Diane Guerrero: Hello? Ello? Hola? Can You Hear Me?
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Diane Guerrero: Hello? Ello? Hola? Can you hear me? I'm just kidding. I'm in your ears. I'm Diane Guerrero, and this is How It Is, where you hear women tell their own stories in their own words. We're unfiltered, real, and totally ourselves. Okay, you guys. I am so excited to be here with you all because we have so much to talk about. I don't know about you, but every day I'm getting tons and tons of information on basically every subject, between the news alerts and the Facebooks and the Tweets and the DMs, it's constant. It's a lot. And what I realize, is that even with all that information, what I really crave is wisdom. And to get that wisdom, I turn to women. To hear their stories, to get their advice, to absorb what they've learned, since they are the experts in their own lives. We are the experts in our own lives. Isn't that crazy? We know How It Is. Diane Guerrero: For this season of How It Is, we've gotten together with the wisest women we know. I'm talking about Lena Waithe, Krista Tippett, Ellen Powell, Mónica Ramírez, Glennon Doyle, Jenny Yang, and so many more. We're talking about this Me Too moment of reckoning. Around sex, sexism, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. Even saying those words out loud is hard. But it's necessary. Because really, what Me Too and Times Up have become are a shorthand for how women use our voices to make change. And yes, these are tough conversations. But I'm feeling optimistic about what can come from truly listening to women's stories. Because that's what we're here for. 1 So, gang. Over the course of the season, we're going to be talking about our anger, our complexity, and the strength and power that comes from telling our stories. We're going to hear from so many phenomenal women, and I cannot wait to share with you. So first up, in this episode, we're talking anger with Rebecca Traister, Tarana Burke, and my girl crush, Gabrielle Union. I don't know about you, but lately I've been feeling The Rage. And it feels like, mira, I don't know. Nichole Bowen- Anger ... Anger feels like a hot ball. Crawford: Mónica Ramírez: Like fire. Inside my belly. Gabrielle Union: I'm just like grrr. Nichole Bowen- Fury in my stomach. Crawford: Rebecca Traister Like it's gonna eat me up inside. Gabrielle Union: You know like when little kids throw tantrums and their little fists ball up, and that's what it feels like as an adult, with just the rage-y rage. Rebecca But it's not something that defines who I am. Traister: Diane Guerrero: What about you, Reese? 2 Reese Anger feels like a boiling hot fire in my throat. I get a sore throat usually Witherspoon: when I haven't said what I wanted to say. A literal sore throat, like my body responds to it. I normally find myself feeling most angry when I leave a conversation and I didn't say what I wanted to say. And I'll go into my car and I'll replay the conversation seven thousand times, and sometimes I'll shout in my car, "That's not what I meant. I wanted to say this. You can't talk to me like that." Or, "You can't explain the Internet to me." And I find myself screaming alone, and thinking, "Wow, I wish instead of getting boiling angry and saying it later to myself, I could learn how to get quiet, get calm, and say something thoughtful but very pointed in the moment." Diane Guerrero: Oh my gosh, I can relate to this so much. It's like fire coming out of your ears, or steam. I'm describing a Looney Tunes cartoon, but I'm a Looney Tune when I feel this. You know? And for all of my life I haven't been allowed to be angry. As a woman of color, if you're angry and you show it, you're fitting into the stereotype, right? So me as a woman who is so concerned to make my family proud and make my community proud and open doors for our community and for our women who are coming from the same situations, every time I feel like getting angry I think about that stereotype. The hot headed Latina, the hot headed woman of color that's angry all the time. So thinking of this stuff always made me hold back. And when I held back, it also stopped me from telling my truth. And so this creates a whole lot of problems, right, when you're not using your voice because you're afraid of people thinking you're angry. This is an emotion you cannot feel. And so what happens is I explode inside very quietly, and I never know where to put these feelings. So it turns out, there are literal experts in women and anger. And Rebecca Traister is one of them. She is an incredible writer and journalist whose book Good and Mad: How Women's Anger is Transforming America is coming out in October. She's the author of two other books, including Big Girls Don't Cry and All the Single Ladies, a book about how single women are changing culture and reshaping politics. 3 Last fall, at the height of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, Rebecca was reporting on sexual harassment every week, and her writing really spelled out How It Is for me. She has a way of looking at the past to explain the present. But what's actually crazy about all this is that we're taught to associate angry women with crazy women. And according to Rebecca, and I believe her, this isn't our fault. Rebecca There are all kinds of cultural messages sent to women not to be angry. Traister: Specifically not to be angry at men, or at the power structures that oppress them or suppress them, right? And those messages are like, "It'll make you ugly. You'll sound hysterical. People will think you're crazy. People will think you're bitter and shrill and nobody's gonna like you." All those messages are sent to women. Here's the one area where women and girls are encouraged to be angry by our social and cultural messages, and that is angry at each other. And that takes a million forms. So it's like the fetishization, the almost sexualized fetishization of like pillow fights and hair pulls, right, like cat fights. We understand just culturally that that's a cool thing, is when ladies are angry at each other. And of course it's structurally reinforced for adults, for example, when the power is a white male power. And so say there are arguments over men, like who gets the resources? Who gets the male approval? Who gets the money? Who gets the boy? Who gets the clothes that will make you more attractive to the boy? Like they're all kinds of ways in which the things that are held out to women and the meagerness of the advantages that are held out to women cause them to fight with each other. You'll talk to lots of women who say, "Actually, the hardest time I've ever had in the workplace is actually with other women." Well, in part when women first entered the workforce, that was right because there was sort of one slot held for them, and then they were made to fight against each other to get that slot. We can see that pattern replicating in all kinds of areas in our lives. I'm thinking so much about women's anger, again, not only at the kinds of oppression they face, but at each other. I think there's this idea that if you're angry about things, that must be who you are as a human being and that gets attached to women really quickly, like an angry woman. And of course that's a dynamic that's far more complex and far more sticky for angry black women. I'm a white woman. 4 There's no way to talk about anger, especially anger in America and American politics and society without acknowledging the way that anger is racialized, especially for black women. There's been all kinds of activism and acts of resistance led by women of color. But very often, then it's when white middle class women take up those ideas that they get popular traction, mass traction, and that the media decides to pay attention to them or take them seriously. And that's one of the things that you can see happen around Tarana Burke and Me Too, is that Tarana Burke is a woman of color who has been at this for more than a decade, and it's when white middle class women take up literally the hashtag itself, make it this Twitter hashtag, that it gets acknowledged as a cultural force, and as a nation reshaping and ideas reshaping movement. I mean, one of the things that I've been very anxious to talk to Tarana Burke about is the sort of cooptation of her message. Is she angry at the way in which a message that she pioneered and work that she's been doing for so long, she in some ways gets erased from at this point? Tarana Burke: I don't know if anger is the right word.