EPISODE 11: SCHEHERAZADE AND SALAMISHAH TILLET
MARY MORTEN: Hi everyone, and welcome back to “Gathering Ground,” where with each new episode a special guest and I — and this week it’s two special guests and I — explore what it looks like to thrive in the nonprofit landscape. I’m Mary Morten, president of Morten Group, LLC. Morten Group is national consulting firm that is based in Chicago and works with clients from coast to coast and everywhere in between. We work in four primary areas: organizational development, research, executive placements, and diversity, racial equity, and inclusion.
Before we get started with our conversation today, I wanted to remind you that “Gathering Ground” can now be found on Apple Podcasts, in addition to anywhere else you listen to podcasts. Just search “Gathering Ground” on iTunes to find us. Be sure to rate us and subscribe to get a notification whenever there’s a new episode.
I am so excited to welcome an amazing pair of sisters — and I mean sisters in every sense of the word — to join us here today on “Gathering Ground.” We are pleased to be joined by Scheherazade and Salamishah Tillet.
Scheherazade is the executive director and photographer for A Long Walk Home. She received her B.A. in child development and studio arts from Tufts, and has studied photography at Boston Museum School of Fine Arts and at Rutgers. She is currently pursuing her master’s in art therapy at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She is a freelance photographer and has worked on numerous social documentary projects, such as Children in Ghana, Body Image, The Last Trimester, Harlem World, and a project in progress on African American women.
Salamishah Tillet is a scholar, activist, social critic, and media personality, and is currently at Rutgers University, where she is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing. She did her undergraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania and her graduate work at Brown University and her doctoral work at Harvard University.
Her book, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination, examines how contemporary African American artists, writers, and intellectuals remember antebellum slavery within post-civil rights America in order to challenge the ongoing exclusion of African Americans from America’s civil myths and to model a racially democratic future. She’s appeared on numerous talk shows as a commentator and as a critic.
And I of course remember you very, very clearly from Saturday and Sunday mornings on MSNBC on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show.
In 2003 the Tillet sisters co-founded A Long Walk Home, the only organization in the country that uses art therapy and the visual and performing arts to end violence against women and girls. A Long Walk Home partners with rape crisis centers, universities, high schools, and state coalitions to provide innovative and inclusive programs for under-served communities. Through their national and local programs, multimedia performances, summer and after-school youth institutes, campus trainings and workshops, A Long Walk Home has educated over 100,000 survivors and their allies to build safe communities and to end gender violence.
Please welcome Scheherazade and Salamishah to “Gathering Ground.”
How are you? Thank you for joining us “Gathering Ground.”
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Thank you.
MM: So happy this could work out.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: So excited.
MM: So, you know, we always like to start with hearing a little bit about your personal story, so tell us a little bit about your upbringing. You grew up in Boston, and I understand you had parents who were inspired by the movement, the Black Power movement. So tell us a little bit about that.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah. I guess I’ll start. Salamishah. I’m the older sister so — (laughter) — because I came into the world first with our parents. So we grew up in a couple of places. So we were both born in Boston, Massachusetts, and then we moved to Trinidad. I was eight and Scheherazade was five. Trinidad and Tobago — that’s the country that my father — our father was from. And then we moved back to New Jersey, or back to New Jersey, where my mother is from, when I was like 11 and Scheherazade was eight. I always kind of figure out the numbers there. But yeah. So we’re children of the ’70s, and our names, I think, reflect that. My name is Salamishah, which means — a Salam is Arabic for peace, and shah is Farsi for majestic. And my parents interpreted the “mi” as black, so when I was a little kid, they were, like, very clear that I should say that my name means Peace Black Majestic. And then Scheherazade had — I always thought had the cooler name. I’m very excited about my name now, but when I was kid — because she had a “z” in her name. She could tell you the story about Scheherazade, because I think she’s really come to embody its meaning and legacy.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah. Scheherazade, you know, is a Farsi name, like you said, but Scheherazade comes from Arabian Nights, and my mom read that as — she was, like, a little girl, like, that story. But I think, more importantly, it’s like Scheherazade told a thousand and one stories to, like, save her life and other women’s lives. I think it’s like Scheherazade’s like ultimate feminist, but also how she told stories. And so I think of myself as a storyteller through my art but also, like, helping other people tell their stories as a healer and the co-founder of A Long Walk Home.
MM: Nice. Well, they’re very lyrical and beautiful names.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: (Laughs.)
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah. Our parents.
MM: And it really fits nicely. I know you do a lot of poetry, and it fits so well.
So where did you go in different directions? Because you [Salamishah] went into the academy. Correct?
And then you [Scheherazade] studied child development and studio art. And how did your interests come about in those areas?
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah, I guess because we literally grew up in the same household we learned early on the power of art to make a difference, to be able to tell your own story, to advocate for yourself and other people, and to really bring communities and collectives together. So our mother’s a musician and we, like, heard the sounds of, like, the ’70s, as we talked about earlier, with, like, funk and soul and jazz and R&B. And then we’re also of, like, the hip-hop generation, where we saw, like, people using music and using dance and using visual art to kind of protest the society that we’re in. So I think, like — well, I guess our upbringing is where we come together and then we can talk about how we kind of came back together with A Long Walk Home. But I went to college. I went to the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-’90s — early ’90s, in 1992, and I always say that senior year of high school, right before I went to Penn, was really deeply transformative and radicalizing for me. The summer before, I read three books: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Malcolm X and Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. So I found Black Power and black feminism at the same moment. Though we grew up with that, I think this was me finding it for myself. And then my senior year in high school, two monumental events happened in the nation: one, that fall, was the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings, and so, seeing Anita Hill come forward and testify that she had been sexually harassed by him was one form of, like, breaking silence, and then my — the spring of my senior year was the Rodney King — the trial of the four L.A. police officers, them being found not guilty, and then the rebellion kind of breaking out in L.A. So I went to college kind of deeply — I thought I was going to be a lawyer at first. And then I didn’t know that you could, like, literally read books for a living and write about it.
MM: (Laughs.)
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Like, I didn’t know that literary criticism existed as, like, an actual profession. But I soon found out that it was possible, and then I quickly shifted from thinking that I wanted to go into law and become a lawyer to becoming a teacher and then an academic, where I could write and read African American literature. And I guess quickly, in grad school — I went to Harvard for my Ph.D. in American Studies, and I switched kind of from literature to, like, cultural studies, broadly speaking, and so art and dance and music. So I started thinking about art as a form of study but also art as a form of protest. I think that’s how Scheher and I really kind of come together in lots of ways, but that art is truly like the thing that we believe is not only a catalyst for change, but also, it can be a kind of a bridge between communities and between constituencies, between organizers and policymakers, between victims and survivors and their allies.
MM: Lovely.
And what was your path?
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Well, somewhat similar. I do — just to add, I think we grew up in a home with enormous pride in our culture. Right? I just remember, like — I mean, how Salamishah described, like, our home, also images of art. My mom collected art and then really surrounded us with art. And my dad had enormous pride in terms of being Trinidadian and living there, but, like, even when we came back to United States, we would follow and get, like, the cultural experience as much as we could. We’d go to local carnival festivals in United States and just kind of follow that along. My earliest kind of moments, I used to write poetry as an adolescent, and my mom — any artistic thing that we would do would be like, “Oh, let’s show that off.” So my mom was singing in jazz clubs as I was growing up, and she would, like — I would be, like, the set in between the other sets, like in jazz clubs in New York City, and she would use to show off my jazz. So I think I grew up with not only, like, enormous pride of the culture, but, like, a reward and love for artistic experiences.
And then I think those things kind of merged. I always loved children. I was very much on the path of wanting to be a child psychologist, like, in — high school was like pediatrician, then child psychologist. I was very focused about, like, this love of children at a very young age, would volunteer at — every summer I would teach art to kids at Boys & Girls Clubs or just really, like — I mean, the path was kind of really focused at a very young age. My mom’s partner was very abusive to my mom, and I think those things kind of started shifting. As Salamishah talked about, Malcolm X — the domestic violence household started to shift what I kind of saw as what I wanted to give back to. And so my senior year in high school I volunteered at a domestic violence shelter in Newark, New Jersey, and I used to teach art to the children there. And so I think that kind of became my way of bridging some of the artistic things, like the path of, like — art was always like my cure. I would take art classes. But what we grew up with but also what I wanted to kind of start focusing on.
MM: That’s really interesting. I have similar memories from my mother, in particular, who — again, this idea of the activist in the community and artwork, and I have some beautiful artwork in my home that I inherited from my mother. So clearly, art has been a theme running through your work for a long time.
So you know that stories have the power to change hearts and minds. Can you talk about Stories of a Rape Survivor, and how did you come up with the idea to turn this into a powerful performance piece?
SALAMISHAH TILLET: So I was sexually assaulted in college. I was sexually assaulted twice, so my first year of college, by a young man that I was dating, and then two years later I went on a study abroad program to Nairobi, Kenya, and I was sexually assaulted there by, like, a — someone I didn’t know that well, so someone — not someone I was dating but someone I knew. The experience I had my first year of college, I remember going to a therapist on campus and the woman was like, “Why do you think was assault?” And I froze because I didn’t really know if it was or it wasn’t; I just knew that my body was having particular responses to touch and I didn’t know if — you know, the definition of rape that I had been working with before that was like stranger, someone lurking in the bushes, not someone that you could be intimately acquainted with. And so I kind of didn’t deal with it. And then when I was sexually assaulted in Kenya, I came back to the United States a month later and I knew — there was no way I could kind of rationalize or tell myself it wasn’t rape. It was clearly rape and it was in a situation where I was afraid for my life.
And so I was fortunate, actually, to be roommates with a woman who suggested I go to an experimental program in Philadelphia at the time, which worked with rape survivors and akin to how people had been working with war veterans, treating PTSD. So this was, like, the early program in terms of psychotherapy to understand that rape victims maybe suffering from PTSD. And Edna Foa was the therapist who was leading this program. So I would do this like once a week. I would leave campus and go to another part of Philadelphia, literally meeting, taking a bus from the veterans’ hospital to a hospital — another hospital in Philadelphia and just tell my story over and over and over again to these two therapists. And so I think — and I always say this: Like, my ability to tell my story with kind of coherency and with a kind of ownership is the result of just doing intensive therapy where I had to tell my story over and over again, so I could understand the difference between the past trauma and what I was living in the present.
So then I finished that program and I was like, “Oh, I’m healed,” and not really. You still have years of therapy, years of help were needed in my case. And so — and that was in 1995 I was sexually assaulted in Kenya. In 1996 I was engaged in a therapy program. Graduated from Penn and then went to Brown University for a masters in education and literally had a breakdown. I mean, I graduated and that was — you wouldn’t know, but I did. And that’s when I told Scheherazade over Thanksgiving that I had been sexually assaulted in Kenya. And eventually I started dealing with the kind of cumulative effect of being sexually assaulted my freshman year. And so I spent the summer of ’97 to ’98 just focused on healing. And I want to give a plug to rape crisis centers that are — that charge either no cost or a minimal cost to their patients, because I really, really found my voice, but also, I think they saved my life. And I went to Women Organized Against Rape; that’s what it was called in Philadelphia. And I was in individual therapy —
MM: I know that organization.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: — you know that organization? — individual therapy and group therapy twice a week for maybe six months, and then I published my story in the feminist newspaper at Penn. And so that was the beginning. So I used to listen to Tracy Chapman’s album “New Beginnings,” and there’s a song, or at least a line from a song, called “hollow body/skin and bone.” And so I have this very detailed testimony of my experience with rape, and the campus newspaper was called Generation XX, because we’re Generation X and it was a feminist newspaper. So that was me first telling my story, and then Scheherazade was spending the summer with me, so —
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah. So when Salamishah told me, in 1997, like, that Thanksgiving, I just remember — you know, we’re very close; we’re sisters and we’ve traveled in different spaces. So I — I just thought, how did I not know that? You know? And so my feelings of sadness, rage — of, like, how could this happen? How could this happen multiple times? How could this happen and I not know? The feelings of guilt and powerlessness. You know? And I just didn’t know what should be my next step. You know? How could I help her in some kind of way to what she was experiencing? Like, you know, how could I now kind of step up? You know, I feel like our roles have been, like, her kind of — been, you know, caring for me a lot. But how could I be there for her? And, you know, it was — it took me a while. I mean, I spent a summer with her that following year, and I got to witness her healing, and kind of through this new lens I got to witness what she was talking about, like this Tracy Chapman, playing that again and again. I got to see her kind of physically go to group therapy and individual therapy. I saw all these stickies around her room, like, you know, “You are beautiful,” “Erase negative thoughts,” you know. And so I was just kind of awe of that, of awe — like someone, despite what had happened, despite someone really trying to destroy her, everything that was great, like, she’s putting and pushing the (piece to the back ?).
And so that kind of birthed me documenting her healing process. It was my second photography class ever. And I decided that some year or whatever — I was at Tufts University, decided to, like, just focus on photography and to — and so I think also proximity of us really worked out. Like, I was at — in Boston and then I moved to Rutgers for a semester just to focus on photography. And Salamishah was in Philadelphia at the time. And I got to — I put a photograph of her and I put that testimony that she published, “Hollow Body, Skin and Bone,” the testimony that she published at UPenn about her — her testimony in my class. And my teacher, who was a documentary photographer, Steve Hart, was like, “You need to focus on that this whole semester.” You know, he was really, like — he was a visiting professor at the time, too. He was just really encouraging the class to kind of go deep with their work and to kind of use this as an outlet to kind of tell our stories, to use the camera as a way to hug, use the camera as a way to speak the unspeakable.
And so I went every two weeks and, like, started to photograph. I asked Salamishah if I could photograph her healing, and naively, she said sure. She wasn’t a person who liked the camera; like, even her prom pictures were, like, frowns. (Laughs.) You know? And we created this really intimate path together. She shared things that no one — like, I went to therapy. Like, it gave me access in a way I couldn’t, at the time, with words. You know? Like, I really wanted to be there, but I also wanted to honor, like, and I think that’s like the — what SOARS is really about. It’s like this love letter to survivors. It’s a love letter to Salamishah. And I had to turn the camera towards myself. I took a series of self-portraits to be like, well, as a significant other, how has this really impacted — I didn’t realize, like, that — I was like, “Oh, I’m just going to document my sister,” and then I realized I then suffered from, like, “Am I next?” You know? My mom is a survivor and my sister is a survivor, and so I kind of had, like, triggers and nightmares. And that allowed me to go to therapy myself and to really do this work I think that allowed me to be more whole today, still to help so many other survivors. You know?
And so I think SOARS — what SOARS became — I showed that — these photographs in my class, and Salamishah came to that class and other students came out and started telling their stories, and I saw the power of my art to kind of unite and help people. And that same photographer teacher, Steve Hart, was like, “You need to continue this.”
And so we then lived together for the first time. She was starting at Harvard and my last year at Tufts University, and so I got to, like, really even continue in even more in-depth, and we decided, if we’re going to do this, we should transform into multimedia performance, that photography alone could not tell the story of what it means to survive sexual assault. She was a writer. She was listening to music. A mom — you know, there were several influences, and so I thought, like, it had to take another form, it had to take a performance kind of form for people to really experience what it meant to survive sexual violence.
MM: And where are all of those photographs now that you took of Salamishah?
SALAMISHAH TILLET: (Laughter.) No, we have them. We did a performance a couple of weeks ago here in Chicago, actually.
MM: So you still use them.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah. Yeah.
MM: OK. I just wondered if they were part of the beginning and then you put them away.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: No. I mean —
MM: But you continue to use them.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Well, we’ve edited. I mean, there’s probably hundreds that I don’t even know of. But in terms of the actual performance —
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Thousands, yeah.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Thousands, apparently. (Laughs.)
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Twelve years.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: But in terms of actual performance, we kind of think of it as like a child of Ntozake Shange's “For Colored Girls.”
MM: Yes.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: And just seeing it again, us doing it recently here in — at Oak Park High School, but also, I just saw Shange’s play on —
MM: Did you see it in New York?
SALAMISHAH TILLET: — at the Public. Yeah. And I was like —
MM: Oh, I wanted to see that!
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah. I’m sure it will —
MM: Just couldn’t get there. (Laughs.)
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah. I was like, oh, we really are, like, her children. Like, it was just interesting to see — though I think ours is very specific on, obviously, the transforming oneself from being a rape victim to what it means to survive. But we have a cast of women who tell my story as they’re telling their own stories. Like, a lot of the — I would say everyone in our cast is either a primary or secondary victim of gender-based violence. And so just to have them speak words that I wrote in my journal, like, or I wrote for the show itself — dance to the music that I listened to, and dance and perform to Scheherazade’s very intimate photographs is pretty — just extraordinary for any survivor, I think, in the audience, to understand the power of our healing. I always say that, you know, rape is something that’s imposed, forced on us as victims. And so how we choose to heal — again, it’s a position that you’re unfairly put into to have to heal from a trauma that you didn’t choose and that you in no way wanted. But how one heals is how — perhaps one way of gaining power and for me, I think, also a form of justice, because I’d gone through the legal process, as well, and was unable to have any really formal redress there. But through working in this world, I guess, of this movement, and then also working with so many survivors has really been a deeply transformative and healing process for me.
MM: So how did all this lead to A Long Walk Home?
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yes. There’s a lot of naive things here, but — so we had this performance and we were students. And then, suddenly she wasn’t a student anymore and we were being invited to perform Story of a Rape Survivor at various universities. And so we were in our early 20s, and this was, again, before Me Too, before the college sexual assault reform movement, inheritors of a legacy of, like, Maya Angelou and Alice Walker, Toni Morrison; Oprah Winfrey had broken silence around sexual assault, but still — focusing on healing. And so it really kind of organically began. Like, we were like, OK, we have this idea. We want to institutionalize it. We have no idea —
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Then we could help more people.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah, we have no idea what we’re doing, but let’s become a nonprofit. And A Long Walk Home — the title of A Long Walk Home, the title of our organization, is from a poem that I wrote about the journey home after being sexually assaulted in Kenya. And so Scheher found that in —
MM: Because that was one of my questions: Where did the name come from? OK.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: And it was “The Walk Home” —
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: — I think is the name of the poem. And then we created A Long Walk Home. So, on one hand, it’s like for any survivor who’s experienced these forms of trauma, you know, that walk afterwards is really devastating. But then also, what does it mean to reclaim home? What does it mean to find a journey to self? What does it mean to engage in these, like, healing footsteps? So it has like a dual meaning, I guess, for us. All this stuff — we were so young. It’s like we grew up in this movement, so we didn’t really know then, obviously, what we know now! (Laughs.)
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: So there’s a lot of things we would do differently, but we’ve also been able to witness a movement unfold and people start to catch up with the ideas and the concerns and the debates and the philosophy that we’ve been kind of having for the last, you know, 20 years or so.
MM: And so, how did you develop the structure for how you carry out the work in A Long Walk Home?
SALAMISHAH TILLET: OK, I’m going to hand it over to you. (Laughs.)
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: (Laughs.) OK. Give me that one!
I mean, so I think there’s one thing, it going from a student project, then it going to a nonprofit organization. SOARS gave us a foundation that we needed, actually gave us the national attention and understanding how to kind of — what this work looks like on a national level. But then we decided to do a new project called Girl/Friends Leadership Institute. I think that’s when A Long Walk Home started to shift and look more like a traditional format, in terms of committees and boards. We had already had a small working board, already, but then we needed the capacity of a lot more people to do the work that we do with the Girl/Friends Leadership Institute, in terms of foundation and having a diverse portfolio in that kind of way.
And so Girl/Friends Leadership Institute is like a — is our second program, but it mimics the source performance where it’s training particularly black girls on the West and South Side of Chicago to become artist-activists and all the lessons that we learned being on stage doing SOARS, kind of giving them back and grounding them in, like, black feminism and for them to, like, end violence in their own communities and schools. So we’re not just talking about sexual assault. We’re talking about police violence. We’re talking about domestic violence. And so they kind of helped us in terms of doing that, build, like, coalitions with organizations. We had to, like, do different structural things in this process of me becoming an artist to an executive director, I did, like, boot camps, executive boot camps and different leadership programs to kind of — what are the shifts that I need to do to become — to be really fully in this position as the executive director, to be a better leader for us all, you know, as well as the organization then had to do that structure, too, with a lot of organization and capacity-building work.
MM: Well, I’m so happy to hear that you did professional development and leadership development, because, as I’m sure you know, so often — and this is part of the work we do at Morten Group —
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
MM: — is just people love the work, the art. Right?
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
MM: And what about the structure? Right?
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
MM: How do you carry that on?
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
MM: How do you share it with other people? And so often we see a disconnect. And I do a lot of executive coaching and I’m always encouraging people to take advantage of the boot camp. I don’t know which one you went to, but I’m on the faculty at Axelson Center for Nonprofit Management, the three-day boot camp for CEOs and EDs, and it’s really important so you can have a well-rounded background and you can have a structure in place —
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
MM: — that can support the work — right? — and reaching over a hundred thousand survivors and their allies since 2003. That’s pretty extraordinary.
And did you ever have this vision of it going on like this, or when you developed the nonprofit was, well, we just want to share the story, share these stories with more people? Did you think it would go on this way?
SALAMISHAH TILLET: I don’t think so. Not originally, because we were both like — in 2003 we were — I was in school, a full-time graduate student and Scheherazade was on her way to here, to Chicago, the School of the Art Institute. So I don’t know — I mean, I really feel like we were called to do this work. I know it’s a little hokey sometimes to say out loud, but yeah, I don’t know if we knew. And we also didn’t — we were, like, just plugging away. Like, I know the work that you’ve done, too. It’s like, you’re like saying these issues matter. Like, violence against — sexual violence, domestic violence. Like, black girls’ and women’s lives matter. And no one was really hearing us for a very long time. I think black women and girls heard us.
MM: Absolutely.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: And some very progressive and very empathetic non-black girls and black women heard us. But it was really like very, very, very difficult.
And then when you’re talking about sexual assault as a black woman and your assailants have been black men, it’s a very difficult conversation to have out loud. And so I think — you know, that’s the thing I’m like amazed — like, we’re still here kind of thing. Like, we’re still here and wow, like, look how much has changed.
MM: Exactly. That’s what I was going to say. The entire environment has changed at this point, which gives more space for these conversations —
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah.
MM: — and to highlight them and to dig —
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah. I agree.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: I want to say that even though we didn’t know, I think we did a couple things, like, right from the beginnings of our foundation. So the — I always — because I give this advice to people who want to — if they want to do nonprofit, even though I discourage them — (laughs) — because there’s so many nonprofits out there.
MM: Thank you for doing that. (Laughs.)
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah. Do you want to do your project or do you want —
MM: Exactly. Exactly.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: — you know. But I think, you know, being at — we use institutional spaces in a certain way. Right? Like, I use Tufts University. Salamishah used Harvard. We got a pro bono lawyer. We had a pro bono accountant, from, like, the very beginning. Right? We had like very little money in our bank. We did not pay ourselves, actually, until 2011.
MM: Really?
SALAMISHAH TILLET: I don’t get paid still. (Laughs.)
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Well, yes. But — so we put that money back to the organization —
MM: OK.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: — as I had other jobs to support this. I mean, I think is important, stories about — I think we keep to ourselves about what it means to be, like, this woman-of-color-led organization, and how do we actually create the infrastructure for us to still be around and support the organization?
I think I did see the impact because we did these performances where, even our first performance ever was like full of people. We had to do, like, three shows back to back. And so we saw the power of art; like, we could do 600 people in one space to talk about sexual violence — right? — at a time when no one else was talking about it. So when we talk about those numbers, it’s because we were able to grab lots of people altogether who didn’t have that visibility at their college campus, particularly women and men of color, and talk about something like that. So we saw, like, how our work, even if people did not know who we were, but the fact how we were doing with music and dance and poetry and visual arts could grab so many people to talk about something so difficult. And so from that very beginning, we knew to collaborate with certain people on the ground — right? — to get people into certain services or treatments or resources at their university. And so I think — those are the things. So, like, I could think about it as an executive director; like, the foundations that we were doing — you know, we did even capacity building in 2003 where we imagined what our future would be like.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: You know, even if it was —
MM: Visioning exercises.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah, yeah, just with co-founders, like, you know. You know —
SALAMISHAH TILLET: But I guess I want to say, like as a plug for black feminism —
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: — because I do think black feminism, which is a very, like, longstanding tradition here in the United States but also globally, is like a prophetic tradition. So I wrote a piece for the Times in March about black women organizers here in Chicago; it was an op-ed piece about how black women are getting stuff done, because they’re grounded in this black feminist tradition. And what that means is, like, it’s, you know, working across issues, so, like, when Scheherazade talked about Girl/Friends addressing state violence, interpersonal violence, at the same time, like, you’re getting so many — you’re hitting so many issues and you’re working across so many different communities, so I think, like, the foundation, of course, like, she’s fully correct: Like, we didn’t — what I mean, like, we didn’t know what we were going to become, it was more like, if you look at black feminist work now or you look at it 20 years ago, it’s where the nation will eventually go. But at the time, you may not always know that, like, people will catch up with you, because it doesn’t always feel that way, because you’re already ahead of the curve. And so, just in terms of, like, the documentation of healing and using photography to kind of self-document this process before the age of selfies. Like, now it seems like “Oh, yeah, like, of course people document themselves all the time in their most traumatic or recovering,” but in 2003, much less 1999, like, Scheherazade had to look to other models. She had to look at how people documented surviving cancer, how people documented people living with HIV. There were actually no models of rape survivors healing, even though there were people breaking silences in moments.
MM: Well, I think that this also ties nicely into our — or at least I want to segue to — just talk a little bit about your book. And what was the impetus for your book? Because one of the things that I find is that we don’t — many, I would say, younger women don’t necessarily know the history, so when I, for instance, because you’re a child of the ’70s; I’m a child of the ’60s, and when I went into Chicago NOW here, in Chicago, the National Organization for Women, I didn’t know — even though I considered myself a feminist. mean, I read Ms. magazine and Essence; I thought I had it covered — (laughs) — and so — but I didn’t understand that there was a black feminist organization in the ’70s, and that, of course, these women were talking about all these issues and, in fact, were pro-choice —
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah.
MM: — and that we could and should be talking about that as a community of folks. And if we did more of that, I really think that Roe v. Wade wouldn’t be hanging by a thread, as it is now.
So when you wrote your book, what was the impetus behind it with regard to the work that you have been doing around healing, the work that you were doing with A Long Walk Home? Because I think the book was written in 2011, 2012, somewhere around there?
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah. Oh, so Sites of Slavery. So I would just say, I’m working on a book on The Color Purple now —
MM: Oh, OK.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: — and then on Nina Simone. So those also come out of A Long Walk Home. But I would say for Sites of Slavery, that was my dissertation, but it does come out of being a survivor. And then, in many ways — I remember having a job interview and they were like, how does your work with A Long Walk Home impact your book, Sites of Slavery? And it’s — so I can give you a very clear answer.
So I’m in undergrad and every year in the mid-’90s, there was, like, a new novel on slavery that’s coming out, and most famously, and before that, though, of course, was Toni Morrison’s Beloved. And so you’re seeing all these characters dealing with flashbacks and trauma, and so I’m also, you know, reading these novels, because they’re really different than the slave narratives from the 19th century, because you have characters like being pulled back into time and having to confront this founding trauma. So I’m having my own flashbacks, I’m going to therapy, I’m reading these novels, and the question that I had in undergrad that I took with me to grad school was, like, what happens when you don’t let a people heal from a trauma? Right? If slavery is this founding sin and this founding trauma, and you go from slavery to segregation within a period of, like, 1865 to 1876 — right? — and then 1896 is when Plessy v. Ferguson gets passed. What happens when people are not allowed to mourn, when they’re not allowed to grieve? And what happens when a nation is not allowed to grieve?
And so to me it was clear that African American artists and intellectuals kept on returning to this founding trauma because it kept on coming back. It’s like in the DNA of American society. And so I was really curious as an intellectual but passionate as a citizen to understand why there was so much focus on slavery in the ’90s and the 2000s. And now we see it again. Like, Ta-Nehisi Coates, I think, in his latest novel; Colson Whitehead — we see a resurgence of slavery in African American art again. So I guess that’s where it came from. And then I think — well, my question to the interviewer was, like, I think I dared to write about dance, Bill T. Jones, or visual culture like Kara Walker, or photography like Carrie Mae Weems in my book because of A Long Walk Home. Like, I don’t know if I would have had the vocabulary or the confidence to cover so many art forms if we, in real time, weren’t trying to tell the story of surviving rape with all those art forms.
So to me, like, you know, I always say that people’s dissertations are like veiled autobiographies, so, like, if you — in grad school I’m, like, doing this work and we’re trying the country to talk about healing from trauma and that I’m writing this dissertation trying to talk about healing from trauma, and so they’re just in conversation with each other. So that’s a great question. Usually people don’t ask me that question, so —
MM: So let’s switch gears here a little bit and talk about some of the opportunities that you’ve had to share stories and to lift up the work in the current environment. So I know, for instance, you wrote an op-ed piece together in January — right? —
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
MM: — around R. Kelly, and it was along the lines of it’s about time that the Me Too movement has again focused on black women, because that is how it started. And of course, we lost some of that. People didn’t know that actually it was Tarana Burke who coined “Me Too.” We saw it in the media when white women activists, celebrities started to push it forward. And I would say that certainly in the — as it became clear that they didn’t coin that phrase, I did see women actually giving credit where credit was due.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
MM: Why did you feel it was important to write the op-ed piece for The New York Times?
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Well, I think we were doing a lot of — I mean, this is the work. We’ve been waiting for this moment for a while. Right?
MM: Absolutely.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: And we saw — our 20th anniversary for SOARS, what we wanted to do is we decided to bring Tarana here before we wrote that op-ed, before “Surviving R. Kelly” actually came out. We brought Tarana to Chicago for a town hall with black girls here in Chicago. We felt like Chicago — this is where our work is being done. We already were talking about as an organization and then R. Kelly — I think the year before we canceled the first R. Kelly with UIC, the first concert in his hometown and we did a new R. Kelly campaign here. The missing and murdered rates of black girls, sex trafficking, and so we knew — we wanted this conversation here. We wanted this huge movement. Not only was it founded by a black woman but it was founded for a black girl. Right? She was inspired in Alabama for a young girl who’s telling her story but she didn’t know what to say, and she really wanted to say the words “me too.” So those two things, as black women about a black girl survivor, and us now doing this program Girl/Friends and knowing and holding all these stories, how could we bring not only the movement but the resources and the energy that was being centered, how could we bring that to Chicago? How could we bring that to these young girls and know that this was about them?
So we did this town hall in November, and, you know, and after that town hall, we also then did small groups with young people talking about Me Too. A lot of our young people did not know — not our people but young people in general — when they were teaching it, they did not know what Me Too was, and they did not know who Tarana was. And so we were like, oh, my gosh. Like, this is a huge movement that’s happening, and they were having these lived experiences — they were talking about sexual assault; they were talking about how we can’t talk about this in their homes or their schools. And so we started doing these talks. And so when we saw “Surviving R. Kelly” really start to, you know — and we worked as consultants on that film with dream hampton when dream was making it, and so, you know, A Long Walk Home provided, like, support on staff for the survivors of that film. But we saw the direct impact of now our community’s talking about sexual assault. We got calls from people we never got calls from before. We got calls from nail salons on the South Side of Chicago asking to talk about sexual assault in their communities. We got, you know, just a real visibility, and we knew how do we hold this moment? How do we — you know? — and how do we leverage our resources? And so that’s the birth, I think, of the op-ed came about. How do we make sure that this — we know that this is not a moment that’s guaranteed. We have never seen this. And we also know that because of that that allowed all of those acts of R. Kelly to exist — right? — the invisibility of all these young girls, to allow that kind of history, you know, to have happened.
I talk about — with R. Kelly, I feel like, it is about R. Kelly, but it really is about how R. Kelly was able to get away with —
MM: For so long.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: So long!
MM: For so long.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: You know, being in Chicago —
MM: It’s unbelievable.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: And what did he get away — he got away with everything that we’ve learned about sexual violence — I mean, kidnapping, sex trafficking, domestic violence. Like, it’s all of that. Child marriage in the United States — I mean, every single thing he was able to get away with. Right? And so I thought, if we focus on that, we, like, really unpacked R. Kelly and bystanders — right? — schools’ involvement. We were also having the — still — the Chicago Public Schools crisis in sexual violence. All of these things were, like, working on all the same time, I thought if we focus on that, then — and all those things that really what R. Kelly represents, then we really are able to deal with some real things in this country around sexual violence and black girls and women.
MM: And what was the reaction to the op-ed piece?
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Oh, it was good, I think. Mostly good. (Laughs.)
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah. The majority — Salamishah’s like yeah. Actually, yeah. I think — I mean, it’s very different than actually shutting down his concert here in Chicago.
MM: Because some time had passed, too.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: And the documentary had —
MM: And the documentary, right.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah, because I think that was the first that A Long Walk Home even got any kind of — like, we had to block people on social media was when we did the concert. Like, R. Kelly then became a little — more visible. It already was existing but came really high. So the op-ed — I mean, people were teaching about. Other, I think, organizations felt heard and seen.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: And I think there was like two — in addition to, like, highlighting the central role that black girls should and have played in Me Too, showing a longer history of black women organizing against sexual assault — I think sometimes these are like — as you were talking about, you know, growing up, reading up Essence and Ms., and then there’s this history of black women organizing against sexual assault that obviously goes way back to slavery.
MM: Absolutely.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: But then more recently —
MM: We don’t know it.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Like Rosa Parks being an anti-sexual-assault activist. So kind of like wanting to highlight that history, like that creates the possibility for something like “Surviving R. Kelly.” Like dream hampton and Lifetime’s documentary doesn’t come out of a vacuum. It comes off of lots of other women organizing around these issues. And the other thing is — and to quote such a woman, Loretta Ross, who is the —
MM: I know Loretta —
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Loretta, yes. I’m sure you —
MM: — from reproductive health work.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yes, a reproductive justice warrior who helped coin that term. We were on a panel two years ago at National Women’s Studies Association looking at this long history of women — black women at the forefront of the anti-sexual-violence movement, and she said something that was really profound to us. She said, you know, in the 1980s there was this blossoming of black women’s voices with, like, Alice Walker and anti — you know, the founding of so many different organizations and so many different publications. And she didn’t — they didn’t realize then that the moment wouldn’t last. And now we’re in another moment where black women — I think it’s kind of unparalleled how many ways in which black women are being recognized, still having to, like, work four times as hard, but being at least sometimes recognized when you do work four times as hard, that this moment is even more significant — not significant — more widespread. And so, I guess that was a challenge, you know, like, and that’s what we talked about in the R. Kelly piece. Like, you know, this may not last, and so because this moment may not last, then we have to get as much done now as possible.
MM: Have to leverage it. Highlight it. Push it forward. Make sure as many people as possible know about it.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yep.
MM: I just felt somewhat, I guess, vindicated when the documentary was out because, you know, I’ve worked on issues around violence against women and girls for many years as well and, you know, really was frustrated about so what can we do besides supporting those organizations that work on these issues? You know, when we go to a party, we would absolutely say please do not play any of that music.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
MM: And I would get cards from people because I do — I’m a documentary filmmaker and they would want me to come in their studio and they would list their clients and they’d have R. Kelly on it, so that card would go out the window. (Laughs.) But it felt as though, to, I think, the point of the op-ed, that it was being seen and heard in a way that all of us already knew, but it was being lifted up in a way that it had never been lifted before. And yeah, very significant. So thank you. I think it was a really, really important op-ed piece to share.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Thank you.
MM: This is serious, hard work. Where do you find joy outside of this work?
SALAMISHAH TILLET: (Laughs.) Well, visiting my sister in Chicago, apparently, is one place.
MM: (Laughs.)
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah, I have two young kids, so I have a seven-year-old daughter named Seneca and four-year-old son named Sidney. So they are sites and vessels of joy and also hard work. But I do think, like, it’s really nice to have these two people who really run our house, so it’s interesting. They have two Type A parents. And yet — (laughs) — you know, as parenting can go sometimes, they really rule the roost. So they’re great. I’m happy to have them as part of our tribe and part of our family. But I guess other — you know, anyone who knows me, I’m an addict of television. I watch thousands of shows. And they’re actually really sad shows — (laughs) — but I get great joy in watching all sorts of police procedurals on television from all over the world, which is kind of weird, given my politics. But I came into reading — really reading, like, Nancy Drew —
MM: So did I. (Laughs.)
SALAMISHAH TILLET: — and Agatha Christie. Yeah. So that’s always in me. So that’s another — and then I just — yoga. I think my next chapter will be being a yogi, of sorts, which seems, like, so daunting because I think about it and oh, that’s so much work to become a yogi. So these are different areas of my life I think that give me joy and give me moments to retreat. And art —
MM: And recharge.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: And recharge. And art really is kind of like — even though we’re like, oh, it’s — it ignites us. It makes us politically engaged. It also is beauty. Right? And being — seeing beautiful things and reading beautiful words and listening to beautiful sounds is still, like, probably my first go-to, so.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: I’ve been really working on bringing joy into the space, the workspace, as an actual practice, in many ways. So with the young people I work with, how can, like, self-care be, like, a component of our work? How can we bring back to young people who maybe “adultified” at a very young age. You know, young girls are adultified at the age of five. How can we bring back play to them? Double dutch, just embracing dance and twerking or double dutch —
MM: (Laughs.)
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: — like all sorts of things that come to us — right? — like how can we put that part in the practice of social justice movement? Right?
MM: Self-care.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah, self-care, like, is an integral part of it. But like, not just say self-care like a lot of people just — you know? — but actually, like, really believe in it. I think, you know, me as an art therapist has really created that, like, just joy in laughter in the space. Community is really important, as well. And I think Salamishah also talks about: For us, it’s also doing different things. Right? So, like, this is one part, but also, like, not having this your whole life. So having different movements, spaces also, like, I think really give me joy. Like, going and doing this work and being in the nonprofit sector but then also then being able to do, like, the arts, art space or, you know, just, like, kind of bouncing around spaces, different spaces — like the black feminist space. Like, they’re all different spaces, and I think, like, not just being this one dimension, like, also allows me joy. Yeah.
MM: In addition to really having this work visible all over the country and the world, you’ve had a lot more support from celebrities. And I recently saw that you were doing some work with Janelle Monáe. Tell us how that came about.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah. That was a pretty amazing event. Janelle Monáe was here in Chicago and she wanted to honor local organizers and artists that are doing work in the community and she selected four, and I was nominated, actually, through the Chicago Foundation for Women, who nominated me. And one of the other awardees was Amanda Williams for her work. And it was just a beautiful night. The theme was about kind of — like Janelle Monáe, like, imagining the future. And it was held at the MCA and she — it was a dinner party, essentially, with 50 guests, and it was this whole, like —
MM: Intimate, 50 guests. Yes.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah. Yeah. Very intimate. I had one-plus, which Salamishah was in town so it was kind of beautiful to share this moment with her. And it was kind of ironic because the day before this Beautiful Future event, we had a whole theme this summer about imagining the future for our young people. So it was like, wow, this is, like, perfect because I just had an exhibition done by young girls where we spent all summer — because part of the thing I thought was, like, we have been spending our whole organization, career talking about ending violence against women and girls, but we have not yet imagined what that future would be like if we achieved our goal. And so we spent the whole summer kind of dreaming with our young people of what future and they said certain, you know — they were like no abortion banned or the future is — it’s colorful, or no gender. You know? They were coming up with all these different ways of really being free and liberated, and they made art about it and it was just pretty beautiful to weave into, like, Afrofuturism with our young people. And then the next day I go to this event done by Janelle Monáe, who is the, like, you know, Afrofuturism person and have this really intimate dinner to — really connecting other people together and dreaming what that world we could achieve be like. And I think I just want to hold on to that —
MM: Absolutely.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: — because I think those are the things that, like, motivate you to kind of, as you’re in the present, to, like —
MM: Keep going.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: — yeah, keep on dreaming. Yeah.
MM: And how do you go from the work that you’re doing and being a part of the academy to writing liner notes for John Legend? How does that come about?
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah. I mean, I think part of what A Long Walk Home has given me is, like, again, really being — to deeply dive into this idea of art and activism. So, you know, I was a professor at Penn for 10 years and it was a wonderful experience, and I was a more traditional literary critic. I don’t know if my colleagues would say that, but I would say that. And now that I took this job at Rutgers, I’m doing — formally doing art and activism as an initiative and an institute that I’ve built there. So I guess, you know, the way in which Scheherazade’s, like, a professional artist and an art therapist and an ED, I guess my three hats would be being a creative writer, being an activist, and now also being an academic administrator, which is — (laughs) — like, you know, we’re on parallel tracks because we obviously came from the same house and we’re always in conversation with each other. But the biggest shift for me I think was becoming a creative writer and still a cultural critic but shaped — trying to create different audiences and speak to different audiences. So I don’t know, maybe you can — you understand what we’re talking about, having these multiple hats —
MM: I do. (Laughs.)
SALAMISHAH TILLET: — you know, you were like an administrative, like, artist —
MM: Filmmaker. (Laughs.)
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Filmmaker. Organizer. So they feed off each other. But I do think it’s like — you know, I tell my students sometimes, like, it’s not easy. It’s just like, you know — because you’re trying to, like, do well in these different spaces and so you have different standards per space. Right? Like, what makes you a good administrator is not necessarily what makes you a good writer. Being a good writer means spending a lot of time by myself, not talking to anybody, having the phone off. And being a good administrator is like the exact opposite of that — (laughs) —
MM: That’s right.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: — engaging, meetings. And so, you know, just trying to find all that —
MM: Trying to find the balance —
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah, the balance.
MM: — which I don’t think — I don’t know that really exists.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah.
MM: (Laughs.) You’re, like, shaking your head “no.”
So we’re going to take a quick break. We have been having an extraordinary conversation with the founders of A Long Walk Home, Scheherazade Tillet and Salamishah Tillet. And we’re going to be right back. You’re listening to “Gathering Ground.”
Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining me on “Gathering Ground.” We want to hear from you. If you have any questions about your work in nonprofits or any of the topics that we’ve covered here on “Gathering Ground,” send them on in. Send them to mary@gatheringgroundpodcast.com. That’s mary@gatheringgroundpodcast — all one word — dot com. We look forward to hearing from you.
So welcome back, everyone. You’re listening to “Gathering Ground,” and today we’ve been speaking with the co-founders of A Long Walk Home, Scheherazade Tillet and Salamishah Tillet. And we are going to move into one of our favorite sections: Question from the Audience.
So we’re going to start with Jackie. Jackie states: “I was at a lunch presentation with my supervisor this week on the future of philanthropy, including equity and inclusion, and one of the panelists was a Latina philanthropic leader and talked about living in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood her entire life. At the end of the event, when the gentleman who was MC’ing the event was at the mic, he waxed poetic about a restaurant that used to be in the community and talked about how everyone would go there: citizens, police officers, immigration officers, “legals,” “illegals.” Obviously, this language is not OK, given that no person is illegal and that this language is dehumanizing. Should I say something to the organizers?”
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Oh, I see. These are real questions!
MM: (Laughs.)
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah, yeah. I didn’t — yes. The organizers of the event.
MM: Yes, the organizers of the event.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah. It’s, like, weird that we’re still using these terms, actually, or — I mean, I understand why certain people who are trying to alienate or scare or demonize folks use it, but in general, I think this person was trying to sound like they — this communal atmosphere. So I don’t know. I mean, I first started — it was, like, the ’90s when I was in college and I had a professor, Ines Salazar, and she taught a class on Chicano and African American women writers, and so it’s then that I started learning, like, not simply that language hurts but the way in which “undocumented” versus “illegal alien” — right? So that’s in the ’90s. So I’m still, like, surprised that we’re having —
MM: In 2019.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: — certain debates about language. But, at the same time, we’re in a deeply traumatizing moment and a deeply partisan moment around issues of immigration and national belonging, and so it’s not unsurprising that we have to have these debates since there are people who are committed to deeply dehumanizing individuals who are seeking sometimes asylum or sometimes an alternative life here in the United States.
But yes, I would say that yes, you probably would want to say something to the organizers of the event, because I don’t know if they meant to harm, but the risk of harm is there, so.
MM: Absolutely. And I think whenever you can call — we have a saying about our work that we want to call people in, not call people out —
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
MM: — meaning that we want to — you know, we’re not going to get anywhere with shaming people, and we will shut down conversation. But we also understand that for real change to happen, as you know, there’s going to be some discomfort. And so it really is about the way you do it —
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Yeah.
MM: Right?
And anything you want to add, Scheherazade?
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: No. I mean, I think — yeah, I think the calling in — I’m kind of inspired from your last podcast, too, in how racial justice training has impacted me in terms of learning about white supremacy, really — right? — so how people of color could really also learn a lot about — get a lot from racial justice training, if it’s done right and correctly. I think that was part of my leadership development work was having racial equity work with — and specific trainings around that, so I think there’s always invitations to, like, learning about what does community building really look like, and that kind of framing.
MM: Great.
So here’s a question from Allison: “I have been working in nonprofits for eight or nine years, and as I start to think about my future in the sector, I wonder whether the road I want to be on is one towards an executive director role. I have a resume that is fairly well rounded: programmatic work, development, staff supervision, DEI implementation. But I haven’t heard great things about being an ED. I’m an Asian woman in my late 40s, if that helps. Any thoughts?”
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Well, you know, I — (laughs) — yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of, actually, articles even just talking about the burnout, particularly of women of color in executive director positions. And so I know that there is a lot of, you know, negative things or articles or research out there. But I also think it also could be very rewarding, if you’re doing it correctly. And I think it’s really important to make sure that you have the right community. Also, just, I’m going to plug again just, like, leadership development work that you guys are doing, you know, and executive coaching really plays a really great role. I’ve had Cultivate here in Chicago. I was part of that. Also part of —
MM: Which was a mentoring program that was funded by Crossroads Fund, Chicago Foundation for Women, and the Woods Fund.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Woods Fund. Yeah. Yeah. That were really built on the leadership of executive directors or just leadership teams in nonprofits, particularly for women of color, and to have that kind of support to really — within philanthropy but also in the nonprofits. And so what I got from it was really like a — it grounded me in a network of women of color who are doing this work here locally.
I’ve also been involved in another program called Move To End Violence, which is funded by the NoVo Foundation, which is a national program that supports people who are doing work around ending violence against women and girls. And so I feel like those two — those kind of networks really help us share practices and also resources and techniques and tools to kind of really create the foundations that kind of, like, help support you doing this work. So I think I would just advise to talk to different people who have been in this position and what works, what doesn’t work for them as you are interviewing in this field.
MM: It can be very isolating —
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
MM: — to be — right? — the bottom line in an organization. And when I am talking often to women-of-color executive directors and I ask, “What are you doing to take care of yourself?” often they start crying because no one’s ever asked them —
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: It’s so much, yeah.
MM: — and they don’t even know how to get to that point.
One of the things we talked about in our last episode was about this idea of building bench —
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yes, yes. I love that! I love that. I was like call in the bench.
MM: Yes. Isn’t that an incredible image? Yes.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
MM: And how do you build bench?
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah. I love that.
MM: I also sometimes talk about having your own personal board of directors. Right? Not the one for your organization, but who are those folks that you can go to where you know it will be confidential and you can just be yourself and get the support you need? Because, as you know, when you are in an environment, being the first, being the only, there’s so many other things that we carry with us that I would say, particularly again for women and women who are not women of color don’t really understand that frame at all.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah.
MM: And so it is important that women can come together with women who look like themselves, at the end of the day —
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yes.
MM: — and get that support. And so it sounds as though Allison doesn’t even know that that exists and might consider being an executive director even more seriously if she knew that there were supports out there.
And there are, Allison. I hope you’re listening.
So thank you so much for joining us.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Thank you.
MM: Before we close, one quick question: What are you looking forward to in this new year of 2020? Tell me one thing that you hope you will accomplish or you will experience in 2020.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Oh, so it’s not about the nation.
MM: No. No. About you.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: OK, it’s about us. (Laughter.)
Well, I’d like to — I have a book called In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of Alice Walker’s Masterpiece that comes out in 2020, which I’m very excited about.
MM: Well, I hope you will come back and talk about that with us.
SALAMISHAH TILLET: I will. And I have to finish another book called All The Rage: The World Nina Simone Made in 2020 as well. So I have these two projects, these two women who have been occupying my imagination for a very long time and have inspired me to be who I am. So I’m excited about that.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: So we’re very similar because we really are sisters —
SALAMISHAH TILLET: (Laughs.)
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: — that we think in projects —
SALAMISHAH TILLET: (Laughs.)
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: — for 2020. So in 2020 I am hoping to continue to work on my art projects, which are about black girlhood and photograph — I’m very excited about this because one of the projects I’m working on is called The Sendoffs, and so I wait for prom season to kind of begin, where I photograph black girls in Chicago getting ready for prom and sending them off and their rites of passage. It’s just a beautiful moment that I think hasn’t been as documented as it should be, but it’s this beautiful moment of young girls really — I feel like it’s its own feminist project, too, because these young girls are oftentimes going to prom by themselves now, and everyone that they use are often black women in terms of designers and chair decorators or costume and makeup artists.
MM: Well, you have to let us know when that’s available as well —
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yeah. Yeah.
MM: — because we want to talk about it —
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yes.
MM: — and we want to make sure people come and see it.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Yes.
MM: It sounds lovely.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: I’m excited.
MM: Thank you both so much for joining us here on “Gathering Ground.”
A Long Walk Home can be — you can find more information about A Long Walk Home at alongwalkhome.org.
This is “Gathering Ground.” You’ve been listening to Scheherazade Tillet and Salamishah Tillet. And we look forward to having you back again very soon.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Thank you for having us!
SALAMISHAH TILLET: Thank you so much. Thank you.
SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: Thank you.
MM: Thank you.