Cultural change work takes time
and it requires a lot of different participants.
Can you gimme an example of what this would look like
if I was in, I don't know, east New York, in Brooklyn.
How would I encounter the work of Breakthrough?
If you're in some place like east New York in Brooklyn,
or Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn, which is where I live,
and, in fact it might not be any different
than if you were in Cape Town, South Africa.
Part of the gift of technology
is that it levels the playing field.
Technology opens up the sort of expanse,
the expansive space in which we can reach people.
It means that somebody in east New York
or somebody in Cape Town can go on YouTube
and watch one of our videos, they can access some
of our works through various media means.
Part of what we wanna be able to do
is to tap into the human capacity
and the human imagination to get people
to think, to be and do different.
So the way that we seek to end violence impacting girls
and women and marginalized people is by using creative means
like arts, culture, and media to do that.
So technology bridges the gap.
It bridges the gap that typically is sort of left
because of the space that is geography.
And part of what we're able to do
is to tap into that and reach people all over the world.
I think you and I would probably agree that human rights
are human rights are human rights,
wherever you are on the planet.
But people do live in contexts.
They do. In some societies,
coming out would be met with a shrug.
In some societies, it would be meant with a lynching.
There are different realities that people live in.
It's what makes Breakthrough's work interesting
but also challenging if you're gonna work
in a cross-cultural context, no?
It's very challenging to ensure that we take the time,
any of us who consider ourselves agents of social change,
to deeply, deeply consider the context
in which people live, the context in which people come
to be and exist.
It means that we can never, ever engage and work
in our own communities or around the world
with a sort of optic that does not allow for us
to think about the particularities of people's lives.
We all live differently.
Our lives are shaped differently
because of a variety of things,
from the color of one's skin to one's gender presentation,
to the amount of money one may or may not have access to,
to a range of capitals, gender, age, ability.
So what we try to do at Breakthrough
and what I think it's critical for us to do
is to remember context matters
and that it's easy for us to think
that folks are moving in the world
if they can move similar to us
because of the context that we bring to work.
But if we don't attend to the lived experiences
of other people and the range of ways
that their lives can be impacted
and how their lives are shaped,
and I think we do our, we won't be able to do our job
in the best way possible.
When I think about what it was like to be a gay, black man
in New York in 1955, instead of 2019, I mean,
there are generations of men who went
to their graves closeted, hidden, and ashamed.
And now we can sit here and talk about this in 2019
in a way that would've been unimaginable 50 years ago.
When I was a kid in Brooklyn, where you, you know,
gay people could be beaten to death
and the cops just wouldn't care very much.
They wouldn't investigate very hard.
It would just be an unsolved cold case
and that would be that.
I mean, the march goes on and progress continues,
even as we're well short of where we need to be as a people.
And it's a funny, it's hard to describe
that kinda situation.
Yeah, it's really hard to land
on these sort of markers of success or markers of change.
One must ask a question,
"Well, success or change for who?"
So an example of that is, yes,
within the context of the US, we have ascended
to a place now where folk can legally marry,
say, if they are queer or trans individuals.
And it is also still the case that queer, trans,
and gender nonconforming peoples, in some cases,
face violent pushback.
It is also the case that as we celebrate a rise
of sort of representation of, say,
trans women of color within popular culture.
At the same time, we know that trans women of color
experience high rates of homicide rates.
So progress for who?
It's easy to say, you know, "We,"
the sort of universal We have made progress
without thinking about who makes up the composite
that makes up the We.
Black folk who are LGBTQI might, may be able to,
in the same places where, the pride flag is raised,
could still experience racism.
Women who identify as lesbian or whatever
can still experience misogyny within queer-friendly spaces.
And so one of the ways that I like to say that
is we exist in a space where it's really easy
to name whose feet are on our necks.
It is not easy to name whose necks our feet are on.
That second part, I think, is part
of the work we're called to do,
which is what we try to do at Breakthrough.
The harder, the more radical work is after one realizes
that their feet has been on somebody's neck to take it off.
And that's part of our work at Breakthrough,
part of the work in which I'm a part,
helping folks to think really deeply
and in more nuanced ways about questions of progress,
about ideas about transformation,
about marginalization, and so forth.
The on ramps, at the same time, yes, resources are great,
but the on ramps are getting shallower all the time.
Everybody's walking around with a video camera
in their pocket, which we couldn't have imagined
not all that long ago.
Being a creator is now something that seems accessible
for a lot of the impacted communities of interest
that you are talking about.
Is part of the design encouraging your audiences
to be creators too?
Absolutely.
One of the gifts of our sort of current times
is the ways that media, in various ways,
have been democratized.
One of the lessons we learned, for instance, in the US
over the last several years, with all of the iterations
and sort of movements that spring up from the Movement
for Black Lives, to Women's March, to Me Too,
is that these movements were sparked
by sort of everyday folk who will use things
like their Twitter handles,
who use their smartphones to record videos.
And then they would share those videos
on their social media pages.
Who would offer counter-narratives that pushed back
against narratives that had been derived
from media, mainstream media, so much so,
and I know this as someone working in media,
that media often went to the folk on the ground
who were creating to actually develop story angles.
So the field has been democratized.
Part of the work is to ensure that people
who typically don't have access to microphones
and to the sort of media-sphere, who now can get access
to that in their everyday lives also have the tools
and capacity to engage on their own terms.
So one of the things I'm really excited about
is an initiative that we are soon to embark on.
It's a project that we're calling Her Stories.
What we wanna be able to do is to speak with
and bring to the camera girls of color from across the US
to begin to give them space to speak
about their lived experiences on their own terms.
So we want to go around the country
and give girls an opportunity to talk
about what their lived experiences are
in ways that so many groups have already begun to do.
Through policy, through research, this work has begun.
African American Policy Forum, Girls for Gender and Equity,
NOVO Foundation, I mean, there are so many people
doing this work within policy.
We want to bring it to film.
So these will be short docs.
And imagine that, in a platform where you can go
onto a website and click on a map of the US,
any part of the map, maybe the Southern, the Southwest,
and if you click on that, you might open up
to discover a girl, maybe cis or transgender,
who's talking about their lived experiences
in the Southwest and how it's different or similar
to somebody who's living, say, in the Northeast.
And that's a work we wanna do over the next few years.
It's a big, audacious project
and we're really excited about it
because we think, not only can it influence the way
that people think about the lived experience of girls
and women in the United States,
but also that can influence policy, philanthropy,
and so much else.