From Presence to Power: A Conversation with Rashad Robinson – Transcript

INTRODUCTION

Kirk: [00:00:00] Welcome to Let’s Hear It.

Eric: Let’s Hear It is a podcast for and about the field of foundation and nonprofit communications, produced by its two co-hosts, Eric Brown and Kirk Brown. No relation.

Kirk: Well said, Eric. And I’m Kirk.

Eric: And I’m Eric. Let’s Hear It is sponsored by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, which enhances quality of life by championing the arts, promoting early childhood literacy, and supporting research to cure chronic disease. Online at krfoundation.org. We are also sponsored by the Prebys Foundation, a foundation creating an inclusive, equitable, and dynamic future for all San Diegans. Check out their amazingly good podcast, Stop and Talk, hosted by Grant Oliphant and Crystal Page. You can find them at stopandtalkpodcast.com.

Kirk: You can find Let’s Hear It on any podcast subscription platform.

Eric: You can find us online at letshearpodcast.com.

Kirk: And if you’d like the show, please, please, please rate us on Apple Podcasts so that more people can find us. Let’s get onto the show.

 

Kirk: [00:01:00] So there’s a blizzard hitting most of the United States right now. But I’m — I’ve never been happier to be in the Bay Area than I am right now.

Eric: Do not gloat.

Kirk: The whole country’s covered under snow.

Eric: It’s rude to gloat. And you, as a Midwesterner, as one of those nice islanders — you should know not to gloat.

Kirk: Well, let’s extend, from the warm confines — the relatively warm confines — of the San Francisco Bay Area, a mighty welcome to everybody who’s coming back to Let’s Hear It.

Eric: Welcome in.

Kirk: There’s a really important word we’re about to hear. I wonder if you can guess what I think is the most important word.

Eric: Just one word? Remember, we’re gonna — you’re gonna listen to whatever — an hour of stuff. A very important 30-minute conversation with Rashad Robinson and then 20 minutes of blah, blah. But there’s gonna be one word you’re gonna have to listen for.

Kirk: That word is win.

Eric: Win. Oh.

Kirk: Rashad Robinson knows how to win, and I think that is awesome. I’m so glad you guys had this conversation. We have much to discuss when we come back — but Rashad Robinson knows how to win, and I couldn’t thank him enough for that.

 

Eric: [00:02:00] By the way, Rashad Robinson is a joyful, amazingly powerful — such a cool person to talk to right now. The timing could not be better. He is the former head of Color of Change, the largest online racial justice organization in the country. He co-founded the Fight Back Table, which was one of the largest progressive coalitions in the US. He has this new newsletter now called How We Win — there’s that word win.

Kirk: There it is.

Eric: He has a show on News One called Freedom Table. And he’s co-chair of the steering committee for the Committee on the First Amendment, working alongside none other than Jane Fonda. And he has a book coming out called From Presence to Power: How to Take On the Fights That Matter and Win. There goes that word again. Coming from One World/Penguin Random House in July. Rashad is everywhere and always incredibly interesting. We had this conversation right after the Super Bowl, so we got a little Bad Bunny talk in there, right?

Rashad: Yeah.

Eric: And I was really excited to talk to him. That’s what we did.

Kirk: [00:03:00] Let’s mention From Presence to Power again — it’s his book coming out July 28th. You can pre-order it now from all the places you order books. And by the way, buy it someplace local — we’d support that as well. Rashad Robinson. What a great conversation. So let’s listen to Rashad and Eric on Let’s Hear It, and then we’ll be back.

 

INTERVIEW

Eric: Rashad Robinson has spent his career proving an essential truth: that visibility for your issue is only the beginning. You have to turn that into power to bring about lasting change. And at a moment when so many organizations — too many — are hunkering down and hoping that the storm passes, Rashad Robinson is asking the question this entire sector needs to sit with: Are you building power? Rashad Robinson, you are a civil rights leader, a changemaker, and you are single-handedly keeping the haberdashers of New York in business. Thank you very, very much for coming on the show.

Rashad: [00:04:00] Ah, thanks for having me. It’s great to be with you.

Eric: One of my favorite things about you are the lids. You have some amazing hats.

Rashad: I really do. I love a good fedora, a bucket hat — I love to connect the hat with the rest of the style. It’s always a fun way to express myself.

Eric: Well, you know, I’ve got a whole long list of questions here and I just chucked them out the window. Because I just want to start with your essence, your personality. You’re a — I don’t know — a happy warrior or something. Maybe warrior’s not the word, but you just seem to bring this life and joy and love to your work. How did that happen?

Rashad: You know, I feel like I wake up in the morning, I see so many things that just aren’t right that I want to change, and I couldn’t imagine not having the opportunity to actually do something about it. So as much as you internalize the pain, I feel blessed to be able to be in service and be engaged. I grew up in a family of people who kind of simultaneously met the work of trying to make their lives better and our community better with living — recognizing that we only have so much time here. It’s unpromised. It could end tomorrow. And so in these moments, we want to do everything we can to be of service, to be of value, to be of use — but also to have some joy along the way.

 

Rashad: [00:06:00] I often talk about joy through the lens of racial justice. I talk about Black joy. And Black joy is not the absence of pain, but the presence of aspiration, the presence of possibility, the presence of hope. That’s how I think about joy. And I try to bring joy to my work. No one wants to fight to get to a better tomorrow if they feel like getting there with you is only going to feel the same.

Eric: Well, that joy permeates everything about you — which is why I’ve been so excited about having this conversation. We’re in a tough time and you bring something special to it. We met when I interviewed you for another project, and we discovered — speaking of suffering — a mutual, unfortunate love for the New York Mets. I already knew we were going to have some kind of connection that way. And obviously your work at Color of Change has been so important. What’s your life been like since your days there? You’re into a new thing.

Rashad: Yeah. There was this piece of my job at Color of Change — maybe 30% of my time — where I kind of played this role of Chief Strategy Officer, in quotation marks. Whether it was through the work I was doing, modeling innovation and new ways of doing things, or just being deeply engaged with a range of activists, I helped found something. I co-founded something called the Fight Back Table, which is one of the largest progressive coalitions, and it still exists today.

 

Rashad: [00:07:00] I co-founded that after the 2016 election as a way for progressive organizations that weren’t going to normalize the real threat of the Trump administration — organizations that recognized we had to have a center of gravity for those who wanted to fight. That this wasn’t the same type of administrative change we’d seen before. George W. Bush may have represented a change candidate. Donald Trump represented a change-the-rules candidate. And changing the rules is a different way to think about how power is used and how we engage. That way of thinking — building frameworks around power — is very much now at the center of a lot of the work I get to do.

 

Rashad: [00:08:00] So I have a whole practice of helping movement organizations really think about power, narrative, and culture change. I have a set of media projects: a podcast being launched with Courier this spring; work I do with News One, one of the largest Black media outlets — a project called Freedom Table, where we bring together conversations that are sometimes tough or interesting and have them as family conversations. A book with Random House that comes out July 28th — you can get it at Penguin Random House’s website and any other places you buy books online, though try to find someplace local. It’s called From Presence to Power: How to Take On the Fights That Matter and Win. I’m also working very closely right now with Jane Fonda and the Committee on the First Amendment —

Rashad: [00:09:00] — where I’m helping as co-chair of the steering committee, and working closely with Jane as she does everything she can to organize Hollywood creatives and A-listers to speak up against authoritarianism, challenge their industry, and reach more people around the country about the threat. So I guess suffice it to say — I’ve been taking some time off and resting and relaxing.

Eric: (laughs) Well, this moment feels to me like your career is coalescing into a set of tools and activities. Can you take us back to the beginning? You were an organizer with GLAD, you did media advocacy there. Can you talk about what you learned along the way that brought you to this point?

Rashad: Yeah, I learned a lot of things. The first protest I ever led was in high school. It was our local Rite Aid out in Riverhead, Long Island, New York. I grew up at the last exit on the Long Island Expressway.

Rashad: [00:10:00] My family got there through the Great Migration — the farm fields of Virginia to the farm fields of eastern Long Island. I grew up in a family that didn’t have the college experience, but was very connected to community, connected to activism, and were part of the local NAACP. And there was something that didn’t feel right about a decision the Rite Aid made to ban young people from entering during lunchtime. So I organized a protest and built a press release — because I was in a class about communications in high school. All of that to say, I ended up on page two of Newsday.

Eric: Whoa.

Rashad: And on all of the local New York affiliates. If you’re on Long Island, you’re part of the New York media market. Getting into WABC and WNBC means the story travels much quicker. So I became this young activist. I had a local public access talk show where we talked about issues, and I learned very quickly what it meant to actually be able to force institutions to do things they don’t want to do.

Rashad: [00:11:00] My first answer from that Rite Aid store, when I reached out, was to kick rocks. But we built up enough energy, got enough media involved, and we forced them to change their decision. There’s always been this piece — from very early on — of understanding how you force institutions to be nervous about disappointing you. How do you force them to listen to you when they don’t want to, to consider your demands? That has very much been at the heart of it.

 

Rashad: And I’ve always been attracted to issues I had some connection to through my family or personally. Whether it was working on felony disenfranchisement and the right to vote for people with felony convictions — which is both a story of political power for that individual and political voice for families affected — or going to GLAD in 2005,

Rashad: [00:12:00] right after all those anti-gay ballot measures passed in 2004. People were saying the LGBT movement was part of Kerry’s loss.

Eric: Right.

Rashad: And what that meant over the next several years, where we saw tremendous change in working to force those pillars of entertainment and news to shift their coverage — what you could say, what you could print, how you could portray gay and lesbian people. In 2005, when I got there, it looked very different than 2011. So across all of that, I’ve learned a lot about power. I’ve learned a lot about story. And I’ve learned a lot about the role of people and strategy in making that possible.

Eric: [00:13:00] Well, I used to deliver Newsday, by the way.

Rashad: You did? Okay. Yeah. We got Newsday every single — Newsday was a big deal, because I grew up with Newsday. It was also how you got those Mets box scores.

Eric: That’s right.

Rashad: I was around enough during that eighties era — Strawberry, Hojo, everyone — those were some good days for the box scores.

Eric: Those were good days for the box scores. And I was at Exit 25 on the LIE, so —

Rashad: So, 70, 71.

Eric: Yeah. That’s far out there. I don’t think I’ve ever been that far.

Rashad: Yeah. We call that Real Long Island out there.

Eric: Well, I’m so interested in what you’re doing now and how these pieces come together. Because you’ve been so well known for

Eric: [00:14:00] advancing narrative — but not just narrative for its own sake. We talk about this in the communications world: stop just trying to raise awareness, you actually have to move people. You have to make these large institutions uncomfortable for not giving you what you need, not delivering for people. So you’ve got this newsletter called How We Win, which I really love — because you come at it with this joyful optimism in the face of what many people feel is an intractable problem. Freedom Table on News One, which you just launched — the first episode came out last month, in January.

Rashad: Mm-hmm.

Eric: And you’ve got all these people you bring together who I am learning from. And now you’ve got the book, From Presence to Power. Was there something that clicked in your mind — here are these components that, if we put them together, we’re going to create this body of information and tools so that others can learn from?

Rashad: You know, getting to the point where I’m at right now, I’ve mostly thought about the different ways

Rashad: [00:15:00] that people take in information, the different ways I wanted to have influence. Leading Color of Change for 13 years, I had the ability to reach and engage Black people — thinking about the role of Black people as both strategists, voices, and participants in our democracy. So the News One thing was: I just wanted to continue to have a way to reach and engage Black folks, for the sake of Black folks, but also understanding that when Black people win, the country is oftentimes moving in the right direction on so many other things.

 

Rashad: The book was something I knew I wanted to write for a long time. The first time I really knew I wanted to find a different way to tell stories — I had just come off real success with the campaign to take on the American Legislative Exchange Council, also known as ALEC.

Rashad: [00:16:00] I ran a campaign that forced over a hundred corporations to leave ALEC. I did a lot of media, a lot of work. And there were a number of folks in philanthropy and other places who did write-ups on the campaign and said, ‘We need more of these campaigns.’ And they took the write-ups and went off and funded people to do that work — and never came back to me or Color of Change.

 

Rashad: I recognized that tricky dance between being boots on the ground and being a strategist. In order to set strategy, there are different things you have to demonstrate — and it’s sometimes a lot harder if you’re a woman, if you’re a person of color, if you’re working class, to be considered in those rooms in that way. But I recognized I had to make the work legible. I had to, in my own way, create the frameworks. And if I wasn’t simultaneously telling the story through my own voice, other people would — and they would sometimes get

Rashad: [00:17:00] key pieces wrong. One of the key pieces people got wrong about the ALEC campaign was how essential it was to have an organized constituency that exists in the world. What I mean is: having a Black constituency organized enough to force corporations to do something. It could be LGBT, it could be women — but not just a political constituency, not just people who shared certain values, but people tied together by something a bit deeper. That was key to being able to force a company with a marketing budget to ask: am I losing market share in audiences that will

Rashad: [00:18:00] hurt my bottom line? Especially if they’re a public-facing company, like a McDonald’s or a Coca-Cola. So these pieces, each of them, came from a desire to reach key audiences and help us get closer to winning. The newsletter is for people who are more players on the field — working in philanthropy, working in movement organizations, organizing and engaging. I’m rolling out strategy, and I’m also rolling out a broader, more dispatches-style version of that newsletter over the next couple of weeks, more targeted toward folks who are every day seeing what’s happening on the news and want to be able to place it in context.

 

Rashad: [00:19:00] I think a lot about audience. I think a lot about helping people make sense of what’s happening. And I think a lot about how to give people the tools to do something. Each of these things I’m doing is in service of that. And hopefully, along the way, I reach enough people to have the type of impact that matters.

Eric: We’re going to take a very quick break, and after the break I’m going to ask you about what just happened at Levi’s Stadium here in San Francisco, and the cultural moment that Bad Bunny might have helped to create. So we’ll be right back with Rashad Robinson right after this. You are listening to Let’s Hear It, a podcast about foundation and nonprofit communications hosted by Eric Brown and Kirk Brown.

 

Eric: Check out season three of Break Fake Rules with Glen Galaich, CEO of the Stupski Foundation, as he chats with inspiring leaders in philanthropy, government, media, and more about breaking the fake rules that don’t work so that we can build a future that does. Check them out wherever you get your podcasts. And now back to the show.

 

Eric: [00:20:00] And we’re back with Rashad Robinson. Okay — so the Super Bowl just happened. And this conversation you have about how to take cultural moments and bring people together and create something out of it — it feels like something just happened at the Super Bowl, and I would love your take on it.

Rashad: I actually just this morning wrapped up the final draft of my newsletter on this.

Eric: Oh, good.

Rashad: And mostly because I’ve been thinking a lot about culture and celebrity and all of these things — how does it give us permission to believe that we can say more? Or give us a signal about where we’re at? First and foremost, I thought what Bad Bunny did was just so incredibly powerful and theatrical. We got real theater — in a way you don’t always get from a performance. And it was political in a way I don’t think we’ve seen at the Super Bowl perhaps since Beyoncé’s performance. The last several years have been interesting and cool in different ways. And of course Kendrick was great in his own way, but he was not political in the way that Bad Bunny was.

Rashad: [00:21:00] So I think it’s a really interesting moment. Bad Bunny did his job as an artist. The question now for the movement is: what is our job? How do we use these moments, leverage these moments, to help people make sense of what they saw? We know that the right wing is going to do a whole lot of work to reach the 135 million people who watched that and help them interpret that moment. That’s what they do. Our infrastructure actually has to help people make sense of it — translate what it means for people, what they should do, help people who may have been moved a little, who may not have understood all the words but saw the images. That infrastructure of sense-making, of translating — and I don’t mean just translating Spanish to English.

Rashad: [00:22:00] I mean translating the cultural critique that matters — that happens online and that moves into our conversations so that we have some shared understanding of what happened. That is the work that movements do. Bad Bunny can reach a whole lot more people than any immigration group, any Latino advocacy organization, any organization working against corporate exploitation or the extraction of wealth and labor and land. He gives us the art, the politics. And now the work is: how do we hone those things into ways that people can understand? It’s a mistake to think that people saw it and that’s enough. In fact, it’s never enough. The more we take these moments and exploit them, the more downstream — and even upstream —

Rashad: [00:23:00] impact it’ll have.

Eric: Well, your book is called From Presence to Power. It sounds like Bad Bunny was the presence, and now the organizations working on the issues he’s helping to shine a light on have to apply the power. And you’ve done this many, many times. I’d love to hear about the Facebook campaign, because I think that is a perfect example of presence to power.

Rashad: Yeah. The Facebook campaign. When I first got to Color of Change back in 2011, our biggest social media platform was MySpace — that’s where we had the most activity. Over time we grew a lot of presence. The goal was to get as many followers on Facebook as we could, build our presence, get as much reach.

Rashad: [00:24:00] And we got to a point where we started to see that the rules of Facebook were stacked against us. It wasn’t enough to just have more followers on a system that is unfair. It’s like trying to go into a gerrymandered district and just asking people to vote without understanding the power dynamics. The underlying power dynamics of how Facebook worked — before we used words like algorithm — were starting to work against us. And there were a lot of rules around how Facebook did its business. We had these moments where Black Lives Matter activists were getting doxed, where police interactions would happen and the police could have the Facebook Live turned off in that moment — and Facebook would comply.

 

Rashad: And we had moments where a young woman was murdered and the Facebook Live was turned off because Facebook agreed to it. We recognized that as much as we were pushing on Facebook, we weren’t having traction. We had to keep changing what we were doing. We got to a moment with Facebook where we didn’t know if we were

Rashad: [00:25:00] being heard — but we found out from the New York Times that we were, because they had hired a PR firm called Definers to place negative stories and attack pieces on me and the organization. We would never have known those pieces were coming from Facebook had the New York Times not exposed it. But in that moment, it meant that Facebook had to engage us differently. So it went from having conversations with senior-level people in their DC office to actually moving to direct

Rashad: negotiations with Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg. And that led to a different type of engagement. This is something I’ve really learned over the years. When you’re dealing with corporations, it’s always important to know whether you’re in a dialogue

Rashad: [00:26:00] or a negotiation. When you’re in a dialogue, they’ll keep you talking, going back and forth — it’s nice to have, and they want you there so they can say they’ve talked to you. If you’re in a negotiation, you might actually be able to move things and win things. The corporation’s job is to keep you in a dialogue. Your job as an advocate is to get into a negotiation.

 

Rashad: Part of what I learned from the Facebook work is really how to move from dialogue to negotiation. And when you realize you’re not getting to negotiation, you have to change your strategies — you have to up your game so you’re not just in presence, but in power. Because power is the ability to change the rules. Sometimes written rules, sometimes unwritten rules. So we had to move to

Rashad: all sorts of other activities — from one of the largest boycotts in American history to a racial equity audit that forced them to change their policies. And in the background of all that Facebook activity, we had

Rashad: [00:27:00] the potential at that point for real regulation on big tech — and that was the thing Facebook was super worried about. So we also had to keep our feet in Congress and the Senate. I testified before Congress on regulation. Each of those moments was about saying: Facebook, change your policies and practices. Congress: Facebook won’t change their policies and practices on their own. Along the way, trying to win as much as possible. Ultimately, we know where we’re at with big tech right now. I think we’ve learned how much power and money they’re willing to put in. But along the way, we won some things. I don’t think the 2020 election would have gone the way we wanted had we not won real

Rashad: [00:28:00] victories in content moderation, in how political ads were handled, in all of that. But ultimately, it is a story of presence to power, and it is ultimately a story of the need for regulation. Our cars are not safe because of the benevolence of the auto industry. Our food is not safe because of Big Ag. It’s safe because there have been advocates, there have been campaigns, and now there is infrastructure that holds those corporations accountable and creates real consequences when they harm and hurt us.

Eric: We talked a little bit about this earlier, but you’ve written powerfully about the danger of fatigue in this moment — the temptation to believe that what’s happening is normal, to normalize the crazy. A lot of our listeners are in the trenches, working day to day on this kind of work, and they’re getting exhausted — if they’re not already completely burned out. How do you talk to people who are running on empty but know they can’t stop?

Rashad: Yeah. I always tell people: put your oxygen mask on first. You’ve got to take a breath. But there are people who have been in much worse situations than we are in right now,

Rashad: [00:29:00] and they found it within themselves to continue to push and fight. So if you can’t do what you’re doing right now in the same way, maybe there’s another way for you to contribute. Find the ways to contribute in this moment. I understand fatigue — there have definitely been times I’ve been tired. But like I said at the start of this interview, I simply don’t know what I would be doing or how I would make sense of my life if I woke up, saw everything that was happening, and wasn’t using every bit of myself to do what I can to right the wrongs.

Eric: Your newsletter is called How We Win. So I want to ask you: would you point to one or two things in the next year or so and say, that’s what winning looks like?

Rashad: I think the incredible bravery and organizing happening on the ground in Minneapolis

Rashad: [00:30:00] — and it is the result of years of collaborative work between folks. As someone who’s supported and engaged that work in Minneapolis over the years, who was part of electing Mary Moriarty as district attorney, and who has supported and collaborated with many of the groups on the ground — I just continue to be impressed by what they’ve built. People talk about the middle of the country, the heartland. This is the middle of the country. This is the heartland. And it speaks to the power of infrastructure, of communities working together, of what is possible.

 

Rashad: We already talked about Bad Bunny, and I do want to mention what he did in Puerto Rico — I think it is an example for so many of

Rashad: [00:31:00] the celebrities and talent we work with, love, support, and celebrate. And the work I’m doing right now with Jane Fonda, who is 88 years old and has more energy than anyone I know — with such a clear focus and analysis about where we’re at and where we’re going. I was with Jane in LA the day that Don Lemon was arrested. I reached out to her that morning and she was like, ‘Well, I guess we’re going to go down to the courthouse.’ I said, ‘I guess we are.’ We went down to the courthouse. And later that day, the two of us went on to Don’s show to talk about the Committee on the First Amendment — protecting the First Amendment, protest, speech, all of these things.

Rashad: And Jane is always so clear about the threats of

Rashad: [00:32:00] authoritarianism — but also the fact that while this is new for many white people, it is not new for Black people. Black people in this country — particularly in the South, but all through the country, in major cities like Boston — have faced a type of authoritarianism. So there is a lot to learn from the knowledge that exists in our own country and in our own space. When Jane rightfully invites people into the work but also calls out where we’ve already been and what we already know, that is such an important piece of what needs to happen. We have to both understand the strategy moving forward and be clear-eyed about the history — this is not the first time we’ve been here as a country.

Rashad: [00:33:00] There are roots here that exist. We live in a country where, literally, the first Black mayor in some towns in the South was locked out of his office in this decade. Without people organized, willing to fight and push, these systems rely on people — and these systems will fail because people fail, and we have to be the people who don’t fail. When I think about Minneapolis, and about the people who have power and platform — whether they’re celebrities, whether they have big reach — who are so clear-eyed about the politics of this moment and what we need to do, I think there’s a lot there to draw on as we move forward.

Eric: Well, I’m glad we have you to turn to. Your leadership, your enthusiasm, and the love you bring to this — it is such an inspiration to me, and I know to a lot of other people. I just want to shout out Freedom Table on News One, your newsletter How We Win, and your book From Presence to Power, coming soon from One World at Penguin Random House in July.

Rashad: [00:34:00] July 28th is the pub date. But the book is out there for pre-order now.

Eric: All right, pre-order, everybody — get those numbers up on whatever platform.

Rashad: Whatever platform.

Eric: Rashad, I cannot thank you enough.

Rashad: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

 

POST-INTERVIEW

Kirk: And we are back. So — other words I like from this conversation.

Kirk: I like win.

Eric: Win. I like build power. Build power.

Kirk: And I like joy.

Eric: Joy. And there’s one more word.

Kirk: Keep going.

Eric: Mets. He’s a Mets fan.

Kirk: Oh my God.

Eric: Exit 71, 72 on the LIE. And —

Kirk: Now we’re off the rails. Now we’re off the rails. Remember, we’re talking about winning.

Eric: That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about winning. We can’t talk about the Mets if we’re talking about winning.

Kirk: We’re talking about winning. Mets don’t win. So where do you start? Because there are so many pieces of the puzzle. One of the things I loved hearing him reflect on — all the work he’s doing, the organizing, moving major institutions to course-correct on a host of different counts. He’s such a savvy person when it comes to media and navigating media in all forms.

Kirk: [00:35:00] And I love that it was part of his origin story too — that he started feeling the power of media early on. You and I both have that media thing in our backbone and our experience, and I thought that was a really cool piece of the puzzle.

Eric: Well, yes. The fact that his book is called From Presence to Power is a reminder that presence isn’t enough — you have to use it to build power. And another thing he talked about a lot is making meaning of particular moments. It’s as though he was having a conversation with Kristen Grimm,

Eric: who we interviewed recently about that very thing.

Kirk: You know, it’s a great idea — this podcast is a great idea. It’s a stupid idea, the way these seminal people could just talk to each other across different episodes. I love this podcast.

Eric: [00:36:00] That was me as the setter in volleyball and you banging the ball over the net. Yes. I knew you were going to start screaming when I said that. But it’s true — and it is so important for us to understand how moments are not outcomes. We have to take moments and turn them into outcomes. His approach to that is really important. When we got into the Bad Bunny conversation, it was a reminder not to think of Bad Bunny being political at the Super Bowl as an outcome. It is the beginning of something, not the end of something. And I thought that was really important — something we all need to take very close to home.

Kirk: In honing this concept around power — man, this landed. Just the weight of what he said when he said, ‘Power is the ability to change the rules.’

Kirk: [00:37:00] That’s what we’re trying to do. We are trying to develop power to change the rules. And I’ve got to say something. It made me want to pause and reflect on one of the things I think as a community we have to come to grips with. We use the word power in such passing, but I think it has so much more significance than we give it. We’re living under — whatever you want to call it — the shadow of the most powerful presidency in the history of our country. The most powerful person in the history of the United States is actually running our country right now. And how do you know that? Because all the rules are being changed with no consequence.

Kirk: Having voices like Rashad saying, ‘We need to develop power — we need to change the rules in a positive way’ — and pulling this work forward at such a crucial time — that idea, power as the ability to change the rules, just landed so weighty, both in

Kirk: [00:38:00] the negative and the positive of it. What do you think about that?

Eric: And let us remember — think back to 2016 and the run-up to the election. People said, that guy doesn’t have a prayer. It’s kind of like how people viewed the Kid Rock counter-programming to the Super Bowl. ‘Look at all this power. Look at the 135 million people watching. It’s a cultural movement. And that other guy over there, he’s doing some stupid counter-programming.’ And we just kind of laugh it off in our own — let’s just call it — lefty way. Yet, this is what happens when you make meaning out of a counter-movement, something like that. And that’s what this president has done, and look where it has landed him. So I do think these pieces all fit together. They are cautionary tales. A reminder not to get smug. A reminder that you have to build power. And one more thing —

Eric: [00:39:00] Rashad was talking about Minneapolis. The response in Minneapolis did not happen at the moment. It was the result of organizations getting together, building power, and also helping to elect a district attorney in Mary Moriarty who helped hold the line. These are not overnight successes. They are accrued over time, built through hard work — and they have to be maintained and fed and watered and all that.

Kirk: And I really appreciated that you guys talked about Minneapolis and everything going on in Minnesota. Just what a poignant, awful, terrible moment it’s been for innocent people being thrown into the mix of all this. And it’s almost always innocent people, right? That observation — whatever we want to make of this moment — the fact that there were years and years and years of hard work that put all that framework and infrastructure together. It sets a reminder that so much of the hard work, the good work, happens not in the limelight.

Kirk: [00:40:00] It’s all the stuff that happens when we’re not paying attention — that’s where that hard work happens.

Eric: And it also happens when you have to respond in the moment as well. When something happens, you respond in the moment. Don Lemon gets arrested and Jane Fonda reaches out to Rashad — ‘Let’s get to the courthouse.’ We need to be there, we need to be heard, we need to be counted, we need to respond. You can’t let things go by. That’s the nature of our information cycle, but it’s also the nature of how you make meaning out of a moment.

Kirk: You know how I like to throw out new projects that people can take on — because they’re not busy enough already.

Eric: No, I have no idea. Tell me more about that.

Kirk: Rashad needs a whole new project — he’s already doing 20 things.

Eric: You’re always telling people what to do.

Kirk: He needs a project helping people like me figure out the hat game. Because his hat game —

Kirk: [00:41:00] — oh wow. It is inspiring. Rashad, this is it. Work the hat game and help others work the hat game. Rashad works the hat game incredibly well. It’s amazing.

Eric: Yeah, I agree. And Kirk, I think you could pull off a hat.

Kirk: With expert assistance. I agree. I need an expert to help me sort that out, as do millions of others.

Eric: You’re a big guy — people aren’t going to make fun of you.

Kirk: Oh yes, they will. I loved the idea he talked about — our job is to get major institutions into negotiations.

Kirk: [00:42:00] And if we are not forcing the negotiation, this gets back to the power of the ability to change the rules. If we’re not forcing the negotiation, then we need to rethink what we’re doing. He calls out: cars aren’t safe because of benevolence, food is not safe because of benevolence. I will go back to my refrain about social media — we are drinking a drink and we don’t know what the ingredients include. Social media will not be safe until there’s a negotiation that requires safety, whatever that looks like. But this notion that the job is to get entities into negotiation is just such an important observation about how this actually works.

Eric: But he also cautions us against getting roped into a dialogue in which nothing actually occurs. You may think you’re in a negotiation when you’re actually in a dialogue — going back and forth, and nothing happens. And then they get to say, ‘Oh yeah, we had deep conversations with such and such.’ Instead of understanding when you are in a dialogue and moving that conversation into a negotiation — one in which you have your interests at stake, in which it has to be painful for people to go against you. That’s how you gauge whether what you’re doing is gaining currency — you see the other side feeling the pain of your pressure, and that’s how you know

Eric: [00:43:00] you’re in a negotiation.

Kirk: Hearing him talk about his work, hearing you guys go back and forth over his trajectory, just feeling his presence — where does joy need to be put into the logic model? Is it fair to say he’s hopeful? Is it fair to say he’s an optimist? There’s just so much positive energy flowing through how he talks about the work. My last observation: you talked about the danger of fatigue and this moment we’re in, needing to take care of ourselves as we do this work. Whatever bottle of joy Rashad is drawing from — whatever the tools or systems he’s using to generate that energy — that is such a crucial ingredient to pull forward right now, because it’s such a hard time for so many people.

Eric: [00:44:00] I agree. I opened the conversation with him just trying to communicate his essence to the listener — which is that Rashad is a joyful person. He goes at this work with a sense of aspiration. And he talks about joy in the context of Black joy. He has a quote I’ll share here: ‘Black joy is not the absence of pain, but the presence of aspiration, the presence of possibility, and the presence of hope.’ And that, to me, is how I experience his joy. That sense of hope and aspiration and possibility is so powerful — it’s winning, it brings people along. And I think it’s such an important part of our collective work: not to lose sight of that. So much of what we’re doing right now is fending off the devil, dealing with the horrors we’re seeing in almost every aspect of American social and political life.

Eric: [00:45:00] And what Rashad has managed to capture is how to go at that work with a sense of joy and hope.

Kirk: It just conveys so clearly as he talks about everything he’s working on. Well, let’s do the shoutout for the book — From Presence to Power: How to Take On the Fights That Matter and Win. Coming in July. You can order it anywhere now, and pick it up at your local bookstore when it comes out. And just — working with culture and celebrity, working with Jane Fonda — I loved that little conversation you guys had about Bad Bunny and what that whole Super Bowl moment was about.

Eric: And I would absolutely commend to you his essay on Bad Bunny, which goes beyond our conversation — you can find it at rashadrobinson.com. He talks about this notion that you have to take advantage of the moment. The title of the piece is ‘Bad Bunny Did His Job. Will We Do Ours?’

Eric: [00:46:00] It is not like we can stand by and say, ‘Good, Bad Bunny solved the problem of culture.’ No. What are we going to take from that? How are we going to take advantage of it instead of watching the other side turn a million viewers of Kid Rock into some kind of spectacle on its own. So let’s remember to take advantage of the opportunities — and to understand that presence isn’t power.

Kirk: Yeah. Just seeing it is not enough. The fact that people saw it is not enough — it’s got to move forward. Well, Eric, what a great conversation. And Rashad, thank you so much for everything you’re doing.

Eric: Well, I think your point about Minneapolis — and all of these things — in the context of the extreme challenges people are facing in this country, understanding how to not just build power, but to do it in a way that is attractive, that brings people along and gives people hope.

Eric: That feels like the crux of the message Rashad is carrying these days.

Kirk: [00:47:00] So exciting. Well, thank you again, Rashad, for coming on Let’s Hear It — so generous of you to give us your time. Please rush out to pick up From Presence to Power: How to Take On the Fights That Matter and Win. And Eric, you’ve done it again. This is a great conversation and I’m so glad we got to be part of it.

Eric: Well, that was a great one. Thanks very much to Rashad. I hope folks will check out his website and sign up for his newsletter — he really does capture a particular moment and give it context, give it meaning.

Kirk: Yeah.

Eric: Thank you again to Rashad.

Kirk: Thank you, Rashad. Thank you everyone. Thank you, Mr. Brown — and we will see you next time on Let’s Hear It. Okay everybody, that’s it for this episode. Please let us know if you have any thoughts about what you heard today, or people we should have on this show — and that definitely includes yourself.

Kirk: We’d like to thank John Ali, the tuneful and inspiring composer of our theme music.

Eric: Our sponsor, the Lumina Foundation.

Kirk: [00:48:00] And please check out Lumina’s terrific podcast, Today’s Students, Tomorrow’s Talent. You can find it at luminafoundation.org.

Eric: We certainly thank today’s guest, and of course, all of you.

Kirk: And most importantly, thank you, Mr. Brown.

Eric: Oh, no, no, no, no. Thank you, Mr. Brown.

Kirk: Okay, everybody — till next time.