Ep 68: Stay Humble and Keep Going

In this week’s episode, Tracie and April discuss the phrase, “stay humble and keep going,” the final words of the podcast every week. They explore why they chose this simple phrase and what it means to them. 

Check out our discussion/reflection questions for this episode:  https://joyousjustice.com/blog/jews-talk-racial-justice-ep-67

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

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

Read more of Tracie’s thoughts at her blog: https://www.bmoreincremental.com/

Support the work our Jewish Black & Native woman-led vision for collective liberation here: https://joyousjustice.com/support-our-work

Learn more about Racial Justice Launch Pad and join the waitlist: https://joyousjustice.com/racial-justice-launch-pad

Read more about bell hook’s life here https://www.bellhooksinstitute.com/

Listen to Kendrick Lamar’s “Humble” (Explicit language warning): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvTRZJ-4EyI&ab_channel=KendrickLamarVEVO

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is when people with little skill overestimate their capacity in that field: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

Learn more about the middot of Humility / Anavah here: https://www.rabbidavidjaffe.com/anava-humility/

Learn about Dr. Alan Morinis here: https://mussarinstitute.org/

Learn more about Rabbi Lauren Tuchman’s work here: https://rabbituchman.com/

Remind yourself about asymptotes here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptote

Transcript

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- [Tracie] Regular listeners will recognize the phrase,"stay humble and keep going" as the final words of every episode, Today, we take some time to unpack them.- This is Jews Talk Racial Justice with April and Tracie, a weekly show hosted by April Baskin and Tracie Guy-Decker. In a complex world, change takes courage. Wholehearted relationships can keep us accountable.- Hey Tracie.- S'up April.- So many things. My grandma passed this week.- I'm so sorry. May her memory be for a blessing.- Thank you. By the time this episode airs, I think it will have been a week ago. Yeah, her memory is definitely a blessing. Now she's loving being in the spirit world. I felt her spirit give my caress a cold cheek, give my cheek a cold caress. I felt like a cold breeze around and I later learned that that was around the time that she died. And I wondered, I was thinking at the time is that Grandma Lue? Because my parents' home is super insulated and it's not a place to get drafts at all. And that was cool. So I'm navigating the grieving process around losing my Grandma Lue, and we're gonna have a memorial service for her. She opted to give her body to science, to UC Davis Medical Center. So it's less of a time issue in the ways that it traditionally would be, but we're doing a memorial service for her on the 28th of the month, which is just, should work out well. And then later that week, and it's so hard to tell, and it's all connected within me, but I was devastated to learn from you actually so at least that helped that it came from a source that I love, a source who I love that bell hooks passed. And so it's just been quite a week and I'm tired and--- Yeah. Two two giants of your childhood or two giants of your development passing at the same time.- Yeah, that's a lot. And bell hooks passing for me. I don't know the circumstances of her life. There was a more sorrowful element of that and that she's so much younger. My grandma was 94, she grew up in the 1920s in the Jim Crow South and lived an amazing life considering those circumstances. And there was a purchasing, not all at once, but in succession, multiple homes and eventually running a lounge, a tavern in Newark had her own business, her husband and my grandpa, Joe. So that's the energy that I'm bringing into our conversation today. And you raised it, it might be really nice and it would be very nice to do an episode talking about bell hooks and certainly it would be great in terms of the fact that her name is trending. And maybe we can do that in the future, but I just, I'm really sad about losing her. She was only around 70 and...- Yeah, not even to 69.- Yeah. I was hoping--- Maybe we should have had another 20 years of her brilliance.- Yeah. Or at least 15. And so I'm still just navigating some grief stages with that. Whereas with my grandma, it's been a multi-year process in different ways, and so I've been processing that all along, but it also now is here. So you had a really great idea of what we might talk about this week. So why don't I turn it over to you to introduce it and we can dive in.- Yeah, sure. So over, I guess a year and a half ago now, when we decided to start a podcast and we wanted to have the credits at the beginning and the end be the same. And we wanted something that we could say as we would close out and we talked about a couple of different things, but then we landed on stay humble and keep going, which is something that, I think I don't remember exactly who suggested it--- I think you did. I think you cited--- That makes sense why it resonates- I think you were inspired by something you'd heard or something at that time. You read or heard someone say something and you did a variation on what they said.- That's entirely likely.- You don't remember anymore?(laughs)- I don't, but I will say that it really, really resonates still because it is the way that I think about my journey, not just anti-racism but just the learning journey. Right? I think it's so easy to get sort of stuck and, or to assume that a little bit of knowledge is all that you need. So the push back against arrogance, or it's not even an arrogance, it's more, I think there's a name for it where people who are good at things in their lives then assume that new new fields are much simpler than they are in fact are, and just assume a higher level of competence than they ought. Because they're good at other things. And I think that particularly in regards to understanding the societal forces of systemic oppression like that happens, and I can't think of the name of it right now, but it's easy to fall into because we think we understand, we all are racialized, and so we think that we understand how it works and it's just much more complicated and hence the humble, and it is so complicated that especially white folks, sometimes are like, "You know what, I'll just, nah, leave that to other people, let other people deal with this complicated stuff." And so--- I can't.- Stay humble. Yeah, we can't stop. We are all needed in this work. And so stay humble and keep going is a little bit of a mantra for me that I hope resonates for other folks, but that's what I have on my mind. April, you're obviously deep in thought about this.- So I like to stay humble'cause it reminds me of a Kendrick Lamar song. What's a good replacement for the B word?- I don't know.- You know the Kendrick Lamar song, right?- Yeah. Baby, sit down.- No.- Oh, well he has this whole song and the chorus is baby sit down, be humble, baby sit down, be humble. Right. And I think it's interesting because and I hadn't fully thought about this before. I like the balance of the two words, because I think across different types of listeners, one or the other might be more helpful. So a person might feel like they have one, but they may not have the other, so they might be going, but they may be lacking humility or they might, where they may have humility on lock and are doubting themselves, or are tired in the case of either dedicated, wonderful leaders and or dedicated wonderful leaders who are explicitly people of color. And there were some elegant way that I connected this in a meaningful way that I can't remember what the through line was, but I would extend it to say, well, I would name explicitly, but not everybody needs to be humble, but that everyone and, or, and by that, I mean, some people already are humble. And I remember being in a text study once with a prominent rabbi who was giving a whole talk about how important humility is and how it was so virtuous and so wonderful and how we all need to do that. And I remember thinking this is a wonderful person, but I remember thinking what a profoundly white male perspective he was coming from. And I can't remember all the phrases that he used, but it was so clear because I was at a point in my healing journey where being humble was absolutely, is how I always had been to an extreme and I literally needed to be bold and I needed to be heard. And I needed to contradict as a woman of color, the different ways that I've been consistently silenced and that's in his lesson, and we didn't have all these added pieces, but he kept saying things that I was like,"All these things are true, but for a particular experience, these are not universal." He was sort of sharing them as if they were universal. And I was like, Mm-mm Shugah. Channeling my grandma. Mm-mm Shugah, Nope. And so just similar to other middot, other Jewish values, humility is a Jewish value. And it's one that we need to right-size and balance, and that may need to shift or downsize, that may need to increase or downsize depending upon a given circumstance. And So that's why I felt comfortable that for a multi-cultural, multi-racial audience is because, and to me inherently when we say that, I take it to mean and it can mean different things for different folks as they need it to mean. It can be an affirmation of the fact that they are leveraging the right amount of humility, or it can be an admonishment to try to take a seat, a little, keep going, but to take a seat, you don't always have to be heard.- I love that you brought up the middot, the character traits because I do think that the Musar understanding of anavah or humility is really, really helpful to account for what you're talking about, where there are times when actually outside societal forces have forced you to be more humble than necessary. We've talked about on the podcast before that Dr. Alan Morinis, I was saying his name wrong in earlier podcasts. I apologize, Dr. Morinis, talks about anavah. Humility is about taking no more than my place, no less than my space, or maybe it's the other way around. We could probably do a whole nother thing about the difference between place and space in that sentence. But I think that's really important for us to recognize that anavah, humility actually is on a spectrum from completely self-effacing to sort of arrogance and that midline, not denigrating who we are and what we have to bring, but also not overemphasizing it is all baked into the idea of humbleness here with that Jewish lens.- Staying in your lane.- And I am excited for us and all of the other contemporary students of Musar, shout out to Rabbi Lauren Tuchman, who are talking about the societal pressures and socialization and how that affects anavah and how we show up and how we find the right balance. So I'm excited for us to continue that work that we do together.- And I liked the juxtaposition of the two pieces, because one is about, I associate humility with descent or contraction. But as we just said, in terms of it's practice for each individual person, it might be upping the level of acknowledgement of one's skills and the value that one brings, particularly the more you have marginalized identities beyond simply being Jewish, but also if you were Jewish and a person of color, if you are a person of color and not Jewish, if you are a person with disabilities and disability or disabilities, or someone with trans or non-binary gender identity, that it's still a practice, right? Because there's a point at which we can powerfully contradict the suppression of our voices and go overboard to a point of taking up too much space, but there's a good amount. And a number of us I know in my experience, my experience with different people with whom I've worked and learned is that it feels like we're taking up outsized space. We might just be speaking in a circle in a way that's actually normal for that circle, but it feels so contradictory to our oppression that we need to do that. But so it's a fine line. And this is where friends and teachers and supports can be helpful for us to say,"Oh, no, you were fine.""And April actually, I think you spoke actually"a few minutes less than the other people. So that was fine," right? Or, "yeah, that was really bold."I'm really proud of you and it was good,"but you might not always wanna do that"because that was really big." And either that was right for the moment or, you overshot a little bit, but we're so proud of you and you needed to do that for you. At times it's a little nuanced, right and we get to feel our way through that. But one of the things that I like about this is the, and keep going, is this sort of outward upleveling, right? And to me, I like this phrase because it's so perfect around racial justice, because so much of racial justice, effective racial justice work and anti-racism is around the nuance. And people initially find this confusing, but I actually think this is true with lots of things. It's like cooking, cooking is not black and white. If you had a one certain ingredient, then you might need a totally... But for some reason, I think, well, not some reason, because of largely I think trauma and unhealed trauma, the nuance of racism, it just makes it too much. Even though there's lots of other places in our lives, financial management, which a lot of people, but I been cooking is a good example because for some people it's really hard, but for a lot of people, they either enjoy the challenge or they love it. And they know that it actually is quite navigable, but there are different things you need to learn and certain ingredients that it sounds contradictory, but for this recipe, you need a lot of this, and in this recipe you need some, but just slightly too much will ruin the entire dish. The bread won't rise or whatever may happen. And that is true with effective racial justice work too, that you have different principles that in certain contexts, it needs to be bigger or smaller and you gotta learn to balance it. And this work is learning to, what is it like juggle while dancing, or patting your head while rubbing your tummy, that we need to learn to both hold racism and practice looking at while also practicing holding and looking at antisemitism. And we need to work on healing ourselves and taking good care of ourselves and not always at the same time, but in time taking very good care of ourselves, but also not, but if we're white also learning to de-center ourselves in certain ways to make room for the narratives and the priorities of people of color to shine and take up right sized space while still holding as a white person. But I still get to deeply care for myself and nourish myself at all times, but that that can look differently, particularly when I'm working on creating equitable spaces and measures that make room for greater collective justice. And so I like that that statement contains complimentary, potentially seemingly contradictory pieces, but that are critically important for each other and needed in this work,'cause if one was just humble and not doing anything, that wouldn't be great. And also when somebody just keeps on going, at times people don't remain humble because they start to get hurt and they'll start to get louder and loud and volume in and of itself is not what's missing in our movement spaces. I think what's missing is key insight and listening and spaciousness for new ideas to come through and for there to be healing for people and for us to form key relationships across lines of difference that are strong and can endure attacks from systems of oppression and actors of oppression who are explicitly trying to undermine those relationships and pit us against each other. And so I love that Tracie proposes and I wish I could remember, maybe at some point one of us will, how you came up with it. It just contains so much and also can take on, it can be a little bit to an extent if one wants it to be, and we invite you for it to be a little bit of a Rorschach, and you can determine the degree to which each one of these you need. And what I would say is that at times people need more humility than they think they may need. So, bear that in mind too.(chuckles)- I think one of the reasons I like it is because it invites you, it talks about both how you show up and that you continue to show up. And I think that's true regardless of your identity. Yeah. It sort of counters some of the things that we see in humanity in general, not just in this work of thinking that, like what I've done enough, I don't need to keep going, or--- Yeah, you do. Oh, that's another (indistinct) like the checklist dynamic or syndrome that can often happen in this work where people think, "I'm done." No, no, no, you need to keep going.- Or even if it's not I'm not quite done, but like, if I could just get these three things checked off the list, then I will be done. I think inherent and stay humble and keep going is that no, it's the soul curriculum.- It's like good hygiene or other things. This is how we live. It's a practice, it's a way of life that we slowly and consistently get to build in more and more as we each are comfortable and ready.- It's asymptotic.(laughs)- What?- For those word nerds out there. Asymptotic, it's like an asymptote, which is a curve that approaches a line, but never reaches it, it's a math term.- Thank you for this wow word of the week for me.- Asymptotic. You're welcome.- All right.- [April] Thanks for tuning in. Our show's theme music was composed by Elliot Hammer. You can find this track and other beats on Instagram@elliothammer. If this episode resonated with you, please share it and subscribe. To join the conversation, visit juicetalkracialjustice.com, where you can send us a question or suggestion, access our show notes and learn more about our team. Take care until next time and stay humble and keep going.