Into Liberation: A podcast about transformative change, equity, and working against oppression

Real-World Vigorous Interventions with Dr. John Capitman

August 20, 2024 • VISIONS, Inc. • Season 1 • Episode 9

Share episode

Join us as we sit down with VISIONS co-founder, longtime consultant, and retired professor public health Dr. John Capitman! Dr. Capitman talks about how he specialized in eldercare and developed community interventions in public health, as well as how his background and the life experiences informed his commitment and his approach, including how a severe car accident and other trials deepened his empathy and understanding of systemic inequalities and the necessity of acknowledging multiple dimensions of oppression. 

We also explore the formation of VISIONS and its mission to combat oppression, including memorable moments of creating VISIONS with his partner Dr. Valerie Batts. Dr. Capitman's story offers insight into the what is needed to continue this vital work in difficult times.

2024 is VISIONS 40th anniversary and we’re having a big celebration at the State Room in Boston on September 27th! Our guest speakers include Gloria Steinem, Verna Meyers, and The Rev. Dr. William Jay Barber II. Learn more here and join if you can! 

If you’re interested experiencing our approach, VISIONS offers a 75-minute public workshop teaching our Guidelines for Effective Cross Cultural Dialogue on the last Wednesday of each month at 4pm ET / 1pm PT.  It’s pay what you can, free if you want, and all are welcome. 

See what's coming up at VISIONS!

About us
Into Liberation: A podcast about transformative change, equity, and liberation is a production of VISIONS, Inc, a non-profit that offers effective tools that help individuals and organizations communicate and forge connections across differences that drive collective success.

Since 1984, we’ve offered research-based, time-tested approaches to cross-cultural learning that invite participants to engage in equity and inclusion work, starting at the personal and interpersonal levels and expanding to include changes toward institutional and cultural levels.

Whether it’s a book club, around the family dinner table, a school board meeting, or within your company, VISIONS offers actionable approaches that empower people to identify actions, explore their motivations, and effectively move through sometimes complex situations with respect and humanity for others and their differences.

Follow us!
Instagram: @visionsinc_org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VISIONS.Inc.1984/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/visions-inc.org/

Music credit: Tim Hall @tv_hall

...

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Hello, you're listening to Into Liberation, a podcast about transformative change, equity and working against oppression. I'm Leena Akhtar, director of Programs with Visions Inc. Welcome, hi, everyone. Today I'm speaking to one of Visions' founders, Dr. John Capitman. For those of you who don't know, visions was founded in 1984 by three Black women from Rocky Mount, north Carolina, and one white Jewish man, and that is who I'm speaking to today.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

In addition to being a Visions consultant, john is a now-retired professor of public health, where he specialized in elder care and community interventions, which he talks about at the beginning of our conversation. I also asked him about his background and the life experiences which informed the development of his commitment and his approach. He is married to Vision's founding director, dr Valerie Batts, and I appreciated hearing more about the earliest days of the organization in our conversation. John has been a frequent collaborator and mentor to me, and both Vision's founding story and the way that we work in cross-cultural teams illustrates something that is really fundamental to our approach that, at its heart, our model is about bringing people into relationship across difference, something that we deliberately lean into and really leverage in our work. All of the elders I've been speaking to in this series have been doing this work for most of their lives and in this time of chaos when things sometimes feel quite bleak, I've also been very grateful for the lesson and message to stay the course and keep going, and we talk about this at the very end. All right, I'm really excited to be here, my colleague and friend, dr John Capitman. John is one of the co-founders of Visions and a longtime professor of public health and also a longtime consultant with Visions.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

John, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. Thank you For folks who are not so familiar with you and your work. Can you introduce yourself briefly?

Dr. John Capitman:

I'm 69, about to turn 70 in a month or so. I retired up just about a year ago from California State University, fresno, and I was there for about 15 years and before that I was at Brandeis University. For a long time my work has really been about inequalities in health and understanding why some groups of people have better health and get better care than others, and looking at ways to improve care for people who are at risk of not getting it. I did a lot of work about elder care, even starting with my dissertation research. Starting with my dissertation, research was interested in elders and the services they get, and then was what? Actually the first people, as sort of disparities in health became apparent, wrote some of the first material about disparities in health among elders, and a lot of attention had been focused on the idea of weathering, that some older African Americans just really lived to be very, very old despite the odds, and that's where the focus of attention was. And my work was about the likelihood of becoming disabled or the likelihood of having a hard time once you were disabled, and, of course, elders of color and low-income elders other people in traditionally oppressed groups as vision language, and I did that work at Brandeis, and then I had the great opportunity to go to California and work with a community-oriented public health institute and be among the first researchers at that university and helping to build its research capacity, and also getting to work in this area of the San Joaquin Valley, which is one of the poorest and most polluted and most unequal places in the United States.

Dr. John Capitman:

I got to do something that was really different than at Brandeis. At Brandeis, we talked to the world about what they ought to do. In Fresno, I really was working with organizations to see what could we do. We pushed policy to allow responding to people's needs. How could we change things up? Funny things though.

Dr. John Capitman:

At Brandeis, one of my biggest pieces of work was about elders of color and cancer. I wrote a lot about the use of promotores de salud, community health workers. That ended up being such important work in California's Central Valley, and we were able to make the public health system, the community health centers and the other public health programs much more effective by the greatest use of promoters about any place in the country. So over that period of time this was starting in 2015. Over that next 10 years, while I was in California, we built up the capacity to use community health workers to meet the needs of low-income people, communities of color that were underserved, and I got lots of other chances to sort of work on. You know, how can we actually fix this at the local level even if we don't have the national policy that supports it? And I also got to work on national policy.

Dr. John Capitman:

By that time. You know I had really been deeply involved in visions and a lot of my work in California ended up being interpreting, translating, working in visions to make it, you know, practical training for public health and community organization leaders. How do they become more effective at moving forward their agenda and how can we use the skills and the techniques that Visions had been developing, was still developing, to support that. And that was the work I really did there.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

I spoke to Cassandra a few weeks ago. She talked about how she also brought in visions to train many people who did early childhood development work out there.

Dr. John Capitman:

And I attracted her to come out there. I recruited her along with others she mentioned. It was so great to bring expertise.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

So that's your professional trajectory, and I'm also curious because we've talked about this in passing I don't know a whole lot about how you grew up, how you ended up in North Carolina.

Dr. John Capitman:

I'm the classic pink diaper baby were very much leaders in the Communist Party in the New York City area in the period after the war, after World War II. My father was a vet and it had very dramatic experiences as a vet that he would never tell us about but was one of the organizers of veterans for the Henry Wallace campaign. I was doing that work that he met my mom who was the press secretary for the communist party at that point. They were married very rapidly and had two kids. I'm the younger of two. My father had gone to law school on the GI Bill and ended up having a fight with getting past the board in New York State because it was right the period of the McCarthy Commission and all that work and so in a way my parents kind of just sort of separated from everything after that and moved further upstate New York and ended up creating this business of the Center for Research in Marketing, and their business was social science research.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

So wait, he did not pass the bar.

Dr. John Capitman:

He did not pass the bar. Wow, okay, it wasn't about the knowledge, it was about the politics. At that point there was some government interference against him and other people who were same period. A lot of people have these stories.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

So they made another plan.

Dr. John Capitman:

They made another plan. They moved upstate and they eventually developed this marketing research business. And you know we lived on a lake and I was a happy kid. I had a happy childhood, very much in nature, skating on the lake in the winter and playing in canoes and rowboats in the summer. Other kids around, my big brother was tough on me but, you know, kept me safe at some level also. Yes, I had a very nice childhood. We would go sneak away and go into the woods to where there was a big beaver dam and they were involved in politics in that small town and it got very, very nasty with the John Birch Society versus the pro-school parents and weird symbolic struggles over things like should there be cots for the children to take naps on became the, you know, with the John Birch parents not wanting net cots for the kids to take naps on, you know.

Dr. John Capitman:

So it was weird and there were a couple of years that things were quite heated. One year somebody dumped several truckloads of pumpkins on our yard and another year nasty things were written on our yard. Thanks that Halloween was really a time for trouble making. That's a small town. They ended up not feeling cool with us going to the local high school. We went to Groton School in Massachusetts, which was we really didn't understand how much this was going into the center of WASP control in the US. Right, he was, you know, one of the very few Jewish kids who went to Groton School. We weren't brought up to be religious, but we grew up with a lot of sense of a Jewish progressive community. That was the community my parents came from. So it's a big, big shock. By the time I went to Milton Academy, milton was somewhat more open and progressive compared to Groton and I guess they were a little bit more prepared.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

How old were you when you went to school? They were a little bit more prepared.

Dr. John Capitman:

How old were you when you went to wait a school? I went to private school in ninth grade for Milton and then had a tough first year of high school and problems with my eye. I had trouble learning to read, got glasses and learned to read very quickly once they kind of got what was wrong with my eyes, but they deteriorated.

Dr. John Capitman:

that first year at milt I competed so hard, I tried so hard so I ended up going what was to be a year off and went to parents, sent me to switzerland, to a school in switzerland that was sort of verbally oriented, so I learned some french and German and continued to study Latin and, you know, had a really wonderful experience.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Switzerland, so I didn't know you'd done it here or there, okay.

Dr. John Capitman:

I ended up coming back early, not actually finishing the school year, because it was the spring of the Vietnam protests and my brother was at Yale getting in trouble protesting the Vietnam War and my parents were at that point living in New York City and I spent a lot of time going to protest marches in that spring and went back to Milton the next year Credit for that year, which hadn't been the plan. I learned enough, I guess that year. Milton was a tough experience. There was one other Jewish kid in my class but he was actually also a Cabot.

Dr. John Capitman:

The Cabots in the Lodges, the big New England families, black guy were first and second in the class and a Catholic Italian guy was third in the class and none of us got any prizes at all. Went to all the prizes went to people who were insiders and there was always that sense that it was OK for me to go to school there. But they weren't really. They really weren't in favor of me there, but they weren't really. They really weren't in favor of me. Many years later, when we were thinking about our son going to private school, the same admissions officer was there who had been there when I was there. Wow, and he said God, we really mistreated you, john, we don't think you'll be happy here.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Wow, what a thing to admit.

Dr. John Capitman:

Yeah, it was rough as a senior. I had really really good scores and grades and I didn't get into Harvard, yale or Princeton and I applied afterwards to Pitt where my father was teaching that year, having sort of gotten tired of his business. His business had gotten to be too much work. He really was doing a little consulting and he taught at Pitt for a couple of years. Then he moved to Florida. But yeah, so I went to Pitt and they wrote nasty recommendations about me, that I was immature.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Milton did.

Dr. John Capitman:

Yeah.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Yikes.

Dr. John Capitman:

The next year I got into Harvard, yale and Princeton as a transfer student.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Wow. So where did you graduate from Yale? Okay, that's right.

Dr. John Capitman:

Okay, so that's not. Back then Val and I met at Duke at graduate school. She was one of the only, or maybe the only, north Carolinian in our program. Everybody else was from elsewhere. I had thought I wanted to go to clinical psych graduate school. I didn't get into any clinical psych graduate schools because I hadn't been a psych undergraduate and I hadn't taken the GRE or whatever test. I hadn't taken any of the tests. I just decided to apply and I applied really to Duke and UNC randomly because my mother had driven through those towns on some trip and thought I would like the area. I was real ambivalent about going to graduate school and I got into social psych at Duke and thought, okay, well, that's interesting, I'll do that. I'm really glad I did. It was a better fit for me as a program.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Than clinical. Yeah, so did you apply to grad school right out of undergrad, or were you?

Dr. John Capitman:

was so. I think my dad died on the summer between my junior and senior year of college and so after my senior year my mom was still living in Miami. I went to Miami and I actually was there for two years doing various things A year or two years, I think it was two years before I went to graduate school and I took a trip cross country. I took about three months to drove cross country before starting at Duke at graduate school and the social psych program was interesting and small. You know, there was a lot of overlap of the faculty, so some of the clinical faculty taught in the social psych courses and vice versa. We took stat together.

Dr. John Capitman:

I think Val and I first really met each other in stat courses and I had not taken undergraduate statistics. I had taken quantum mechanics but I hadn't taken statistics. I mean taking quantum mechanics but I hadn't taken statistics and I found it very difficult and kept asking stupid questions, things that everybody else you know. I think that it was assumed that people knew and I later learned that many of my classmates appreciated me, asking what is that, what is that, what does that mean in that class, and Val and I started hanging out after that.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

That's class and what led you to your interest in psychology.

Dr. John Capitman:

I was an undergraduate linguistics and philosophy major, and I think it was really.

Dr. John Capitman:

This actually relates to some content that I hope we talk about. You know, coming from my father, my brother is an economist. My father studied law, was really kind of a sociologist more than anything else, but I definitely grew up with a bias against thinking about the personal level. The perspective that that was silly, that things were shaped at the macro-individual level by societies and systems and structures, and linguistics is clearly what could be more of a social phenomenon than language. Language is about. Interaction is the sort of model for everything else. That's macro-individual in terms of shaping people. So I got interested in the idea that, yeah, maybe the most important questions were at the systems level, but somehow you had to take into account that individuals were shaped by systems and systems shaped people. Both were the case, and I thought that I didn't know enough of that. That's how I got into psychology.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

You've certainly corrected for that bias now.

Dr. John Capitman:

You know that's really interesting. A lot of my work in public health has been about introducing the macro level into public health. So we typically have studied obesity, smoking, anxiety disorders, all those things as characteristics of individuals and we've tended to understand racial, ethnic and social class differences in health outcomes as the behavior of individuals. And so a lot of my work was about well, okay, what about air pollution and what about the quality of life and what about the opportunities available to people? Those were all macro, individual and were shaping health, and so it's almost accepted now. It's almost accepted now. If you were to look at a year of random newspapers and pop psychology things, you'd see just as much about the environment as individual. But that's really a major social change that you know I and lots of other people got the chance to participate in. You know, and so much of my life has been about wanting to sort that out, sort out the sort of individual system, how that all worked.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

One of the wonderful things about the way that we work at Visions is we ground our, I find I mean I've certainly ground my relationship to the model and to the work that I do in my own experiences and the transformation that happened in me. And one of the things I've been asking our elders about, as I've done these interviews, is how they feel that their early life experiences, the perspectives they developed, maybe even like shock moments, shaped their view of the world and decision to do this work and the approach to this work. So that's a question I want to ask you.

Dr. John Capitman:

You know, having the education that I had, I felt like an ultimate insider and constantly reminded of my outsider status. So both and I felt both so visibly. I mean I understand. You know how do you say this without sounding terrible. I understand I'm one of the best educated people in the room, almost always. You know almost every setting. I understand that I've had opportunities to learn from amazing people and opportunities to engage myself in learning in a way that other people haven't. So I'm really aware of that opportunity, what that's meant, you know. I mean we've had shortages of money, but I never felt really at a deep level that I could get another job in a minute, you know, in a few days. I never really felt like I was going to be out on the street and that. I know that's a weird way to put it. But that level of confidence about being successful in the economy was something that I really got from that establishment education and also from my parents, who were just endlessly hopeful, though always kind of worried they could all fall apart tomorrow, that kind of perspective. So I got that too, but that deep confidence that the society does in fact work for me and I also saw, you know, shared a couple of things.

Dr. John Capitman:

I had lots of experiences that taught me the other side, including the car accident. Val was on her way down to Florida for us to have an engagement party. I was hit by a drunk driver. This was in Miami. I had a crush, fracture, three cervical vertebrae and other damage. Of course, terrible shock for a young couple and all that. But it also gave me, unfortunately, just a tremendous sense of my, but all of our physical frailty being among the able-bodied is temporary.

Dr. John Capitman:

I don't really know at what point we came to the sort of idea of understanding all of these patterns of oppression as simultaneously and equally valued.

Dr. John Capitman:

It was so much for hearing people not wanting to talk about racism and wanting to talk about their pain as a working class person, as an Italian, as a person with disabilities, and I think, at first by kind of agri-action to all that, oh, they're just avoiding talking about racism, they just don't want to talk about that, and that over time you have to acknowledge that those experiences are perfectly real, that our society is structured around all these dimensions of better than and less than, better than and less than, and that you know if I could really get to understand what it feels to me like as a person with disabilities when there's when space doesn't accommodate for me at all.

Dr. John Capitman:

You know, in the earlier years, after my accident, I was a fit young man but I also had a lot of pain and, you know, needed to, needed not to be slouching at a chair, needed to be able to get up, you know, and move around, and I wasn't always able to and you know you could really feel it. Or spaces where there were only deep, low couches. So you know, for me that sort of feeling of being not accommodated in that way was so real that it made me begin to be able to see and listen to other people's experiences of not being accommodated. The Jewish thing, you know, in a way not as meaningful, not as emotionally charged for me as physical pain and lack of accommodation and that sort of experience of being just hit over the head in the Boston area, in Miami, in North Carolina, every place with you know Christianity and the depth of Christianity and the assumption of just this idea we're going to live forever. You know we're going to have an afterlife.

Dr. John Capitman:

You know, as a Jew, I don't believe in an afterlife ever. You know we're going to have an afterlife. You know, as a Jew, I don't believe in an afterlife. You got one time. You got one time to do the best job you can and to try and make the world the best, better. That's a really basic thing. To have the world structured on the idea that this is just practice for the afterlife and I'll be forgiven anyway. You know that's a perspective that when you don't have it, it's quite overwhelming to be around so much.

Dr. John Capitman:

You know, I've always been dissatisfied with myself.

Dr. John Capitman:

Physically, I wanted to be more of an athlete, more fitting, whatever it is I think my father wanted, although I don't really know and that difference and realizing how much pain other people have even much more than I do I'm not discounting them around their physical differences.

Dr. John Capitman:

That's different from the disability dimension, but it's another dimension around differences so powerful, palpable and painful for people as I let myself be aware of it. You know, I think this came to a deeper understanding of the intention, the intention of freeing people from racism, sexism, I don't know. That's one part of the model I think is incredibly important and so much based in my own experience, I think that this you know, the whole notion of the levels, how the levels shape each other and are shaped by each other and interact constantly in creating and sustaining inequalities. Again, I think that level just that came from I mean, my own contribution to that really came from my cynicism about psychology. Cynicism about psychology, my parents and my brother and the worldview of psychology. But it's not the opiate of the people, that's religion, but some similar kind of idea.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

So this is something I'm quite interested in. So you and Val, you met in grad school. You were thinking about these things. You were thinking about these things together, thinking about them grounded in your own experiences.

Dr. John Capitman:

I'm curious about the trajectory when the two of you met and how the work that you did in that period you know academically and then afterward how that culminated in the founding of this organization and the development of the model. I really think everything is about Val's leadership at some point.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

I can remember, our honeymoon consisted of driving cross-country.

Dr. John Capitman:

I don't know if you did that, I did not. To begin her, we both had fellowships in the Bay Area, required residency for a psychology degree and for me it was just a postdoc. Anyway, on that trip we came up with the acronym Visions. Ah, amazing. I remember us thinking a lot about the acronym, joking about that, as we drove through the Colorado mountains. So that's. I really think that Val was really clear that she wanted to have her to create her own organization. She didn't want to. She didn't want to work at a hospital or a university as a full-time thing. You know, after the internship she worked at medical College of Virginia, vcu, virginia Commonwealth University, in a counseling psych program and I think it was in in that period that we kind of thought about well, we had this neat acronym named for an organization. Maybe we really needed to form the organization.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

That's when you knew Julian.

Dr. John Capitman:

You met Julian in Virginia, yeah, we met Julian, big parts of it were already in our minds. I mean, at Duke we worked with somebody named Joyce Landrum Brown. Anyway, I got a gig that gave us the opportunity to rent an office and very soon visions formed. It's funny. I don't know how julian answered this, but I don't remember a specific moment where we decided go for it. I remember when there was a moment where val had enough consulting contracts and mary, julian's wife, had enough clients that they didn't need the health center anymore. They didn't need VCU anymore.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Julian remembers an initial meeting where he made the shrimp curry.

Dr. John Capitman:

Yeah, when we discussed the organization. Sometime in there there was this meeting at Moten Conference Center. Did he tell you about that?

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

No.

Dr. John Capitman:

Conference Center is in Virginia. It's where Martin Luther King supposedly wrote the I have a Dream speech and it's one of the oldest Black-owned conference centers in the US and it's still there and we met there and my mom was there, valerie's dad was there, several other elders from her community, a couple of our teachers were there, and that was when we formally formed Visions. That was the beating where Barry, in front of everybody, in front of a whole group of people, told me to shut up and I laughed and didn't shut up and other people were shocked that we had that kind of relationship. That would be okay. Yeah, wow, almost all of the elders who were at that meeting are gone now, but they gave us great and you know, they, they it was really, you know, valerie, but it was them. It was yeah, you can do this, you can take this idea and and and go someplace with it. We also had this simultaneous thing going on, which was the Wright Center.

Dr. John Capitman:

I don't know if we talked about that, but that was taking a property that had been in Angela Bryan's family but was neglected. That was an Art Deco gem, something my mom recognized and got excited about where we could meet, and Angela's mom was starting to have Alzheimer's. Her father had died from Alzheimer's. I had been studying adult day health centers we just had a Vulcan mind mill there. You know just that different forces and had identified this property and gotten support from the guy who's now the governor Hooper, who was a representative from that area and a friend of Valerie and Angela's from growing up, from high school days, I think. He gave us financial support and we got other financial support and my mom produced an architect and that's how the Wright Center developed. So that was all going on right at the early point, right around the same time as we had the Moten meeting and talked about. You know that we not only wanted to do that, that our vision was broader than that, that we not only wanted to do the Wright Center thing. We thought that was great, but we wanted to more broadly take our emerging ideas about racism and address them.

Dr. John Capitman:

This was the period where people were really you know this is the late 70s, early 1980s. That's a period where people were really convinced that we had not everybody but white people were really convinced that we had overcome racism, that the typical US resident maybe held negative affect toward people of color but largely denied having racism and largely denied awareness of a history of inequalities and a current reality that was just such a striking feature of the moment. You know kind of the way that the emergence of Trumpism is so much the striking feature of this moment. If there's a lesson to our story, it maybe is that there needs to be an emerging voice, just like ours was about wait a second. Racism is real. It's not quite over yet.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

So I have two questions for you, then. One question is that I'm curious what doing this work in that kind of a climate was like initially. How do you make the case for this work? Obviously, we are constantly reinventing the language that we use as we pitch our work and, you know, share with clients and make the case. And the other question I have is now, 40 years on, or 35 years on, when I first started training. The model is really tight. It works. The process is set up so that it contains people as they go on a journey with this, and I'm curious what the early days were like.

Dr. John Capitman:

Yeah, yeah, so I guess I learned most from these circumstances that really didn't work. And there are things that I learned a lot from what didn't work. I often tell this story of being at a session in Richmond with the utilities department and there are I don't know 40 men, all big and overweight and in their 40s and 50s, most have not had a college degree. That are the various officials in this department and then one very diminutive 28-year-old African-American woman, and so here's the part of the story they tell. At some point she says wait a second, we're not all the same. I'm here, I'm different from you, and it was super revealing for me about that concept, about the several concepts. So here's the part of the story that I don't usually tell. Over lunch they went out and got drunk. Most of the guys went out and got drunk, and in the afternoon one guy fell out, you know, had a heart attack or something in the course of the meeting.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Like you're training with them.

Dr. John Capitman:

Yeah, Wow, Okay, Out for lunch. They had several beers. They came back they clearly were inebriated as we continued the training and just sort of soldiered through it and then one of the guys fell out and he fell out. You know just what I was sort of getting into, but high-budget. You know, just to the point where I was sort of, I think, firmly arguing with one of his colleagues about one of the ideas and just as now you know ideas that affirmative action meant that inferior people would be hired. You know, right, with this young lady right there, this was really where I learned something about sensitivity and about awareness that this is all deeper and heavier and harder than I think. And I don't think we made them go drink and I don't think we made the guy fell out, but imagine it wouldn't have taken much to feel like that's what had happened, Do you mean?

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

that sounds like a very stressful facilitation, John.

Dr. John Capitman:

Yeah, it wouldn't have taken much to feel responsible and I knew I wasn't and I just learned a lot from that about how serious the work is and how emotional it is for people and that the emotionality is real and I guess. So I have various stories of things that I didn't, that didn't work and they learned from and so you know I what's that? The vibe is much more capable learning the you know when you touch the stove than it is. Rick Archer 1 session.

Dr. John Capitman:

For some reason this was in Boston and I either didn't have a female person of color trainer, female or person of color co-trainer, or I think this is the case. I didn't trust the person, I didn't know the person and I gave some examples of internalized oppression and I didn't phrase them. I experienced this because of my disability. I phrased them. I've heard from an African-American woman and people were very upset and angry. A negatively influenced woman and people of color in the room wasn't my place to share those ideas and I think that, for me at least, that whole concept of what we mean by internalized oppression really got much clearer to me in that moment. Internalized oppression really got much clearer to me in that moment and, most particularly, it's never my places. Only the person can say whether their behavior is internalized oppression. Someone else can judge that about them, and I really didn't understand that till then.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

So those are trial by fire moments and I deeply appreciate hearing those because there are a lot of experiences like that that I've learned from the touching the fire moments Absolutely how the model, the intellectual and theoretical underpinnings came together as you all were starting to apply it in the ongoing natural settings. What was that like? Pioneering the model, developing it, working with the various pieces?

Dr. John Capitman:

I feel like it was developmental. It was those experiences that I'm talking about, or preparing for conferences. Val and Joyce Landrum-Brown and I did the multicultural process of change picture the first time in preparation for a conference. I don't remember what the conference was and we were trying to talk about this idea of the four levels being connected to each other and that process of moving from a monocultural perspective to a multicultural perspective. And that model has been really worked on and fixed and made much clearer and much more specific over time and lots of people contributed and I think that most of the pieces are like that.

Dr. John Capitman:

The five modern racism behaviors we originally had four and the first couple of times we shared pieces of the model shared about this idea of modern racism. In California we had people you know say things like you know, I had a taco for breakfast and sushi for lunch. I love all the multiculturalism in California. It's just wonderful and everybody's got a fair shot. So we really hadn't heard that in the East or the Midwest, the places where we grew up, the inequalities were people knew they were there and knew you know that wasn't the question.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

So it developed as you, as you worked with different groups and different.

Dr. John Capitman:

Right, so so things came out as we talked about them Makes sense. And then I think the you know the internalized oppression work to some extent comes straight out of Val's dissertation. Internalized oppression were to some extent come straight out of Val's dissertation. Oh, we also worked for one of our mentors at Duke.

Dr. John Capitman:

Anyway, his theory he had worked on the Bradley-Yorty campaign and he had articulated an idea that he called symbolic racism.

Dr. John Capitman:

John Sears is one of the people involved in that and I'm still blanking on another guy's name, john McConaughey and their idea was that people would use abstract symbols instead of the traditional language of racism so the streets are not safe without a policeman really came as a measure of racism from their world, or Blacks are getting too demanding in their push for equal rights, and that was their idea. So that was already, and they had articulated a kind of denial of differences as part of the phenomenon. And then you know, I don't see people as people. You know I don't see people as black and white. I see people, people, that stuff that was just so prevalent in the society that that clearly was one of the phenomena. I don't have a single story. That's what I think is. The story I want to share is that each piece of the model that came from trying to work with people about their feelings and their behaviors related to race, and we understood pieces of it as we went along.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

So, speaking of feelings, what you just said, I think the thing that sets visions apart we've talked a lot about this is the astuteness around and adeptness in working with feelings. Was that there from the beginning, like most explicitly in the feelings as messengers segment?

Dr. John Capitman:

Feelings as messengers was my thesis.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Okay, there we go.

Dr. John Capitman:

And then the analysis of interactions came from two different sources. It's transactional analysis. It's just basically what it is, and, having never heard of transactional analysis, my undergraduate thesis was about misunderstanding in conversation, and one of my key ideas about misunderstanding in conversation was that people often heard the words rather than the affect or the affect rather than the words. So that that's what I worked on as an undergraduate, and so, as we started really focusing on the transactions between around race, both asking people about racial politics but also seeing how people responded differently of race In my thesis we had people.

Dr. John Capitman:

We had white undergraduate women working with another woman who was either white or Black and who became increasingly unpleasant during the course of the experiment, and we selected women who said that they felt just as comfortable towards whites as Blacks and women who didn't, and we also asked them their attitudes about questions like the streets are not safe without a policeman, and what we found was that modern racism questions and the feeling thermometer both predicted behavior and that the women who were said they felt colder toward Blacks actually got much more anxious when the Black partner started to be mean to them and took it much more personally. It's quite a social science experiment that aren't even allowed. Yeah, and he were measuring galvanic skin response and blood pressure and a few other things. And you know, show this, you know, right now I think we would want to measure some hormones to see big spikes. So this was the idea that, physiologically, people stated views on race and racism, even if they were indirect and confusing, were still predictive of a biological response to being in a racial, in an interracial situation.

Dr. John Capitman:

So feelings thermometer that was your undergraduate research. Feelings thermometer and complicated? No, my undergraduate research was misunderstandings of daily life.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Okay, and then this this was later Okay.

Dr. John Capitman:

A graduate, yeah Right, so that all kind of like really fit awfully well with transactional analysis. So that all kind of like really fit awfully well with transactional analysis. And so a lot of the ideas really came from that sort of intersection of a kind of social science view of the role of feelings and attitude formation and expression and the way the transactional analysis worked on that Fantastic Seeing the feelings is connected to sort of deeper messages about who I am as a person. Transactional analysis was uncomfortable for Val and even more so for me because it was still at that point apolitical. And so you wanted to talk about not just not just were your folks mad at themselves and the world or not and passed on negative perception, but also did your folks have confusing ideas about race that they passed on directly or indirectly? It's really interesting.

Dr. John Capitman:

I read pretty broadly in psychology and there have been a lot of efforts to understand racism and I think that our work is consistent with the broad variety of approaches. That somehow has to add a complicated story about how you grew up and what you were exposed to and what you know and kind of what you imagine about the other people and you know what you actually know All the kind of mass of different factors that we talk about kind of are the basis of the social science account and at a certain level that social science account is so uncomfortable it doesn't work to just do political science. It's not just about big groups of people and their interactions, it's also about how people take that on personally. That idea, that fundamental piece, is really different than just about every other group that does consulting about racism who either do one level or the other.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

The deeper elements of the work that we do, where we see where people pick up and are emotionally impressed with their ideas about oppression, about themselves, about other people. Again, I think that that's the thing that differentiates visions from other approaches. So you know, this is Vision's 40th year. It's been 40 years since the inception. The model's been evolving and developing. Now me and cohorts below me are taking it on and using it and implementing it out in the world. What do you hope to see in the world?

Dr. John Capitman:

In terms of hope. I've been thinking a lot about Holly Neer's comments and Val and I heard something quite different Holly Neer speaking to the Visions group and we actually heard something different. It's funny. This is something that I hope for, that I think is actually there. I think that when we started out, we really thought that by the time we got to be old, that things would be really different, that the society would have become much more open, that people would, you know, be okay with themselves and be okay with each other.

Dr. John Capitman:

A little bit that was the arrogance of youth and a little bit it was a worldview of progress, that societies make progress, and I guess what we've seen over our lives is that, yeah, progress can be made, but so can moving backwards, and that you know every little bit of progress is tentative, and so, rather than being sad, and that you know every little bit of progress is is is tentative, and so, rather than being sad about that, there's a part of me that's always known that the work is the work, that the process is the process, that, even if we don't get there, that our purpose and being in life, you know the reason we're here. I'm laughing because it sounds so overblown. But you know, you kind of decide that working to make the world better, to make people kinder to each other, if I can do something to make that possible, I want to do that and I may only make a little bit of progress sometimes with some people and I may even, you know, move communities forward. I started out by telling this story of community health workers in the Central Valley. More people get better health care. That's something that really did change. Adult health centers are all over the country.

Dr. John Capitman:

That was one of the first things I worked on. That's something that made life better for people. So we can, you know we can make contributions. I think that the way in which some of the big companies we've worked with are different is real at Lafcine and yet making sense of when that happens and when it doesn't, and how to value when it happens and how to value the struggle. So that's my hope. My hope is that you know your generation and the people that come after you who do this work, do it with that understanding, with some peace, having come to some peace about that. It's this process, it's the working on it, it's the moving it forward, it's the little victories that matter.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

You know, val said something a couple of years ago that's really stayed with me. It was along the lines of if the people that preceded her had given up, she wouldn't be there. And that's really stayed with me, especially when I think about staying in the work and exactly what you're talking about, right, how to recognize the victories, even if you know we have not eliminated racism or sexism or any of the other.

Dr. John Capitman:

The big story ain't so great. You know it's funny. I guess it's very much my mom's job. My mom said take care of the little stuff, the big stuff will take care of itself.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Yeah, yeah, John, thank you so, so much. It's always wonderful to talk to you and collaborate with you, and this has been great. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. Yeah, likewise, as you may know, 2024 is Vision's 40th anniversary and we're having a big celebration at the State Room in Boston on September 27th. Please join us if you can. Please join us if you can. Our lineup of honored speakers include Gloria Steinem, Vernee Myers and the Reverend Dr William J Barber II. There's a link down in the show notes Now if you're interested in getting a taste of our approach. Visions also offers a 75-minute public workshop teaching our guidelines for effective cross-cultural dialogue on the last Wednesday of each month at 4 pm Eastern, 1 pm Pacific. Upcoming dates this year in 2024 include August 28th, September 25th, October 30th and November 20th. It is pay what you can, so free if you want, and all are welcome. I hope we see you at one soon. There are more Elder Stories in the works, so stay tuned. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.