Molly Mendoza

Many people want to help in the ongoing struggle for equality and equity, but they don’t know what to do.

Activist DeRay Mckesson explains how we can all show up and stand up:

1. Own your privilege.

“Acknowledge that there is a privilege you have [if you’re white], and use the privilege to disrupt that privilege itself. I’ve had people say to me, ‘Well, I didn’t benefit from white privilege.’ [You need to realize] every Band-Aid in this country looks like your skin and not mine, baby dolls look like you, and the color ‘nude’ is your skin color. That’s what the privilege of whiteness looks like — it’s not about what you’ve done; it’s about what society does when it treats white as normal. It’s about you saying, ‘I have privilege, I have power, and I will seek out how I can use that privilege and those resources. I’ll ask marginalized people, ‘What is the help you need?’ as opposed to just saying, ’I think this is what you should do’.”

2. Talk about what’s uncomfortable and what’s important.

“There’s no winning in silence. If we allow white supremacist ideology to spread without being challenged, people continue to replicate it. And the question is: what do you do? You need to talk about it — you can’t change what you don’t talk about. And while we’ve had a great conversation [in the last year] about the symbols and about Confederate monuments, there is still so much work to be done that we actually don’t talk about — like what to do about police violence, or bail, or rehabilitation for people who are coming out of prison, or the opioid crisis. You don’t always see the trauma — it doesn’t show up in the same way as a man running a car through a crowd of people — but the impact on people’s lives is as disastrous as anything else.”

3. Be strategic in what you say and how you say it.

“People don’t respond well to being shouted down at the dining room table. If your goal is to change somebody’s mind, that isn’t the most effective strategy; if your goal is to make a point, then that isn’t an effective strategy. Try to show people what you mean, as opposed to just saying, ‘I’m right.’ It’s a long-game solution. Rarely do people come out of one conversation and say, ‘You know, my whole worldview has changed.’ It’s about setting a foundation, so that people over time can change. This isn’t everybody’s work — some people are much better at having conversations than other people.”

4. Activism isn’t just about protests and marches — it means voting, too.

“Many of the things that will change people’s lives are structural, so it’s about voting where you are and pushing for or against legislation in your city and town. Use your institutional power to change structures and systems. Who shows up to the hearings about police violence? Who is working on welfare reform? Who is working on bail reform? Are you willing to come out for three weeks of hearings, sit, and say, ‘This is an issue that is important to me, too’? Even when it may not be convenient? That’s what it means to show up.”

5. Figure out where and how you can do the most good.

“I think there’s a role for everybody. The things I care about might not be the things you care about, and vice versa, which doesn’t mean they aren’t all important. For some people, their space is being on Twitter and on Facebook and pushing out messages. There are some people who are better in the street than I am, and some people who need to skip the street because they can just go to the governor’s mansion. If the governor is your friend and you can talk to him in his dining room, do that. We don’t all need to play the same role. The cacophony of all of us doing work together will actually lead to systemic change.”

6. Start where you are.

“Harriet Tubman knew that something could be done. She started where she was and started small, and it turned into the Underground Railroad. It can often start with you and another person, or you and two people, having a conversation about what the world can be and here are the steps you can take. You need to take concrete steps — small ones, like steps on a ladder — to get to systemic change. Ask people what they need, stand in concert with those who’ve been doing the work longer than you, listen, ask more questions than talk. Those are all the hallmarks of the people I’ve seen who are the most effective.”

7. Ask yourself: what do I want the future to look like?

“When we think about resistance, we focus almost exclusively on the absence of oppression. We think: How do we end mass incarceration? How do we stop the disparities with regard to police killings? How do we stop police killings altogether? But when we tear down these repressive, oppressive systems and structures, something has to replace them, something that’s better.

For example, we know there will always be rules, there will always be people who break the rules, and there will always need to be consequences. Do the people who enforce those consequences have to be the police? No. Does that enforcement have to mean prison? Absolutely not. We need to spend more time now talking about potential solutions. How do we help people imagine a conception of safety that doesn’t center on the police? How do we help them imagine a world where every adult can read? How do you help people dream in a big way that will actually change lives? It’s hard because we haven’t lived in that world before. But it doesn’t mean that world’s not possible.”

8. Feel the fear — and act anyway.

“Martin Luther King said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ It bends, because people bend it. There are so many people who understand the power they have. They’re standing up across the country when the odds look like they’re against them, and they’ve learned to make sure fear doesn’t overpower everything else even if fear is still present. There are just so many incredible people who are willing to put something on the line to make the world a different place. That gives me hope.”

These remarks were taken from a Facebook Live conversation conducted with DeRay Mckesson at TED headquarters in New York City. To learn more, watch the video.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Deray Mckesson is a civil rights activist, organizer and educator. He is also the host of the podcast “Pod Save the People.”

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Alamy

From tennis to swimming and soccer, female athletes are at the top of their game right now, but they are still not receiving the support that men do.

Despite accumulating international titles, the US women’s national soccer team are currently having to pursue a gender discrimination lawsuit for equal pay (above, a photo of them from August 2019). In advance of the trial, their governing body, U.S. Soccer, has filed court documents declaring them less skilled than their male counterparts.

But the problem isn’t just that the gender pay gap also exists in sport — even the average woman just wanting to have enough energy to hit the gym regularly is at a disadvantage. The underlying research that makes good nutrition and effective training possible has also all been done on men, says exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist Stacy Sims in her TEDxTauranga Talk. “[During my early research I was told] ‘women are an anomaly, so we don’t necessarily study women in sport nutrition or exercise science’… I looked around and I thought surely with 50 percent or more of the population being female, aren’t the men the anomaly and they don’t know it yet?”

New Zealand-based Sims is on a mission to get the sporting world to recognize that “women aren’t just small men” but have their own set of nutritional and physiological needs.

While everyone’s body is different, there are patterns in physiology that are particular to most women and deeply impact their training. One of these is the menstrual cycle. Sims is frustrated that this isn’t addressed enough in sport and training. “This is one of the reasons girls drop out of sport, because no one talks about it… and wait til you get to perimenopause and menopause; it’s like tumbleweeds.” She has also seen clients in her own practice who have felt it was normal and “easier” for their periods to disappear during intense training.

While some studies have suggested that it can be useful to plan strength training around your menstrual cycle, and that you may even be more at risk of injury in particular stages of your cycle, we are still lacking a large and robust body of research to tailor training and competition around a fundamental aspect of many top athletes’ physiology.

In nutrition, too, Sims says that studies on high intensity interval training, the ketogenic diet and paleo intermittent fasting are all done on (often sedentary) men, then generalized over to the entire fitness population. “If we look at how women have been marginalized [in this process], they’re just assuming that this information is going to work for them as well.”

This mindset is also letting women down when it comes to something as fundamental as equipment, says Lynn Le. She’s the founder of women’s boxing gear and sportswear brand Society Nine (named after the Title IX legislation that made gender discrimination in sport illegal).

A former kickboxing instructor, Le founded the Portland, Oregon company in 2013 after struggling for years with combat sports equipment that hadn’t been designed for women. Clients would show up to her classes wearing children’s boxing gloves, or “some brand’s version of a pink glove, and they almost always didn’t fit the wrist and feel supportive. The material felt super chintzy; it just had no realm of seriousness at all in either fit or quality, and I realised I didn’t really have a place to direct them.”

Le herself had resorted to doubling up on the hand wraps usually used by combat fighters, so she could force her hand into a fist inside men’s gloves that were too big. As women’s hands are narrower than men’s, Le knew that a dedicated design was necessary not just for comfort but for basic safety.

“[In combat sport] your first line of defense is creating that shock absorption through the power of your own body, which is compressing your hand into as close of a perfectly formed fist as you can. If you’re wearing a glove that’s two sizes too big, how on earth can you possibly do that?… You want to enjoy what you’re doing, and to enjoy what you’re doing, you want to wear things that are comfortable, support you and help you prevent injury.”

Le and her development team also came up against the severe lack of research on women’s physiology when they were trying to design shin guards. There were no studies on how to make a suitable fit for women, despite women having a much more variable sizing from the knee down than men do. “We had to go back to high school biology and really try to understand the human body… Women’s bodies are incredible and complicated. They’re way more different in variability than men’s bodies. That’s the number one thing I’ve learned.”

But for Le, founding Society Nine was about more than solving an equipment problem. “The industry wasn’t really interested in representing all self identifying women, from their products to their stories. If they did, they did it in such a way that it tokenized individual women singularly rather than as a collective. So many brands… only talk about being the one, being the champion, being the winner, and that is not a recipe for longevity.”

Her own experience with combat sports changed her life, and created a community for her when she was going through a difficult period. Now she sees an outpouring of the same stories from her customers.

Le’s aim is to make it known that this community exists far beyond what is regularly shown in advertising, and it is welcoming. “Why we train, whether for fitness or competitively, goes so much deeper than glory or attention.” Society Nine works hard to make sure that whenever the company uses the term “women” that it’s defined as “self-identified women”, and it continues to expand its sizing and representation.

The industry is even more alienating for trans women and intersex athletes, who face not only a lack of representation but a serious dearth of research, with debates and disagreements at the highest level about how and whether they can compete.

In terms of what the future looks like, it’s still an uphill battle. Even now, as a professor at the University of Waikato and having held a research position at Stanford, Sims gets asked why it’s important to study women when “we don’t know enough about men.”

She recently published ROAR, a nutrition and fitness guide for women, and she wants to see more women realising the full and unique potential of their bodies. “We can really work with our physiology to improve our health outcomes, to improve our performance. Whether that be walking up the mountain, running a fast 5k, or winning Ironman. Whatever your goal is.”

For Le, the aim is to keep serving her community and to keep having challenging conversations. Though she received a strong welcome when the company started, some of the push back she encountered in the early days still remains. Like sports pro shop retailers telling her that women don’t really come to their store. “Maybe they don’t come into your store because there’s actually no women’s product. There’s no reason for them to enter if they are shown blatantly that they aren’t served or thought about.”

Society Nine also continues to donate equipment to combat sports programs for women and young people across the country. “I want to keep on helping self-identified women and other underrepresented people. I want them to feel seen … What motivates me isn’t just making really beautiful stuff that works. It’s also telling these women’s stories.”

Watch Stacy Sims’s TEDxTauranga Talk now:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Halton is Assistant Ideas Editor at TED, and a science journalist based in the Pacific Northwest.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.