Speaker 1: Welcome to The Laverne Cox Show, a production of Shondaland
Speaker 1: Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show.
Speaker 1: My name is Laverne Cox. I've been thinking a lot
Speaker 1: lately about privilege, and it's such a interesting, tricky conversation
Speaker 1: to have.
Speaker 2: These days.
Speaker 1: You can see people online saying check your privilege, and
Speaker 1: in people getting into fights around privilege and not feeling
Speaker 1: privileged because they've had struggles in their lives. You know,
Speaker 1: when we talk about something like white privilege, for example,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of working class white people who
Speaker 1: don't feel privileged because they've had to struggle in their
Speaker 1: lives and they're still struggling. A lot of men, when
Speaker 1: we talk about male privilege, they're going through struggles and
Speaker 1: they don't feel particularly privileged. And the way I like
Speaker 1: to think about privilege is that privilege does not mean
Speaker 1: that you have not struggled. It just means that there
Speaker 1: are some things that you don't have to think about.
Speaker 2: So you could be the most privileged.
Speaker 1: Person in one room and change rooms and be the
Speaker 1: least privileged person in that room. And when I talk
Speaker 1: about a privilege, I love telling this story I was
Speaker 1: giving a lecture in South Carolina around twenty fourteen, and
Speaker 1: before the lecture, I got to meet with a group
Speaker 1: of students from the university and they had sat themselves
Speaker 1: in a semicircle in this sort of conference room. And
Speaker 1: I go around and I want to meet the students
Speaker 1: and I ask them, you know who they are?
Speaker 2: And they were all sort of student leaders.
Speaker 1: They were representing different organizations and I am meeting. To
Speaker 1: my left was the president of the LGBTQ Student Alliance.
Speaker 1: And I go around the table and the students hit
Speaker 1: sat themselves in an interesting way where they the students
Speaker 1: were like white to Asian to Latino or Hispanic to black.
Speaker 2: That's how the students were seated.
Speaker 1: And so as the students went around, they told me
Speaker 1: who they were, and I asked them some things they
Speaker 1: may have been struggling with around identity or you know,
Speaker 1: education or whatever they might have been struggling with at
Speaker 1: the university. And I remember getting to the last student
Speaker 1: who was who was a black student. He talked about
Speaker 1: being black and gay and that as a member of
Speaker 1: the Black student Union, he's often felt like he's had
Speaker 1: to choose between being black and gay. When he's in
Speaker 1: black spaces and when he's at the lgbt Alliance in
Speaker 1: that group, that he has to sort of leave his
Speaker 1: blackness behind and that he can't bring both those identities
Speaker 1: into the queer space, or can he bring both those
Speaker 1: identities into the black space. And so having the president
Speaker 1: of the LGBTQ Student Alliance sitting right next to me,
Speaker 1: I turned to the to the president and said, well,
Speaker 1: what do you think about what he said? And he's like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I've never thought about it. And I
Speaker 1: was like, that's this is privilege. I was like, this
Speaker 1: is a privilege. It is not like he was a
Speaker 1: bad person. This, this kid who's the president of you know,
Speaker 1: LGBTQ Student Alliance, is not a bad person because he's
Speaker 1: never thought about this.
Speaker 2: It's just it's a privilege to.
Speaker 1: Not have to think about leaving parts of yourself behind
Speaker 1: when you go into a room because you inhabit multiple,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of marginalized identities, and privilege just means
Speaker 1: there's something that you don't have to think about and
Speaker 1: it is not an indictment on you to have privilege.
Speaker 1: I am a black, transgender woman from a working class background,
Speaker 1: right like all of those identity categories aren't necessarily thought
Speaker 1: of as privilege. Yet I sit here in a lot
Speaker 1: of privilege. I sit here in quite a bit of
Speaker 1: class privilege. And the class privilege is recent, you know,
Speaker 1: over the past, you know, within the past decade. And
Speaker 1: I'm fifty years old, so most of my adult life
Speaker 1: I've been working class, working poor, however you want to
Speaker 1: describe it, but still fly and now I'm sitting in
Speaker 1: a lot of class privilege. Being famous and a public
Speaker 1: figure is a tremendous privilege. Fame mitigates so many of
Speaker 1: the struggles of being black and trans and a woman
Speaker 1: doesn't mitigate all of them, but it mitigates some of them.
Speaker 2: Education.
Speaker 1: Having a mother that was a teacher was a tremendous
Speaker 1: privilege of mine. Having a mother who corrected my grammar
Speaker 1: and wanted to make sure that I spoke properly. That
Speaker 1: I went to Bethel ami Church or Bethel African Methodist
Speaker 1: Episcopal Church was a tremendous privilege because every Sunday I
Speaker 1: summarized the Sunday School lesson, so weekly I was standing
Speaker 1: up in front of a room full of people speaking,
Speaker 1: and that would serve me later in my work as
Speaker 1: a public speaker, going to the Abams School of Fine Arts.
Speaker 1: Education is a huge privilege. So there's different kinds of privileges.
Speaker 1: And all those privileges did not mean that I have
Speaker 1: not had a life of struggle. It just means that,
Speaker 1: like those privileges were things I didn't have to think
Speaker 1: about and gave me entree into spaces that I maybe
Speaker 1: wouldn't have gotten entree into if I didn't speak a
Speaker 1: certain way and if I didn't have the education that
Speaker 1: I have. And so, what I would love to invite
Speaker 1: people to think about when they think about privilege and
Speaker 1: ultimately when they think about racism or transphobia or sexism
Speaker 1: is so I think so two things. When we think
Speaker 1: about our own levels of privilege and the ways in
Speaker 1: which we're privileged, it does not mean that we are
Speaker 1: necessarily an open right. Being able to critically engage with
Speaker 1: our privilege doesn't mean that we're a bad person and
Speaker 1: that we're like oppressing someone. And I think that we
Speaker 1: have to understand that ourselves. And then when we talk
Speaker 1: about other people's privilege, we should be careful not to
Speaker 1: paint them as an oppressor because they have maybe not
Speaker 1: thought critically about their privileged or quote unquote checked their privilege. Right,
Speaker 1: So just because someone is privileged doesn't mean that they
Speaker 1: are a bad person. And maybe if they haven't thought
Speaker 1: critically about their privilege doesn't mean they're a bad person.
Speaker 1: All of this should be an invitation. We all grow
Speaker 1: up in a world where we internalize certain ideas. And
Speaker 1: I've said this many many times, if I can be
Speaker 1: I'm a black transfer to woman from Mobile, Alabama, I
Speaker 1: internalized negative ideas about black people, and I'm a black person,
Speaker 1: I internalize white supremacist, racist ideas about my own people
Speaker 1: and myself that because we live in a white supremacist,
Speaker 1: anti black world, I internalized negative ideas about myself based
Speaker 1: on class. We had an episode in the last US
Speaker 1: season of the podcast about class shaming. I internalized negative
Speaker 1: ideas about myself as a trans person. Because we live
Speaker 1: in an anti trans world. I had to unlearn all
Speaker 1: of those negative things about myself. And so if I
Speaker 1: can internalize negative things about myself as a black person,
Speaker 1: as a trans person, as a woman, as a person
Speaker 1: from a working class background, because we live and what
Speaker 1: Bellhus calls imperialists, white supremacists, capitalist patriarchy, we live in
Speaker 1: a system that.
Speaker 2: Is racist, that is sexist, that is cis.
Speaker 1: Noormative, heteronormative. So then we all internalize these things. And
Speaker 1: so if I'm internalizing it, even if you're a cis
Speaker 1: gender person or a white person or a man, if
Speaker 1: you likely internalize those things too. And so we're all
Speaker 1: in the same boat. So calling someone racist, it's like
Speaker 1: not it's not even really useful, I think anymore, because
Speaker 1: we're all racist. We've all been sort of you know, God,
Speaker 1: indoctrination is such a loaded word right now, but we've
Speaker 1: all sort of internalized.
Speaker 2: We've all been raised in a world.
Speaker 1: That devalues blackness, whether you're black or not, we all
Speaker 1: live in a world that this celebrates on a systemic
Speaker 1: level whiteness over other things that like devalues womanhood, femininity,
Speaker 1: that devalues trans people and LGBTQ plus people, and we
Speaker 1: all have to unlearn that. And so if we can
Speaker 1: begin to envision a world where we're all in the
Speaker 1: same boat, it's like the transphobia thing or the racist thing,
Speaker 1: like even calling someone I think the problem with just saying, oh,
Speaker 1: this person is racist doesn't allow the space for transformation,
Speaker 1: and the conversation about Bell Hooks with Darnell and Inmani
Speaker 1: we talked about creating space for transformation, and when we
Speaker 1: just say that someone is racist and that becomes their identity,
Speaker 1: that doesn't open up space for transformation. Now, some people
Speaker 1: are not interested in being transformed. Some people are not
Speaker 1: interested in, like you know, interrogating the ways in which
Speaker 1: they've internalized racism.
Speaker 2: It's very uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: It's been very uncomfortable for me to sit with the
Speaker 1: uncomfortable feelings of like how I've internalized racist ideas about
Speaker 1: myself and about my people, the internalized transphobia.
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I've told the story on this podcast,
Speaker 1: but there was a moment when I was working at
Speaker 1: Lucky Chang's, which is a drag queen restaurant in New
Speaker 1: York City, which was and there was a woman named
Speaker 1: Verra who had a school called Miss Vera's School for
Speaker 1: Girls who want to be Boys, sort of a charm
Speaker 1: school for cross dressers, and most of her clients were
Speaker 1: straight identified CIS gender men who enjoyed cross dressing and
Speaker 1: a sort of itishistic way. They were often married to women,
Speaker 1: and they would go to Miss Vere's charm School and
Speaker 1: get lessons in femininity, and then sort of their graduation
Speaker 1: would be getting dressed up on film and going out
Speaker 1: for a night on the town. And often she would
Speaker 1: bring them to Lucky Changs. And so one night, some
Speaker 1: of the students from Mis Severe School that come into
Speaker 1: Lucky Chang's and some of the girls who work at
Speaker 1: Chang's found themselves so sort of saying really disparaging things
Speaker 1: about the students from Miss Vera School who were very
Speaker 1: obviously cross dressed men and who weren't the most feminine
Speaker 1: or elegant or whatever. And I found myself joining in
Speaker 1: with these other queens who I worked with, some of
Speaker 1: whom were trans women, and then I had to check
Speaker 1: myself and I was like, Laverne, what are you doing?
Speaker 1: This is the same stuff people say about you. And
Speaker 1: I realized in that moment, looking at these you know,
Speaker 1: students from Miss Vera's school who were these sort of
Speaker 1: cross dressed men really probably for the first time out
Speaker 1: in the world in drag, and the awkwardness of that
Speaker 1: and the you know, the vulnerability of that moment, and
Speaker 1: I had to confront my own sort of anxieties around
Speaker 1: being seen that way by the world. My fear of
Speaker 1: being seen is this sort of awkward cross stressor and
Speaker 1: knowing that often when people find out I'm trans, I'm
Speaker 1: viewed that way anyway. And so there were so many
Speaker 1: levels of internalized transphobia that were operating in that moment
Speaker 1: as I found myself joining in on making fun of
Speaker 1: these students who were being really brave that night to come.
Speaker 2: Out for the first time, and I had.
Speaker 1: To interrogate the way in which my internalized transphobia was.
Speaker 1: You know, I hopefully I don't think they heard us,
Speaker 1: but that was really not cool, and that's not the
Speaker 1: kind of person I want to be. I don't want
Speaker 1: to be making fun of people because of the way
Speaker 1: they look, and that's not how I want to proceed
Speaker 1: in the world. So I had to check myself in
Speaker 1: that moment, and I had to like say that I
Speaker 1: don't want to behave this way and I don't want
Speaker 1: to be this way in the world, and why am
Speaker 1: I doing this? And I'm doing this because of my
Speaker 1: own feelings about myself that I need to get better
Speaker 1: with myself and okay with myself, and so much of
Speaker 1: that for those of us who are from marginalized groups
Speaker 1: who are internalize transphobia and sexism.
Speaker 2: That's the journey that we have to have.
Speaker 1: And if we're not from a marginalized group, if we are,
Speaker 1: that cis white man that feels like they're being attacked
Speaker 1: on a regular basis, Like the work is different. But
Speaker 1: if I can be raised in a culture where I've
Speaker 1: internalized racism and sexism and transphobia, it's probably likely that
Speaker 1: you also internalize some of those ideas and it's not
Speaker 1: and you're not a bad person if you're willing to say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I have, and how do I work on this and
Speaker 1: how do I get better? How do I acknowledge that
Speaker 1: there are certain things I haven't had to think about
Speaker 1: around privilege, or things that I've taken for granted or
Speaker 1: things that I've thought I knew or assumed.
Speaker 2: And it should be a privilege to.
Speaker 1: Even when it's uncomfortable, to be lovingly called out. And
Speaker 1: it's been uncomfortable for me when I've been checked around things.
Speaker 1: It has been, but hopefully, like there are people in
Speaker 1: your life who love you, who care about you, who
Speaker 1: can lovingly say that's not it, and then hopefully you
Speaker 1: can hear them. This is a good time to take
Speaker 1: a little break. We'll be right back though, Okay, we're back.
Speaker 1: I think we're all I think we're all racist. I
Speaker 1: think we're all transphobic. I think we're all sexist because
Speaker 1: we've you know, grown up in a culture that has
Speaker 1: sort of taught us all those things, and it's our
Speaker 1: job to unlearn all that if we're interested in on
Speaker 1: learning all those things, Like, maybe maybe a different way
Speaker 1: to frame it. Instead of saying you are a racist
Speaker 1: or you are transphobic, maybe like say, this language or
Speaker 1: this approach is consistent with a history of transphobia, or
Speaker 1: consistent with history that devalues the womanhood of trans women
Speaker 1: or suggests that trans people aren't real. And when I
Speaker 1: say transphobia, really just you know, most transphobia is about
Speaker 1: sort of degrading trans people, saying that we're not real,
Speaker 1: saying that we're mentally ill. Ultimately, the core of transphobia
Speaker 1: is that like trans women aren't trans women, that transmen transman,
Speaker 1: and that non binary people don't exist. Like that's the
Speaker 1: core of transphobia, or saying that, like, you know, the
Speaker 1: Roseanne Barr moment, I think is a really good example,
Speaker 1: like a really good example because it's just so blatant
Speaker 1: when oh, I still can't say what she said about
Speaker 1: Valerie jareded but you can google it. But after Roseanne
Speaker 1: Barr tweeted what she tweeted about Valerie Jared and many
Speaker 1: hours later would go on Twitter and say I'm not
Speaker 1: racist when she said one of the most racist things
Speaker 1: that somebody could say about a black person, It's like,
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, what And I think she believes that
Speaker 1: she's not racist, right, I think she can make a
Speaker 1: statement like that and believe she's not racist. And so
Speaker 1: I think having the discussion around like, well, what you
Speaker 1: said is consistent with a history of how black people
Speaker 1: have been talked about in America in a racist context,
Speaker 1: So the accountability would be acknowledging that these comments are
Speaker 1: consistent with that history. I didn't realize that, or I
Speaker 1: realized it, and I was angry, and I said, who
Speaker 1: knows how that came out or why you know it?
Speaker 1: I extended as much grace as possible, But I think
Speaker 1: it's more to focus on the behavior and not the person.
Speaker 1: Is another way to kind of have the conversation maybe
Speaker 1: about the ways in which we might discriminate or buy
Speaker 1: into this normative, heteronormative imperialists, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. Maybe
Speaker 1: focusing on the behavior and not the person, so it
Speaker 1: doesn't become that person's identity the racism, but the racism
Speaker 1: becomes a behavior that they can change.
Speaker 2: If they choose to or not. Just some thoughts, Just
Speaker 2: some thoughts.
Speaker 1: I'd like to think that everyone is redeemable, that everyone
Speaker 1: is human and can be transformed. So you know, some
Speaker 1: people demonstrate over and over again they're not interested in that,
Speaker 1: and we have to believe them when they tell us
Speaker 1: that through their actions. But I want to be perceived
Speaker 1: from a place of love and empathy at all times.
Speaker 1: And I think that starting with we all have internalized
Speaker 1: the values of this normative, heteronormative, impeerless, wide supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
Speaker 1: It is a great place to start, so we're all
Speaker 1: in the same place, and then we can begin to
Speaker 1: do the work together and it doesn't become like you
Speaker 1: did this to me, or you're a bad person, but
Speaker 1: you've just gotten the wrong information. And here's different information
Speaker 1: that you might want to consider so that you can
Speaker 1: see the full humanity and not discount the full humanity
Speaker 1: of the person standing next to you, or the person
Speaker 1: on the other side of the screen, or any of that.
Speaker 1: So we can see each other better, see ourselves better,
Speaker 1: acknowledge our shared humanity better. That's what I'm interested in
Speaker 1: as an artist, as a human rights activist, that we
Speaker 1: can acknowledge each other's humanity more fully.
Speaker 2: Just some thoughts. Thank you for listening to The Laverne
Speaker 2: Cox Show.
Speaker 1: Please rate reviews, subscribe and share with everyone you know
Speaker 1: if you can find me on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and
Speaker 1: on Facebook at Laverne Cox for Real. Until next time,
Speaker 1: stay in the love. The Laverne Cox Show is a
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