Transcript: Monica Harris

My interview with the author and executive director of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism

This year has not been an easy one for a lot of people. Not only are many coping with economic instability, but our culture is polarized and often extremely hostile. But my guest on this week’s program — the last episode of the year — wants to leave us with a vision of unity. And of hope for a better, and more harmonious, 2024.

Monica Harris is the author of The Illusion of Division. She’s also the executive director of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the episode for free here.

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TH: Monica, welcome to Lean Out.

MH: Good to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

TH: It's so nice to have you on today, for the last episode of 2023. The north star that seems to guide much of your work, and the title of your book, The Illusion of Division. This idea is exactly the kind of idea that I wanted to leave our listeners with for the holiday season, which is really a reflective time of year. But before we get to that — and an essay that you wrote, that I want to ask you about today — I want to share a little bit about your story. Around 12 years ago, you decided that you had had it with the rat race. You quit your job as an executive at a Fortune 500 company in Los Angeles. You and your partner and son moved to Montana. Now, your friends and family, and colleagues warned you about what you'd find there, in a predominantly white, Christian, conservative community. You are Black, your partner is a white woman, and your son is biracial. What did you and your family find in Montana?

MH: I think what we found, surprisingly, is that there were so many more people who embraced us, and welcomed us, and looked beyond our differences. And there are differences. There are pretty obvious differences. This state is, I would say [around] 93% white, and as you said, mostly Christian, and very heavily heterosexual. A lot of our friends that we've made here attend church on a more than regular basis, several times a week. In some cases we didn't find this out until we got to know them better. They weren't proselytizers. They were very open-minded, which surprised us as well.

So, I think that we were hopeful that we'd be accepted. But I think surprised by the degree to which we were accepted. And it was really illuminating because we did take a leap of faith. It's Big Sky country. We came because we enjoyed wide open spaces and we were looking forward to adopting a simpler way of life. 

We didn't know if it was going to work out. Again, it was a leap of faith. But we were very encouraged that people connected with us and we were able to connect with them based on bigger picture issues — the common concerns we had. The concerns about traffic in larger cities; we were all trying to get away from traffic in larger cities. The concerns about making sure that our children were in schools that were a little more wholesome, and weren't exposed to as many divisive influences, as much drugs and alcohol. Of course, there was drugs and alcohol in Montana as well, but there were fewer influences than we had in the larger cities. 

I think that people here just generally want to live a more simple life. And whether we're gay, we're straight, whether we're Black or white, Republican or Democrat, I think a lot of people were drawn to this particular part of the country for the same reasons. And that's what we bonded around. It's really been a wonderful experience.

TH: In your TED Talk, you tell the story of a particular turning point. Of encountering a man you were a little bit afraid of, and discovering that maybe you had more in common than not. Would you mind telling us that story again today?

MH: It was spring break. It actually wasn't in Montana, it was in the Idaho panhandle, which I think the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as one of the most hateful places in the country, one of the most hateful states. Because, I think, there's the highest concentration of “hate groups” in Idaho. 

We were going there because we were on a budget that year. We couldn't go to Hawaii or any place exotic. So, we went to this indoor waterpark at this resort. Our son was romping in the pool, and my partner and I were just hanging out, looking at our phones and scrolling through the news. There had just been a mass shooting, I think that weekend. I can't remember where it was. There has just been so many mass shootings, it seems. And as we're scrolling through the news and talking, we're discussing the Second Amendment, which my partner and I completely support, within reason. We think that Americans should have the right to own arms. We own arms. But we need to be judicious about who has that right. If you have a mental condition, for example, or you've committed a felony, we need thorough background checks to make sure those people don't have access to firearms. So, we have a very balanced sense of the Second Amendment, I think.

As we're talking, I noticed this guy behind us looking at us off and on. Whenever I'd look at him, he would look away. He had a very particular look, I would say. He was bald, sleeved up with tattoos, from his head down to his neck and all over his arms and chest. He was just looking at me. Sort of inscrutable, is the word I'd use. I couldn't tell whether he was just curious about me, or if he wanted me to get the hell out of there.

I think my partner picked up on my apprehension and she was urging me to play it cool. Then after a while, he got up and he came over. He made me a little nervous as I saw him approaching. I did my best to remain calm. When he drew up beside us, he said, “Mind if I sit down?” We're like, “Okay.” I guess we can't really say no, but we didn't know what to expect.

When he sits down, he immediately starts engaging us about guns. He says, “I couldn't help but overhear you talking about the Second Amendment. Do you think Americans should have the right to bear arms?” I was initially taken aback, because I felt like I was being cornered. I didn't know how he was going to respond. He looked like a guy who probably slept with a semi-automatic rifle.

But I just decided to be bold, and to be very honest with him, and transparent. I said, “Listen, I believe in the Second Amendment. I'm a strict constitutionalist. I'm a purist.” I told him my opinions about the reasonable restrictions on guns I thought we should have. I was fully prepared for him to just go off on me. But he just looked at me and he smiled and said, “That's what I think too. We're on the same page.”  And for the next hour, we talked about the Second Amendment and kids and family and living in Idaho and living in Montana — and what was going on in the country. This is a guy who, I kid you not, look like a skinhead. He had the teardrop coming down his eye. If I'd seen him in any other context, I probably would have been terrified. And I was semi-terrified, even at this waterpark. 

But what blew me away about the experience is that this man, who I thought I would have nothing in common with — and more than that, who I thought looked like he might even harm me under the right circumstances or the wrong circumstances — we actually connected. And we had so much in common. Not our life experience, per se. He wasn't gay, he wasn't Black. I doubt he even went to college, to be honest. But we were on the same frequency about what was happening in our country, what the problems were. And what we, as Americans, needed to do to fix them.

As he got up to leave, he said something I'll never forget. He looked back at me and said, “You know what they're trying to do to us, don't you?”

I thought: Who's he referring to? Who are they? He said, “They're trying to divide us. They don't want people like you and me talking.” I said, “Who's trying to divide us?” And he says, “The government, the media. They're absolutely afraid that people like you and me will connect and find common ground.” And he continued to look at me, and he said, “But it's not going to happen. Because you're my sister and I'm your brother, and we're all Americans. And we're all in this together.” 

That was pretty powerful. Never in my life would I have imagined that a man who looks like a white supremacist, a skinhead, would consider me his sister and ask that I consider him my brother.

TH: I'm a little choked up, listening to that, to be honest. I love that story. And I love it for so many reasons, Monica. And one of the reasons I love it so much is that I've been a journalist for I guess almost 22 years now — and that is my experience of journalism. Over and over and over again. People surprise you all the time. And I really believe that there is just so much more common ground than not

MH: If we just give ourselves the opportunity. I think that's the problem, Tara. So many times we are just afraid to open up and to take a chance and to give others the opportunity to be in our space. To come into our bubble. It's not always going to work out, but it's really worth taking the chance, in my opinion.

TH: Me too. And another thing I've heard you say, in regards to all of this, is that all of this division, all of these boxes we're putting ourselves in, is distracting us from one thing we really do have in common — and for many of us, it's economic precarity. Talk to me about that.

MH: I think class is the elephant in the room. That's one of the things that acquaintance that I met at the waterpark was trying to get across to me. At the time when I first moved to Montana, I had somewhat of a sense of it. But when I was talking to him, it became clear to me. Right now, whatever we look like, whatever our sexual orientation is, however we vote, it seems as if 90% of this country, if not more — and I can't speak for Canada, but the United States at least — it seems that most of us are struggling. With the challenge of putting food on our tables. The challenge of affordable housing. The challenge of affordable healthcare. The challenge of keeping our kids away from fentanyl, which has become an epidemic. The challenge of just keeping our families together, in a nuclear fashion.

Right now, one of the things that I'm battling with is my son is constantly on the screen. It's really difficult to get him to engage with me and my partner in a way that's meaningful. I realize a lot of this is even coming about because of our schools. Literally all of his assignments now are online. He doesn't have a physical book. He does very little work that's handwritten. So when we try to take his phone away from him, just to get him to engage more, the first thing he tells me is, “Well, I can't do my schoolwork then.” And we go to his teachers and they confirm this. Everything is being moved online, even though we know from studies that this is incredibly destructive to young developmental minds. 

There's so many things that are happening that, again, don't have anything to do with whether we're Black or white or anything like that. It's really just a function of 90% of us being in the same boat now.

I wish that we could get our elected officials to focus more on that. It seems that our media and the people we elect are just not interested in paying attention to these issues. I'm not sure what we can do to get them to focus on them more, but I know that it's absolutely critical. Because until we come together, we are never going to be able to move forward.

So that's one of the things that I'm really focused on doing, with my work, is trying to get people to fixate less on their differences and focus more on the crushing class issues, particularly inflation, that are coming at us left and right, front and center.

TH: It's a very similar state of things in Canada right now. Huge housing crisis, major opioid epidemic, and very high inflation as well. I want to take a moment to dive into how you think we got here. You recently published an essay on Substack, “How a global pandemic and the social justice movement have undermined America.” The contexts for this in the U.S. and Canada are quite similar, actually. We'll talk about some of the causal effects after. But first, in that essay you wrote about the dehumanization you experienced as someone who chose not to get vaccinated. This is something we saw a lot of here in Canada with our vaccine mandates, which I was against. There was a really famous cover of The Toronto Star that rehashed really dehumanizing online messages about unvaccinated Canadians. Everything from “unvaccinated people do not deserve ICU beds” to “I have no empathy left for the willfully unvaccinated.” Just really quite extreme. And, as you note in your essay, the bank accounts of the truckers who protested the vaccine mandates were frozen. Talk to me about what life as an unvaccinated person was like during the pandemic — and what lessons you drew from that experience.