Ep 47: Thinking Outside of the Box, part 1

In this week’s episode, part 1 of 2, April and Tracie think about new paradigms for the future. Inspired by a song, we use the prison abolition movement & criminal legal system as well as Western medicine as points of reference, investigating the ways inherited systems, received as “natural,” are in fact human constructions which can be deconstructed (and reconstructed!) for a future that is more equitable, sustainable, and just. 

Find April and Tracie's full bios and submit topic suggestions for the show at www.JewsTalkRacialJustice.com

Learn more about Joyous Justice where April is the founding and fabulous (!) director, and Tracie is a senior partner.: https://joyousjustice.com/

Read more of Tracie's thoughts at her blog, bmoreincremental.com

Check out We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1664-we-do-this-til-we-free-us

Learn more about The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein here: https://www.boldtypebooks.com/titles/chanda-prescod-weinstein/the-disordered-cosmos/9781541724709/

Read more about the implications of a racist medical system and the higher mortality rates of Black mothers here: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/maternal-health-in-bipoc

Listen to our episode on Either/Or thinking here: https://joyousjustice.com/blog/jews-talk-racial-justice-ep-9-digital-skin-color-eitheror-thinking-and-pizza-in-dakar

Read more about the Allegory of the Long Spoons, attributed to Rabbi Haim of Romshisok here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_long_spoons

Explore the phrase, “if it’s hysterical, it is historical” here: https://www.inclusivetherapists.com/blog/if-it-s-hysterical-it-s-historical

Transcript

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- [Tracie] In this two-part conversation, we explore the truth that sometimes inherited boundaries are not natural limits, but human restrictions.- [April] This is "Jews Talk Racial Justice" with April and Tracie.- [Tracie] A weekly show hosted by April Baskin and Tracie Guy-Decker.- [April] In a complex world, change takes courage.- [Tracie] Wholehearted relationships can keep us accountable.- So that song that you just played, it really aligns with some of the things that I've been thinking about lately, because the universe is showing me in multiple ways, different areas where our thinking, our vision for the future is limited by our past and especially by either/or thinking. It's really coming up for me, I'm most of the way through-- You're talking about us as a team-- No.- Or us as the collective Jewish people?- I'm talking about even bigger than the Jewish people, like us-- Humanity.- I mean humanity and especially like Western culture, but yeah-- So weird, this resonates.- Not just us as a team. Yeah, no, okay, so I'm mostly through reading,"We Do This Till We Free Us" by Mariame Kaba. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing her name right, which is an abolitionist, is a collection of essays about abolition organizing, and so for those of our listeners who maybe don't know, abolition is a term for folks who are looking to just fundamentally transform our... Our legal system, our criminal system. They call it the criminal punishment system instead of, or the criminal legal system, rather, rather than the criminal justice system, because there is no justice in it, as the abolitionists see it. And one of the things that it's clear from these essays that Kaba has, that have been collected from Kaba in interviews and other things, that like the thing that she faces the most often is like,"but where will the criminals go?" Like, "what will we do with criminals if we don't have prisons?" And her answer is like, we will have addressed the causes of crime, right? Like, instead of just creating a cycle where people, where the desperation is continued. Anyway, so that's one area where the universe is saying like, think outside of the patterns. And then I'm seeing other places-- Yeah, this really resonates.- Where the same, that same message is coming to me. I was thinking recently, I think I even shared this briefly with you where I've been thinking again about pronouns and realizing how limited, when I first was introduced to the practice of sharing pronouns. And I thought I was good with trans siblings, because I was like, well, I'll just use the pronoun that they want me to use, but in my head, I still thought there were only two options. And it took me years and actual relationships with genderqueer and gender nonconforming folks for me to finally like, get that it's not either/or, and it doesn't have to be an either/or. And I'm just seeing this message, this message of like, think bigger. Our colleague Daniel just shared recently a physicist who was talking about thinking outside of Euclidean geometry, that actually curvilinear understandings of the physical world can be... Can be useful as opposed to sort of the XYZ axis of Euclidean geometry that we, in the West have been taught is a natural way of thinking about it, or sort of an intuitive way of thinking about it. We've been taught that these things are just like these common sense things are somehow... Right, baked in, except just, the boundaries. That's it. we've been taught that these things are the boundaries, that they're normal and natural. And we just need to, you know, get automatic with our understanding-- As you're talking, I'm thinking of the intro of the song of like, Open your mind, open your mind, open your mind- Exactly. Open your mind Open your mind, open your mind- Even the-- As you're talking-- Are you ready? Even like the very beginning the, are you ready? Are we ready? I don't know. Even that feels resonant.- Let's still open our mind anyway.- With these messages that I feel like I'm getting in through multiple channels about just trying to actually take a bigger view and not get stuck in the either/or, and not get stuck in... Thinking that a minor reform is somehow a solution. Like that's another thing that's really coming out of the abolitionist work for me.- Yes, yes.- Where Kaba talks about how actually, prison itself was a reform over corporal or capital punishment. Like, well, at least they're not dead.- Execution, yeah.- But the harm that is being caused or like women's prisons was a reform so that women weren't housed in correctional facilities with men, but that this new reform of having women's prisons allowed a lot more women to be incarcerated. And so, these reforms that seem like an improvement over what was-- Are still constrained by-- They're still constrained-- Previous thinking and structures.- The boundaries, and then it may be different harm, but continue cause harm instead of actually addressing the cause of the harm in the first place. It's, I'm still wrapping my mind around it because I'm someone who has actually done really well within those boundaries of what society has said are like normal, natural. I'm putting air quotes around all those words, like within those boundaries of expectations, like I've succeeded. And so, wrapping my mind around the fact that those boundaries are arbitrary and not normal, they are completely created by human minds and therefore, can be deconstructed by human minds, and we can do something different, like.- Right.- It's blowing my mind a little bit.- Right, and I love it. I love our alignment, first of all, just in case people are curious (laughs), and I'm just laughing because it's funny to me because I often discover songs and they're new and glorious in my life, and at times, they're anywhere from three to 12 years old, but I'm just hearing them, because I'm so saturated and in love with my work that I don't hear music often when it comes out. And often, I don't like, always, a lot of the music, and so it takes me awhile to find gems years later. And so the song that we're referencing is Logic's "Hallelujah," that I'm just in love with right now. And Tracie, I love your, what you're saying and our alignment, because in a very different sort of way, I've been thinking very similar thoughts and I've been having a hard time articulating them. And it's, so it's fun and affirming to hear you talk about this, but I've just been like, it's just in my own head, and so it's hard to find the words, but I've been, I was feeling a couple months ago or a month or so ago, exasperated about medicine. And that I both, I know, and also, then, I was reading this book called"The Checklist Manifesto," that's written by this doctor. And in it, the author references, this physician references that actually, it wasn't that long ago that certain advancements were made that dramatically reduced fatalities in hospitals and different procedures. But to me, it's just amazing to think about, excuse me, technologically and intellectually and spiritually, all the different advancements. And yet, that there's so many common ailments that I would just think at this point in human development, and it actually really intricately ties to a lot of what you're saying around equity and structure and how we design things, because I'm just like, there's clearly enough brain power and brain power and spiritual power, because that's another thing that I've started to think about a lot here in Senegal, as I don't have some of the alternative resources that I would have in the United States because even the medical system, like the medical system in the United States, I got an infection and some complications from a poor IUD placement. And it just, it wasn't a good situation for me. And after that experience, I really didn't want to take any antibiotics. I was just feeling a little bit like I just had this foreign thing in my body put in by a, as I later realized, the sexist gynecologist, the sexist male physician, who, I don't wanna say anything that will trigger people, but you know, it was just a painful and miserable process the entire time I had it. And that's not a typical experience for these kinds of physically, medically, for me to have something that, even if I have discrimination, anyway, it's just a whole thing. So, oh yeah, so I had this experience and it was around the time that I had had a couple other health challenges and I was just reluctant to take antibiotics. I was reluctant to follow any advice from the specific OB-GYN gynecologist. And I was like, and I was also in the midst of learning about really robust, healthy diets. And I was like, I wonder if I do some kind of like really healthy diet where I just make green soups that have dark leafy greens and beans and lots of fresh garlic, different fresh herbs. And I did that a few days along with eating some other lightly cooked foods. And within a few days, all signs of my infection were gone and they never came back. And after that, that like that shifted something from me and like in many areas of my life, the hold of both/and that I am incredibly grateful to the medical community for the ways that they've helped me and my family in a number of ways. And I'm also viscerally and passionately aware of certain limitations of the Western biomedical model. And it's just, it just baffles me that to this day, even if like, because doctors at this point have to know so much, so this isn't inherently a critique of doctors, but just the fact that systemically, there's not more communication or connective tissue between physicians and dieticians and nutritionists, like it just, it's interesting to me and it feels like this thing, like I'm not fully grounded in a timeline. Like it doesn't make... Like the passage of time and different things seems like becomes more nonlinear in my brain. And I'm like, these solutions are here right now. We're just not accessing it. So I don't know if that's getting in a little too ethereal, but when you talk about what you talked about, like I've been thinking about that with certain social things in our own Jewish community, and even certain things that in my own lifetime I've seen where they were, but just feeling a tension around where things are and the potential and the possibility that's right here in any given moment. It just, it's... I could swim in it. There's just so much.- Yeah, yeah, it's really big. You're talking about the Western medicine. That resonates for me, as well. I mean, just when you look at the aggregate of like how some of the outcomes, the statistics around for Black mothers, for instance, and the fact that Black maternal mortality is so much higher than white maternal mortality in America, and that, you know, Black infants have better outcomes when they're treated by Black doctors...- Dramatically so.- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like it's not just...- The rates are staggering=- It's not anecdotal.- And infant death. Yeah, no.- Yeah, it's... As you're saying that, as I'm thinking about those statistics, like it does seem like that's another place where we're, as a society, we are stuck in a paradigm that is not serving us, and it's hard for us to kind of think outside of it. I don't know what the solution is.- Right, and I feel like with part of it is, right, and I find with these sorts of things that people, because of how our society has been structured and maybe, in part. also because of human nature and certain ways, although I get, oftentimes, I think people, people say certain things are human nature and I'm like, no, that's not. Like racism is not in human nature. To be able to make distinctions between ingroup and outgroup is. For that to be inherently oppressive and horrible, I don't agree.- Yeah.- Maybe in industrialized societies, that is an inevitable outcome of certain social structures, but it's not to me inherent. But like, a huge part of it is this either, often, because it's implied or it's not, but again, this deep entrenched, actual or perceived and feared experience of either/or that, like, I feel like it's like I, when I, even when I was just talking about this a moment ago, I explicitly specified and that isn't to say that it can't be righteous at times to completely do away with something, that I needed to specify because it's often so, people often go to these binaries, whether it's around gender or perspective of like doctors are all evil and different things like that. And there might be a lot of crappy doctors, but they're also a number of amazing, phenomenal doctors and a bunch or somewhere in between who are also pretty great. So that's not, so people at times, they take it as an attack on their field, or on them as an individual, instead of saying there's some great, but like, there's some great stuff here and wouldn't it be fun if we like, drastically reduced misdiagnoses by having some system, and we're not saying you have to do it all. Like, what is the third space here where we have this knowledge over here and this thing over here, and we can find ways so that these things talk? Is there a way, like, it's just...- I think the individual piece is also really important when combined, the individualism when combined with the either/or in what you're saying, like-- Yeah.- I've been thinking about that a lot lately, as well. Like that classic story of the people with the long spoons. Do you know that story? I don't remember-- It sounds familiar, but I can't quite...- So I have to look up where the origin of it was,'cause I don't, I do not remember. It's just like popping up in my brain as we're talking. But so the allegory of the long spoons is a parable attributed to Rabbi Haim of Romshishok, as well as other sources. This, I'm reading from Wikipedia right now. So the allegory of the long spoons, in heaven, there's a pot of soup. Oh, sorry, let's start with hell. In hell, there's a pot of soup in the middle.- Ice the soup!- There's a long, it's in the middle of a moat and people are on the edges and they all have these long spoons so they can reach the soup, but it's too long to reach their mouth. So they can't eat. And then right across the way is heaven, same sitch, same soup, same ring, but they're feeding each other. Right? So because the spoon, they dip into the soup and then they feed the person across-- Ah!- The circle. And it seems so relevant, and especially when combined with the either/or, right, because in what you're talking about, when you're saying people get upset with the binary and they think they're being personally attacked, right? As a doctor, as someone who has a family member who's a doctor when we talk about the medical community, when in fact, we're saying, how could we use these spoons differently? It doesn't have to all be on you because when it is all on you, then you know, the spoon can't reach your mouth or you spill it, you spill the soup. I don't know. The metaphor is falling apart, but you get my point.- Right.- That the difference between sort of it's all on me and it's all on us, I think also, it changes the way we look at things.- Ooh, ooh, ooh. Well, I see here this theme that shows up in other areas of our work around racial justice, where people have, and just in general, and I'm curious about the reasons why. My theory is maybe because of the ways we were raised to inappropriately take on other people's feelings, and/or inherently blame ourselves when someone else is upset, is that, in general, whether it's around these systemic challenges or interpersonal things, there's often this misfiring where someone's pain and upset, that people have a hard time being present, and being able to notice what they're saying and delineate that this person is talking about something that is painful. And as we often know, I don't know who said this, so if we wanna figure out who said this before, but you know, and I think you're one of the people I heard this from, that if it's hysterical, it's historical. And just the idea, both within the medical field, as well as other areas or in these conversations about the need for innovation in a given field or industry, whether it's the, what did you call it? I love that shift, the legal system, what did you call it?- The criminal legal system.- Criminal legal system. Right, so whether it's that or medicine or any other area that really needs an upgrade and/or based upon what we know, could have an upgrade based upon the available knowledge and insight that's in the world. And I think part of what gets in the way, at times, is that there is consistently, there's various reasons, but this is just the thing that I think is interesting right now, a group of vocal people who have been deeply harmed by that industry, by that organization and people, we as a society in general, and as a number of societies, we have not been conditioned to remain clear and balanced in our own energy in the presence of someone else's upset. And I think that there is this intermingling and messiness that happens around maybe some of our own insecurities, about things we know to be true, but we don't wanna take full responsibility, but rarely outside of real upset, which makes sense, when someone's going through a mourning process or something like that, that they're regulating their emotions and their perceptions about their loss and the great degree of pain. What I'm trying to say is that I think, at times, oppression stays entrenched, oppression or outdated systems stay in place, in part, because of people's inability of lack of emotional intelligence, to be able to parse out legitimate critique from, and be able to hold legitimate critique while also holding their inherent goodness, as well as the strengths of what they bring and that innovation or improvement doesn't necessarily have to mean an attack on individuals or even a field. Like to me, it's kind of like growth of a tree. Like, I guess you could say that the older, taller tree is better, but it wouldn't have been able, it wouldn't have been able to exist if the earlier iteration of the tree hadn't occurred. But there's such critique that people and judgment that people are, to me, just so intensely trying to avoid. And I'm curious about what can help grease and shift that so that we can start to notice. Actually better for all of us. And it's totally okay for us to iterate this thing and that we can be a part of something that can still be continually evolving. And you know, to me, it's like, it's basically like the principle of we're all doing our best with the knowledge and understanding that we have. And then when we get better knowledge or have more insight, we can know and do better, even if that insight was available, but you were missing the missing link. Then you got that link. Like we don't have to stay locked in. It's kind of like bad financial decisions. Like just because you made one bad financial decision doesn't mean you need to keep going down that path once you realized an error in your ways. Thanks for tuning in. Our show's theme music was composed by Elliot Hammer. You can find this track and other beats on Instagram@ElliotHammer. If this episode resonated with you, please share it and subscribe. To join the conversation, visit jewstalkracialjustice.com, where you can send us a question or suggestion, access our show notes and learn more about our team. Take care until next time, and stay humble and keep going.