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Ep. 11: From Poverty to Psychology: A Life Story · Wellness in Today's World

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Welcome to Wellness in Today's World, a space where we discuss the latest insights in psychology, wellness, and everything in between.
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Hello, I'm Debra Kawahara.
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Thank you for joining us today.
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I am super, super excited about the guest that we have today: Dr.
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Rosie Phillips Davis, formerly Bingham.
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Dr.
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Davis is the 2019 president of the American Psychological Association and past
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Vice President for Student Affairs at the University of Memphis.
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She also is a professor of counseling psychology.
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Dr.
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Davis is a native Memphian and daughter of a garbage man from the sanitation strike in Memphis where Dr.
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Martin Luther King Jr.
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was killed.
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Welcome to the podcast.
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I'm going to call you Rosie from here on out.
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I hope that's okay.
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I'm thrilled that you're here.
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So welcome!
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Let's get,
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thank you Deb.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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I appreciate it.
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And I'll call you Deb.
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Yes, of course, of course.
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So let's start off with going back to your early years growing up and the experiences in your childhood that shaped you into the person that you are today.
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Yeah.
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And you know, Debra, the interesting thing is that as I talk to other people, I learn more about my childhood, not because they tell me more, but because they tell me about their
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childhood.
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And when I assumed that ours were the same, I learned that they were very different.
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But my life started on a plantation in Mississippi.
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And I like that because there are not many people who can say, "My life really did start on a plantation." And when we talk about African Americans and
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what happened during slavery in our country hundreds of years ago, it feels closer to home when I realized that I was born...
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even though I was born in a hospital, my first four or five years were on a plantation where my parents were sharecroppers.
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And as children, we even had to work.
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I had to help clean the house and sweep and do all those things.
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I did not go to the field to
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chop and pick cotton because I guess I just wasn't quite old enough but we were there and we pumped water outside from a pump, from a well and the toilet was an outside toilet.
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And then something happened, and I don't know what the story is but it's about my father.
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And I know that the sheriff came and I remember how that white sheriff person talked to my mother; it was the first time I ever saw my mother cry.
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We had an ice box.
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Do you know what an ice box is?
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Yeah, where they would bring blocks of ice and put it in your refrigerator.
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And it was low enough that she put her elbow on it and tears rolled down her eyes.
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Since a little girl, I saw that, but I remember how awful that man sounded talking to my mother.
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But I know the next thing is that we moved to Memphis, Tennessee.
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And that's where I spent a lot of my life.
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That was when my father did get that job as a garbage man.
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We lived for a while on a street in one part of town...
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and actually some of your viewers may have heard of
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St. Jude Hospital, which is a national
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hospital. So I lived near where
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St. Jude is and then we moved into a little place called Smokey City, and I stayed there until I graduated from high
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Yesterday I was talking to one of my girlfriends.
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Wherever I go, usually there are four of us who are best buddies.
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And so there were four of us.
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One of them I was talking to yesterday, and she was talking about the people calling her the n-word and her hearing that.
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And I grew up in an all-black community.
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It was poor
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My calculus teacher lived down the street from me.
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When my mother worked, she cleaned houses for white people who treated her like she was a girl.
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And as I said, my daddy was a garbage man.
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Nobody ever called me the N-word.
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I never was around black and white water fountains because we didn't go anywhere.
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I never rode the back of a bus because we didn't have any money to go get on the bus.
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And my friend did those things and she had people call her the N-word.
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The first time anybody ever called me the N-word was when I started working at then Memphis State University and a full professor, white guy, called me a
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"smart-a** n*****.
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That's the first time anybody ever actually called...
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And I said, "You know, I have never thought about that until yesterday that that didn't happen to me." So it actually made me think hey, there were really some good things about
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growing up in that little bubble that I was in.
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I knew about a lot of the things going on but they didn't directly affect me the way they did some other people.
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Growing up in a family that...
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I had 11 siblings, six boys, six girls.
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I'm my mother and father's oldest child.
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She had two daughters, he had two sons when they got married.
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Now my father probably had some more children, but the two I knew about who came to live with us for a while.
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And all of them didn't live with us for a long time.
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My sister, who was a couple of years older than I, lived with us.
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There were like nine of us at a time or eight of us at a time who lived in the house with my parents.
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The other thing that I will say about being a little girl in Memphis is my sister Georgia,
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two and a half years older than I, went to school first.
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I was not in kindergarten or at school, but I read her books.
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Mmm.
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part of what has impacted my life and a part of what I tell children all the time is read.
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Read, read, read, read, read.
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That is the thing that shaped my life and allowed me to daydream about having a different type of life.
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Reading.
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It gave me, it helped me to imagine what life could be like somewhere other than in my little four room shotgun house sleeping with all my
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siblings, sleeping together in two beds.
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Reading, reading is what makes a difference.
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Well, it sounds like reading was a big influence in your life and that it allowed you to maybe expand your world.
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What other kind of big influences did you feel helped you in terms of growing up both professionally and personally?
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Well, okay, so I'm gonna tell you one more reading story and that is, since we were poor, now I knew we were really poor and whereas a lot of people worried about race, I mean, I
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did have colorism, but I worried about poverty because I felt shame about being poor and shame about the clothes that I wore.
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So reading allowed me to think, "Wow, one day I'm gonna grow up and move to New York.
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And I'm going to be a secretary and I'm going to be working in my office and I'm going to go to lunch and then one day I'm going to be coming around one of those tall buildings and
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a man is going to be coming around and we're going to bump into each other and fall in love and get married.
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That was my imagination, and what the reading did for me.
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And so then, and of course when I got ready to go to start thinking about college, I could think about going anywhere in the United States.
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I didn't think about going anywhere in the world, but already I knew that I would leave Memphis.
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I already knew that I would not stay.
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I knew I would not stay in Memphis, Tennessee, but I was going to want to get away because of
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the circumstances.
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So mine were more influenced by poverty.
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Now race influenced...
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I went to an all-black school and when they desegregated our school in Memphis, when I was probably a junior or senior, probably a senior, all of my friends and I went to the Board
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of Education and transferred back to our school because we liked that school.
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We were Manassas Tigers and that's where we were going to graduate from.
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And actually, we still have reunions every year.
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Manassas Tigers...
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Oh, every year.
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It's the school.
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It's not just our class.
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It's the school.
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But I still have...
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one of my, a couple of my friends and I went to the same college.
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One of those friends, he went to law school.
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I went to graduate school.
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We went to Ohio State for those.
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Elmhurst College for the undergrad, the Ohio State University.
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And we still connect like...
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those friends of mine, another guy who went to Elmhurst with us.
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They have more money than I do.
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So they buy season tickets to the games.
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But once a year, they treat us to a game and we all still meet and go to a football game at Ohio State.
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And so the friends were probably the other big influence, just having friends and teachers and people who believed in me
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and saw more in me maybe even than I saw in myself.
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Now, on the negative side, I think the thing that was a big influence was living in my family.
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I mean, my family gave me strength, but it also gave me...
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Well, an interesting kind of resilience and fortitude in that, when my father, my father and mother got married, my mother says he was a deacon in the church.
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I don't know, didn't know that man.
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I knew the man whom we moved to Memphis and he became a garbage man and he was abusive to my mother.
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He drank; he was an alcoholic.
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And my mother would run away and she would take my older sister, because my oldest sister was with our grandmother still in Mississippi.
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But my sister Georgia, she would take with her and little girl Rosie did not understand that.
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I was left
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with my other siblings, with my father.
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And I later learned as an adult, it was...
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it's interesting, Debra, it was because he was our biological father.
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And black women...
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And I don't know if this is true for all women, but had some strong commitments to their children.
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And they believed that they had to protect the girl child that was not that man's child.
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And they didn't want any abuse or anything to happen
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to those girls.
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I didn't know that until much later in my life because I didn't understand why was I left?
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And she got to go with my mother.
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And so that influenced me.
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And the way that it influenced me was when I was a little girl.
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And I remember I couldn't have been more than 10 sitting on the steps of this house saying, "I am never going to care about anybody enough to feel this bad when they leave."
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Hmm.
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So I wrapped that little heart up and put it in a shelf and didn't even know it was there until years later.
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So when I was a teenager and girls were going on about boys, I'd pretend about going on with boys, but I really, really didn't know what they were talking about.
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I had no idea.
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When I went to college, I was a freshman, people were being homesick.
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I didn't know what they were talking about.
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I was fine being gone.
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I didn't know what that, I didn't know that feeling because those feelings were on the shelf in the closet somewhere.
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So lots of things.
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Teachers influenced me.
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They thought I was smart and one thing that was good and bad in my neighborhood, I was smart and so the teachers wanted me in the groups with the smart kids.
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Most of my friends were the next level.
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And they didn't get to go to the same things I did.
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So I resented that because I told my neighborhood friends and my school friends, and I didn't like that.
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So I saw the division early in life and didn't like it.
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But that was the way that it was.
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But the good thing is that the teachers saw in me and they just took care of me.
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I mean, when I went to the
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senior prom the teacher selected my date.
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Senior prom, it was a guy, the valedictorian.
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I was a salutatorian in a class of over 400 nearly 500.
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I was third but they had us go to senior prom together; that's how much they ran our lives.
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Matchmaking in the works back then.
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I don't even know if they were matchmaking, because that was just who I was going to prom with, and I went to the prom with that guy.
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But they influenced our lives.
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They really did.
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And the church was down the street, so I went to church.
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Yeah.
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So books, community, people that believed in you, really having that foundation for yourself.
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But I also heard that you had to protect yourself by putting kind of your heart away until you kind of could feel safe to open it up.
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So tell me, Rosie, you know, from those beginnings and
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your experiences, you've had this remarkable career as a psychologist.
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And I guess I was wanting to think what inspired you to go into psychology or the field of psychology and all the triumphs and challenges that you have encountered and faced?
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The spiritual part of me just says that it was a calling from God and that's probably what made it all happen, because I really...
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as a child, as a poor kid...
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and it is remarkable to me how little really poor kids are exposed to...
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maybe now with social media they have more but I didn't know anything about professions.
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I mean, I'm looking at TV, so I thought maybe I maybe want to be a spy.
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My mother did want somebody to be, and you know, work for the FBI.
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My mother did want somebody to be a doctor.
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And I thought, I only thought of surgeons.
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I'm thinking, I don't want to cut anybody, so that's out.
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And she only had an eighth grade education, but still she somehow kind of wanted that.
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And then I think people like talking to me.
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And so I thought, well, maybe I could be a psychiatrist.
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Don't ask me how I learned or anything about
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the word "psychiatrist." But I remember when I was 15, I saw some people at a park and these people had severe mental illness, evidently, because they were out there but you
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could tell they were swiping at things that weren't there.
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And I said, "Oh no, I can't do that." And so that scared me away from that.
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So when I went to college, I wasn't sure...
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What I loved when I went to college was history, actually.
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My history teacher had been very influential and I loved that.
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And when I talked to the guy who was my advisor, I said, "I want to major in history." And he said, "Well, what are you going to do with that?
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History teachers are a dime a dozen." That's what he told me.
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He didn't tell me I could go to law school; he just told me history teacher.
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I said, "Well, what am I going to do then?" He says, "Well, what do you like?
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What do you like?" I said, "I like helping people." He said, "Why don't you be a sociology major?" I said, "OK." And after my first course, I said, "Well, that was boring." And he
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said, "Your upper-division courses will not be boring.
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It'll be better." And so I tell everybody that I graduated from college bored.
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I didn't, I never liked any of the classes.
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I took abnormal psychology.
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That didn't turn me on.
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So that was more...
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no.
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So when I graduated, I, my first year out, I went to work for the Bell system; they used to have things like Illinois Bell.
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And so I was in Chicago.
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I went to Elmhurst.
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So I went to work as a...
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what they called in those days a group chief operator.
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And what used to happen, they used to have people, if you would dial 411 or 211, information, you could dial information and get somebody's phone number.
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So I could say, "Can you give me the phone number for Debra Kawahara?" And so they said, "Well, what's the address?" And then I'd look it up.
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And the way that we answered their phone, they called and it was one of those, this is how old it was, it was a keyboard that you had to plug things into to talk.
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Yeah, that's what I did.
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For those of you that are wondering, go look at some of the old movies.
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They'll have those.
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Yeah.
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who had headphones and they plugged the things in.
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So I was the group chief operator.
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That meant that I had...
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they've all been replaced by machines that now...
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or you look it up on...
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ask Google.
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But at any rate, I had a group of those operators.
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We sat in a big office space.
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The operators were in rows.
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And then the assistant managers had desks spread out at the front and the back of the room And if we wanted to talk with any of our operators, they came up to our desk.
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And so I had this woman come up to my desk and she had been absent two or three times and so I'm talking about her being absent.
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This woman probably was in her 50s and she started crying.
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And she said that the Bell system just wanted her not to reach retirement, that they just want to fire her.
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And she's crying and I'm thinking...
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I had no idea what to do with this woman, and it's in front of this whole room.
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I didn't know what to do and I thought, "I need to go and learn something about what to do." So that along with
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I was just hanging out, not doing much of anything, and I couldn't think about growing up in corporate America.
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And I'd been such a little activist on campus.
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I was in the "say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud." And doing things for black people.
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And so then some people talked to me about going to graduate school and I didn't know.
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I applied to various places and Ohio State was one of those places and they had something they called the SPA program, a student personnel administration program.
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That would be for people who've gone to college now, where your dean of students, your sororities and fraternities, your leadership organization.
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Those are the kind of people who get those kinds of degrees.
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But in the SPA program, I could also take courses
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that area in what they call guidance and counseling or counseling and guidance, something like that, which is now clinical mental health or counselor education or something like
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that.
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And I could take courses in counseling psychology.
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For some reason, I took a lot of my courses in counseling psychology; they all counted toward my master's degree.
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And when I was in that program, the guy who was chair of admissions of counseling psychology came up to me one day and said, "Rosie, you know, I think you'd make a good
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psychologist.
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I think that you ought to apply to our program." I said, "Oh, okay." He says, "So, have your files sent over from the College of Education.
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And then you come and talk to me and I'll tell you how to complete the application to enhance your chances of getting in." 'Cause Ohio State at that time took four or five
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students a year into their
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doc program.
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So I did have my files sent over but I never went and talked to him and I never applied.
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That's why I say, here's your And my girlfriend who was a 4.0 student didn't get in.
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I had a 3.7.
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I got in to the counseling psych prog-.
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And the reason that I did it, it's pretty pitiful I know, but the reason I did it is because I finished my master's in December.
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And I said, "I'm not ready to go to work.
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I think I'll just stay and go in this doctoral program.
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And then about a year and a half later, I had finished all my coursework for my doctorate.
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And I said, "Uh-oh." And my advisor told me it's time to take my comprehensive exam.
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And I said, "Uh-oh." So I studied with the smartest white boys in the class.
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Because I wanted to pass.
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One of my white girlfriends didn't.
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I passed, she didn't.
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Because I was not embarrassed by being with them and them knowing more than I might know.
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I told her that my goal is to pass, it's not to care what somebody thinks about me.
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So I did, I passed and...
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The really good thing about passing that exam, and this is, you had a question on there that you sent me about who influenced me, and Bruce Walsh was my advisor.
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And Bruce ran up to me one day after I had passed my exam, because then what you had to do was pick people to give you an oral exam.
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They gave you an exam on the written exam.
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And so I, of course, picked all the hardest white guys, because I want to prove
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myself to everybody that I got this, that I did the work and got it.
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Bruce walked up to me in the hall one day and said, "Rosie, I see you got doctor so and so on your committee.
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Didn't you and he have a thing?" I said, "No." When I took his class, and it was assessment,
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he complimented me a lot and he did, he really did.
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And he said, "Yeah, but didn't you have...?" And I'm thinking, "No I didn't," and then I go home at night and honestly, Debra, this is the way, I tell this story all the time, and
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it's the same story.
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I go home and think,
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"I got one white man trying to tell me something about another white man.
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I better take that man off my committee." And I did.
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I took him off and replaced him with another guy.
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Bruce walks up to me the next day in class and said, "Did you take doctor so-and-so off?" So I said, "Yeah, I did." He said, "I almost called you at home last night to tell you."
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And I said, "Oh, man, that must have been..." And so when they blind-rated our exams, I had one set that were not great
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and all the rest of them were good.
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And he said, well, "You got one little set here, but we culled that one." And so the good thing is that he was not on my oral examining committee to examine me.
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And so that went fine too.
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And I finally said, "I guess I'm going to get a doctorate." That was when I finally knew I was getting a PhD.
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And Bruce and I worked on my dissertation.
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I had these wild ideas about what to do.
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And he said, "Yeah
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you could do that or you could do the study that I'm doing." And he was working with a guy by the name of John Holland.
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You're familiar with the Strong Interest Inventory?
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And it has those things where you can be realistic, investigative, all that.
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Those things were developed by a guy named John Holland.
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And Holland at the time was trying to validate his instruments, the Self Directed Search and the Vocational Preference Inventory.
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Mm-hmm.
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the study that I did was to validate it with college degree black women.
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So I had to find college degree black women in all those categories to see if those instruments actually could...
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not predict, but were consistent with and correlated with their...
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And I did.
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And honestly, that has been really, really good for me because I had a career interest anyway.
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And that just made it possible for me to continue to work in that area and teach in that area.
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And I loved it.
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So Bruce has been a really good friend.
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Now, I cannot remember what question you asked me to make me tell you my life story like that, but...
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That's okay, Rosie, because I think one of the things as you were talking and, you know, I was hearing is how you had this advisor, mentor who was looking out for you, like helping
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you navigate what, what to make you be able to do the things that he knew you had it in you,
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that you didn't need these extra barriers.
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And I guess I'm just saying he was a mentor.
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He was an ally to you.
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And
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really was.
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And then I had my buddies.
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So I had my friend David, who was, he and I were bad kids in graduate school.
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Yeah, we partied all the time.
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I had a good time when I was in grad-, I had the tough times and I did the work.
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But even when I was in undergrad, my commitment was to work
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Sunday afternoon until Friday at five and the weekend was mine.
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And I really had that same attitude in graduate school and when I went to work.
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I worked hard day and night and then I partied.
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It sounds like that was part of your balance in life too.
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You knew you needed to work hard but you also had time to kind of have fun, relax, be with your friends, kind of connect.
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I guess...
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dancing.
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I still love to dance.
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Yeah Love it.
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Uh-huh.
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Yep.
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So even at those APA parties, usually I go to and dance and have a really good time; this time I couldn't.
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My arthritis would let me but any other time you can believe that when 45 and 35 have those parties, I'm out there partying.
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But I was also very serious.
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Yeah, I mean, it sounds like when you needed to work and be focused and study, you did that.
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But you also allowed yourself to have time to have fun, relax, be with your friends.
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And so, you know, important in terms of taking care of yourself, not only being focused on one thing.
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Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.
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I love working when I work.
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When I fell in love with psychology was when I went to work at the counseling center at the University of Florida I loved it.
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I mean, look...
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I would have to schedule myself one night off because I'd worked during the day and then I did outreach and...
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but not at night.
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I loved it, but I scheduled myself one night a week off just because I knew it made sense to not work all the time, but I...
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I loved it.
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First time I ever aspired for anything when
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I worked in that counseling center, I began to aspire to direct the counseling center.
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But I never had dreams.
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I was a poor kid who needed to work to earn money to take care of myself, but to aspire to something just because I loved it?
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That was the first time when I went to work as a psychologist and I loved it.
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My first job, as I told you, a professor.
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I didn't love it, but I'm telling you, being in that counseling center, doing individual and group therapy and outreach,
27:20
oh, I had met my spot.
27:24
That was it.
27:25
Yeah.
27:26
How wonderful.
27:28
I mean, we had talked about how you were able to take your degree and your strengths and your loves and figure out, where are my talents going to be used well?
27:40
And it sounds like that position at the Counseling Center, you were able to, what I call, find your sweet spot.
27:48
I did.
27:48
It was absolutely my sweet spot.
27:53
I also learned to work with diverse groups.
27:55
So for example,
27:57
I learned to do walk-ins, some black folk would walk in, and then I ended up starting a group for black women.
28:04
And then I realized, at that time we said Hispanic students were not coming.
28:10
So the way that we got them to do it with an intern was I formed a Hispanic academic enrichment group to get them to talk about their academics and then when we got to their
28:22
personal issues, we could refer them.
28:24
And so I learned ways
28:26
to get all kind of people
28:28
to come in and get the services they needed by going where they felt safe first and then having them shift over to come for things that were bothering them in some significant
28:41
way.
28:42
And so I learned to do that.
28:44
Black Women Against the Odds.
28:45
We did a conference that I chaired.
28:49
And the other thing that I did while I was there, I knew...
28:53
I've always known,
28:54
it's important as a black woman and then I learned as a person who worked in the student affairs side of things, that there are things that I have to do so that people accept
29:07
that I'm good enough to be where I was.
29:09
So when I was at Florida, I started making sure I set goals for myself.
29:14
I was not a faculty, but I set a goal to publish twice a year, to present at least one national, one regional, one local conference every year.
29:23
My job didn't require it.
29:25
Rosie required it.
29:26
And so I would take off on vacation to finish writing articles because I didn't want anybody telling me that I couldn't do it.
29:35
So I'd do it on my vacation time.
29:37
And so my credentials looked like the faculty that enabled the faculty to listen to me when I talked to them about student needs.
29:47
Yeah, and that worked well for me.
29:49
I loved it.
29:51
yeah, let me ask you, Rosie, as you're talking, some people may counter it like, "Yeah, see, she had to work that much more to be accepted, you know, at that other level." How
30:02
did that sit with you and that you accepted that as something you wanted to set as a goal for yourself, you know?
30:12
It's right now, like we're in the midst of this whole thing about people of color being DEI, or being affirmative action picks and all that stuff.
30:21
I knew that wasn't real.
30:24
I knew that I had people compliment me just for having subject-verb agreement.
30:30
I always knew I had to work harder.
30:32
Mm-hmm.
30:33
it and I didn't care because I like working hard anyway so it wasn't no issue for me.
30:38
So when I applied to be director of the counseling center at University of Memphis, the guy who was the vice president said to me,
30:45
"Rosie, I don't have a high-ranking black woman in my administration.
30:49
If you are as good as the guy," and it was a white guy we're looking at, "I'll hire you." I said, "I'll be better." And my credentials were better because I knew they had to be.
31:01
I knew they had to be all along and so I made them better.
31:06
And so I knew that I worked a lot.
31:09
So I never
31:10
cared one whit about somebody calling me an affirmative action hire, because I knew that the people that I knew who were affirmative action hires were white.
31:23
It was not the people I knew, because we had to work twice as hard to get that same job.
31:29
I knew that.
31:29
I understood that.
31:31
And I didn't care.
31:33
I really don't.
31:34
I didn't care.
31:35
I loved what I was doing.
31:36
I loved helping all students, all of them.
31:39
So I didn't care about having to work harder because I like working hard anyway, so who cared?
31:46
I loved reading when I was a kid.
31:47
I loved it.
31:48
That's what I did.
31:49
I had fun and I worked hard and I loved it; still do.
31:54
I don't love working hard as much right now, but...
31:57
Okay, Rosie, well, I commend you and it just sounds like you accepted what you saw as reality to be able to do what you loved.
32:10
So I want to move us, because you talked about your love for reading.
32:15
I want to, for all of you, you, this this is actually why I asked Rosie to be on my
32:21
podcast.
32:21
She has recently written a book: "Rosie's Superpower: The Power of Imagination." And I'm wanting to kind of talk about this book as I know, you know, your career has focused on
32:37
deep poverty, your own life.
32:39
You talked about that earlier in the broadcast.
32:41
So tell me what inspired you to write this book at this time?
32:48
Actually when I was...
32:51
oh it probably was in 2017 or '18 or somewhere around in there.
32:56
And I have this closet that's big enough to exercise in.
32:59
So I'm some doing sit-ups in the closet.
33:01
And I was an NPR nut, and so I'm listening to "Poverty Mythbusters." And this one was on pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
33:09
And it was Chetty and Hendren talking about if you are born into, if you live in the bottom quintile, your chances of making it to the top quintile anywhere in the world is
33:23
only 15%.
33:23
In the United States,
33:27
your chances...
33:28
if you were in I think was San Jose, 12.9 percent.
33:32
And they said, "And if you're from Memphis, Tennessee..." And of course that caught my attention.
33:37
"...your chances are three percent." And I said, "God dang, I'm a miracle!" Yeah, yeah, and so that made me even want to think about poverty even more.
33:47
So when I was asked to run
33:49
for president of APA...
33:51
and really one of my old colleagues asked me if she could nominate me.
33:55
And I said, okay, thinking I would never get enough nominations.
34:00
Then it was the last week I think and people said, "Let's nominate Rosie, blah blah." And I told my husband, I said, "Oh!
34:05
People are nominating me." I said, "What shall we do?" And so he was happy that I had just stopped being a vice president.
34:11
So that must have been 2016 or 2017.
34:14
So I said, "Okay, how about this?
34:15
I'll only do it if I get at least a hundred nominations." 'Cause I wanted room to say no.
34:23
So when Susan McDaniel called me and told me I'd been nom-.
34:26
I said, "Yeah, I know.
34:27
But my husband and I agreed I'd only run if I got least 100 nominations." She said "Well, you got 119." And I almost fell off the chair.
34:36
And I said, "Oh, my goodness." And she said, "You could either run to just run or run to win." I said, "I think I'm going to run to win." And then I had people start to call me or
34:47
write to me
34:48
saying that they wanted to be on my team to get me nominated.
34:52
So that's when I started to think seriously, okay, if I do this, what am I going to use that microphone for?
34:59
And I knew it had to be on not just poverty, but deep poverty, because people did not understand that.
35:07
And what I came to learn was that psychologists, 90% of them don't ever see anybody poor.
35:13
They just don't.
35:14
If you don't know poor people, you don't interact with poor people.
35:18
If you're not poor, you rarely ever know a poor person.
35:22
And so I wanted to get the message out about what that was doing to poor people.
35:26
And I was a great example because I had been that.
35:30
And so one of the things that I wanted to do to get people's attention was to tell them the Rosie story and talk about this little girl
35:39
who had lived in this four-room shotgun house; the way that we ate was beans and cornbread and we'd have to eat it every day.
35:48
And when we didn't have any beans that my mother...
35:53
and I just tell the story of Rosie, I wouldn't say it was me, but she'd fry some fat back and make gravy and we'd eat cornbread and gravy and save that fat back for the next day.
36:04
And wash the clothes and rinse them in a tin
36:08
tub and hung 'em up.
36:09
To tell the story, and people could relate to the story.
36:12
And then I'd go into facts about poverty.
36:17
And the thing about poverty, Debra, is that it is all over.
36:22
Mm-hmm.
36:23
place I got up and talked about it in the United States, folk would come up and whisper to me that they were poor.
36:30
So there's so much shame because in this country, we do have that myth about pulling yourself up by your bootstrap.
36:37
We do have that thing about having shame about poverty.
36:41
And yet, there is not a single city in these United States that doesn't have people living in poverty and extreme poverty.
36:49
We make people ashamed about it.
36:52
When we talk about SNAP benefits and talk about people out of work, there is nobody I know who wants to be poor and who wants to stand on the corner and beg.
37:01
And yet, we create those images saying that that's what it is so that we can take away benefits from poor people.
37:10
When we have people working, when we...
37:14
in order to get benefits, Medicaid, you've got to go to work.
37:17
So you're having a sick person...
37:19
Say you got to go to work, because they create an atmosphere that says that poor people are just playing and that they're ripping off the system.
37:28
How?
37:29
Who wants to live like that?
37:31
Name me one person.
37:32
And they will come up with a story; I remember Reagan had somebody some woman who had a Cadillac or something.
37:37
And I'm not saying that there aren't some people who would rip off the system; there are.
37:42
But most poor people are not clamoring to be poor.
37:46
That's just not true.
37:48
And so just to get individuals to hear the facts, I would tell the story.
37:54
And so it was the Rosie story.
37:56
And so then when COVID came, I said, well, I've started, I've edited some books, but I've never actually written a book.
38:03
I said, well, it looks like I'm never gonna actually write a book.
38:06
I wonder, could I write a short story?
38:08
And it was during COVID.
38:10
And so then I looked up, how do you write a short story?
38:13
And so it told me three incidents and a solution.
38:19
And so that made me
38:20
think, I've been telling that Rosie story now over and over again.
38:23
Maybe I'll put it into book form.
38:26
And the part of the story that was true, and the part of the story that I told when I was a little girl, was about wearing those shoes with the hole in the bottom that I had to put
38:37
cardboard over.
38:37
So that was true.
38:38
And going to school, I would have these kids calling me black and ugly.
38:43
So I found that, okay...
38:47
What if I got a dollar
38:48
for every time they called me black and ugly?
38:51
What could I buy at the end of the week?
38:53
And the first thing I did think of buying was a pair of shoes.
38:57
And what I've learned over the years is that every child...
39:01
and I called it a superpower because that little girl could get through bullying and still go there and be the smartest kid in the class a lot of time because she had a way not to
39:11
let that bullying drag her down.
39:14
Mm.
39:14
every little kid, and if I asked you, you have a way that you thought up to make it through being a kid.
39:23
Every child does.
39:24
And so I want children to discover their superpower, to remember what it is and apply it in their situations, because you still need it today.
39:34
You need to learn how you formed it as a child and how you must keep forming it as an adult.
39:39
Yeah.
39:40
So really that superpower, tapping into your resilience and your strengths.
39:48
Tell me, you know, as you were writing this book, what do you want parents, teachers, psychologists, you know, all the adults, what do you want them to get from the book?
40:01
'Cause the book is wonderful.
40:03
And I think at the level of young readers,
40:07
in showing, you know, the ways in which you, that little girl Rosie, tapped into her superpowers.
40:15
But what would you want adults to get from this book?
40:19
In the first place, adults sometimes are more impacted by that book than children because most adults have gone through some kind of trauma as a child.
40:28
It may not be the trauma with the death of a parent or something like that, but there are little things.
40:33
All children go through something or other.
40:37
Because everybody wants to belong.
40:39
I think that's a natural human instinct because we want to survive.
40:42
So we want to belong.
40:44
And so most children go through something when somebody has done something or other to them, or they thought that they had to be...
40:52
I mean, with all the social media now, they think they've got to look a certain way.
40:56
They've got to wear their hair a certain way.
40:58
They've got to do a cer-, to be accepted.
41:00
And right now we have so much loneliness and so much sadness and
41:05
so many mental health issues among children more than we ever have had before.
41:09
And I think that's because we get that fake social media stuff, thinking life is perfect.
41:15
Well during my time before social media you still had that fake stuff and children want to belong and they don't.
41:22
And adults relate to it because they went through something as a child themselves.
41:27
And so they relate to it because nobody has ever given them permission to talk about it.
41:33
Children relate to it because they're going through it now.
41:36
So when I read it to children, they come and tell me...
41:39
and if it isn't even that they've had something terrible happen, it's that they have a dream and they want their dreams to come true.
41:48
So even in the little superpower book, Rosie dreams about what could be better for her.
41:54
So I love reading it to children because then I'll say, I'll ask them what is their superpower and most of them can tell me.
42:02
And then I'll ask them, what is your dream?
42:05
What do you want to be?
42:06
I had this one little person tell me he really wants to be a billionaire.
42:09
I think he was in...
42:12
He did.
42:13
And I said, "And would you share that with your classmates?" And he said, "No!" He wouldn't give any of it.
42:19
And that tells me that what some of the messages are in the media that are making it down to children,
42:24
we have got to find a way to have that little boy say, "I can be a billionaire and it's okay to share with someone." Others want to be...
42:35
want to have one of those, what is that in Star Trek where they have a lightsaber or whatever?
42:40
They want to, they want to fight off something and save the world, you know.
42:44
So children have dreams and they have fears.
42:48
And so what I want them to be able to do is to tap into...
42:51
I love reading to little kids.
42:53
One of my favorite things that happened to me, the woman who's currently the vice president for student affairs at the University of Memphis, it's also over the bookstore.
43:02
And so she had her bookstore manager arrange to get some books and then have the...
43:09
we have a campus school.
43:10
And so we had the kindergartners, first graders,
43:14
and second graders all come from the campus school at their grade levels.
43:18
I read to the kindergartners, the first graders, and the second graders.
43:21
That's my favorite thing to do is to read it to the kids and have them tell me their stories.
43:27
And that's why I know that they all have...
43:29
If I were wanting to do research, I could go find their stories and let them tell their stories and get strength from what their stories are now.
43:39
I love it.
43:40
The superpower and the imagination to dream and dream big, right?
43:47
Dream big.
43:50
And they do.
43:50
And most children
43:52
have dreams.
43:53
I'm working with a young person now, a late teenager, and he's had dreams but I don't think he's ever actually told anybody what they are.
44:04
And he has to figure out how do I solve the issues that I have so that I can implement the dream that I have?
44:13
How do you fulfill it?
44:14
There's a way to do it.
44:15
There's a way to do it.
44:16
But we have so much stuff on TV that makes us think it's easy.
44:21
It's not easy for the most part.
44:23
There are not that many football players who make it to the NFL or basketball players who make it to the NBA or top models or top actors or presidents of the United States.
44:34
But you can have a fulfilling life.
44:36
You have to have a dream.
44:38
And how do you get to that dream?
44:40
And how do you keep the world from dragging you down?
44:43
That's what we have to do for our children, all of them.
44:46
We're having to do it for all people right now, and right now in this country we need it more than ever because we tend to unfortunately focus too much on the things that divide
44:56
us rather than the things that unite us.
44:59
And the things that divide us usually are the things that tell another group what their weaknesses are or how awful they are instead of saying, where do we find the strength in
45:11
those individuals to make them a better person and the world a better place?
45:16
Powerful, wonderful, Rosie.
45:19
We've talked about your childhood, the book, things that you have felt so important.
45:26
What would you hope people would remember you by or your legacy in terms of all your work and your life?
45:35
What would you want that to be?
45:38
You know, what I love, and the reason I think that I have loved my job so well is that I really, really love to help people survive, thrive, and soar.
45:52
I really do.
45:53
One of my favorite songs was "The Wind Beneath Your Wings." I like that and I want children to know that you were born whole and perfect.
46:06
That doesn't mean that you cannot make changes but you were born whole and perfect.
46:13
You're good enough.
46:14
And if you want to make some enhancements, fine.
46:18
But you were born whole and perfect.
46:20
I want them to understand that because I want them to survive and thrive and soar.
46:24
And I want them to help others survive, thrive, and soar.
46:29
If I could see that being done, I'm a happy woman.
46:33
I have no illusions.
46:35
I really don't have any illusions about, for real, being a superstar or anything.
46:40
We all live a time on earth and we die.
46:43
And because I still to this day don't know who Benjamin Franklin's secretary was.
46:50
But I know whoever helped him, helped him to soar.
46:54
And that's what I want for us, to help others to survive, thrive, and soar.
47:01
That's what I want.
47:04
beautiful, Rosie, beautiful.
47:07
I was president of APA and worked in council, and you know, council for those of you who will reach, it is this governing group.
47:15
It's like our, like the United States Senate and House of Rep- Congress.
47:20
So you gotta get up there and manage it.
47:22
At first I was afraid to do it, but when I got in front of that group, I knew that my job was to help every member of council
47:32
Mm-hmm.
47:33
to survive, thrive, and soar; that was my job.
47:36
It was not to make anything happen.
47:38
It was to help them reach fruition and to be the best representatives and council persons that they could possibly be and do the best good they could for APA and all the people
47:49
they represented.
47:50
It was not about me.
47:51
It was how do I create an atmosphere so that people can do their best and be their best.
47:56
That's what I want.
47:58
Wow.
47:58
Okay, Rosie.
48:00
So last question: From all that we've talked about and you know, just what would be one thing that you would want our audience members to know as a takeaway from today's episode?
48:22
Other than knowing that they're perfect?
48:26
I would want them to really get in touch with...
48:30
What is their superpower and how can they use it to help themselves and help others?
48:36
I think that, really and truly, if I had a t-shirt I'd probably put "Be Kind" on it.
48:44
Personally in my personal life, my prayers are for
48:48
faith and kindness, to have faith and to be kind.
48:53
And so I think, though, in order to do that, people really do have to look inside and realize that they really have a lot to offer.
49:03
They can give that to themselves and to other people.
49:05
Rosie, I just, I mean, me being able to have this time with you has been a gift to me.
49:12
So precious and you're just so positive.
49:17
You believe in
49:18
people. I think you see the good in people and you just want them to be able to reach their potential in whatever they're wanting to
49:26
do. And for that, I am thankful that, you know, we have you in the
49:32
world.
49:34
Well, thank you.
49:34
Now, I don't want people to think that I don't get pissed, because I do.
49:39
And because...
49:40
I am just another human being.
49:42
It's just that I have to take a breath and step back and come back to what is the good and right thing to do.
49:48
But it's not that I don't get mad.
49:50
And sometimes I'll even respond to a text and an email, and then I'll erase it, because it's just going to hurt somebody.
49:58
And that is not helpful.
49:59
I really appreciate you saying that, Rosie, so that people know it's not like you're this perfect person that doesn't have any of those other emotions or feelings or thoughts, but
50:12
how do you manage them?
50:14
What do you do with them?
50:16
And that you're a real person, just like the rest of us.
50:20
But we can believe, we can hope and grow, you
50:25
know?
50:26
yeah.
50:27
Thank you so much for being here today.
50:30
I've really enjoyed this time with you.
50:33
For those of you that are interested, please check out her book, Rosie's Superpower: The Power of Imagination.
50:40
Amazon or my website or anywhere, but you can find it at Barnes & Noble, anyplace.
50:45
You can just Google it and find it and have fun with it.
50:49
Buy it and read it to a kid.
50:51
Yep, I second that for sure.
50:54
So there we have it.
50:56
That's the end of this episode.
50:59
Thank you for joining us.
51:01
And for you in the audience, please remember: Wellness is a journey, not a destination.
51:08
Please take good care of yourself and we'll see you next time.