Our Body Politic joined KPCC’s Public Radio Palooza for a special live taping featuring Farai in discussion with Dr. Safiya U. Noble, Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies at UCLA, board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, and author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, about how to address inequities caused by the tech industry. Farai also interviews Julie Lythcott-Haims, New York Times best-selling author of How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success and Palo Alto councilmember about her goals to address wealth disparity and community displacement. We also feature live performances by singer-songwriter, Monica Martin, who opens up about her journey to becoming a musician.
Farai Chideya:
Hi folks. We are so glad that you're listening to Our Body Politic. If you have time, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast. It helps other listeners find us and we read them for your feedback. We'd also love you to join in financially supporting the show, if you are able. You can find out more at ourbodypolitic.com/donate. We are here for you with you and because of you. Thank you.
Farai Chideya:
This is Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. Here at the show, we are always looking for ways to connect with others who are just as passionate as we are about politics and how media law and society shaped them. We launched Our Body Politic during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Social distancing was a must back then, but now we're grateful to connect with listeners in-person, which is exactly what we did in Pasadena, California. We joined KPCC's Public Radio Palooza for a special live show featuring two women of color who are champions of change in their respective fields.
Farai Chideya:
MacArthur Genius Award winner and Internet Studies scholar, Dr. Safiya Noble and Bestselling Author and Palo Alto City Council member Julie Lythcott-Haims. I have been so affirmed by reactions to Our Body Politic. We do our best to fill each show with deep, complex and joyful conversations. And it was such a joy to be in community with everybody who came out to the live taping. We had a fantastic evening full of laughter, insight and music, the music provided by the talented Singer-Songwriter Monica Martin, whose songs you will hear throughout the show. Let's get right into our live show.
Farai Chideya:
My next guest is someone I have known for decades and we have both changed and grown so much. And that is one of the great joys of life is to see your friends grow and change and evolve. And boy, has what Safiya Noble evolved into is important and brilliant. Dr. Safiya Noble is a Professor of Gender Studies and African-American Studies at UCLA, a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. It is a must-read, or in my case, a must-listen. I've gotten into audiobooks, much to my surprise. Also, she is the winner of a 2021 MacArthur Genius Award. Welcome Dr. Noble. It's really such a treasure to see you flourishing and I know it hasn't been easy and just because you're brilliant and Black and female, things just are not that easy.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
You have paved the way in showing us just how tough that is.
Farai Chideya:
But here you are. And I have to say as I was listening to your book, there were so many things that stood out to me, but there's this one of many lines, [inaudible 00:03:10], "These mathematical models were opaque." What is the opacity that you're talking about as you talk about these algorithms?
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
Well, first let me just say, it's a thrill. Add this to the bio, she gets to be in conversation with you. I truly mean that. And it's really a delight to be here tonight with you. Let me just back up a tiny bit and say that, I've been writing about technology for the past good solid decade and researching the dark parts, the hidden parts, the terrible parts of the internet, which means I am absolutely no fun at a cocktail party because I will ruin everything for you. And part of what I have been studying for the last 10 years is the way in which we are seduced into engaging with so many different kinds of platforms and technologies, whether it's social media or YouTube or Search. And people think that they're engaging with something that's just neutral, a tool. They don't really give it a second thought.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
And in that way, the companies themselves have really marketed their products as if they are neutral and benign. But when you scratch the surface, which I did in my work 10 years ago, looking at the way that women and girls of color were represented in these large scale digital media and multinational technical systems, advertising companies, I found that Black women in particular and girls were highly likely to be exploited, commodified, hypersexualized, pornified, disrespected. And all the while that that was happening, the tech companies themselves were narrating their systems as simple tools and putting the onus of the terribleness back on the public. And I had to double-click on that and say, "I think there's actually more to it." And that really led to the writing of the book Algorithms of Oppression, to explain what's really happening with these technologies to the public.
Farai Chideya:
And early in the book you have this wonderful example of being with young cousins, these young women and being like, "Oh, I'm just going to show them some stuff on the internet. Nevermind."
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
"Maybe not." Yeah, that's right.
Farai Chideya:
Explain how a search about Black women or Black girls can go terribly wrong in the hands of companies, that specifically use the way that search functions to make money?
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
Okay, so this was interesting to me because my daughter was a tween and her cousins were all coming over. I have the staircase of nieces that I love so much and I was thinking about things for them to do and I was pulling up the computer and husband and I, we're always looking to just like, "What are we going to do with the girls and get them excited?" And they were always on our laptops too and so I thought, "Well, let me just do a query." And I was just like, "Black girls." It was really off the cuff, it was a benign thing. And of course, I was stunned that 80% of the first page results were all porn sites or hypersexualized sites. Now, you didn't have to add the word sex, you didn't have to add the word porn.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
Black girls were synonymous with porn. And of course, these were not children, these were women who were coded also as girls. That's a feminism 101 lesson about the way that women are degraded in our society under patriarchy. That is what was the perfect opening. I was getting my PhD at the time at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and I was thinking about the role of these large platforms, especially Google, because the librarians, believe it or not, I was in library school, I was getting a PhD in Library and Information Science and all the librarians that I was engaging with were also talking about search, like it was going to replace the public library. And so, in that context I thought, "Wow, we need to talk about what happens when you do different kinds of searches on different types of identities." And people get these results and they think, "Well, maybe that's what Black girls are about." And in fact, I was at an academic conference once where senior scholar man in Europe said to me, "Don't go messing and challenging Google's algorithms. Maybe Black girls just do more porn." And of course this-
Farai Chideya:
Really? Really said that?
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
This is-
Farai Chideya:
And of course I believe you, because I hear stuff like that, but-
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
All the time, right? Okay. What that also signals, is that we live in a society that has naturalized these stereotypes about Black women and girls. And if you just look a little more closely at racist and sexist stereotypes, one of the things you realize is that these stereotypes come into existence around a variety of different kinds of economic imperatives in the United States. For example, the mythology of the hypersexualized Black woman and girl comes into existence at a about the time that the Transatlantic Slave Trade is made illegal.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
And the only way that you can reproduce the enslaved Black African labor force is through rape and forced exploitation. We know this. And so, you need a stereotype under that economic exploitation in human trafficking that says, "Black women like to have sex and Black girl children like to have a lot of sex." And this is the origin story of these kinds of stereotypes. But when they show up, when you type in Black girls naturalized, neutral, that is a real problem. You see this because, and I know no one in this audience that's listening tonight or that's present believes the things they find in Google. I know no one here takes just what comes on the first page. I know no one here tells their kids, "Just Google it." But see, when you do that around a lot of different kinds of ideas and concepts about people and communities and politics and power, you find a lot of dangerous ideas about those people.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
And I think ultimately what I tried to argue, is that these systems are a threat to democracy. They're a threat to civil rights. They are implicated in the present political climate that we're living in. We know a lot about things like social media distorting and giving rise to things like the January 6th insurrection and attempt to overthrow the United States government and other governments around the world. We know that social media plays a role in the rise of let's say, fascism and White supremacy. But you would be surprised how many people take things that they experience in social media and think, "Well, let me just Google this and see if it's true." And then we enter into another Pandora's box. And so to me, these are the things that I'd love to talk about. Again, making me terribly unpopular at a cocktail party.
Farai Chideya:
At this event, we were honored to have Singer-Songwriter Monica Martin perform some of her original works. Here she is accompanied by Pianist Ben Darwish singing Pillowcase.
Monica Martin:
(singing).
Farai Chideya:
That was Singer-Songwriter Monica Martin performing Pillowcase. I am someone who really grew up in libraries. It was such a part of my family's culture and my grandmother did a lot of volunteering at libraries and I was really into being able to do discovery in the context of libraries. And then when the internet came along, I was all in on that, but I also did see how it was drifting. How has... Because you talk in your book about the market cap of Google and how Google has claimed to be divorced from the havoc of the weaponization of identity and the use of search to sell. Where do we stand now in terms of a public debate on regulating platforms after this evolution, which you and I have seen in our lifetimes, and which your son and other people, it'll be old history to them? Where do we stand legally and in terms of policy?
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
Well, you and I met living in the Bay Area in Oakland a million years ago and except that we're 35, and we lived through that first dot-com boom and bust. We saw what happened in the Bay in terms of gentrification and lack of affordable housing and all the terrible things that we lived through. And I think that in that era, there was a lot of fascination with the tech industry and they really wrote the song that they wanted politicians and the public to sing, about how incredible the industry was. Even though many of us were living right up close to the tech industry and witnessing something else, rise in people experiencing homelessness, just a lot of atrocity too. And I'm feeling some kind of way, because I know that Julie is coming on next and she's coming from Stanford, so, hey girl.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
All right. We know that those things were happening and then it was very, very difficult to talk about regulating the tech industry, it was just absolutely not. And so now, fast forward and you've seen many of my colleagues around the world, in fact mostly women of color and LGBTQ scholars and journalists, investigative journalists like yourself have been on the forefront of seeing the failures of the tech industry. And we've been writing about it and no one was really listening. And now in 2016 you have the election of Donald Trump and all of a sudden, all kinds of tech industry leaders start saying like, "Oh yeah, we knew these problems were here." And we're like, "Did you? Because did you see what you just let happen?" I think that now there's more attention, certainly in the United States, we are behind compared to the EU.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
The EU has been way out front in terms of regulating around privacy concerns, around competition, antitrust. They definitely have understood what it means to have an American monopoly, quite frankly, have control in their countries over their cultural patrimony and other kinds of concerns that they have. And I think we're just starting to get a little bit of energy around regulation. Certainly the appointment of Lina Khan to Chair the Federal Trade Commission has been incredibly important as a signal for wanting to see regulation. Rohit Chopra, the Head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, another incredible advocate for talking about how the government will hold companies that develop discriminatory technologies to account. We're seeing a few more fines. But in mass I would say we are in so much trouble, because we're so far behind in these conversations in the United States. We have the powerful lobby in Washington DC the tech lobby, and we have a fractured debate over the value of these technologies.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
And in fact, it's almost like the world turned upside down because we're people, feminists and people of color and civil rights leaders, we've been saying, "The internet is being weaponized against our communities and we are being harmed." We are also seeing now people on the very, very far right, politically, White nationalists, people who are autocrats and believe in authoritarianism also say, that they are being discriminated against by these platforms. That is actually creating, I think a lot of confusion and that's why we need to have these conversations so that we can sort out, are we arguing for the right to be free from having our civil rights imposed upon or a rollback of civil rights through these various kinds of technologies? Or are we talking about having the right to raise up a White ethnostate? Completely different conversations, which is one of the reasons why we have to put these values kinds of conversations to what we're talking about when we're talking about technologies, so we understand what values are in play.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
And I think just ultimately, to your question about libraries and other kinds of public institutions, they are so incredibly important to democracy, to multiracial democracy, to civil rights, and all of these kinds of institutions are increasingly under threat, by not only an unregulated industry, but an industry that doesn't pay taxes for the most part. And think about what we're doing here on Public Radio, the fact that we can live in the State of California, where this is one of the global epicenters of technology. Our public schools are falling apart, our universities are falling apart, we don't have enough funding. We're talking about a depletion of resources that actually exist. They just don't exist in the coffers of the public. They exist in offshore accounts. They don't get paid back into the system.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
And yet the industry uses our airports, uses our roads, takes the cream of the crop of the best students into their employment contracts and relationships and leaves the public holding the bag. And I think that's actually probably the single most regulation we could pass around the tech industry, would be around taxation and they're paying their fair share back into the system to underwrite the kinds of things that we need like public media, public education, public libraries and so forth
Audience:
Hear, hear.
Farai Chideya:
A hundred percent, hear, hear. Well, I could talk to you all night, but we have a limited window here. And I have so many questions, I would love to lob at you about equity engine, but I'm just going to give you an open forum to give us a taste of what you think is hopeful. You've laid out a number of different challenges in the information environment. Where would you like us to go from here and how do we begin to get there?
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
Well, after the MacArthur Fellowship, I was trying to think about what to do with that platform and I started a nonprofit, it's called the Equity Engine. It's been a labor of love on the side, really to help crystallize the kinds of things that I experienced in my own career. I remember a decade ago when I would say, "Hey, that these technologies are really racist and discriminatory." No one wanted to listen. They told me, "Black girls do more porn." And it was the investment in me by a handful of people that really helped me draw out a very important set of ideas that actually now are mainstream. I meet people in the airport and they're like, "Girl, have you heard about these racist algorithms like Google?" And I'm like, "As a matter of fact, I have." Black women have a lot of amazing ideas and they go under-supported. And we see things, like the canary and the coal mine before a lot of other people see them.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
And so, this nonprofit Equity Engine has been trying to raise money to give support to Black women in particular who have great ideas that are undervalued and under-supported, because I have seen in my own career what a transformational impact that can have, even if it doesn't solve the problem, the kind of consciousness raising that we do, does in fact generate change. And it's been very difficult, I will tell you that people want to give me money to take on the tech sector. They are less inclined to want to give money to build Black women's power. That's something we should notice and I know you have this experience too, Farai.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
We stay at it and I feel very hopeful that we hold a powerful vision of a truly democratic, multiracial, socially just human experience for everyone. And those are the things that motivate me, that make me feel like getting up every day and working on these problems, because it's amazing to think about the kind of world we could live in and what is lost if we don't pay attention to some of these things. Even though what I study is incredibly depressing, I feel empowered and hopeful that we are not going to let it all go down on our watch.
Farai Chideya:
Amen to that. And I truly do believe that. I believe we can co-create a future we actually want to live in.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
Absolutely. And I love making it with you.
Farai Chideya:
Amen.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble:
Thank you.
Farai Chideya:
Yes. Thank you. That was Dr. Safiya Noble, Professor of Gender Studies and African-American Studies at UCLA, board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, an author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. From our live recording at KPCC's Public Radio Palooza in Pasadena, California. Let's listen to Singer-Songwriter Monica Martin introducing her next song Go Easy, Kid.
Monica Martin:
Growing up in Wisconsin, we do love Wisconsin, but living in Baraboo, Wisconsin, it is not diverse. And the narratives they take in about Black people, people of color, it really shaped a lot of my confidence. And I'm still in my thirties chipping away at figuring out my identity and stuff. Just having this beautiful example of all these different women of color taking control of the narrative, it's so very special. And thanks for having us. All right, this one's called, Go Easy, Kid.
(singing).
Monica Martin (singing):
I commit myself to sabotage
See, I can get what I want, then I'll make it hard to hold on
Convince myself that I'm without a god
A spiritual fraud who got lost in her own sad song
We've been talking outback by the garbage cans
About dreams that we had and the five-year plan
Missing the mark, we're laughing in the dark
'Cause after all, no one's in control
Go easy, kid, it's only rock and roll
Speaker 1:
COVID-19 may be milder for kids, except when it's not. Healthy kids can still become seriously ill and immunocompromised children and those with underlying conditions like asthma are even more susceptible. If your kids are unvaccinated, they're not protected, protect your kids and everyone around them. Get them vaccinated or boosted today. Learn more at covid19.nj.gov.
Farai Chideya:
My next guest is Julie Lythcott-Haims, who can give us many lessons on adulting, which I think so many of us need, especially me. Bestselling Author of books including, Your Turn and How to Raise an Adult, longtime Educator and Guider of young humans and also has an incredible newsletter, Julie's Pod, which is really to me, it's like a wonderful connection. She asked me earlier like, "What do you think it's about with that level of inquiry?" I said, "It's about where connection meets inquiry. It's asking questions, but also making sure that you're held in community." And that means so much. Also, she is a newly elected Palo Alto City Council member, because it's not enough just to say that you want things done sometimes, which is my favorite thing, like, "Hey, can you do that?" It's to get them done. Julie Lythcott-Haims, Elected Official welcome.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yay.
Farai Chideya:
What does it mean... And I think that you really did such a great job in Your Turn, your book about what it means to actually take on the reins of being an adult. What does it mean to be an adult?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
To be an adult is not to be a child. When you're a child, you are someone else's responsibility. When you're an adult, you get to be responsible for yourself. And yes, that is terrifying at times, but it is also delicious not to be on the end of someone else's leash. That's what I want for all of us in adulthood to know, this is your one wild and precious life, to quote the late Poet Mary Oliver.
Farai Chideya:
Mary Oliver, yes.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Right. This is yours to figure out. And there is terror occasionally, and there is tremendous joy, when we are in charge of ourselves, so much is possible. That's what adulting is, I think.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. And your adulting has taken you through young love that has endured over decades, parenthood now of adult children being at Stanford, working in the law, many different chapters. Can you just give us a little sketch of how you got to be who you are now as an author and an elected member of the City Council?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I came into this world inherently transgressive. I am the child of an African-American father and a White British mother, and I got the message from young that something was wrong with me in the eyes of some, and something was wrong with daddy and something was wrong with my parents' marriage. Society taught me that, teachers taught me that, friends taught me that. And I think that gave me a heart for humans. Many of us are in the helping professions, many of us are empaths. I think the source of my care and concern about using my work to help others emanates from having been a young child who saw in the eyes of others that, I was not enough or worse, that I was problematic. And so, I studied American Studies in college. I fell in love with law. I went to law school to be the lawyer who would help humans, who would help America.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
But I was so insecure as a young woman of color at an elite law school, I now realize, with the wisdom of my 55 years that when I was 25, I so needed the approval of White mainstream society, that even though I'd gone to law school to help humans, I left law school to help myself matter in their eyes. I went corporate, went to Silicon Valley, worked at a nice law firm, intellectual property litigation. I was making the world safer for copyrights, patents and trademarks as the internet and social media were becoming a thing, protecting trademarks instead of protecting humans. And that work quickly sucked the life out of me. I was well paid and miserable. And I decided to become a University Administrator to try to help young people make better decisions about their life journey sooner than I had managed to do. And that was incredibly rewarding work.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Being paid to care about other humans as a Student Affairs Administrator does was joyful work. I left that 10 years ago to write a book about a concern that was emanating from my role as a Dean of freshmen. I wrote How to Raise an Adult because I was seeing the encroachment of parents into the agency of young people, parents loving the heck out of their kids and holding their hands and doing so much for them that they were actually depriving those kids of really being able to do for themselves. 2016, 2020 happened, and like many of us, I felt a degree of helplessness, highly educated, upper middle class, privileged, scared, wanting to leave. I googled, "How do I get a Canadian passport?" And I thought about leaving America. And then, I realized if people like me who are highly educated and privileged, take our privilege and leave, what have we done?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
We've left people with less to fend in a really difficult environment. I got myself out of my pandemic malaise. I got myself out of my Trump America malaise and said, "You know what? There's some seemingly intractable problems in my city of Palo Alto, the birthplace of Silicon Valley that are worth focusing on." We have become entirely unaffordable because those Googlers and Facebook folks and Twitter folks, when they were startups, they all got stock options. When those companies went public, they minted millionaires and there was a waiting period in which they could not sell their stock. We were all aware. This is the date when the Google millionaires can now buy property, and they wanted their kids to go to the public schools in Palo Alto, so they wanted to buy in our city. And so, they made a bid on a house and bid it up by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our real estate market in Palo Alto is out of control, because we didn't have the wisdom way back then to put some controls in place. I'm running because Palo Alto has be become... I'm sorry, I have run.
Farai Chideya:
You run already.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I'm about to be inaugurated. I am trying to serve the working class and what we call the missing middle, who work in our city and our nurses and teachers and utilities workers. They make our city magnificent and they live two hours away and their own children can't go to school in our magnificent schools because they live elsewhere. I ran for them, I'm aiming to serve them to restore the out of balance ecosystem of Palo Alto, California.
Farai Chideya:
I love it. And as you're talking about Palo Alto, a number of different things are popping into my mind. I did a Knight Fellowship at Stanford. Yes, 20 odd years ago, and it's a year-long journalism fellowship. And at that time, East Palo Alto was still predominantly working class and Latino. But then before even it was mainly working class and Latino, I found out that Jon Funabiki, who's a wonderful Writer and Journalist who had been the Journalism Program Officer at the Ford Foundation, a job I later held, he grew up there. His family is Japanese-American. They had been interned in the internment camps and when he grew up, East Palo Alto and other parts of Palo Alto, even the non East part, were truly multiracial. He was like, "Well, we had these squads where there'd be the Latino kids and the Asian kids and the Black kids and you'd all have a representative to get over a feud."
Farai Chideya:
He's like, "We didn't have any serious beef, because we all had an emissary that would work it out." And so I think about this Palo Alto, this to me like bygone era where there were actually Black people just being children there, with no particular faculty connection. That seems unthinkable now. But you're here to stand up for people who live in the tradition of a multiracial and at least income mixed Palo Alto. But how do you begin to really think about what conversations you might be having with your soon-to-be colleagues?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Well, it's conversations with my soon-to-be colleagues of whom there are six and then an enormous staff of wonderful, talented people. But then there are my neighbors, we are 69,000 strong in Palo Alto and we tend to go blue in every election and we tend to have signs out in our front yard saying, "In this house, we believe all lives matter. We believe love is love, and Black lives matter, and queer people matter." And all of... We have this signage that purports to express our beliefs, and yet we are populated now with the majority of folks it seems, who don't want those folks in their backyard. Thankfully, I have learned that it's not helpful to call people racists. If you're trying to move a population toward adopting a different set of principles about, can we make the housing more dense so it's more affordable? Can we go a little bit higher so we can put more people here?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
It's not helpful to say, "You know what? This all goes back to redlining. And this is our equivalent of the Jim Crow South." I actually did manage to say that in a debate this fall, and that didn't go over very well. I am learning, and look, I'm here to learn and grow until I take my last breath. I am determined to listen better and to tell better stories about why humans need homes and about why we should be delighted to welcome new neighbors into every community in Palo Alto rather than fear those neighbors.
Farai Chideya:
Yes. That is worth clapping for. To me, I was thinking, a friend of mine said, "Hey, friend of mine's son just got a job at Google as an Engineer, straight out of college, starting salary was just over $200,000. And there are people pooping on his doorstep in San Francisco." And I was like, "Yeah, that makes sense because of what's happened to San Francisco." And the hyperpolarization of income is directly correlated to unhoused people and two things like people defecating on your doorstep. And it seems to me that there's some very practical, selfish reasons that one might not want to have that lack of a civic stability, which seems to come in the case of the hyperpolarization of wealth. Can you make a practical argument like, "Hey, our lives might be better if..."? Or not really?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I've found that people are most willing to open up and listen when you can tell a story about a particular human. Palo Alto prides itself on the quality of our public schools, some of the finest in the nation. And when you can sit down with somebody and say, "Isn't your kid's teacher great? Aren't we fortunate that our kids can go to these schools? Isn't it terribly unfortunate that that teacher spends two hours in the car in both directions to be able to serve our city? Does it feel right that we seem to be creating a permanent servant class of folks who work here, but cannot themselves take advantage of that higher quality of life associated with living in a place like this? They don't want to be on the road two to three, four hours a day, going to and from their homes in our city."
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
That's one argument to develop compassion for those who don't yet live here. Here's a complete flip argument. We had a small earthquake up in the Bay in October. It was a 5.1, so not a big deal, but enough to remind you that we live an earthquake country. And that's when I began to change the narrative on the campaign trail. I said, "You all look, it was a 5.1. If it had been a 6.9 like we had up here in Loma Prieta in 1989 earthquake, we would've all emerged from our homes and our offices, seen the buckled roads, seen the collapsed bridges, seen the fire in the distance, seen the collapsed power lines, worrying about our elderly friend who lives an hour away or our disabled friend or family member."
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
And we would ask ourselves, "Where are the helpers? Where's the person who's going to fix the utilities? Where's the person who's going to fix the roads? Where's the person who's going to come be the home healthcare provider for that person who is home bound?" And then the universe is going to tell us, "Oh, you wanted the helpers to live here? Oh, sorry, they don't live here, because you didn't want them before. And so they're not here to serve your community that is now in need." We've become this community of kings with a moat around us, and we're drawing up the drawbridge and we're going to discover to our detriment, there's a very enlightened self-interest concerned here, no, no. We all who currently live there would benefit from this being a more economically integrated and more racially integrated place. It behooves all of us to live amongst each other. We are interdependent. A proper city needs plumbers and teachers and software engineers living together to do the work of the city.
Farai Chideya:
When I think about America's evolution over my lifetime, we're about the same age, I really think about the ways in which I grew up in a family that believed in the American Dream, despite many traumatic experiences, many forms of employment discrimination. My grandmother was an Employment Discrimination Whistleblower and paid for it. And she was working for the federal government at the time. She eventually prevailed on merit. But she was still blocked from promotions for seven years, so it hurt her retirement. And I didn't see a lot of tangible reward to her. But I still tried to live up to that legacy as I navigated my own industry with its own levels of discrimination. But my family believed in the American Dream in a passionate way. I wonder if someone who is a teenager today would have the same level of faith. And you in your work at Stanford, but just also as a public intellectual deal with this transition point of adulthood. What would you say to someone who was a teenager, who said, "I don't know what I should think about the American Dream? Is there a dream left?"?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I would say, "I'm deeply interested in your thoughts on this. Tell me more." I would try to demonstrate, respect that is by deep listening. And then, I would pause and I would say, "You know what? Things look incredibly bleak right now, and I'll give you that. In some ways they are, and yet two things I know, are ancestors most likely endured worse. And there is nothing more powerful than a person who's decided who they are and what matters to them and gives themselves permission to go and solve that problem." This is why Gen Z gives me so much hope. And then Gen Alpha, which I think is the name of those coming after, but Maxwell Frost, our first Gen Z Member of Congress.
Farai Chideya:
Who we interviewed on Our Body Politic.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I'm so glad.
Farai Chideya:
He's fabulous.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Identifies as Black and Latino out of Orlando area, Florida, just got to DC, tried to rent an apartment and was turned down because his credit score is bad, because he racked up a lot of debt in the campaign. He is highlighting the imperative to fix our broken housing system, whether it's to buy or to rent. We have an inhospitable system for our young and it can make the American Dream look impossible to attain. And yet they're fierce and they're ferocious and they're going to demand change as generations before them have. Tough times breed warriors. Bring it on. Let's do it. There are good problems to be solved and we are the people whose job it is to solve them.
Farai Chideya:
Well, I could again, go on all night, but I'm going to leave it there. I love that. You just gave me a pep talk. I'm going to carry that with me.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I'm so glad. I love being with you.
Farai Chideya:
Yes, likewise.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Your podcast is remarkable. Thank you so much for having me.
Farai Chideya:
Thank you, Julie. And please check out her books, Your Turn, How to Be an Adult, Julie's Pod. Trust me, if you're in a bad mood and you read a Julie's Pod, you'll be in a good mood.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I love it. Thank you.
Farai Chideya:
Julie Lythcott-Haims, thank you so much.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Thank you, Farai. I appreciate you.
Farai Chideya:
That was Julie Lythcott-Haims, New York Times bestselling author of books including, How to Raise An Adult and Your Turn, and a former Dean at Stanford University. She's also a City Council member in Palo Alto, California. Throughout the show today, you heard excerpts of the talented Singer-Songwriter Monica Martin. During our live show taping at KPCC's Public Radio Palooza, we were lucky to have Monica performing some of her original singles like Cruel, Pillowcase and Go Easy, Kid. We want to introduce you to this incredible artist, so we invited her to come chat with us on the show today. Monica Martin was born in Chicago and raised in rural Wisconsin. In addition to her solo music, her experience includes fronting the experimental-folk-pop, sextet, PHOX, collaborations with James Blake, and recently opening for Marcus Mumford on tour. Monica is also a very special guest from Our Body Politic family as the sister of our former Senior Producer Bianca F. Martin. Welcome, Monica. Great to have you.
Monica Martin:
Hi, Farai. Lovely to see you again.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. It was so much fun. That live show was just... The energy was so good. But let me start with you, every superhero has an origin story. Obviously we know your sister well. What is your origin story?
Monica Martin:
Well, quickly, villain. And like you said, born in Chicago, raised in the Midwest, Baraboo, Wisconsin. My parents listened to a lot of music around the house, so I really always loved it. And I was frankly, too shy to sing in school, but I eventually had some really good friends who coerced me into joining the PHOX. And then I was like, "I like connecting with people in this way. I love singing, I love writing." And it's really vulnerable, but it's worth it.
Farai Chideya:
How did you start playing music professionally
Monica Martin:
Farai, I had a good friend named Matt Holmen whose band had broken up. I was probably 20, I guess, and he's like, "Monica, I know you can sing. You've been singing harmonies of things in my car for a while. I need a singer. You've got a lot to say. Let's do this." At first I was playing covers of a mutual friend of ours, artist named Sonntag, and then I was like, "This is strange. I don't know. I want to sing my own stuff." Made a record and we had this charmed indie experience in Madison. A lot of people came around us and supported us, South by Southwest happened for us and it was still when magazines were happening.
Farai Chideya:
Was this with the band PHOX or a different band?
Monica Martin:
Yeah. This is with PHOX. We had a great experience at South by, and it just rippled out from there.
Farai Chideya:
What are you doing now musically and are you touring?
Monica Martin:
Yeah. I've been working on a record for a few years and I'm about to finish it and hopefully have it released by the fall time, crossing my fingers. And I'm about to go on tour, actually leaving tomorrow from LA to New York to start a tour where I'm opening for Lake Street Dive, which should be really fun.
Farai Chideya:
Great.
Monica Martin:
Yeah, so that'll be East Coast and Midwest. I'll be passing through Madison, so I'll get to see Bianca and family as well. And it's going to be so fun. We're playing two shows at the Ryman in Nashville, which is one of my favorite venues, [inaudible 00:45:05], Grand Ole Opry. Oh, I'm so excited. And Lake Street Dive is just an awesome group of people.
Farai Chideya:
How does it feel in your body when you're singing and when you're really in your groove?
Monica Martin:
This is a hard question because I often have trouble, I think on tour I'm neurotic and I'm grateful for the experience, but it's also been a difficult thing for me being on stage. But I do have moments on stage where I feel, even if I'm still really activated in a way that can feel dark, I do also feel connected to my songs. And at the very least, I feel very much like I'm being myself, being honest. That's important to me. When I'm in my groove, I feel like, "Okay, I'm able to be telling the full truth right now.
Farai Chideya:
We will leave it there because you squeezed this interview in when you have a tour to get ready for and it was so great to meet you in person, and thank you for coming on Our Body Politic
Monica Martin:
Farai, you're awesome. I had so much fun and I hope to see you again.
Farai Chideya:
Thank you so much. That was Monica Martin, Singer-Songwriter, now touring with Lake Street Dive. You can catch some of her work on PHOX's Tiny Desk Concert online. That's P-H-O-X, PHOX. Her site is monicamartinofficial.com. And here's Monica with a final song for us, Cruel
Monica Martin (singing):
Angel on my shoulder, till I lost it
I'm barely out the door and she's exhausted
Flirting with the line and then I crossed it
Oh, oh… (fades)
Farai Chideya:
Thanks for listening to Our Body Politic. We're on the air each week -- and everywhere you listen to podcasts.
Farai Chideya:
Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms. I’m host and executive producer, Farai Chideya. Jonathan Blakely is our executive producer. Nina Spensley is also executive producer. Emily J. Daly is our senior producer. Bridget McAllister is our booking producer. Steve Lack and Anoa Changa are our producers. Natyna Bean and Emily Ho are our associate producers. Kelsey Kudak is our fact checker.
Farai Chideya:
And a special thanks to the folks at K-P-C-C: Jon Cohn, Tony Federico, Rebecca Stumme,, Kristen Payne, Kristin Ranger, Caitlin Biljan, and Alexis Gero.
Farai Chideya:
Production and editing services are by Clean Cuts at Three Seas. Today's episode was produced with the help of Lauren Schild and engineered by Archie Moore.
Farai Chideya:
This program is produced with support from the Luce Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Ford Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Democracy Fund, The Harnisch Foundation, Compton Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the BMe Community, Katie McGrath & JJ Abrams Family Foundation, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.
Speaker #1:
COVID-19 may be milder for kids, except when it's not. Healthy, kids can still become seriously ill. Get them vaccinated or boosted today. Learn more at covid19.nj.gov.