Loretta Ross
speaker
82 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Loretta Ross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And basically he said, outside I rape women, inside I'm raping men, and I'd like not to be a rapist anymore. My first reaction was disgust and outrage. I'm like, how dare you? We're a rape crisis center providing services to victims and we don't have enough money, we don't have enough staff, and y'all are the perpetrators asking us for help. I mean, I was pissed off to the heights of passivity.
But I didn't throw the letter away. I don't know why. I think curiosity and outrage made me go to Lorton to talk to William Fuller. I can't say I was prepared to cuss him out, but I was certainly prepared to gloat that he was in jail. But I did William's pain and the pain of those guys that they talked about what they had been through.
And that's when I realized that our society never wants to listen to what prisoners have been through. We only want to know what they did. And I was like, wow, this is not what I expected when I walked into this prison. I hadn't dealt with any of my trauma from being a rape and incest survivor from childhood and all of that. And because I didn't know what the hell I was doing.
I just started talking about my story. And they started telling their stories. And next thing I knew, some kind of weird kind of trust and bond was built through shared survivor stories. And so then Floyd Cochran came 20 years later.
As part of my job at the Center for Democratic Renewal, formerly the National Anti-Klan Network, was to parachute into towns that had experienced hate crimes or a Klan march or whatever. Und er hat die Gemeinschaft damit unterstützt. Aber Rev. C.T.
Vivian, der damals mein Vorsitzender war, und mein Boss, haben mir auch gesagt, dass Teil meines Jobs war, Menschen zu helfen, die von Hate-Movements ausgehen wollten, in eine normale Gesellschaft zu reinkommen. Und er hat sehr berühmt gesagt, dass wenn man Menschen hat, um Hate zu geben, dann musst du für sie da sein, wenn sie es tun. I didn't agree with that sentiment at all.
I mean, I'd gotten shot at as a 10-year-old in Mississippi. There was nothing in me that made me want to... feel any empathy for someone who is a Klansman and proud of it. There are accidental racists, there are reluctant racists. These are the proud racists. But anyway, part of my job was talking to Floyd Cochran. And Floyd Cochran had become the national spokesman for the Aryan Nations.
He'd become a Nazi when he was 14 years old and now he's 35, 21 years in the hate movement. And Floyd's epiphany change of heart, if you can call it that, happened when his second son was born with a cleft palate. And his Nazi buddies told him that his son was a genetic defect who needed to be put to death.
And that was Floyd's wake-up call, like, oh wow, these are the people I'm hanging out with, they want to kill my child, it's okay if they kill all the Jews and the Blacks and the Queers, but my child kind of thing. And so, when I met Floyd, I was prepared to be disgusted by him. It felt kind of like,
Du hast dein Bett gemacht, du liegst darin, also warum muss ich mich darum kümmern, dass du von dem Arian Nations-Komponenten ausgeworfen wurdest? Sag mir, warum muss ich mich darum kümmern? Aber Floyd war überraschend intelligent und lustig und selbstkritisch, nachdem er endlich wuchs. Und er hatte einen schönen Sinn für Ironie und war unglaublich heimisch.
All the things that you would not have suspected if you saw his public performance as a national spokesman. Quoting the Bible along with Mein Kampf with Equal Ease. He was really fascinating. But sadly, he was also the consequence of dedicating his life to hate groups. Because Floyd didn't have any marketable skills. He couldn't get a job.
Wenn du in einem Hate-Group bist, entwickelst du kein Resümee, von dem jemand dich hinstellen möchte, richtig? His only developed talent was as a demagogue and even how he joined the hate movement. Floyd was just a skinny white kid in upstate New York who was bullied at school and he really was suffering.
And then he found that once he put on a swastika, instead of him being afraid, everybody was afraid of him. It was just that simple. And I see that in a lot of alienated white youth, today even. If they can go around making other people afraid, they can disguise their own fears.
Es braucht zu viel Energie, um Leute zu hassen. Ich habe das immer so angenehm gefunden. Als Kind fand ich das angenehm. Und so investieren so viel Zeit und Aufmerksamkeit in jemanden, den ich einfach ignorieren kann, macht einfach mehr Sinn für mich. Ich meine, wenn ich ihm die Aufmerksamkeit bezahlen würde, würde ich ihn zu einem Crisps frieren.
Und ich würde meinen Power in einem anderen Weg verwenden. I tell all my enemies, the worst thing you want me to do is pay attention to you. Really. You do not want this storm coming at you.
Really. I beg people to not bring themselves to my attention when they get on my nerves.
Shaming has never worked to correct a behavior once the shame has been made public. Because the person who is being shamed will always feel or assume that every time somebody says their name, they're going to remember their shame. That they will not have an identity, a presence without this shame hanging over their head like a storm cloud.
So as a corrective, it tends to drive people away rather than engaging them, bringing them in to correct the sources of that shame. And I also had to do a lot of reconciling with my own shame, my own sources of shame. One of the things that made writing my book so difficult was how much self-disclosure I had to make of my own mistakes. And my mistakes were large and visible.
Und viele Jahre habe ich sie versteckt. Und dann, als ich mich zurückgezogen habe und sie weggezogen habe, hat mein Therapeut viel Geld verdient. Aber ich wollte die Perspektive eröffnen, dass man von der Scham lernen kann. Man kann von seinen Fehler lernen. Und man kann immer noch kontrollieren, ob man von der Scham und den Fehler definiert ist.
Und es war für mich erheblich, die Geheimnisse zu beurteilen, die ich so viel emotionalen Energie verwendet habe, um zu verstecken. Ich weiß nicht, ob es für alle so funktioniert, aber ich denke, dass es für genug von uns funktioniert und sicherlich für einige von uns. Aber dann... I don't think I ever had the luxury of having my worst secrets remain secret.
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