Loretta Ross is an activist, associate professor at Smith College, and public intellectual. In her five decades in the human rights movement, she has deprogrammed white supremacists, taught convicted rapists the principles of feminism, and organized the second-largest march on Washington. She is a co-founder of the National Center for Human Rights Education and the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. In 2022, she received a MacArthur Fellowship, and then in 2024, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
What’s the big idea?
Calling people out has become normative in today’s cancel culture, but it is counterproductive to the actual betterment of our society. While calling people out may feel like power, real influence and change-making happen when we call people in. To create a world with less fear, more compassion, and space for growth, it is important to share moral generosity with all humans. Calling in offers this gift to ourselves and those around us.
Below, Loretta shares five key insights from her new book, Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel. Listen to the audio version—read by Loretta herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Calling out doesn’t achieve what you think it does.
Calling people out can bring a lot of temporary satisfaction because it feels like power. But is it the best choice for situations that demand accountability? If you want to build something instead of burn everything down, calling in means creating a revolution from within that changes how we are in relationship with others. We can learn to handle our passion with compassion by behaving in ways that don’t wall people out. Calling in acknowledges that we must emerge as new human beings, motivated by integrity and grace instead of punishment and vengeance.
It is nearly impossible to force someone else to change their mind without violence. When you try to force it, they generally double down and refuse to budge. When you call someone out by challenging their beliefs, you reduce the likelihood that they will listen to you. People generally believe those they trust, and when you call people out, you’ve proven yourself untrustworthy because you did not take their feelings or experiences into account. You’ve shown that you are more interested in being right than being effective.
2. There are five options during conflict.
Most people assume that calling someone out is the only and best option for achieving accountability for a harm committed. But that’s not true. Calling out, which is publicly shaming people for something you think they’ve done wrong, is only one option. Usually, this is done in a tone of outrage and can be particularly vicious over social media.
Canceling them is a second option, with which you want to punish them by losing their job, reputation, or platform. That’s your inner Karen impulse.
Calling in is the third accountability option. It uses respect for others as a vehicle for conversations. This option does not instigate fights the way calling out or canceling do.
“When you call on someone, you are requesting that they synchronize their inner good opinions of themselves with their outer behaviors.”
Calling on is the fourth option. It is particularly useful when you don’t want to invest your time and attention into someone else’s growth. When you call on someone, you are requesting that they synchronize their inner good opinions of themselves with their outer behaviors.
Calling it off is the fifth option. This choice recognizes that you have no obligation to continue an unproductive conversation with anyone who is gaslighting you, lying, cherry-picking their facts, or behaving like a troll simply to get on your nerves.
3. You can’t influence everyone and you don’t want to waste your time.
I created the Spheres of Influence model to help you understand that not everyone wants to grow and change. This model helps me analyze who is likely to trust me and helps me chart a path toward increasing my trustworthiness by how I respect them despite our divergent viewpoints.
The inner circle of the model is composed of my 90-percenters: those whose worldviews mostly align with my own. We pay close attention to politics because we believe in and fight for human rights. We are intelligible to each other because we use the same language, understand the same cultural references, and read the same news sources. We disagree around the edges—this is where call out culture is most passionate and politically self-destructive—and spend too much time pressuring each other to become 100-percenters, as if total alignment with another’s perspectives is achievable, or even desirable. In this inner layer, calling each other in is possible and likely to succeed.
Outside of my 90 percent bubble are the 75 percent folks. These are the people with whom I mostly share political and social perspectives, yet they do not pay much attention to politics. They simply want to live their lives compassionately and create a better world for themselves and others. We share the need to be of service to humanity and pretty much agree on a “live and let live” philosophy. We don’t want to tell others how to live their lives and vice versa. I can’t use my 90-percenter “woke” opinions and language with them because it may sound condescending or judgmental.
“I created the Spheres of Influence model to help you understand that not everyone wants to grow and change.”
To call in the 75-percenters means I must use words that honor their compassion while not judging their level of political knowledge with the litmus tests the 90-percenters delight in wielding against others—like saying “unhoused” instead of “homeless.” The only thing we prove with language policing is how ruthlessly we pounce on people for not knowing enough or being enough to suit our political views. While we may think they are not woke enough, they think we are not tolerant enough.
The next and largest circle are 50-percenters. These are folks who are more conservative than me, and they can go either right or left in politics, depending on which issue they’re discussing or who they trust. My parents were in this middle circle. My father, a military lifer, and my mother, an evangelical Christian, believed in God, America, and family, in that order. They were sincere in their beliefs but not pushy about them. We disagreed on many issues, but they also conveyed great timeless values about community service, family loyalty, and humility to their children. Through the church or an American Legion Hall, they would feed the hungry while I, as a human rights activist, asked why people were hungry in the first place. We disagreed on tactics, but we shared the same values. I could call them in based on these shared values when I dove beneath their surface-level words to see their hearts and intentions. I eventually learned they didn’t have to change; I had to change how I understood and appreciated them.
The next sphere are the 25 percent people. These are folks whose worldviews are not that different from my parents, but they are more likely to have different meanings for common words. For them, “freedom” might mean not wearing a mask during a pandemic or believing that everyone should worship their true god. Freedom to me means something quite different because I believe everyone should worship how they wish (or not). For the most part, my 25 percenters have their pain manipulated by ruthless, ambitious people without moral guardrails. As victims, they’re not the ones in charge. Their fear of change means that their pain is real, although their solutions usually are not.
Since there is unlikely to be a shared language, worldview, or news sources between this sphere and my own, trust is not assumed and must be earned. Through patience, respect, and humility, I can engage in conversations with them as we exchange experiences on common cultural signposts. For example, I can start a conversation about grits with any Southerner. A shared humanizing experience, such as the refusal of my health insurer to pay for a vital medicine, goes a long way in bridging the gulf between differing political perspectives. It doesn’t cost anything to listen, and I’m often surprised about what I learn from people whose news sources differ vastly from mine. At the very least, I hear what informs their worldview and begin to understand how they arrived at their opinions.
“Calling in helps us be trauma-informed instead of trauma-driven.”
The final sphere is what I call the zero-percenters. These are the folks who profit from manipulating the fears and anxieties of others—those for whom cruelty is the point. For reasons I’m not particularly interested in, they’ve decided that their pathway to power and fortune lies in perpetuating ignorance, hatred, and selfishness. Because we’ll never be as talented at shaming as those who make a career out of belittling others, calling them out backfires.
And even these folks can sometimes be surprisingly kind to their families, magnanimous in their gestures, or trusted by those who believe they will protect them. They are complicated people, and my ability to influence them is minimal, if I care to try.
4. You don’t have to behave badly to prove that you have been treated badly.
It’s a well-known truism that “hurt people hurt people.” Calling in helps us be trauma-informed instead of trauma-driven. It helps us right-size our response to harm so that we calibrate the conflict by using intelligence and integrity to show up in positive ways.
We can learn to experience joy by leaning into the discomfort of civilly disagreeing with others. We can strengthen our resilience and be in harmony with our value system. We can invite people into a safe space for their unfolding thoughts that may not be fully developed or reasoned out but will not tee them up for harsh criticisms. Even the most heated exchanges can be based on love and respect.
5. The first person you call in is yourself.
The first thought that pops into your mind during conflict usually stems from your trauma. If you put that thought on pause and give yourself time to consider only speaking aloud your second thought, that will usually be based on your integrity and intelligence. Calling in begins and ends with you. You are self-determining how you show up in the world. You can decide to handle conflicts with love, compassion, and respect. You can make the world a better, less cruel place by treating strangers with the same moral generosity as you would a best friend.
To listen to the audio version read by author Loretta Ross, download the Next Big Idea App today:
