June has been a powerful month. Pride Month honors the fight for inclusion and celebration for the LGBTQ+ community. Juneteenth finally became a national holiday the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans. And, the Optimist Daily completes a week focused on ancient wisdom featured at the World Unity Week conference.

In honor of so much that has made June an impactful month towards the goals of a more inclusive tomorrow and a world heading in a powerful and positive direction, we bring you a fascinating conversation with the Reverend Deborah L. Johnson, reflecting on the current moment as well as on the past.

Nicknamed “Rev D.”, the Reverend Debra L. Johnson is an activist, educator and the founder and the spiritual director of a spiritual community called Inner Light Ministries. She has been a life-long social justice advocate, a healer and transformational agent, particularly helping heal cultural and socio-political divides.

With a specialty in organizational development, Rev D has maintained a consulting practice focused on  issues of diversity including the intersectionality of things like gender, sexual orientation, race and religion. since the 1980s. She has been involved in a number of precedent setting civil rights cases in the state of California.

I met Rev D through her work as a Board Member of the Pachamama Alliance, an organization working with indigenous tribes to protect the Amazonian rainforests and sacred headwaters. Among many other accomplishments: she is also a founding member of the Agape International Spiritual Center in Los Angeles with her mentor, Michael Bernard Beckwith, has received numerous awards, holds degrees in Political Science and Economics, an MBA in Urban Land Economics and Real Estate Finance, and topped off her educational journey by earning a Ministerial Degree.

In other words, she’s an inspiration.

Wherever she goes, Rev. D.’s message is Oneness, inclusion, possibility, empowerment, and transformation.

Rev. D. and I discussed the nature of reform and talked about how progress is never measured in a straight line.

Our  conversation touches on the growing awareness of our collective need to change emerging from the “perfect storms” of social, political, and economic issues We address how difficult it is to make the choice to say goodbye to the structural bounds created by different exploitations and supremacies of our societies, and we must collectively act to make uncomfortable changes for a better world.

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“Progress is never a straight line” – a conversation with Reverend Deborah L. Johnson

[Edited for length and clarity]

Kristy: REV D,  I am so thrilled to be here with you today.  You write and speak so openly and with such clarity about your history growing up in Los Angeles, personally struggling with issues of race, class, religion, gender, age, and sexuality. And how these experiences guided you into a life-long search to reconcile our human diversity and our spiritual divinity.  Part of the reason I want to talk with you is because of your background and your work in diversity and inclusion and your deep understanding of how to integrate these concepts into our lives and our businesses.

I’m wondering what, what are your thoughts about this moment? Do you feel like things are different now or do you feel like it’s just more of the same?

Rev D: Well, from the business world perspective, what I would say is that I think there really is some change afoot.

When I heard yesterday that it was the stakeholders at some of the largest oil companies in the world that basically flipped the whole compensation structure so that their top executives won’t even get the kinds of compensations that they would have been expecting unless they lower the carbon emissions….

That there are these moments kind of like Derek Chauvin being convicted on all counts. There are these little glimmers that I call them kind of trim tab moments. A term that Bucky Fuller [Buckminster Fuller] used to use…

From my perspective, all of this upheaval and chaos is part of the process.  It’s part of the process of healing.

Well, you know it. It takes, it takes a little bit. And when it comes to social justice and business, I feel like I have a little different perspective to a narrative out there that actually I find troubling.

When you look historically, we’ve actually made more progress on social justice issues in the business world than we have made in the political arena… on any number of fronts. When you look at something like gender equality, we still don’t have an equal rights amendment at a federal level. The only protections a woman has anywhere is in the workplace. She can be raped by her husband. She can be battered.  The only place a woman has any kind of protection against harassment, discrimination — is actually in the workplace! What I am saying is that the safest place for a woman is actually at work.

Now, I know that’s hard to imagine, but when you just look at it, historically….

Or take the LGBTQ community: Our first protections came in the corporate world. They were the first ones to do domestic partnerships. And even when the big marriage equality cases were being tried in the Supreme court, there was something like 600 of the biggest corporations all saying, do it, do it, do it. And yet we’re still battling this in the public arena.

So, what I know is that progress is never a straight line. Nothing is linear, everything is cyclical, everything kind of recycles. What I see happening now in the corporate world, I look at as the next installment, kind of the next layer of going back to some of its roots in doing this work and now going up at some higher levels.

What I’m about is true radical inclusion — honoring the allies everywhere, not doing the demonization anywhere.

Have we reached Nirvana? Of course not, but pound for pound, when you look at any other of the institutions: if you look at religion, if you look at economics. If you look at the political landscape, you know, education, criminal justice, health care, on and on and on, you’re actually going to find, pound for pound, more progress happening in the business arena.

So, I just got to do that as a preface, to say that big business has one, gotten a bad rap and two, it’s not getting its due.

What I am about is true radical inclusion – honoring the allies everywhere, not doing the demonization anywhere. And this is to say that business has been an ally in this for some time in ways that do not get acknowledged. That, I think is to the detriment of us all.

Kristy: I love that concept.

Rev D: Now there is something that’s different. Now there’s no question about it. There is an awareness growing. I would say when George Floyd was murdered, it was the perfect storm for any number of reasons from COVID to Trump to, I mean, I can go on and on. But what is significantly different now is that there is an understanding…. At least it is the beginning of an understanding, a glimmer of understanding, that the isms are not just about discrimination.

People have thought that the end and the purpose of the isms was discrimination. But now we are coming to grips with the larger ends, which is the issues of supremacy and superiority, which was not something that we would even speak of before.

But something clicked in the collective psyche with George Floyd, and watching that murder and people really feeling not just the pain of the Black men dying, but the corruption of this system that allows it to perpetuate.

So, when people were out in the streets, when white people were out in the streets and other non-black races out in the streets, shouting Black Lives Matters, sub context of what they were saying was white supremacy has to go, right?

Kristy: In a way, both Derek Chauvin and George Floyd were victims of the whole supremacist model that they exist within.

Rev D: Yes, exactly. I say that all the time. I just said that at his anniversary rally here that white supremacy hurts everybody. And I think it’s taken the January insurrection to drive that home to a lot of people that this isn’t just a white versus people of color issue. No.

Kristy: iIt’s about trying to preserve a worldview, a hierarchical structure of dominance that predicates everything in our lives from our earliest childhoods to our dying day; from our marital relationships or our intimate relationships to our employer relationships; to our family, extended families and, and it infects every part of society. And, which has led us to destroy our planet.

Rev D: Exactly. I always say footprint on the planet, footprint on the people.

It’s the same footprint. What’s happening is that this thing that we keep calling the big lie… The big lie isn’t about Trump winning the election. The big lie is this thing that you’re talking about. It is the unwillingness to come to grips with the shifting demographics, the loss of positionality of absolute power.

It reminds me of something that Martin Luther King Jr. said when he said that the days of segregation are over. You could be certain of that. The only thing uncertain was how costly the segregationists will make the funeral. And that’s where we are now. The days of supremacy, they’re really over.

The question…. male supremacy, religious supremacy, on and on, gender — it’s over. The question is: how costly will the supremacists make the funeral?

And what I see now, it’s just, there’s so much energy going on now. So much invigoration, so much hope, and alliances being built, and people really doing the work. There’s an aliveness now, that’s in the midst of the pain. That is a joy to see.

Kristy: I’m being bolstered by that energy, even just talking with you. And it’s funny because, as we started off this conversation, you mentioned the shareholders of Exxon saying this is going to stop. And they voted into the boardroom environmental activists who are now going to change the way that fossil fuel-based company is run. It’s no longer a question of if we’re going to get off fossil fuel. It is when. No question we will eventually end the carbon economy. It’s just, how long, and how costly will the funeral be?

But now we’re facing a damaged climate for our survival, and all the other structures that go along with it. The human costs have been tremendous. All of these things are interconnected: the racial inequities and environmental inequities, these things are very closely linked.

Rev D: Yeah. And, also we all have to assume our responsibility in it. You know, the oil companies, they weren’t drinking the oil. No, you know, we were buying it.

We were using it. We were culprits in the whole enterprise. And, and the reason why I bring that up is that, as we were talking before, — the pain pushes until vision pulls — it’s too easy to scapegoat. It’s too simple to place blame, and point out there that, “Oh, well it’s big business. It’s the police department.” It’s this it’s that, you know, while all along, we’ve been complicit. These are our tax dollars. And a lot of this stuff that’s been going on, we’ve been financing. At some point we have to say, “Enough.”

Kristy: I agree that we have to make that choice, and that we have to invest in alternatives. But the counterargument is that there’s tremendous discomfort or pain in giving up some of those things, that it is too difficult to say goodbye. What is missed is that there are also the benefits that you get from the new choices.

Rev D: But see, you speak to where in my mind, the rubber hits the road. In the business world, there’s a concept of opportunity costs. You know, you’ve got hard costs, soft costs, all these other kinds of costs… and the idea of opportunity costs essentially says that you can only invest something in so many ways.

So, if I have an egg, I put it in the cake. Then I can’t have scrambled eggs in the morning. And what I always verbalize and articulate in my trainings with people, whether it’s straight up social justice or spirituality, or whatever, is that I want to help show them that it costs too much to stay where they are. That the opportunity costs in what you’re missing, the power you’re trading for, in the joy you’re trading in, the reconciliation, the clean heart… You’re forgetting that staying where you are in the status quo, costs too much.

All of these things that we are clinging onto, once again, they are costly. We are paying the price in so many different ways.

And where it connects is that we have this false narrative, that change is more difficult than staying where we are. That false narrative that it’s easier to stay in the status quo and that it’s more uncomfortable to change. But that really isn’t true. All of these things that we are clinging onto, once again, they are costly. We are paying the price in so many different ways. It’s just kind of which discomfort do you want then. Not changing is not going to be pain-free. It’s not.

Kristy: No, it’s not. I love that you frame that as a false narrative. And that is exactly the argument when we talk about how it’s going to cost too much to get off fossil fuels. I know I keep going back to the oil economy as my touchstone, but this is where I’ve done so much of my thinking. And I do feel like it’s a metaphor, and that these are just different areas of dominance and of an extractive mentality. It’s the same conversation. It just has different faces.

Rev D: Exactly. And what it looks like in my mind is that in our capitalistic system, the first big extraction was not only the land and the resources, but black bodies.

Kristy: Absolutely. The slave economy was the first extractive economy that there was.

Rev D: Exactly. So black coal, fossil fuel was just the next iteration.

Kristy:  It’s just a different kind of labor. It’s the energy that is extracted from that labor.

Rev D: What I’m saying is that it was the same mentality. It was the same mentality, and we’re entering into a new era.  But, kind of similar to what I was saying about the corporations, and also what my grandmother used to say, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”  Most of our “new technologies” are trying to accord with nature. They’re trying to use the best of what nature has. It’s like, we got off that track so to speak. And we’re trying to get back on now and to live in better…

Kristy: harmony?

Rev D: Right. The reason why I bring this up is that one, I think it’s arrogant on our parts to keep thinking that we’re doing stuff that’s just so new; and two, it helps to break once again, that false narrative of it being impossible.

What do you think we were doing for hundreds of thousands of years?

Kristy: In a way, this era is an aberration; this last couple of hundred years is a bizarre turn in our history. This is the dead end for us humans.  Maybe we’re done with this and we’re ready to move back…

Rev D: Right. But we too often look at our norms as though that’s our nature. See? So, then we think, well, we’re actually going against our nature to have a caring economy!

But it’s like, no, no, no, we’re going back to our more fundamental roots. We’re wired for community! Our brains are wired for community.

Kristy: Rev D, this has been a fantastic hour with you. We always like to end our interviews with the question: What in the world today is making you optimistic or where are you finding inspiration or optimism or hope right now?

Rev D: There’s an energy, as we mentioned earlier, an energy of possibility, and I am literally watching things shift and change. And my own life is the proof. You know, here I am: an out, Black, lesbian celebrating 25 years as the spiritual director of an independent church. When halfway through college, it was still illegal…We’re talking felony. We were sick. American Psychiatric Association hadn’t changed its mind. Completely demonic, according to the church.

I mean, I grew up with all of that, so I don’t have to go much further actually than my own life, to see that something is shifting and happening …. moving towards that whole integrated, interconnected… Not to be long-winded here, but from my perspective, all of this upheaval and chaos is part of the process. It’s part of the process of healing. Everything unlike where you’re trying to go, has to come up to heal. You can’t heal what you don’t feel. So, the fact that we feel the racism now gives me hope.

That may sound weird, but just being in the pain of it all is the sign to me that finally, finally, we might have a chance to really do something.

So, I look at the number of women in the positions that they’re in. You know, I look at Obama being president and Kamala Harris. There are just all of these little things. It says, we’re moving in a direction.

You don’t get there overnight. But I kind of feel like when King was quoting Moses, you know, King Jr., “I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there…”

Kristy: But it’s coming.

Rev D: The fact that I was legally married. Oh my God. And what happens, like it’s the pendulum swing. I mean, I literally. Literally, in the civic center, in the same office, as I was applying for my marriage license on October 6th, 2008, I did my absentee ballot and voted, voted for Obama, like sitting at the same spot. I had gone to heaven.

And there will be the swing back. We see it with Roe vs Wade and all the transgender stuff. And 13 states never changed their books about it’s only a man and a woman and you know… there’ll be the pushback, but that’s, that’s part of the drama. You’ve got to be in it for the long haul, but you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. It may be a costly funeral, but…

…. But it’s coming.