Diane Guerrero: Hello? Ello? Hola? Can You Hear Me?

Home , And It Feels Like, Crazy Women, Gabrielle Union

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.

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?

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.

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.

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. I've been propelled by anger in a lot of different ways in movement work. You know, police killings make me angry. Watching people not find justice in the system that's unjust makes me angry. What makes me sad and makes me frustrated is that, in the first 24 hours of Me Too going viral, 12 million people across the world engaged with this hashtag. And I think about what would happen if 12 million people globally were to suddenly get some infectious disease, right, some wildly communicable disease.

Our 100% focus around the globe would be on finding a cure. The conversations in the media would be, "How did this happen? How do we stop it? And how do we make sure it never happens again?" People would be up in arms if articles started coming out saying, "Well, how do we date in the age of this new such and such disease?" Or, "Who do we blame?" That's not what the focus should be. The focus in this moment should be on the millions of people who are asking for a cure, and who are also saying we have solutions, listen to us.

And so right now, and I might get angry, right now I'm supremely frustrated and really, really sad that we can't have a better, more robust, more humane conversation around something that affects everybody's life. The reality is, you are either a survivor or you know one.

Diane Guerrero: That voice you just heard was Tarana Burke, the founder of the Me Too movement. Tarana's the activist who coined the phrase "Me Too" more than 10 years ago when she was working with girls who had been abused. She knew then the power of sharing your story, and knowing that you're not alone. But even now that women everywhere are coming forward, she's shocked that not much has changed.

Tarana Burke: One of the things that I find most interesting and odd, and not interesting in a good way necessarily, but just interesting about sexual violence, is that it is so pervasive. It crosses all kind of boundaries and it's every part of the world, and yet people who are survivors of sexual violence feel completely isolated. Over and over again, the thing that you hear is that people feel, say things like, "I thought I was the only one. I didn't know anybody else went through this. I thought it was my fault." You know?

So for something that touches so many lives, it's always been really interesting to me that the people who it affects feel like they're alone. And that's how deep it runs, and the culture of silence runs in our various communities that people don't talk about it or normalize it or compartmentalize it in such ways that there's no space to have connection with other people.

And so the power in those words is that the details of what happened to you matter less than the connection that you have with somebody else who recognizes the trauma that's left over from it. Do you know what I mean? So if one person was assaulted in college and one person is a survivor of child sexual abuse, there's a completely different details, completely different things that happen, but there's an underlying trauma that is very similar. And the connection behind Me Too, it opens up a whole world to you, even if it's just between two people.

It's a new world that says, "I'm just not on this island alone." And we just underestimate the power of community, right. All of the ways that we talk about healing from sexual violence are individualistic. You need to go to therapy or counseling, you need to read these books. All of it is very isolating in what you do on your own, but I have seen through this work the power of community.

Because of the way it was introduced to the world and because it happened on the back of the Hollywood scandals, people obviously associate it with Hollywood scandals. And that's actually fine with me, but I think that this idea that it's a movement about taking down powerful men is a dangerous notion. I also think that this idea that it's a witch hunt or it has targets on people's backs, or these distracting conversations about, "Well, can we date in the age of Me Too? How do we date? Who can we hug in the age of Me Too?" All of those are giant distractions away from the fact of the matter: that there are millions of people around the world who have opened themselves up and are now saying, "I need resources. Now I've done this thing, can you help me?" You know what I mean? "What do I do now?" And our focus should be on survivors.

And so we have to shift the conversation away from perpetrators and accused and more so on the people who are surviving these things. And not just currently, like over the years, this is like a can of worms that's been opened and we're not paying attention to it.

I value anger. I value rage in such a way that I also hold it close. Everybody is not welcome to my anger. Everybody is not privileged enough to feel my rage. And I mean that in the same way that people are not welcome to feel my joy. I've reserved that for occasions and for things and ideas and moments that are absolutely deserving of them. I spent a good part, because of the sexual violence I experienced, I spent a good part of my childhood being angry. So my interaction with anger has changed over time and so there was a time in my life when it was a shield, it was a protection for me, it allowed me to not have to engage with the emotions that were bubbling underneath and just use that as the way I engaged with the rest of the world.

And then when I discovered the possibilities that joy in my life opened up, I really shifted from leaning into the trauma, which is where the anger was coming from, and moving to leaning into the joy. And when I did that, is when I learned to reserve my anger. I found the usefulness in my anger, and I didn't just give it out to everybody because I think that anger is useful and I think that when you willed it across everything, it becomes diluted.

But the other part to it is then, and this is the thing that I really try to get people to understand about the Me Too movement as well, people get confused when I say it's a joy movement. And that's because what I have found to be the antidote to trauma and the anger that comes from trauma and the pain that comes from trauma and all of those kinds of things, is joy. And not just like, "Hey, we should all be happy," because that's obviously not realistic. But I mean learning to cultivate joy in your life.

What I find happens, 'cause it happened to me and I've seen it happen to other people, is that the thing that traumatized you, that whatever it is, sexual violence or other violence, other things, the thing that traumatizes you becomes part of your identity, and it becomes so a part of your identity that it becomes a security blanket. It's not that I feel good to think about it and stay in that place, it's comfortable. It's familiar. And so we lean into that trauma every time something happens.

But I really taught myself, and I'm always constantly teaching myself and part of this movement is teaching other survivors to lean into the joy, to look for it, to crave it. One of the things we, in our healing circles, we do is create joy journals. You know, everybody has a gratitude journal, this and that, but it works. It's hokey, but the stuff works. And the assignment is usually to have people spend a week writing down the joyous things in your life. Just documenting. You don't have to write paragraphs about it, but just document it. What are the things that bring you joy? Little joys, whether it's extra foam in your latte or big joys as listening to your child laugh, whatever that is. I need you to document those things, because the curation of that is where you have to train your brain to go when the anger consumes you, when the residuals from your trauma start to consume you, you have to find a soft place to land.

And that is what the curation of the joy helps you to do. That's a big part of why I'm here today.

I am Tarana Burke, and I am a mother, a survivor, an organizer, and a warrior.

Diane Guerrero: I think we could all benefit from a joy journal. You know what would be in mine today? Me driving for the first time, which is this week. I just started driving, it's something that has terrified me for a very long time. I'm 31 years old, and it's just been such a freeing experience. And I did it on my own time. I had to get there. But I made the decision to go for it, and I'm feeling great for it. I'm feeling empowered. I'm feeling like I'm a woman. And I don't know about you, but I'm feeling really inspired right now.

Listening to Rebecca and Tarana makes me think about all the different types of righteous female anger. There's change the world anger, there's standing up for yourself anger, here's revenge anger, which of course, always makes me think of, and you know what I'm going to say, ladies, Waiting to Exhale.

When Angela Bassett throws her cheating husband's clothing into his car and burns it and as she's walking away, she's smoking that cigarette, honey. I love that scene not because, oh, this cheating man, and oh we have to burn his stuff down, and I'm like, "Yeah, get him." It's more the reason behind it. Why she did it. Because she had spent so many years helping this man build his business, because she was his secretary.

(singing) I was your lover and your secretary. Working every day of the week.

It's that feeling of “I put so much work into this company, into our lives, and to be just discarded that way, in such a humiliating way”, that righteousness is what gets me. It's like, "Oh, I'm gonna turn it around." I just saw that power in that film, and I was like, "Man, if anything like that ever happens to me, I'm gonna turn it around."

I've obviously been inspired by movies my whole life, and there's one movie star who has inspired me not only on screen but in her activism and in her life. Gabrielle Union. I've loved her since 10 Things I Hate About You, since Bring It On, Being Mary Jane, I mean I love this woman's work so much. She's been a long-time advocate for victims of sexual assault as well as gender equality overall. Oh and yeah, she's an author and an incredible actress. This woman is an inspiration. If you follow her on Instagram, which you should, you know she is a woman who loves to laugh and be joyful. But when she wakes up everyday, she's not afraid of being angry, either.

Gabrielle Union: Every morning, I'm like, do I look at Twitter? Do I look at social media? I'm going to be angry. But I need to be angry, otherwise I'm going to sit on my ass and think, "I'm straight. Life is good. Too bad about the others, but I made it." You know, you need to be angry. You need to be aware. You need to be uncomfortable. And most of us are not really willing to stay in a place of being uncomfortable for too long. But that's also how we get complacent. That's also how we get to, "Eh, it's good enough." But if we want real change, systematic change, generational change, good enough isn't enough.

If you're informed in this day and age, you're gonna be angry. And to stay constantly in a state of anger and inspiration, and when those two things are married, you're gonna accomplish some shit and it's necessary. I'm never gonna be cool with oppression. I'm never gonna be cool with black and brown lives not mattering. I will never be cool with a lack of opportunities for women. I will never be cool with misogyny or sexism or any 'ism. That's just not how I'm built.

But I can also find time for some joy. And peace. I have found peace in my rage. Because I know it's keeping the fire burning. It's not gonna be an inferno, because I couldn't function. But it's that flame. It's like the Olympic torch. It's always lit. And when it's extinguished, I'm not effective.

It's infuriating that, and I've been talking about being a rape survivor for 20 years, and on the one hand, I'm immediately believed. But on the other hand, I'm also asked, "What were you wearing?" Even though I'm very clear that I was at work, in a tunic and leggings. It wasn't the best outfit, but I was fucking working at Payless. "What did you have on? What did you do?" 'Cause everyone wants to think that there must have been something you did or something about you that you somehow had control over that triggered some normally non-rape-y person to just magically become a rapist. You had to have had some kind of control over it. And if you had some kind of control over it, that means I could have some kind of control over protecting myself.

And then again, we get into the coulda, woulda, shoulda. Well, if it was me, I woulda ... Okay, well, I was 19, at work, in a tunic and leggings. I was raped at gunpoint by a stranger. I got the after-school job I was supposed to get, in college. I couldn't have done anything else better. And I was still raped and beaten at gunpoint. And when you hear about a lot of the Me Too's, and I hate the phrase date rape 'cause what they mean to say is, in some kind of capacity, you had seen your assailant before. Could have been just passing in the hallways, you didn't even have to need to have spoken to the person. But if you attended the same school or church or lived on the same block, whether you spoke to them or not, they would call that date rape. Acquaintance rape.

What they never really call it is sexual violence and rape. Rape that will change the course of your life. What they do do is minimize the responsibility of the rapist and put the onus of the sexual violence onto the victim. And it's bullshit every time. I remember being in group therapy at UCLA and I was the only stranger rape. And how my stranger rape during certain sessions would silence other people, or they'd start ... "Well, you know, mine's not like Gabrielle's because I knew, it's my lab partner" or whatever. And the moderator would, "No. Rape is rape is rape is rape. There are no degrees of rape, there's no better rapes than others." You know, people say, "Gosh, your rape, I mean if you had to be raped, is quite ideal."

You know, to be raped in an affluent community by an assailant that was apprehended, who faced the criminal justice system, who is in prison, and you were believed. By law enforcement, by your family, by your friends, by your community, now that I'm a celebrity I'm believed by millions. I'm held up, used as an example for how you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and overcome rape and be a cheerleader fighting for cultural appropriation.

And it's bullshit. Everybody should be able to have the same experience. The pain is the same. It hurts. It can derail your life. It can change the course of your life. It can shape shift. While everyone's experience isn't identical, the pain is universal. There's a reason why rape is the most under-reported crime in the world. There's a reason we will never have accurate statistics for sexual violence, because of this perceived gray area. And degrees or legitimacy of rape. And we drive people underground and sometimes we drive people into the grave because we pick and choose whose pain gets to be heard, whose pain gets to be prioritized, whose pain is acted upon, whose pain inspires legislation, whose pain gets to be named a law named after them. That's big.

But if you're just a girl, just a woman, and for whatever reason, people have decided that you played a part in being targeted for sexual violence, what do you say? I say fuck everybody who ever fucking told you that your pain is not real, that your rape was somehow in any kind of way your fault. You have to fight fire with fire. And we have to keep telling our stories until there is no gray area. There is no degrees or legitimacy, it's all fucking rape. And they're all acted upon with the same enthusiasm and rage and action as the next woman.

I am Gabrielle Union, I am a black woman, I am flawed, I am perfectly imperfect, I'm obsessed with words, I love silence, I also love vengeance, and I'm on Team Fuck It.

Diane Guerrero.: Team Fuck It for the win.

So I gotta say, I've learned so much from listening to these three brilliant women. And it really has changed the way I think about anger. Now, I know that I'm a change maker. I know that I want to make my community better. I know that I want to affect change. But I think that the missing link with that, and for me personally, was that I wasn't allowing anger to be a part of it. In reality, I was really angry, and that was the reason why I decided to be a change-maker. And now owning that anger brings me tons of relief. Because I know that I can wake up, be angry in the morning, and say, "Okay, how can I make this a positive thing? How can I affect change? Not just within myself, but with those around me."

And that is so healing. And it's inspiring, because I know every day I'm going to be angry so that means I have a chance to make something positive. And that, my friends, is How It Is.

On this episode, you heard from Rebecca Traister, Tarana Burke, Gabrielle Union, and me. I'm Diane Guerrero, I'm a Latina, I'm an author, an actress, and an activist. I am also a human being, a citizen of this universe.

How It Is is a production of Hello Sunshine. It is executive produced by Amy S. Choi, Rebecca Lehrer, and Reese Witherspoon. Our senior producers are Gillian Ferguson and Michelle Lanz, and our producer is Charlotte Koh. Sound design by Jocelyn Gonzales. Our theme song, "Queen," is written and performed by Victoria Canal.

And now that you've heard How It Is, head over to our website to learn about what we do. Visit hello-Sunshine.com to read, learn, and make things happen. And in the meantime, don't forget to find us on Instagram, Facebook, and if you liked what you heard today, go ahead, give us all the stars on Apple Podcast. Stay tuned for our episode on the gray area and how we're learning to embrace all of the nuances and complexities of being a person in the world telling hard truths, especially at this moment in time. What would Gabrielle say about that?

Gabrielle Union: Fuck the gray area.

Diane G.: Ooh, get ready.

You guys, this is really fun.