Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams, this is the Red Eye Podcast. In our show today, Lorraine Chisholm talks with Emily May from Hollaback about their training model for what to do when you witness a racist attack.
Speaker: In the midst of the COVID -19 pandemic, there's been a marked rise in harassment and targeting of people who are Asian, Asian Americans, and Asian Canadians. Here in Vancouver, a city where multiculturalism has been part of our DNA, there's been a significant increase in hate incidents. These racist and xenophobic attacks range from verbal harassment to physical assaults. And we've often seen bystanders intervene to show solidarity and defend people who've been targeted.
Speaker: Two long -standing American organizations, Asian Americans Advancing Justice and Hollaback, have partnered to offer online training to safely and effectively intervene when we witness anti -Asian harassment. I'm pleased to be joined by Emily May. Emily May is founder and executive director of Hollaback, an organization created 15 years ago to fight harassment. Hello Emily.
Speaker: Hi, how are you doing? I'm great. Your organization partnered with Asian Americans Advancing Justice to work on this training. Why was it needed now? So we have seen such a tremendous rise in anti -Asian, anti -Asian American and anti -Asian Canadian harassment happening.
Speaker: in the wake of COVID -19. And I think it ranges in terms of what it looks like. We have seen everything from broadly staring or assuming that Asian and Asian Americans have the coronavirus or have been exposed to it, to things like using the term like Chinese virus.
Speaker: or Wuhan virus instead of calling it COVID -19. And then to more extreme things like people spitting on others, right, bullying, death threats. And really all of these behaviors compromise what we call the spectrum of disrespect towards Asian communities. And at that sort of first rung, right, those things like staring or assuming that Asian Americans have it or have been exposed to it, those microaggressions. And we talk about
Speaker: you know, what to do, we talk about intervening there first and not waiting until it escalates into something worse. Why is it important for people who are bystanders to intervene when they see this behavior?
Speaker: I think it's important to intervene as a bystander because we all have a role to play in addressing these forms of violence. And if we leave it to the people who are experiencing the harassment, it's not fair. They've got enough on their hands trying to navigate and survive the harassment that they are facing. Whereas other communities, particularly white folks who are coming into this with a lot more privilege, can really leverage that to show up and intervene in ways that are safe and really break that cycle of violence.
Speaker: Well, I took the online training a few days ago, and I can't recommend it enough. It was really excellent. And I'd like to dive into each of the five Ds that are part of your methodology. But can you start by giving us a quick sketch of this system for intervening effectively?
Speaker: Yes, so the five Ds of bystander intervention, five strategies to intervene when you see anti -Asian, anti -Asian American or anti -Asian Canadian behavior happening, right? So the first one is distract, creating a distraction to de -escalate the situation. Next, we have delegate, finding somebody else who can help. Then we have document, creating documentation of the harassment and giving it to the person who experienced that harassment.
Speaker: Fourth, we have delay going up to the person who has harassed after that harassment happened and checking in on them. And then lastly, we have direct. Direct is about directly intervening in instances of harassment by setting that boundary and then turning your attention towards the person being harassed.
Speaker: Well, it's a very easy, it's a great system to try and remember those. And I think you probably need to practice them. I put them on a note on my phone so that if I need to use them, I can like quickly look at the note. But let's take a look at them a bit more in detail. The first one, distract, may not immediately come to mind. Talk us through how that looks.
Speaker: So distraction is for folks out there who are creative or who are performers or just people who can start a conversation about anything with anybody. Distracts about creating an indirect approach to deescalate the situation. So two basic ways to do it.
Speaker: One is to start a conversation with the person being harassed, right? It can be about anything. Can you tell me where the closest grocery store is? I love your dress. Where'd you get it? The idea is really to build safe space with that person. And as you build that safe space, what we see is the person doing the harassing starts to get starved with that attention that they so want. And we'll start to kind of back up out of the situation. And I don't think I would believe it had I not seen it happen so many times.
Speaker: The other way to create a distraction is to do something that draws attention away. So I typically like dropping things. You can drop your cell phone. People will look to see if it broke. You can drop change on a hard floor. People will scramble to help you pick it up. But dropping things is another form of drawing attention away.
Speaker: However, you know, I've done this training for Juilliard students, music school, and they said, Miss, you know what I would do if I saw harassment happening? I would just break out into song and dance and everyone would pay attention to me and the harassment would stop. So if you have song and dance to break out into in this moment, right, yet another way to deescalate that situation using an indirect approach.
Speaker: That's just brilliant. So let's look at delegation and documentation. How, how should we use those tactics? So delegates an interesting one. When I talk about delegation, oftentimes people are like, Oh, you mean call the police and actually don't mean call the police. So what we see is in particular black communities, broadly communities of color, immigrant communities, trans communities don't always feel safer with the police around. And so if you're thinking of calling the police, we just ask that you check in with the person being harassed first.
Speaker: and see if they also think it's a good idea. The other thing, and my favorite person to ask to intervene is actually the person next to me, because I find that, you know, like me, they're a human who wants to take care of other humans, but unlike me, they haven't been through our bystander intervention training. So when it comes to them, right, just ask them, hey, that's not okay, right?
Speaker: I'm going to go check in on them. Will you just watch and make sure I'm okay? Little things like that are great ways for others to get involved. And I've never had anybody tell me no. You can also talk to people in some kind of position of authority, like bus drivers or cashiers, and ask them for help as well.
Speaker: When it comes to document, the third D, document's actually a little bit trickier than people think. People think, oh, I'm just going to, you know, document it, right? And then I'm going to, you know, put it on my Facebook page and done, done, done. It's actually not what we recommend. So first we recommend that somebody is doing something else before you start to document, if at all possible.
Speaker: And secondly, we recommend that you give it to the person who experienced the harassment afterwards and really put them in choice. Remember, this is their experience, their trauma, their harassment. Let them be the hero of the story that posts that video to Facebook and lets it go viral. And what can be some of the downsides of documenting it and then publishing it?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a great question. And it's a great question in particular because we're seeing so many human rights abuses, including the murder of George Floyd, being brought to light because somebody documented it. And I think that that is incredibly powerful. However, when it comes to instances of harassment, if you're able, really giving that power to the other person is important because harassment is very disempowering. And we've had stories where we've seen people take documentation
Speaker: send it to the local media, all of a sudden it's gone viral, but without the consent of the person who was originally harassed. And they may not want to be the poster girl or poster boy for harassment in their community, but at the very least, even if they do want it, you as a bystander really want to focus in on them in terms of how you're intervening and give them as much power in the situation as possible.
Speaker: Sometimes you advocate delaying your actions. You mentioned that, so D for delay. And I understand that there's research that shows that can be very beneficial for the targets of harassment. Talk about that approach.
Speaker: Yeah, so delay, sometimes harassment is quick, right? It's a passing comment and then it's over. Or even it's a touch, right? But then the person has left the premises. So in those situations, delay is sometimes your only option. And delay, quite simply, is that check -in on that person. And what we've seen in our research with Cornell has shown is even as little as a knowing glance can reduce the trauma associated with harassment.
Speaker: And for people who don't speak the same language as you, a knowing glance can still be a powerful gesture, right? Or just going to stand next to that person while they are experiencing harassment to show that you're with them, that you've got their back. And I think that delay is something that all of us can do. And sometimes when we do have that instinct to freeze when we see harassment,
Speaker: Taking a moment after the harassment is over to check in on the person is powerful because what we also see is that when note when people watch it But nobody checks in on them afterwards It actually makes the trauma much much worse and people will say yeah I got harassed as if they almost expected the harassment, but then you won't believe it Nobody did anything so we want to make sure that that never happens to folks and then at the very least they do that check -in and
Speaker: In the training, you talk about how everybody maybe gravitates towards a certain kind of intervention. And when I think of intervening, I tend to think of direct intervention. That's just sort of my gut reaction. But you point out that needs to be
Speaker: handled very judiciously. How so? It does. And I think a lot of people think that direct intervention is the only form of bystander intervention because most of us have learned or think we have learned bystander intervention from watching one too many movies from Hollywood.
Speaker: But bystander intervention is not about strapping on your superhero spandex. It is not about swooping in to save you the day. And it's certainly not about getting in a verbal spar with somebody who is doing the harassing. And so in brief, when you do direct intervention, what we recommend, clearly set the boundary with the person doing the harassing and then turn your attention to the person being harassed. And here's the logic behind that, right?
Speaker: So typically when you set a boundary with somebody doing the harassing, they're already mouthing off. They're going to say something sassy back to you. You, being human, are going to want to respond, right? But think about it from the vantage point of the person being harassed. Now they not only have one person who's escalated in front of them, they have two people who are escalated in front of them, and nobody is taking the time to actually check on them and take care of them.
Speaker: The other thing to think about is that while people are doing harassing, I'm all about education for people who harass, but while they're in the act of harassing others, they're typically not in their best learning mindset. So when you go in there, you don't tend to be going in there to actually educate the person doing the harassing, and you're not going in there with the intention of taking care of the person being harassed because that's
Speaker: you know, something that you could easily do in a much better way by turning to your attention and focusing on them. A lot of times when people go in there for that verbal spar, they're going in there for themselves. And so we recommend that bystander intervention, not about you. So set that boundary and then turn your attention to the person doing that. So maybe you could walk us through one of the scenarios from the workshop briefly and then give us an idea how we could apply some of these five D's.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. So I think a lot of us are in grocery stores right now. It's one of the only forms of shared space that we are navigating into. So one of these stories actually comes from a grocery store. So you're hearing raised voices down an aisle, and you see a man spit on an Asian -American woman and continue yelling at her.
Speaker: What would you do, right? So, you know, some of those options could be if you're somebody who does want to directly intervene, telling that person, sir, that's unnecessary, please step away from her. And giving her a direct action is actually important. Giving the person doing the harassing a direct action is very important to step away, right? It's not enough just to stop. We want you to move away.
Speaker: And then to turn your attention to the person being harassed to check in. You could also distract in this scenario. You could say, excuse me, excuse me repeatedly as you tell them that you need six feet and get them to physically move apart from each other.
Speaker: as you kind of push your cart between them to give both of them a little bit of space and then check in on the woman being harassed. You can also delegate. You could find another shopper. You could find a store clerk or something else. There's lots of options here. And even though the 5D looks a bit scientific, there's a lot more art and heart in bystander intervention than people give credit to. The goal here, though, is prioritizing that person being harassed.
Speaker: As I mentioned before, one of the interesting things that the training pointed out was that all of us might have different styles that make a certain kind of intervention a better fit. How can we use that knowledge to just help us intervene at the time? As I was talking and explaining the five Ds, I would imagine everyone listening in today was like, oh, I could do that.
Speaker: probably do that or that one's for me. And look, you may have your superpower may be distract and you may find you're in a situation where distraction just
Speaker: is not working, does not make sense, is not appropriate, whatever it may be. And so you're going to need to default to some of these other ones. But we recommend that folks at least do a little bit of work to think about what might be something that you could do. And knowing that about yourself and having that knowledge, you can quickly whip that out and see if it meets that moment is a powerful thing.
Speaker: The workshop was so practical, I think, and really helpful in giving tools to people. How can people take the training and get some of your other resources?
Speaker: Yeah, so you can go to our website at Ihollaback .org. That's I -H -O -L -L -A -B -A -C -K .org. You scan about halfway down the page. You will see this work that we are doing in partnership with Asian Americans Advancing Justice, A -A -J -C. And you can click there. The trainings are one hour and they are completely
Speaker: Free so we recommend that you please show up We've had over a thousand people registering for each training and we've done about 15 of them so far So we are on a quick mission to get everyone in North America and eventually the world trained in this So please be part of that and show up for our Asian American sisters and brothers in this in this trying moment
Speaker: One of the things that was totally great in the training that I did was, you know, there's a bunch of different sort of interactive things that happened during the training. And one of them was a poll at the end and it asked people, you know, was there something that they felt now that they could do in a situation? And it was 100 % of the people in the workshop, which I think was over about 700 in the workshop that I was in, said, yes, they felt that they now had something that they could actively and practically do to intervene.
Speaker: And that's like my favorite moment of training every single time. You would think having done this training as much as I have every single time that moment comes up that maybe like the magic of that moment would have dissipated for me. But no, it's just as magic every time. I'm like, oh my God, we did it. Best hour of my life. Excellent.
Speaker: The training is, I really highly recommend it for people, but it's just one in a set of tools in the tool belt for anti -racist work. I wonder if I could ask you for your thoughts on the effort we need at this particular very, I can only say insane moment in time to be strong allies and fight back against racism.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a really important question. So we have three trainings we're working on with Asian Americans Advancing Justice, AAJC. In addition to the bystander intervention training, we're also talking about doing a training on how to respond if you experience harassment and how to do conflict de -escalation. But I also want to point to the police -sponsored violence that is happening right now in the US with the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many more who came before them.
Speaker: And we're seeing a really public outcry. And it is a heartbreaking picture here in the US, but it is also a hopeful moment because people are fed up with this. So we are launching a bystander intervention training
Speaker: Next week to stop police sponsored violence and racial harassment towards black communities That takes the same methodology that I talk about here today But really has it adapted into that context and into those communities and there's some specificities around it right in terms of what are your rights when it comes to police sponsored violence and
Speaker: what is safe when it comes to police -sponsored violence, and also what does harassment look like for Black communities? Because one of the things that we have learned in running Halle Back over the past 15 years is that harassment looks very different, right, for all different identities, whether we talk about Black communities, Asian communities, you know, women, LGBTQ folks, and of course that gets much more complex
Speaker: when you start thinking about, you know, black women who are queer, for example. And so we really need to take the time to explore the contours of this and not just assume that everyone experiences harassment the same or even that it impacts people the same. It's been fantastic talking with you this morning, Emily, and I really appreciate the work that you're doing and will point people towards the website where they can sign up. Awesome. Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker: I've been speaking with Emily May. Emily is co -founder and executive director of Hollaback. Hollaback developed the online training bystander intervention to stop anti -Asian, American, and xenophobic harassment in collaboration with Asian Americans advancing justice. You can sign up for their online training at IHollaback .org. And that's spelled I -H -O -L -L -A -B -A -C -K .org.
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