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Campfire Learn Together: The Job Still to Be Done

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I think it knows and doesn’t itself want to cope, and that is the society’s problem, not mine.

— Maya Angelou, Bill Moyers Journal, 1973

When I was young, I knew a lot. Now I don’t know nothing, which is a great relief.

— James Baldwin, in conversation with Maya Angelou, Assignment America, 1975

For our Sunday, October 11, 2026 at 10AM CT, 4PM UK Campfire Learn Together, we are watching and discussing two conversations from the THIRTEEN archive: Maya Angelou talking with Bill Moyers in 1973 about being a Black woman in America, and Maya Angelou talking with James Baldwin in 1975 — her friend and, in her words, her brother and teacher and pen pal.

We have been quoting these two for years without ever sitting down to listen to them during a Campfire. Our Learning Space opens with a line we borrowed from Baldwin by way of Gayatri Sethi: The place where we belong does not exist. We will build it. Our canary entry carries Carla Shalaby’s line from Troublemakers: as Maya Angelou reminds us, the caged bird will always sing of freedom. Baldwin turns up across our glossary — in framing, privilege, allyship, and belonging. That is a lot of borrowing from two people whose voices we have never brought into the room.

So this week they get the room. No lectern, no essay, no finished paragraph. Two writers talking, unscripted, on public television, fifty years ago. In the first conversation Angelou answers the questions. In the second she asks them.

What comes up across fifty-four minutes is our territory, almost item by item: labels as a way of not dealing with people, the cost of being asked to be strong, the energy it takes to resist all day, family as the net under the tightrope, belonging, and freedom as a job you start over every morning. They say all of it about being Black in America — as a Black woman, and as a Black gay man — and we are going to be careful about that. They are not metaphors for us. They are elders with a great deal to say to us, and to the Black Autistic and Disabled people in our community, who live where these lines cross.

We watch. We reflect. We bring our whole bodyminds. And in the morning, we start the job again.

Videos

We’ll watch both together at the start of the session — subtitles on, sound up, cameras optional. No need to have watched ahead. We’ll take a bodymind break between them.

Maya Angelou on Being a Black Woman in America — Bill Moyers Journal, 1973, from THIRTEEN’s archive. About twenty-six minutes. Angelou has Gather Together in My Name, the second volume of her autobiography, due out in the spring. Moyers grew up ninety-eight miles from her hometown of Stamps, Arkansas, and the ease between them lets her say things to a white Texan on national television that are still hard to hear. Labels, the strength of Black women, freedom and belonging, Watergate, critics, and the melting pot.

Maya Angelou & James Baldwin in Conversation — Assignment America, 1975, from THIRTEEN’s archive. About twenty-eight minutes. Angelou was one of the series’ four rotating hosts. Baldwin has just turned fifty and lives in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France; the two of them usually keep this conversation going by mail, and met in Los Angeles to pick it up face to face. Exile, family, the assassinations, sexuality, love, death, success, and why a writer never finishes trying to be one.

Content note. The Baldwin conversation speaks of the murders of Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King Jr., of addiction, and of friends who died young, and a racial slur is spoken once. The Angelou conversation speaks plainly about slavery, rape, and murder. Take it in pieces. Leave the room whenever you need to, and come back, or don’t.

Two conversations, one question: where do you belong — and who is building it with you?

Table of Contents

Put a Label on Somebody

All you have to do, you see, is put a label on somebody. And then you don’t have to deal with the physical fact.

Moyers opens with a question built on an assumption: how does a person who is both Black and female come to grips with a society that doesn’t know who she is?

Angelou takes the assumption apart before she answers. She names herself in three words — I woman, I Black, I human — and then says she doesn’t believe the society is confused at all. It knows. It doesn’t want to cope. And that is the society’s problem, not hers.

Then she explains how not coping works. It doesn’t want to deal with the human quality of me, so it reaches for a label. Once you have said that’s a junkie, you never have to wonder whether that person loves Christmas, loves their parents, or is afraid of dogs. The label is the end of it.

Moyers supplies the word himself. Stereotypes are easy to categorize — more manageable. Exactly, she says.

Manageable is the whole point. A label isn’t a description. It is a management technique.

This is our house position, spoken about race and gender on public television in 1973. We publish a page called Broken Systems, Not Broken People, and its promise is the same move Angelou makes: you don’t have to carry what institutions refuse to change. When a system can’t meet you, it tells you that you are the problem — motivation, grit, resilience, self-control. That story protects the system from accountability. It is the social model in one sentence: the barrier is out there, and so is the work.

Our labels entry carries Kieran Rose, The Autistic Advocate, on what clinical language does to Autistic people: They create categories that professionals have control over, and the rest of society absorbs it. That is Angelou’s junkie, in a different file cabinet. Functioning labels are the plainest example we have — high, low, severe, mild, words that let a service decide what you are owed without ever meeting you. Our own page says it bluntly: “Functioning” is often code for compliance.

Then she adds the line that tells you where a label lives:

Black women wear them only in white people’s eyes.

A label belongs to the person holding it. It says more about who is looking than about who is seen. That is what the pathology paradigm and deficit ideology have in common: an observer’s convenience, written up as a fact about someone else.

An Adjective, Not a Noun

It is certainly an adjective, but it is not a noun.

Angelou asks Baldwin to repeat something he once said to a man who asked him about homosexuality. It’s a weary, weary, weary question, he sighs, and then he answers it anyway.

The word can describe a person. It cannot replace one. To ask the question at all, he says, means you don’t know anything about human experience, where it can take you, what it can do. And then the consequence:

If you categorize the world in that way, then you lock yourself out from so much.

Grammar is politics. A noun swallows a person: a homosexual, a schizophrenic, an autistic, the forms clinicians and headline writers reach for. An adjective sits beside a person and tells you one true thing about them. That is part of why we use identity-first language. Autistic person is not a smaller claim than person with autism. It is a word we chose, attached to a human being — an adjective we own, not a noun someone filed us under.

Our labels entry holds the history behind that choice. Deaf communities refused clinical labels of deficit and claimed a culture. Queer communities reclaimed words once used as slurs and turned them into badges of solidarity. Same word, different hands.

And the same entry holds the complication, which we should bring to the campfire rather than smooth over. Labels are also keys. David Gray-Hammond warns there that schools and governments saying we don’t believe in labels is often a way to stop paying for support: These positions often masquerade as compassion while functioning as austerity. So the answer is not no labels. The answer is: who holds the word, and which part of speech it is.

Baldwin’s next story is the cost of getting that wrong. He has known boys, he says — football-player types, white boys too — who went on the needle and died, because they were afraid of what they might be. The category didn’t just lock other people out. It locked them in, and it killed them.

And then the line we put at the top of this post. When I was young, I knew a lot. Now I don’t know nothing, which is a great relief. It is the opposite of a category. It is a man at fifty who has stopped needing to sort people, and finds that restful.

Asked to Be Strong

You see, she’s asked to be strong, so she’s strong.

Moyers asks whether Black women are still wearing the old myths and labels. Angelou says they wear them only in white people’s eyes, and then she tells him a history.

Black women, she says, were brought from West African societies with matrilineal inheritance, and under slavery that inheritance went underground. After slavery, until around 1940, the Black woman was often the one in the family who could make a living, because Black men couldn’t get jobs. Moyers asks whether that gave rise to the image of matriarchal ogres. She does not let it stand. It’s not fair. It is not the total picture. People who use “matriarchy” as an insult should do their homework, she says, and see where it came from — and why the Black woman at some point begins to believe her own publicity.

Then she says the line the whole video opens on:

Black women have nursed a nation of strangers.

For hundreds of years, she says, they nursed babies who, they knew, would grow up to rape their daughters and kill their sons. Moyers says that’s strong. She says: I know, but it’s the truth, Bill.

She is doing two things at once, and we want to hold both.

She is honoring. The story of the Black woman is about the most noble story I know. There is a kind of strength in Black women, she says, that is almost frightening — as if a steel rod runs right through the head, down to the feet. No Black man in American history, she says, has been able to feel he didn’t need the Black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder, in the cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto.

And she is diagnosing. Asked to be strong names an ask. Believe her own publicity names what happens when you have been asked long enough.

Then Moyers asks whether women’s liberation is a white woman’s fantasy. Certainly not a fantasy, a necessity, she says — and it says very little, I’m afraid to Black women. White women, she argues, were made to feel decorative to the running of the world; Black women were never allowed that. She quotes a poem by the actress and poet Beah Richards, spoken to white womanhood, about the white woman who accepted a bracelet and never noticed it was a chain. That is intersectionality, sixteen years before Kimberlé Crenshaw gave it the name we use. Our intersectionality entry says its purpose is to reveal the systems that organize our society. Angelou revealed one on network television with a borrowed poem.

We will push on the steel rod in the Synthesis. For now, set beside it the words of Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, in a 2022 Good Morning America roundtable on the trope:

‘Strong Black woman,’ to me, allows so much time for abuse and manipulation, for not resting, for burning yourself out.

I want rest. I want ease. I need help.

Believe Your Own Publicity

You begin to believe your own publicity. You begin to take your identity from other people. And you stop experimenting.

Two years after the Moyers interview, Baldwin uses Angelou’s phrase almost word for word — about a different trap.

She asks how he copes with success. He says something she makes him say twice:

It is not possible for an artist to be a success.

Success, he says, is a little like finding yourself on a runaway horse, because you never see it coming. After Go Tell It on the Mountain, he says, everybody fell in love with him, and he was going to be the great new folklore hero. He wanted to be a writer instead. So he wrote a play, The Amen Corner, and put it in a trunk for years. Then he wrote Giovanni’s Room, partly as a finger exercise and partly in order to confront something I had to deal with myself.

Because, he says, one of the dangers of being a Black American, and certainly a Black American man, is such a complexity of poses. He had been playing a role. He didn’t want to drown in it.

Publicity is an identity assembled in other people’s eyes. The strong Black woman. The folklore hero. The stud. Angelou and Baldwin, two years apart, describe the same mechanism: someone else writes the part, you get good at playing it, and if you start to believe it, you stop being able to move.

We have a word for keeping that kind of part going, and our masking entry opens with what it costs: Masking is exhausting. Utterly utterly draining. We have written about the respectable version too — how being cultured, precise, articulate, and accurate did not protect Jason Arday, in our Campfire on his talks, because respectability politics is insurance that does not pay out.

Baldwin’s remedy is self-knowledge, not reputation:

A book is always flawed, and the writer knows it better than the critics do.

The person inside the work knows where the flaws are. The publicity never does.

A Kind of Asylum

It’s a kind of asylum. It’s the place where I can work.

Angelou asks what he feels when he comes back from his adopted home in France to his real one. He misses his family, he says, and a certain speed, energy, beat that only Black Americans have. And then he corrects her word. France is not exactly home. It is an asylum — in the old sense of the word, a refuge — the place where I can work.

Then this exchange, which may be the most important minute in either video for our community:

If you are in a situation where you’re always resisting and resenting, it’s very hard to … It takes too much energy.

Well, you can’t write a book, Angelou says. No, he says. You can’t [write] a sentence.

Resisting all day costs the sentence you would have written. That is energy accounting, stated by a man who left a country to get his energy back. We know this arithmetic. Spoon theory is its best-known form. Our belonging entry defines the thing Baldwin had to cross an ocean for: being able to participate without constantly having to explain yourself, hide parts of who you are, or push past exhaustion just to keep up.

Helen Edgar of Autistic Realms names where the cost goes, in No Space Is Neutral: for people holding marginalised identities, the ongoing work of navigating a world built for someone else accumulates in the body over time and impacts mental and physical health.

Baldwin says where it went, for the men he grew up with. Driving through Harlem, he asked his brother David what would have happened to him if he had stayed. David’s answer: you’d be dead, everybody else is. David is forty-three, Baldwin is fifty, and:

Neither of us knows anybody our age.

That sentence is racial weathering, said out loud by someone living through it — the repeated stress of racism showing up as chronic disease and early death. Our minority stress entry describes the same mechanism with citations. Baldwin describes it with a headcount. This is a high-priced country.

He also tells Angelou what his mother’s telephone is like when he is in town — the people who call to say what they will do to him — and reminds her that he has been writing, after all, between assassinations. When he was due to tour Germany for If Beale Street Could Talk, he learned that the United States Information Service had broken its arrangement with his German publisher. In effect, I was being banned by my own government. He went anyway, and refused to let a German audience congratulate itself at America’s expense. If you want to see the race problem here, he told them, look out the window and see who is sweeping your streets.

Exile did not take him out of the argument. It changed where he could stand to make it.

And he will not call it escape:

That’s why I can never leave it, by the way.

Angelou and Baldwin trade the old line about how you can’t go home again, and turn it around: you can’t even leave. You can’t leave home. You carry it with you.

No Net on the Tightrope

Ain’t no net on the tightrope. Each time out, it’s higher.

Angelou asks Baldwin whether he could stay alive, vital, and productive without his family. His answer is the tightrope — no net, higher every time — and then:

We have a certain safety because we love each other.

The family he describes is extraordinary. His mother raised nine children and knew every one of them, the difference between each of them. When he left for Paris in 1948, on a rainy day, she let me go. He believes she knew how much he loved them — maybe better than he did. He had five minutes, he says, and he had to jump, to save his family.

Angelou tells the part he leaves out. His brothers worked coal in the winter and ice in the summer, the family on welfare, and still saved up pennies and nickels and dimes to send him a check for a hundred and fifty dollars in Paris, France. Baldwin:

But that’s what people don’t really know. About us.

Years later it is his brother David who comes to see him in the south of France, because David always knows that I’m in trouble, reads the finished manuscript of the book Baldwin cannot let go of, and the next morning picks it up and mails it himself.

That is a care web: reciprocal, informal, holding someone up without a charity model anywhere in sight. It is mutual aid paid for in coal money. It is interdependence — our survival is bound up together — and it is why Baldwin could walk the tightrope at all.

It is also not only blood. Angelou says she feels lucky to have been adopted into that family. Baldwin won’t have it. She wasn’t adopted, he says — she marched in. That is chosen family, claimed by walking through the door.

And it is lineage. I trust my ancestors, Baldwin says, when Angelou asks him about death. When he is in trouble, when he is writing, he is listening to something. We watched two jazz masters do the same thing at two pianos earlier this year: elders keeping a lineage alive by hand. This tape is that, too.

Now set it beside what Angelou told Moyers two years earlier, when he asked what price she had paid for a free and wandering life:

At some point you only are free when you realize you belong no place, you belong every place, no place at all.

The price is high, the reward is great, she said. Do you belong anywhere? he asked. I haven’t yet. Do you belong to anyone? More and more. I mean, I belong to myself.

In 1973 she belongs to herself and no place at all. In 1975 she is part of a family she marched into. We will come back to that.

Accept People Where They Are

Really being free is being able to accept people where they are and not try to understand all they are or be what they are.

At the end of the Moyers interview, he names what he calls the last immutable boundary — the frustration of people like him: how do you cross over and get inside someone else’s skin?

You don’t have to, she says.

Then she takes on the country’s favorite metaphor for itself. One of the most dangerous phrases in the United States, she says, is melting pot:

And look at the goo it’s produced.

Respect does not require full understanding. She is not asking Moyers to become her or to decode her. She is asking him to stop requiring everyone to melt. Let the Italian family sing, let Mr. Chan and Mrs. Brown be who they are, and say all of them are good, not change them, not at all.

That is acceptance as our glossary defines it: a world where autistic people don’t have to camouflage themselves as neurotypical. The melting pot is assimilation, and the goo is what neuronormativity produces when it gets its way — one acceptable way to be, and everyone sanded down to fit it.

A few minutes earlier, Moyers asks whether white critics have the right to judge Black artists.

Well, certainly, I think they have a right. It would help if they understood what they were talking about.

She recites her poem Harlem Hopscotch to show him what gets missed. An outside critic, she says, will see the social meaning in the lines, which is there. But he won’t hear the counter-rhythms, the beat inside the beat that cracks up a Black audience, because those rhythms mean a great deal to the people who grew up jumping them. So it’s dangerous if we start setting up white critics as the end-all, be-all of Black work.

The person outside the rhythm can hear the gist and still miss the joke. That is the double empathy problem — mutual incomprehension between people with different experience, not a deficit on one side — which we spent a whole Campfire with Damian Milton on. It is epistemic injustice when the outsider is crowned the authority anyway. It is why code-meshing treats every dialect as equal in complexity and value. And it is the root of nothing about us without us.

Note that she grants the critic his right. She is not policing who may speak. She is refusing to let the outsider be the final word — which is a very different thing, and the right thing.

Underneath all of it is an ethic she states plainly. She tries to see people not idealistically, but realistically — and believes that if this person knew better, he would do better. That does not mean she won’t protect herself from what someone does. It means she refuses to call any human act inhuman, because if a human being did it, she has the potential too. No one is outside the human family. Not the worst person, and not the person the world has labeled.

The Stimpunks Synthesis

The following is a Stimpunks synthesis — our own extension and critique, not a claim made by Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Bill Moyers, or THIRTEEN.

Grant it all first, because they deserve it, and because they were not writing position papers for us to grade. These are two people thinking out loud in front of cameras, and much of what they say we already believe — said earlier, and said better.

Angelou moves the problem from the person to the society, in so many words, in 1973. She dismantles the label as a management tool. She describes intersectionality with a poem a decade and a half before the word. She rejects the melting pot and, with it, the idea that you must understand someone fully before you are obliged to respect them. Baldwin turns identity into grammar and makes the noun give way to the adjective. He names energy as the price of constant resistance, refuge as the condition of work, family as the only net, and success as a trap made out of other people’s eyes.

We owe them the respect of an argument. Five places we push. The last one is aimed at us.

First: belonging nowhere is a price, and only some people can pay it. You only are free when you realize you belong no place is an honest account of one extraordinary life — a woman who had already sung, danced, acted, taught, and written her way across continents. As a theory of freedom, it is priced for one person. Many Disabled people cannot pay it at all; we survive through care webs, not around them. That is why our philosophy says it the other way: Freedom is not freedom without care — Cara Page and Erica Woodland’s line from Healing Justice Lineages. Carla Shalaby defines freedom on that same page as safely getting to be our whole human selves in community with other whole human selves. In community, not no place at all.

And the second tape is the counterargument, made from inside Angelou’s own life. Two years later, she has marched into a family, and Baldwin is telling her that the only safety on the tightrope is love. The answer to belong no place is Baldwin’s own line, the one at the top of our Learning Space: The place where we belong does not exist. We will build it. Unbelonging is where we start, not where we stop. I belong to myself is necessary — authenticity is our purest freedom — and it is not sufficient.

Second: strength that is asked for is labor, and someone is collecting it. Angelou honors the steel rod and diagnoses the ask in the same breath, and she was doing it on national television, in defense of Black women, against a slur. We are not correcting her. We want to move the weight of the sentence from strong to asked. Black women have nursed a nation of strangers is the starkest description of extracted care we have ever heard. Care work makes all other work possible — and here it made possible the very households that would harm the caregivers’ own children. Calling that noble is true, and it is also how extraction gets told so it can continue. Our resilience entry is blunt: resilience does not reduce risk or vulnerability. Our burnout entry describes what years of trying to live up to demands that are out of sync with our needs do to a bodymind. Hersey’s answer is the one we want on the wall: I want rest. I want ease. I need help. The goal is not a stronger rod. It is fewer people needing it. Rest is the structural fix.

Third: the Watergate hope rests on goodwill. Angelou tells Moyers that Watergate is the most positive thing to happen in the country, because for the first time since the abolitionists, a great mass of white Americans is concerned with its own morality — and once they clean up their own backyards, they will have no recourse but to deal with race, because it is right to do so. Grant what she gets right: she insists the reckoning come not from a paternalistic point of view, and she reads movements as having a rhythm of surges and pauses, citing Herbert Aptheker’s history of slave revolts. That is structural thinking. But because it is right is an engine that waits for a change of heart. As we wrote of Arday’s hope, a politics that assumes universal goodwill has no plan for the people who want you gone. Hindsight is cheap, and she knew it — she called it a hope, out loud, in public. We would only build the plan so it doesn’t depend on one.

Fourth: exile is an access solution for one person. Baldwin’s diagnosis is exactly right — you cannot write a sentence while resisting all day. But France was an individual remedy, and part of what kept it going was a family on welfare saving checks out of coal and ice money. We said it about open source in Code for the People: exit is not voice. Baldwin says it himself: I can never leave it. So the structural version is to build the asylum where people already live. That is what a cave is in Cavendish Space — a place where you can work without resisting all day — and it is what our Learning Space exists to be. Design is tested at the edges, and the edge here is everyone who cannot afford a ticket to Saint-Paul-de-Vence.

Fifth, and aimed at ourselves: we do not get to annex them. It would be easy for a Neurodivergent organization to hear these tapes as being about us — labels, masks, energy, belonging — and quietly turn Black life into a metaphor for neurodivergence. We praised Jason Arday for holding race and neurodivergence in one hand without letting either become a metaphor for the other. The same standard applies to us here. The overlap is real, and it is not the point. The point is the people who live in both at once. DisCrit starts from the claim that racism and ableism are mutually constitutive and collusive. Helen Edgar puts it in one sentence: An Autistic Black woman does not experience ableism and racism as separate forces. Our minority stress entry cites research finding that a third to half of all incidents involving the use of excessive force by police involves a disabled person — with institutional racism compounding it. When Baldwin says neither of us knows anybody our age, the Black Disabled and Autistic people in our community hear it twice. The intersection is not an analogy. It is an address.

Which brings us to the title. Angelou told Moyers that struggling toward being free is like struggling to be a poet, or a good Christian, Jew, Muslim, or Zen Buddhist: you work all day, reach some kind of success by nightfall, go to sleep, and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. Two years later, Baldwin tells her that one is always trying to be a [writer], and she answers him with the same list — a good Christian, a good Jew, a Muslim, a poet — and says that every morning, even at eighty, you get up and try to make that cloak fit you again. Baldwin’s last words on the tape are about his brother: what David taught him, laconically, was that I had to keep the faith.

Carla Shalaby says the same thing in the keynote we quote on our freedom page: I am absolutely about the practice of freedom. A practice, not a possession. The place where we belong does not exist. We build it. And in the morning, we build it again.

None of which makes them wrong. It makes it an argument in progress, which is the best kind to bring to a campfire — and they were having it in public, as friends, fifty years ago, and still working it out.

Join Us

Campfire Learn Together happens every Sunday at 10AM Central, online via Discord. This session is on Sunday, October 11, 2026 at 10AM CT, 4PM UK. Open to the whole community — no preparation needed, no expertise required. Come as you are.

We’ll watch together, take a bodymind break between the two conversations, and then open up the reflection questions as a community conversation. You can participate by video, voice, text chat, or just by being in the room. All modes are welcome. Cameras optional. Silence is participation.

There is no designated expert here, including us — and including James Baldwin, who said that not knowing anything was a great relief. This is omni-directional learning in a Cavendish Space campfire, and the most useful thing in the room will be somebody’s story about where they belong, not our glossary.

Join our community to get access, then find us in our online space. Our Campfire Learn Together page describes some of what to expect. If this is your first Campfire, you’re in good company — many of our regulars showed up for the first time not knowing quite what to expect, and stayed.

Come with two words. The label someone else put on you, and the word you chose for yourself. And if you have one, bring the name of your net — the person who would send the check out of the coal money.

Main Takeaways

  • A label is a way of not dealing with someone. Angelou: put a label on somebody and you don’t have to deal with the physical fact. Labels are a management technique, not a description.
  • The society’s problem is not yours to carry. It knows and doesn’t itself want to cope. The social model, said about race and gender in 1973.
  • Adjectives describe; nouns replace. Baldwin’s grammar of identity is part of why identity-first language matters: a word we chose, attached to a person.
  • “Asked to be strong” names an ask. Look at who is asking, and who is collecting. Strength that is demanded is labor.
  • Publicity is an identity built in other people’s eyes. Believe it, and you stop experimenting. The strong Black woman, the folklore hero, and the mask all run on it.
  • Resisting all day costs the sentence you would have written. Baldwin’s energy accounting — and why belonging means not having to push past exhaustion just to keep up.
  • “Neither of us knows anybody our age” is a public health finding. Racial weathering, said with a headcount.
  • Exit is an access solution for one person. Build the asylum where people already live.
  • There is no net on the tightrope but love — so weave one. The Baldwins wove a care web out of coal money, a mother who let him go, and a brother who mailed the manuscript.
  • Freedom is not freedom without care. Belonging nowhere is where we start, not where we stop. The place where we belong does not exist yet. We will build it.
  • Freedom is a practice. The job is still to be done in the morning, and that is not failure. That is the work.
  • Labels — The words used about us create categories professionals control. Angelou’s junkie, in a clinical file.
  • Functioning Labels — External judgments that deny support and distort needs. The most manageable labels of all.
  • Social Model — A clear focus on the barriers out there, not the person. That is the society’s problem, not mine.
  • Identity-First Language — The identity word placed first, as part of who someone is. An adjective we own, not a noun we are filed under.
  • Intersectionality — Revealing the systems that organize society. What Angelou did with Beah Richards’s poem in 1973.
  • DisCrit — Race and ability as co-constructed. Why the intersection is an address, not an analogy.
  • Racial Weathering — Racism as a stressor that shows up as chronic disease and early death. Neither of us knows anybody our age.
  • Minority Stress — Social disadvantage translating into health disparities. The research version of Baldwin’s headcount.
  • Resilience — It does not reduce risk or vulnerability. The trouble with praising the steel rod.
  • Masking — Exhausting, utterly draining. Keeping up the publicity someone else wrote for you.
  • Belonging — Participating without having to explain yourself or push past exhaustion. What Baldwin crossed an ocean for.
  • Care Web — Informal, reciprocal networks of care. The Baldwin family’s net.
  • Chosen Family — Kinship bonds that aren’t biological. Angelou didn’t get adopted; she marched in.
  • Double Empathy Problem — Mutual incomprehension, not a deficit on one side. The critic who hears the gist and misses the joke.
  • Acceptance — A world where we don’t have to camouflage ourselves. The opposite of the melting pot’s goo.

Reflection Questions

On the label and the word. Angelou says a label lets people skip the work of dealing with you as a whole person. What label has done that to you? Which words have you claimed back for yourself, and which still belong only to the people who use them on you?

On being asked to be strong. Who in your life is always the strong one? Is it you? If no one were watching, what would you put down? Tricia Hersey says: I want rest. I want ease. I need help. Which of those three is hardest for you to say out loud, and to whom?

On resisting and resenting. Baldwin left the country to get back the energy to write a sentence. Where does your energy go on defense — explaining, masking, bracing? If you got it back, what would you make with it? Where is your asylum, and could it exist closer to home?

On the net. Baldwin’s brothers sent a check out of coal and ice money. Who is your net? Who have you been a net for? And if the honest answer is “no one, yet,” what is the smallest strand you could start weaving this week?

On belonging. In 1973 Angelou says she belongs to herself and no place at all. Baldwin’s line says the place where we belong does not exist yet, and we will build it. Where do you land between those two? Is belonging nowhere a freedom for you, or a cost?

On being understood. Angelou says you don’t have to get inside someone’s skin to respect them. Do you need to be understood to be accepted? When has an outsider explained your work, your culture, or your bodymind back to you — and what did they miss?

On the job still to be done. Both of them describe a practice that is never finished: you wake up and start again. What do you start over every morning? Does it feel like failure, or like faith?

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This page draws on two programs from THIRTEEN’s archive: a 1973 episode of Bill Moyers Journal featuring Maya Angelou, and a 1975 episode of Assignment America in which Maya Angelou talks with James Baldwin. Quotations from both are transcribed from the videos’ captions, with capitalization and punctuation ours and obvious caption errors corrected in brackets. Tricia Hersey is quoted from a 2022 Good Morning America roundtable. Helen Edgar’s No Space Is Neutral at Autistic Realms is her work and not ours. Carla Shalaby, Cara Page and Erica Woodland, Kieran Rose, David Gray-Hammond, and Gayatri Sethi are quoted from pages on our site that cite them. The Stimpunks Synthesis section is our own extension and critique, not attributed to Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Bill Moyers, or THIRTEEN.

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