On Saturday’s Global Awakin Call we had the opportunity to engage with Peggy Callahan, who is the co-founder and Executive Producer of Free the Slaves and is regarded as the world’s premiere filmmaker on modern slavery. She has spent 14 years interviewing enslaved people on five continents and has created the world’s largest video library on modern day slavery. Moderated by Aryae Coopersmith, the conversation revealed new depths of understanding on what it means to be free.

Aryae: Can you tell us a bit about your childhood, growing up in the deep south, the influence of your mother on your life, and how your childhood shaped your understanding of your direction in the world?

Peggy: I grew up in South Carolina and it was amazing in many ways. The people there really value storytelling and I’ve been a story teller my entire life. But there were things that were uncomfortable also. Where I grew up, the people believed that the Civil War was still going on against the north and mother would always say, “Take what’s good here, take the best and leave the rest.”

So I often felt like an outsider which allowed me to be an observer. There were things that I loved and things that I thought were fundamentally unfair and that sense of injustice was there from the beginning. When you’re not in the center of it or completely comfortable, this makes the eye of the observer very refined.

A: Do you have an example of a time when you observed something unfair and how you related to that?

P: I started school the first year that the schools were integrated in South Carolina. I was always an athlete and so I would race home from school with some of my friends and they would come home afterwards and we would have cookies and milk and just have fun. One time, the children I was racing home with happened to be African American and we went into the house when a neighbor knocked on the door. She told me her child would no longer be able to play with me because I was associating with people that I wasn’t supposed to associate with. My response to her wasn’t nice. “I don’t want to play with your daughter anyway!” I remember exclaiming. After I told my mom, she went after the woman and said, “You may not say those kinds of things to my daughter.” That experience set me on a path where I understood that it was good to recognize things that were unfair.

A: You got to recognize that you could see what was unfair in the world and that you could have an independent stance in response. I’m curious, as you grew up, how did this transform into a career in journalism?

P: I wasn’t one of those brilliant people that always knew what they wanted to do from the beginning. In my life, the path kept revealing itself as I went along. The very questions that got me into trouble in the society that I grew up in - how come, who says, why have you all agreed on this thing that doesn’t seem quite right - those questions fueled my career as a journalist.

But I fell into it by accident. I went into school running track and when I got out of school, I realized that I was supposed to find a grown up job. Some people I met thought I had a funny take on the world and asked me to try out as a writer with the NBC station in San Diego. My journalism career took off from there. There are fundamental problems in our society and we should say, “Wait a minute!’ I think I started to specialize in the “wait a minute” part of it.

A: As you moved through and progressed in your career, was there a point where you had to decide how to cover a controversial issue?

P: How you present a story impacts how the public takes in information around an issue so that meant that I would take a long time to find the right story. I waited for about two years until there was a story about the death penalty that I wanted to tell. This was a self limiter because I wanted to find the story that had all the nuances and really made people think about the depth and breadth of an issue.

For the death penalty issue, there was an 86 year old nun who had been murdered in Texas on Halloween by a neighborhood boy who had a horrible childhood. The bishop asked all the nuns to forgive this young man but some of the nuns left the convent because they couldn’t find it in themselves to do this. I thought this was a really interesting way to explore this death penalty issue because this wasn’t something that you could just have a knee jerk reaction to and you really had to explore the issue.

A: How did it happen that you made the choice to leave your successful journalism career and delve into the issue of freeing the slaves?

P: I was so lucky and graced to read a book called “Disposable People” by Kevin Bales. I read it and was horrified that slavery still existed and I didn’t know because I had spent a career covering social justice issues. How did I not know this? I contacted Kevin Bales and suggested that we start a movement and an organization to free slaves. We met in Oxford, Massachusetts and sat around the kitchen table and started Free the Slaves. It’s been quite the journey and it has allowed me to be inspired everyday and work with some of the most astonishing visionaries on the planet.

A: In your work for Free the Slaves, is there anything which surprised you, which you didn’t expect? What is an example of the biggest learning you had in doing that work?

P: One of the most surprising things is that having grown up here at a time when psychology was thought of as pathology (what is wrong with people versus what is right with you). I had only heard about PTSD and not Post Traumatic Growth and in our society there was an expectation that if you had gone through this horror of slavery, then you were damaged for life and it would be difficult for you to put together a life that anyone would want to live. But I learned that’s not true.

I have seen many people who were victims of slavery and who have been to hell and back so many times but they have come out so strong. I met a woman who was enslaved in brothels and today she chooses to go back into these brothels to rescue other women. When I ask her, “What would you say if you met your trafficker today?”, her response was, “I would thank him for making me the strong woman that I am today.” People are extraordinary. If I didn’t know the power of the human spirit before, I have the pleasure and great honor of learning that to the depths of my soul in my work all the time.

A: Given that this work that you were doing was so satisfying, I want to talk about “the current fun” that you’re having now. Can you tell us about that decision to make the transition from what you were doing then to what you’re doing now?

P: Free the Slaves does amazing work and it will always be a part of my heart and soul, but I was really starting to get caught up with a lot of management work that I thought wasn’t the best use of my time. So we started another organization called Voices for Freedom, which is more of a niche org that uses education, media, and entertainment to bring direct help to people working on the ground. It all started when I was on a run one day and thought to myself, “I would really like to have some quick hits of joy.” I wanted to continue doing the antislavery work but add something else. I read a lot of brain science stuff and understand that it’s really about human potential. I had just read about serotonin and learned that if I do an act of good for you, I get a drop of good in my brain that make me happy, you get a drop of good in your brain that makes you happy, and anyone who witnesses the act of good also gets a drop of happiness. There are a lot of statistics about happy people and we know that they make better decisions in life. So I started wondering, “How do we help increase acts of good and the number of witnesses?”

I came up with Anonymous Good, which is a website and a soon to be app that allows people to post their anonymous good, build their community online, and then retake those acts and have them sponsored so that an act of good is actually currency that makes you an international philanthropist in an instant. Through these acts of good, currency is created to help free people from bondage, to dig wells for water so that girls can go to school, to plant trees in order to supply more clean air on this planet, and much more. We just started and we have helped feed more than 20,000 people and 380 people are coming to freedom and all of it makes you feel good so you get to double down on the good that you’re doing on the planet.

It’s simple. We do good things everyday: we hold doors for people, we smile at people, etc. So any of those things that are posted on this site will not only make you feel good but it will make others that read it feel good.

I’ve worked with Father Desmond Tutu over the years and he talks about ubuntu, “I am because you are”. Anonymous Good tries to draw on that connection. The question is, “How do we make these local acts of good connect to global acts of compassion?”

Deven: You have been supporting a lot of frontline groups fighting slavery. What has been your experience?

P: I don’t believe that anyone can helicopter in and tell any other country or culture how to do stuff. Everyone has their own answers and it’s important to find great people on the ground doing great work and help them do that more. A lot of people doing the great work aren’t known by funders because they’re so busy doing the work! Some of the best work I’ve seen is by a group MSVNVS in Varanasi, India. The guy that founded it just won a State Department Hero Award. What you learn from people that do it really well is that they’re very understanding of the culture. This man often goes into an enslaved village with someone from the same community and usually it’s someone from the same caste in so that the people who he’s talking with think that they’re being understood at a very primal level.

It’s all about empowering people to find their own answers. I get really uncomfortable if I use short hand and say, “We freed so many people here.” The truth is that you can never free anyone, they can only free themselves. You can set up circumstances where people can bring themselves to freedom but if they don’t make that shift internally in their heart and in their spirit, they will be susceptible to slavery forever.

Rahul: I want to revisit the difference between PTSD and post traumatic growth. The legacy of slavery in the U.S. still carries a huge amount of historical pain. There seems to be this reactiveness and a structural violence that’s built around this core of unresolved stress from slavery that was theoretically ended by Lincoln. We didn’t see much growth since MLK and we have still many shades of racism today. What are your thoughts on how to move from a state of this PTSD around the legacy of slavery to post traumatic growth as a society and learn to heal the wounds that still exist there?

P: There is no doubt that we had a botched emancipation. If you could pick everything to do wrong when emancipation came, we did that. There have been different groups and movements that have tried to address that over time but there is such a long way to go and so much of it has become engrained. I don’t have an answer for you but you’ve led me to start thinking of things in a different way.

Caller: Is there a point where you experienced doubt about whether you could really make a difference and if you did feel this, how were you able to pull out of that and continue your work?

P: It does feel daunting at times and but here’s what happens every time. Just when you’re frustrated and colleagues have gotten hurt and received death threats and you feel overwhelmed, about that time is when amazing things happen. I can’t begin to tell you the headway we’ve made. You really feel that there is hope and you see amazing things happening on the ground. I don’t tell people that I work in the world of slavery, I tell them that I work in the world of freedom and that’s a very different world. If I worked in a world of slavery, it wouldn’t be possible to keep going.

We are on the cusp of freedom and we are going to end slavery. When the slave trade was outlawed in England, the slave trade was so pivotal to the economy of the UK that it was like knocking out an entire car industry. When we start to end the slave trade, it’s not going to knock out any business. There are laws in place in every country, they just have to be implemented and enforced. There are ways we can, as consumers, force companies to do a better job on their product chains. Through Google maps you can see where slaves are being used to clear the Amazon. Developments like this keep me going. It’s unbelievable what we can accomplish now.

A: Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you would like to talk about?

P: There is value in truly seeing someone. One of the things that happens when you do an act of good or when you interview someone or when you work in the anti-slavery field is that you have the opportunity to really turn your attention on someone and show that you really care and truly see who they are.
 
Truly seeing someone is a powerful thing and it’s something we can do everyday because so often in our lives, people don’t look at us and say, “Tell me, explain, help me understand.” That is a gift you can give in any minute in any day and it has a profound and powerful impact for yourself and for others.