had been such a coward.
I had been a coward and I didn't even know,
and I had so much compassion and empathy for that coward.
But I needed this version of Africa to step forward
and to say this is what we're doing now. So
I was not The truth is I was not afraid
of cancelation. I was not afraid of the exile. I
(28:52):
was afraid of the uncertainty because there's so much unknown
once you liberate yourself, there is so much that is unknown.
But in writing those words, even when I read them
back now or someone reads them back to me, I
feel a sense of so much power. That's exactly how
I felt in that moment. I didn't feel consumed by
fear at all. I didn't, But I think it's because
(29:14):
being consumed by fear was just no longer a choice
at that time.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Your open letter went viral. It's currently been read by
I think around twenty million people. Were you canceled?
Speaker 1 (29:27):
No what happened quite the opposite. Actually my letter, I
realized here's the thing. By the way, can I ask
you a question, how do you define cancelation?
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Yeah, it's a great question, isn't it. I mean, I've
been canceled so many times, over so many years before
it was even called that. It used to be called
a pylon or backlash or outrage culture. But I think
a pylon is probably the best description of what it
feels like when it happens to you. And it's very
different to criticism. I always try to explain that to
(30:03):
people that can be constructive. Criticism can always be helpful
and well meaning. But cancelation is such a horrible word
because it's so dehumanizing. It's so dehumanizing, like you cancel
a flight or you cancel a meeting. You don't cancel
a human being, And yet people try to because the
(30:27):
thing is that you can reschedule a flight or a meeting,
but there's no formal process for being uncanceled, and that's
kind of the point to it, to delete you as
a person, which is just so awful. And the other
thing about that word is how it's applied to such
a wide range of people, for such a wide range
of things. So like everyone from Harvey Weinstein, who was
actually a serial rapist who went to jail for his crimes,
(30:52):
to someone who used a word that maybe they didn't
realize was no longer acceptable because I don't know, they're
seventy years old, or maybe they just don't mix in kind.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Of woke circles. So I guess with.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
Cancelation, the big difference to me, besides the fact that
Harvey Weinstein committed actual crime, is that he didn't do
them by accident, and the person who used the wrong
word probably wasn't trying to cause harm. You know. I
know this is general, but in most cases when someone's canceled,
they didn't intend to be offensive or cause harm. And
(31:26):
that doesn't mean that they didn't offend people and they
didn't cause harm. But cancelation is the total flattening of
intention and effect. So that's kind of how I've come
to understand it. How do you think of cancelation?
Speaker 1 (31:40):
I love that so much, I think, and I'll just
say this as well, even when you think of Harvey Weinstein, right,
he still received due process. Right, he did still receive
due process. So I asked that question, and it's a
question that I now ask a lot of people because
I genuinely believe that a lot of the posarization that
(32:02):
we continued to experience and just never getting anywhere in
conversation is because we have definition issues. If I think
cancelation is simply accountability and allowing for people to see
the harm that they've done so they can take responsibility
for their actions, sure I would be on board with
(32:22):
that too if that was actually true. But if another person,
and I'm the other person in this case, if another
person believes that cancelation is a combination of public shaming, pylons,
virtual stoning, that it's doxing, that it's anti social behavior,
it's cyberbullying, then we're working with completely different definitions, so
(32:44):
we'll never agree on what it is. So I always
like to ask people how they do define it after
having studied this for the past five to six years
and really understanding the nature of cancel culture, which I
prefer to call it collective sabotage. And the reason I
do that is because I've been studying self sabotage for
the past eight years. Self sabotage being and this is
(33:07):
how I describe it in the book. When you are
the one poking holes in your own ship when what
it is that you say you want is in direct
conflict with your behavior. You're saying you want progress, but
you're using extremely regressive methods to get there, you know,
and you're pulling the plug on your own cause. So
when you have individuals that are already in a state
(33:29):
of self sabotage and then we come together as a collective,
we're quite literally acting against our own best interest. Because
if you are part of a mob and you get
your exhilaration and fire and charge from that, you better
believe that same mob is going to come after you
the moment you get any step out of line, and
(33:49):
the same thing will happen to you. But we don't
think that far. We have very sort of short term
thinking in this mindset. So for me, I haven't been canceled,
whether it's in my open less or my work from then. Sure,
I've had people. I remember someone at and I thought
(34:10):
this was so hilarious. I think it's when I wrote
my open letter, and then this woman sent me. She
was a black American woman. She sent me this long
email about how she's been following my work for such
a long time, and she's so disappointed that I have
decided to become a bed wench for the white man.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
And I wow, a bed wench for the white man. Wow,
what an insult. It's very creative.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
It's seen how much I was laughing. I could not
stop cracking up. I was like, that takes time to
write an email, and it was very well listened to. Honestly,
I've never received any sort of trolling or any cancelation,
or any call outs or anything like that. And I
think it's because when you actually read my open letter,
(35:02):
it's very easy to see the word wokeness on the
title and to make so many assumptions about what will
be in there. But I think I'm quite fair, so
I've never experienced cancelation. And I think it's because this
kind of like a mindset thing. And it might sound
really abstract, but I think there's something about it. Even
happens with bullies in the playground, right. If you show fear,
(35:23):
you become more attractive. That's just how it works. If
you don't allow for your convictions to be shown. And
I'm very good at being convicted, but I'm still open,
I'm still very warm. I'm not cynical. I am able
to look at things differently if someone offers me new
information that I wasn't aware of. So I think my
open letter served as a point of just relief for
(35:45):
so many people, especially other racialized people, who didn't know
that they could or who had forgotten rather that they
could ask questions that they can say I don't agree
with that.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Or I agree with parts of it, but there are
other parts I'm not willing to sign up for.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
That's exactly it, to say this works for me, but
this doesn't quite work for me, you know.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Or I'm unclear about that. I see it in a
more nuanced war exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
And also for people that have been racialized as white,
that were made to believe that they have this original
sin that they need to I just don't believe in
any of that. I just won't stand for it. And
I think it just offered as a point of relief
for people. And I think because of my genuine curiosity,
but also my expertise as a developmental coach, as a researcher,
(36:35):
as a consultant, as a writer, it's allowed me to
continue exploring the conversation in a way that isn't sensationalized.
You know, I'm not doing this so I can be
a talking head, So I can kind of, as we
were saying before, hone in on just one thing. So
I'm not anti woke, for example. I haven't made anti
woke my identity and sort of become like a caricature
(36:57):
of myself. That's not what I'm doing. So I think
my work is easily received by people because they can
feel that it's not some kind of what's the term.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
For this, Well, you're not scolding people. It's not about scolding.
It's about it's about refusing to be part of a
polarized system who insists that you pledge complete allegiance to
a particular team. Yes, after this break, I'm going to
(37:29):
ask Africa about this current moment in the news and
how it's playing out on social media. And I'll be honest,
this is the part of the conversation I'm most nervous
about Africa. Since October seventh last year, we've seen a
similar situation play out on social media as we saw
(37:50):
after George Floyd's death, in that the world's been really
shocked and really distressed by truly horrific news and images
of the war in the Middle East, and there has
been a similar attempt by some people to kind of
police what isn't isn't being posted about the war, just
as the black square turned out to be, I guess,
(38:12):
an imperfect expression of solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
We saw a.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Similar phenomenon a couple of months ago where in a
twenty four hour period, millions of people on social media
all around the world posted that image with the words
all eyes on RAFA to show their support for Palestinian civilians.
And at the time there was a lot of surveillance
around who had and who hadn't posted it, and then
(38:37):
it emerged that the image had been generated by AI,
So then people started yelling about that. And meanwhile the
war continues and Palestinian people are still being killed and
the hostages are still being held. And then some people
believe if you don't post about those things, then that
means that you don't care, so they start questioning other
people's humanity. Right, how did you read that moment when
(39:01):
everyone was posting and then deleting that tile about raffa.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Gosh, and thank you for bringing that up. I can
imagine that so many people listening will resonate with that.
The interesting thing about this is that even if someone
is listening to this in six months time or a
year or two years, three years, there's going to be something.
It's going to be something that is happening culturally that
will be very reminiscent of this. Always something, And that's
(39:25):
what I like to keep in mind, by the way,
and I would invite anyone listening to this or watching
to keep that in mind too, that there's always going
to be something. Try and notice the patterns in terms
of how you're expected to respond and the time in
which you're expected to respond. So for me, when I
saw that, exactly as you said, it was like immediate flashbacks.
(39:46):
It was the same mechanics, same mechanics. This thing comes out,
no one asks where it's from in terms of its origin. Again,
we do need urgently actually more media literacy for people
wondering where things are actually coming from and who are
they coming from, because again, things just come out and
we see, we tend to see a number Okay, twan
(40:09):
and people have shared this. Ten thousand people have shared this,
two hundred and fifty thousand people have shared that means
I should also be sharing because there is that thing
where it's contagious. We don't ask any questions. We just
trust that the data being higher means that it's the
right thing that we need to be sharing. And for
many reasons it could have been because exactly as you said,
(40:29):
it makes people aware of what is going on. So
I understand that awareness peace offered in terms of that
being an objective. But within twenty four hours, actually people
were already being shamed for posting it exact same as
the black square, the exact same thing. To a t
it is uncanny, right, And then now people are feeling
(40:52):
ashamed of being like, do I delete it? But if
I delete it, people might see that I've deleted it
becomes a whole thing. But then for me, the biggest
thing is and this is why I remember recording a
specific podcast episode on this maybe three four years ago,
on why you don't have to speak up on every
social issue, and it all rings true today. This idea
(41:15):
that every single thing people are doing or thinking they
are putting online is something that we need to realize
is very, very very limiting. In many ways, someone could
have been marching for the past ten months, you know,
in their hometown or sending letters to their local MP
(41:35):
or donating hundreds, maybe even thousands, maybe even more. Some
people are having real world conversations. Some people are actually
holding people who are being harmed by this every single day.
Some people are seeing what they can do in their community.
Some people are making phone calls. Some people are dealing
with another war happening in their country, another reality we
(41:56):
have to accept. And again this is just opening up
the nuance in the grave for people to understand that
things are not as simple as oh, if this person posts,
then that shows that they care. That shows that they're
doing something. Because I could post an infographic from bed
and not even really care, but just post it to
say that I've done something. I think it's such a shame.
(42:16):
It's such a shame that we have come to this
point where we believe that if someone doesn't post something
quite literally by the way, that something could be anything.
There's never any detail on what it could be. It
could be anything doesn't even have to actually be a
link that sends maybe something more tangible to where the
conflict is happening. It could be anything. It could be
(42:37):
a photo, it could be a slide, it could be
just one word. People prefer the performance more than whether
something is actually changing fundamentally, because I think where in
such a trance when we're online that we don't even
think that people could be doing something else that isn't posting.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
You know, what's the reason for that, Because it's not everybody,
but the people who speak loudest online often around these
things have become like vigilantes. It's like there's self appointed
shareefs of the internet surveiling what everyone else is posting
and calling out people that they think are posting not
(43:18):
in the right amount or not in the right way.
Isn't narcissism?
Speaker 1 (43:22):
I mean, I guess they.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Think they're doing the right thing. Do they actually think
that what they're doing by centering themselves and shouting at
everybody else is helping or is it just that they
get sort of addicted to the attention or the head rush?
I mean back in the day when I used to
be a lot more outraged online, there is a bit
(43:43):
of a head rush, as you spoke about before, about
when everyone agrees with you and you get lots of
likes and you go girl kinds of comments. Is that
why there's just this intolerance for nuance because being extreme
gets more collapse. To me.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
I don't have one answer, but I think it can
be a combination of different things. I find that a
lot of the time, when we find it so difficult
to hold our own contradictions, we just won't be able
to hold other people's. That's just that's actually just the
reality of it. Because if I can't see myself as
(44:19):
both good and bad, as both manipulative but also very thoughtful,
but also very kind, but I can also be very rageful,
I can also be very impatient, but I can also
be very sweet, and I can also be ground. If
I can't see all of those things about myself, and
especially be able to name the shadowy parts of myself,
(44:39):
I will never be able to do that about someone else.
I just won't. And even worse, if I then encounter
someone who's able to hold those truths about themselves, they
will always be a trigger for me. So something that
I always think about it in the context of self
censorship is that when you become very well trained at
censoring yourself, you will find people that are not just
(45:03):
uncensored to the extreme, but people that allow themselves to
actually speak their minds, or to ask questions or say
I don't know agree with that, or to say I
know everyone agrees with this, but this is what I
think you will feel. That it's actually a threat to
your sense of self and it's very illogical, but it's
people feeling like your worldview isn't actually just yours. It's
(45:24):
now a threat on my sense of self. So I
have to do everything I can to take it down
and to somehow give you mine so then I'm safe.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
You're right. So when I was a couple of years ago,
I was diagnosed with ADHD and I wrote about it,
and I wrote about how there was nothing good about
it for me, like it had only made my life harder.
And there was huge pushback from the neurodivergent community saying,
you can't say, how very dare you say that? You're
(45:55):
not allowed to say that. You've got to be a
role model for young people. And of course there were
other people saying, oh, thank god, I'm so glad you've
said it, because I said, I don't feel like it's
my superpower. Maybe some people feel like it's their superpower.
I don't feel like it's my superpower, Like it's made
my life harder. I wish I could give it back.
But I had strayed from the party line and this
(46:16):
orthodoxy of no, you can only.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
Be positive about it, right.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
And I was I agree. I just went, well, no,
forget it, like I'm not interested in that.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
That's that's exactly it. It's like it's group think essentially. Yeah,
this idea that we only have safety if we all
think the same way, and anything that gets in that
opposes that is a threat and we have to get
rid of it.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
It feels like a threat, right, because what people, I
think often miss is that the people who are most
likely to cancel you, or who are most likely to
call you out or pile on you or whatever, are
people who you are ideologically very similar with. They're part
of the people that you agree with most things. Yes,
Whereas I once spoke to someone who is like a
(47:04):
very right wing commentator and I was asking her, oh,
do you get a whole lot of shit from these
particular people on the left who like to cancel me,
And she's like, oh, no, they completely ignore me. I
get it from the right. So she got canceled from
the right, and the right leaves me alone. I get
canceled from the left. Gosh, why is that, why do
(47:25):
we cancel people that are more likely to cancel people
that are most like us.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
It's like, to me, that's just tribalism. I always laugh
at how we think. Because we wear clothes now and
we have all of this technology whatever, we can override
our primal nature, but it's never going to go anywhere,
and we are tribal creatures. There was definitely a point
in time where if you stray from the tribe, whether
(47:50):
it's through actual action or thought, there's danger. There's danger
if you are cast out by the tribe, you will
be dead, you know, within a few hours. So I
think we still have that biological wiring, and I write
about it in the third perspective. We need to understand
our biology and our human nature so we can see
it at place because we will always have that thing
(48:12):
where our safety is determined by the people around us.
And that also means intellectual safety. Right. I can't feel
that safe if I don't know where to place you.
That's why I think identity has its uses, because it's
not about getting rid of identity completely. It just allows
us for us to understand each other. Even someone saying
(48:33):
I'm British, I'm Zimbabwe, I'm Australian, I'm this, and that
it gives you an idea, and that gives you a
bit of safety. Whereas when you don't know someone's name,
or their age, or where they're from or who they
actually are, How can I trust you when I don't
actually know you? So we take that a step further
with ideology, How can I trust you when you don't
think and feel exactly like me? So where I have
(48:56):
a lot of empathy and compassion actually for all of
this is that asking people to face their discomfort when
they're confronted with a different worldview, etc. It's a very unnatural.
It's a very unnatural thing to ask someone to hold
that contradiction and for it to not feel completely threatening.
(49:17):
But that is our work to do as people, to
surround ourselves not to an extreme, because this is why
people have to say, well, so what I should just
be friends with biggots and white supremacy? Why do we
have to go to those extremes. There are many things
in which you disagree with someone else on, but we're
building such a level of intolerance where even with the
most basic things people can't deal with it anymore. You know,
(49:42):
that's so true.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
Just finally, Africa, your wonderful book. The third perspective, the
subtitle is Brave Expression in the Age of Intolerance. I
want to ask you about intolerance and why you think
we've become so intolerant, because I've worked in media for
thirty years and it used to be just understood that
you could disagree with someone, right, I don't agree with
(50:04):
your opinion. I don't agree with that story you published.
Now people have become so intolerant. It's I disagree with
your opinion. I'm unfollowing you, I am blocking you, or
I don't like that story. You need to take it down.
I can't handle that it even exists in the world.
Speaker 1 (50:25):
What's that about?
Speaker 2 (50:26):
Why have we become so completely intolerant?
Speaker 1 (50:29):
Gosh? So I think that's a big question, and I'm
sure there's a big answer to it. But again, I
think there's a lot of different things, but I like
to kind of bring it back to the self, and
it's what I do in the book as well, because
I think these things can feel so big. Whether we're
talking about cancel culture, identity, politics, the politicization of absolutely
(50:51):
every single thing, even your food choices. It's political in
some way, even what you wear on your body, it's political?
Is it fast fashion? Is it you know, independent brands?
Who has more money to everything is political? But I think,
to me, the intolerance, there's kind of something and I
wonder what you but there's something sort of childlike about
(51:11):
it that everything is sort of me me, me. There's
been like an infantilization of people. People treating themselves like
sort of infants that need to be wrapped in cotton wool,
you know, in case something rubs onto them. So I
find that a way that I'm able to sort of
deal with this without it feeling so big is to
(51:32):
realize that I'm kind of dealing with sort of infants almost.
So I'm not going to let them run the show.
I'm not going to let them tell me what I
can say and not say. I'm not going to allow
for them to say you need to behave in this
way when a lot of the time it's people that
are so out of control in their personal lives, but
then they get this sense of control online. Now they
(51:54):
tell everyone else what to do. When you can barely
have a conversation with your own family, when you can
barely have a conversation with your partner or your sibling.
So I like to think of it in that way,
that it's people trying to gain a sense of control
they don't have in their own lives. So there's something
quite childlike. It's like a toddle.
Speaker 2 (52:14):
That makes so much sense now I understand a couple
of people so much better. It's like a toddler stamping their.
Speaker 1 (52:18):
Foot, absolutely absolutely, And I think you have to think
about it in that way, as in, how would you
respond to a toddler who is stamping their foot and
saying post this and do that and share this. Why
have you done that? It's insane.
Speaker 2 (52:33):
You wouldn't be scared of them, you wouldn't listen to them.
Speaker 1 (52:36):
So I think we need to sort of understand that
we're dealing with something a little bit unnatural here in
needing to lean in instead of leaning out of the
discomfort of being confronted with a different worldview or a
friend of yours changing their mind you know about something,
or saying, you know what, I used to agree with this,
but I don't actually agree with that so much anymore,
(52:56):
And for you to feel like you can still love
and appreciate that person and not apply so much meaning
to it, so I think we've kind of lost this
ability to be able to hold contradiction. But I do
think it starts with our selves. Otherwise, I promise you,
as much as you would like to think you'll be
able to do it, you will never be able to
hold contradiction in someone else if you can't do it
(53:17):
for you.
Speaker 2 (53:22):
That makes so much sense, the idea of holding contradiction
in yourself and being open to the idea of changing
your mind or having nuanced views about things because most
of our views aren't completely polarized, and listening to Africa's
story and her wisdom, I can really understand how she's
(53:45):
become unafraid of cancelation and the online mob, especially through
that framework of someone behaving a bit like a toddler.
And that's not to be trite, because I do believe
that everybody thinks that they're doing the right thing. They
honestly do believe. I have to think this right. I
have to believe that they have good intentions if I
(54:07):
want that same consideration given back to me every time
I make a mistake or do something that people don't
agree with. But I think what's important is to pause
and ask yourself what do we actually owe the Internet?
What do we owe social media? What do we owe
to the strangers who follow us? Is it the only place,
or even the right place to engage in really complex
(54:28):
ideas and situations that require critical thinking and nuance and
where we might change our mind. The truth is, you
don't owe the Internet anything. What we do in our
actual lives, what we stand for in our communities and homes,
in our workplaces, and in our hearts, in our wider society,
(54:51):
that is always going to matter more than what you
do or don't post to the world. I don't post
about my kids online. Do you think that means I
don't care about them? And, as Africa says, in the
eyes of the Internet, you'll never get it right. So
maybe the best way to protect ourselves and each other
is to live our core values more than we post
(55:13):
about what we want people to think our core values
are or what we feel that their core values and
their posts should be. And look, I feel like I've
said that a lot in this podcast. I'll be honest
with you, there were moments I was really afraid to
even have this conversation with Africa or share my own
experiences and ask my own questions, because well, you know,
(55:36):
I know what cancelation feels like, and it is life changing,
not the good kind of life changing. And even saying that,
I'm scared that people will try to weaponize those words
to cancel me. But you know what, I can't let
that fear run my life and I can't let it
determine the kind of conversations that I want to bring
you here on No Filter. I want No Filter to
(55:57):
be a place where you can hear from people you
might disagree with, or feel your own positions challenged a bit,
and remember how to actually have conversations in a good
faith way. And that's what this show is about. And
as you heard, that is certainly what Africa is about.
What strikes me most about her, I mean all the things,
(56:17):
but it's her lack of righteousness. It is her openness,
her ability to listen, and her willingness to embrace nuance,
an uncertainty and contradiction. You probably want more of Africa.
Who wouldn't Lucky for you. She's a consultant, a coach,
a strategist, a speaker. She's magnificent on social media, and
(56:38):
we will pop all the links that you need to
become the Africa Brooks super fan that you should be,
and like we all are here at No Filter, will
pop them in the show notes. The executive producer of
No Filter is Naima Brown. Give her a big, hard,
thorny conversation any day over small talk. Our audio producer
is Tom Lyon. He's learning how to meditate and will
(56:59):
not engage in online drama. And I'm mea friedman. I'm
gonna have a big cup of tea and a very
big lie down. I'm your host. Be kind to each other.
I think twice before you jump into a pylon. There's
a real person on the bottom of it. Cancel reservations
and meetings, not.
Speaker 1 (57:15):
People love you.
Speaker 2 (57:17):
See you next week.
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