Dr. Rita Fierro, born in New York to Italian parents, is a social justice consultant and coach. Everything Dr. Rita does is about Liberation. Dr Rita hones the visions of changemakers to realize a more humane world.
With 28 years of expertise in group decision-making and monitoring and evaluation, Dr Rita has evaluated $95 million in projects, trained 800 individuals and provided coaching to 200 people across four continents.
In 2017, she was instrumental in fostering a collaborative vision between law enforcement and communities in Newark, New Jersey, aimed at addressing police abuses of power. Dr. Fierro holds a PhD in African American Studies and a BA in Sociology.
Her book, Digging Up the Seeds of White Supremacy, serves as a call to reimagine our activism and organizations to confront structures of inequality in creative and regenerative ways.
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[00:00:55] Wir leben in troubling times. Was ist dein beste-case-scenario? Wird die Welt ein besserer Ort, wenn alle die BAD-Pfälle weggegangen sind? Jetzt, wir sagen uns ja zu das Frage. Und wir denken uns jetzt, dass wir die BAD-Pfälle, die wir gerne wollen, haben wir gerne weggegangen.
[00:01:24] Ich bin Dr. Rita. Ich bin ein Social Justice Consultant und Coach. Und after devoting my life's work to undoing racism, I'm here to tell you, my answer to that question is no. My first memory of racism... I was five years old, and I was playing under the dinner table. People's legs and feet are fascinating!
[00:01:56] And I remember someone saying, he got promoted because he's Black! He took my job because he's black. They took him over me because he's black. I was really startled as a five-year-old under that table because I never heard
[00:02:23] hatred in someone's voice that way. And every time he said the word black, it felt like I was getting punched in my stomach over and over and over again. It was the 80s. I was raised in the Bronx. Black children were being bused to my school and I wouldn't actually say that I had a black bestie or really good
[00:02:52] friend that I felt an allegiance towards. I had never been to most of my black classmates homes nor had they had been to mine. But there was something still in that voice, the hatred that felt wrong. And all I could think of, it's wrong for him
[00:03:15] to talk about people that way. Now, the tension in my belly, this visceral tension that I have even now telling you the story, loosened up when my mother spoke up. He has a college degree. You don't. Go get your butt back to college.
[00:03:40] And when I think back on that story, I always think about my mother speaking truth. And that's part of what released the tension in my belly. But there was something else. The good guy had won the argument. You won't be surprised that that wasn't my only experience of this.
[00:04:05] 15, 20, 25. I have many memories of being at events where folks of color were not in the room and racism was being spoken. Because what we do in public is actually strengthened by what we do and what we believe behind closed doors. And that visceral reaction fueled my journey.
[00:04:33] Because I had to find a way in this world, in this world where so much injustice happens outside, I had to find a way to be with my own belly. Because my belly feels a lot. So I invite you to reflect with me for a second. Cookies look good, don't they?
[00:05:02] I'd like you to close your eyes for a second and imagine this scenario that may have even happened in your own childhood. Mom said no cookies before dinner. But they look so good, so you eat two of them. And the minute that you're about to grab a third, your younger sibling walks in. If you don't have a younger sibling, I invite you to imagine that you do.
[00:05:29] And you hand your younger sibling a cookie. The minute your younger sibling is about to grab the cookie, mom walks in. What do you feel? Pause right there for a second. What do you feel? What do you do about that feeling? You can open your eyes now.
[00:05:56] Now, most of us will recognize that the response of, it wasn't me, it was him. Or I wasn't going to eat it, I was giving it to him or to her. It's just part of who we are. It's very familiar. Almost everyone can identify with that. So what's fascinating is, why do we do that?
[00:06:27] We're afraid to lose connection with our mothers. We're afraid to lose connection. We lie because in that moment, keeping the connection alive is more important than anything else. And here's the paradox. We end up losing connection anyway. Because if you're the kid who lies, because if you're the kid who lies,
[00:06:55] the guilt will ultimately drive you away from your sibling. And if you're the sibling who got accused unjustly, the resentment will push you away from your sibling. So the very reason we lie or we blame another is actually the reason that we lose it all.
[00:07:16] So if all the bad people went away, if that's integral in each and every one of us, who would be left? Who has never been blamed for something we either have done or have not done? Who would be left?
[00:07:53] Who has never been blamed for something we've left? Clearly, I was one of those who I often felt scapegoated. Both in my family and in groups. And I don't know if this has ever happened to you, but groups turning all at once against someone... That's pretty scary stuff. You guys don't know. You look really scary right now. There is a part of me, if my voice is trembling right now, it's because there is a part of me
[00:08:19] that's scared of getting scapegoated by this group right now. Like if you all were to leave this place and start talking about how awful my talk was, right now my legs are shaking. Because that has happened to me. Not about how bad my talk was, but about other things. That has happened to me. And when a group of 10 or 20 or 50 people turns against one person, it is terrifying.
[00:08:51] And so my life's work became about how do we, this major question, how do we turn the hatred and the contempt that we have towards difference into curiosity? What's at the root of it? What can uproot it to the point that humanity can show up as the best of who we are? And I found these four
[00:09:16] roots. I mentioned them in my book. Blindness, illusion of separation, illusion of scarcity, and illusion of superiority. It took 20 years to look at what history actually was versus what I was taught it was. Right? And I traveled the world, luckily, thankfully for my work. So whether I was working with violence against women in Aromia, in Ethiopia, or with the Maori of New Zealand on issues of public
[00:09:45] health, or on relationships between community police in New York, New Jersey, there was always a group of people who had felt that institutions had harmed them because they were being put as the bad guys against the people who believed that they were the good guys. And so there are all these variations of
[00:10:07] these stories all around the world. Right? Like they're different histories and contexts. And so uncovering all that was pretty much 20 years of my life. And then someone said to me, well, you know, if you go around, walk around the world like you're the expert and you feel like you're better than other people, you're not really undoing racism. You need to like get down and dirty and messy with the rest of humanity.
[00:10:36] Get off the pedestal. And that was another 16 years. And then someone had me notice, hey, if you believe that resources are scarce and there's not enough for everyone, you're also not undoing racism. Because you'll work from the assumption that our institutions already work from, that there's not enough for everyone. So we have to protect the needs of some against the needs of others.
[00:11:05] So that was another six years of learning there. And separation is again about the getting messy in the face of all of it and human with everyone else. And I'm still working on that one. That's probably why I'm giving this talk right here today. So getting to the root, I reached the conclusion that we need to change three essential things. How we relate to the present, the past and the future.
[00:11:36] So for the present, back to the cookie jar moment. In that moment, what is the feeling? Is it guilt because we really thought we were better than that? Or shame? Is it grief because we actually fail our own expectations of ourselves? Is it fear? And then the moment in which we put the blame on
[00:12:05] someone else, that is in effect scapegoating. The thing that's interesting about scapegoating is that the origin of scapegoating is in the Old Testament. Leviticus 16. So God said to the people, if you're really struggling with all the parts of you you don't like, take a goat. Put all your stuff,
[00:12:32] your weaknesses, your failures, all the things you wanted to do differently on the goat and send the goat out into the wilderness. I'm here to tell you that we're treating people like that goat. And we're pretending that if we just send people off into the wilderness, it'll go away. And that doesn't work.
[00:12:58] And it's time to actually bring it back and be willing to see these things about ourselves that we're not willing to see. So in the cookie jar moment, the harm is in the person getting unjustly accused. But there's also a taking responsibility for the disconnection. Because the lie generates
[00:13:22] disconnection. And our world requires that we take responsibility in a way that isn't the simply, it was him. But I didn't want to, but I did. This is from my book. I actually unpacked the history,
[00:13:48] 500 years of history of 10 different systems. And I believe that if we started looking at system or institutions as branches of the same tree, instead of pretending that they're all separate, we would be as we would be finding different solutions. If we look at institutions as branches of the same tree,
[00:14:12] then we will ask different questions. And asking different questions, we will find different solutions. What is the seed? What is the origin of it all? In my work, I went back to look at the first law in each of these institutions, and I landed that the core is fear. But also that our institutions are kind of split into two categories. The ones that provide services, that basically are set up to serve
[00:14:42] those who the ruling class thought were good people at the beginning of our history, and the policing systems that are designed to patrol the people we decided were bad. And so although good and bad shifted over centuries, the obsession of splitting the good for the bad has not changed.
[00:15:07] We spend billions of dollars trying to sort out who deserves and who doesn't. The phone call you're on with health anything that takes hours and hours on either waiting on hold or trying to convince someone that you need the job, that you need the exam or you need the medicine or you need. That's because we
[00:15:33] haven't decided that there's actually enough for all of us. And we are in a system that would rather pay to sort what I call the Santa Claus complex the other than to actually admit that all of us are both. Because if we came to terms with our humanity as both,
[00:16:03] we would ask different questions. We would find different solutions. The future. When we are stuck in a mindset of good and bad, when we're stuck selecting the good people from the bad people, or pretending that we're good and that everyone else is bad because there really are no good people
[00:16:30] and bad people. When we're stuck in that mindset, our vision for humanity is so small. It's tiny. What's the worst case scenario that people who look like me will be happy or that I will be happy in my little backyard? There's something that opens up when we see that something is possible for all of us.
[00:16:56] And when we stop projecting onto other people our weaknesses. Play with me. I invite you to close your eyes for a second. Let me walk you through the world that I see. I believe that's what's possible and what I live for is a world where tomorrow morning you wake up and you know
[00:17:26] in the bone, every bone of your being that we are valuable. Value is not into question. And so we completely give up proving anything to anyone. And we don't work to prove. We work because we're so excited about our value. We're ready to share it with the next human being.
[00:17:52] And because we're excited to share the value of what we have with the next human being, what happens is the world of work is transformed. We don't nine to five anymore. Because we walk in the world making contribution in and out. And it shifts the restrictions on our lives.
[00:18:15] A lot of people think that my vision is a world that has no conflict. It's not that. It's a world where we turn to each other to resolve the issues of our world. And we know that ten brains are better than one. And so we actually solve issues like cancer and climate change and famine. We get to solve the issues of our time because everyone's brain is used to the highest capacity.
[00:18:44] And back to the cookie jar moment. The world I see, the vision of the world I see, is the world where even a little child is ready to take responsibility for their weaknesses because they know the community that the community will not turn against them, but that the community is a resource.
[00:19:07] What's your best case scenario? Do you have it? Do you see it? My invitation is that if you don't have it just right, that you spend the next couple of days thinking about what is that image for you. And that you surround yourself with people who encourage you to live that vision.
[00:19:29] And then you find a way to bring it into your present, into every moment of your life so that that vision isn't just a vision that orientes your future, but it becomes real in every single day of your life.
[00:19:46] Sparen? Mit Azubi-Gehalt oder BAföG? Klingt utopisch, ist es aber nicht. Mit ETFs im Sparkassen-Sparplan reichen schon kleine Beträge, um von Anfang an was aufzubauen. Und das Beste? Du musst dafür kein Finanzprofi sein. Wir zeigen's dir easy und ohne Fachchinesisch. Tippe jetzt auf das Banner und sichere dir deinen kostenlosen ETF-Vorsorgecheck.
[00:21:10] This podcast is a part of the C-Suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-suiteradio.com.