Tonya Mosley
A decade ago, Gerald was a rising star, a Yale and Harvard graduate running a celebrated nonprofit. Then he shut it all down. His new book is an argument for forging a different path.
TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley.
My guest today, writer Casey Gerald, has walked away from his own success twice. The first time was in 2016, at the height of everything.
He was a kid from Oak Cliff, a working-class neighborhood on the south side of Dallas, who had made it out the way America tells us to make it out - a football scholarship to Yale, a job at Lehman Brothers, an MBA from Harvard. He created a nonprofit that put him on magazine covers and TED stages, with a talk viewed millions of times.
He opened for President Barack Obama at South By Southwest in 2016. And there was even a New York Magazine headline that asked, "Does Casey Gerald Know How To Fix America?"
And then just like that, he shut down his nonprofit, stopped answering the phone and disappeared. His memoir, "There Will Be No Miracles Here," was his first report back.
Then he went quiet again. And now, after that second long silence, Casey Gerald has returned with a book that reads less like a memoir and more like a challenge.
It's called "The Great Refusal: A New Vision Of Resistance." It's his attempt to make sense of the choice at the center of his own life - to stop trying to convince America that he deserves a place in it and take back the authority to decide what his life is for.
Casey Gerald, welcome to FRESH AIR.
CASEY GERALD: Thank you, Tonya. So good to be with you.
MOSLEY: Well, you know, the first time we spoke - I think it was around 2018, 2019 - you had just come back into view after shutting down MBAs Across America. That is your nonprofit, which you created, that sent MBAs all across the country to help small-business owners.
And you left New York. You went quiet.
And in this book, you describe that choice as a desperate one. And I thought that was a very interesting choice of words, to call it a desperate one.
Desperate to get away from what?
GERALD: Well, I wasn't getting away from anything. I was going towards something.
I just didn't know what it was. You know, people ask me all the time.
They say, hey. My cousin wants to write a memoir.
Do you have any advice for them? I say, absolutely.
Do not do it unless your life depends on it. And that certainly was the case for me.
I had accomplished by my late 20s about everything a kid is supposed to achieve.
You know, when I first left Oak Cliff, South Oak Cliff High School, in 2005 and went off to Yale, they put posters up in every school - public school in Dallas. Look who's going to Yale.
He did it. You can, too.
And despite doing it, or maybe because of it, I was really cracked up. I don't know if you'd say I was having a nervous breakdown, but I wasn't too far off, and I was awful sad.
But all I knew was that something was wrong with me, and something was wrong with a lot of my friends. When we finally talk about it in "Something's Wrong With The World," (ph) it's 2016.
So I just said, I'm leaving.
MOSLEY: Where did you actually go? What did you actually do?
GERALD: Well, I went to Texas. I went back to Texas.
I went to Austin. I'm from Dallas.
And so I had two friends in Austin, and I woke up one morning. I said, hey.
Do you think I could rent a house in Austin to write? 'Cause I had agreed to write this book - I didn't know if I was going to finish a book; I didn't know that I could write a book - "There Will Be No Miracles Here." All I knew was, you know, the book business is about the only one that'll pay you to investigate your own problems.
And so I figured, OK. I'll try this as long as I can.
So I went to Austin and kind of hid away, you know, in this little house for two years to write.
MOSLEY: I'm just curious. Those unanswered calls, those text messages - did you listen to them? Did you read them - all of the people trying to get in touch with you during that time that you were away?
GERALD: Not really. But I don't necessarily say that with pride.
I write in this book, sometimes you have to ruin your reputation to save your life. So, you know, I like people.
I don't like putting on this front of, oh, I'm, you know, too busy to answer the phone. And so I didn't really listen to any of them because I was trying to listen to whatever this little heart of mine was trying to say.
MOSLEY: I want to get to why you feel like you were cracking up and running away because by all accounts, as you said, your life seemed like a dream on paper. You had attained ultimate success.
And somebody once told you - in fact, it was - I think it was the dean during your freshman welcome at Yale who said to the class, if you're going to be a token, just be the best token that you can be. You went on - Yale, Lehman Brothers, magazine covers, TED Talks.
What did that token require of you - being that token?
GERALD: Well, I never believed the whole token thing. Thankfully, I grew up in pretty much total segregation.
So, you know, Oak Cliff, at least in my vintage - you know, the yard man was Black. My teachers were Black.
So I came from people who were extraordinary. My elementary school principal - I always say she looked like Lena Horne, you know, Aretha Jones.
She's passed now. But she had a PhD.
My grandmother Clarice - I carry her around all the time - was born in a freedman's community - Pelham, Texas. Didn't have a college degree, read books all the time, and she'd always tell us, you have to know your history.
So I never felt any lack of value that would lead me to believe that I needed white people to accept me. I don't give myself any credit for that.
I give the people who raised me the credit for that. So it wasn't so much that I was - the cost was trying to be a token.
The cost was trying to convince the world and myself that I was valuable as a human being. That probably comes more from - you know, it's a strange thing when your parents leave you, you know?
And so I had this sense - my mother left, disappeared from a psych ward when I was 13. And so it struck me, I think, very early that if your mother can leave you, everything's on the table.
MOSLEY: Your mother struggled with mental illness. As you said, she really disappeared when you were around 13.
And your father, who was this larger-than-life football star - he played for Ohio State for a time - he also was in and out of your life most of your life. So that is interesting - you, really understanding this moment that you're in, where you were at the height of your career, and success and attention is being lauded towards you.
That - you make this decision to disappear in a - from a system that - you don't view yourself as a token. But you came to the understanding that you are viewed that way within the system.
GERALD: Well, I came to an understanding - a couple things in that. First off, I came to an understanding that our universities were committing malpractice. That was my understanding.
MOSLEY: Say more.
GERALD: Thankfully, I heard that dean tell that to those freshmen years after I graduated from Yale and had started the work that I'm doing now of trying to be real, you know, and trying to be free.
MOSLEY: So you didn't hear that while you were in school?
GERALD: No. And to be clear, if I had heard it, I probably would have done it. I would have tried.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
GERALD: I remember my freshman adviser when I got to Yale. I had on a fitted hat. And she said, well, first off, you know, take your hat off.
MOSLEY: Like, a baseball cap?
GERALD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, a baseball cap - a New Era baseball cap. And she said, well, first off, you know, take your hat off - which is fair. I was in her office. Take your hat off. She says, do you wear those things around campus? And I said, yeah. You know? And she said, oh, no, Casey. You're at Yale now. You don't have to do that.
And so when I say our universities and our elite regimes of accomplishment are committing malpractice against young people - not just Black people but young people in this country, probably many countries beyond this one - it is that they offer a dead-end bargain. They say, we'll give you the keys to the kingdom. But you got to leave parts of yourself outside.
And so we're trained very comprehensively, probably from nap time in kindergarten, to comply, to become strangers to ourselves so that we make sense to other people, to mutilate ourselves and turn ourselves into little nuggets so that people can digest us. And they give us the right degrees and the right job and the right invitation to Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard, OK?
And in return, you wake up one day. And you said the same thing they said 2,000 years ago.
What would it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? There is no brass ring, no degree, no accomplishment that can fill the hole in your soul.
MOSLEY: You know, it's really interesting with the rollback of DEI and the word diversity even being a dirty word. People don't even like to use it anymore. Do you think that that dean would give the same advice to those students today - you know, to be the best token that you can be?
GERALD: I don't know. My generous read is that the advice - if you're going to be a token, be the best token you can be - is coming from a place that makes a lot of sense.
And it can get you a decent part of the way down a path that you think is the path. But there's only one path, and the path is to remember who you really are.
Your soul has come into this human body for a time and for a reason and for a much larger purpose than dying for your country or getting into the university club in San Francisco.
MOSLEY: My guest today is writer Casey Gerald. His new book is called "The Great Refusal: A New Vision Of Resistance." We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF BEASTIE BOYS' "TRANSITIONS")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, I'm talking with writer Casey Gerald, author of the new book "The Great Refusal: A New Vision Of Resistance." It picks up from his previous book, "There Will Be No Miracles Here," which is a memoir that chronicled his life growing up in Oak Cliff, Dallas, attending Yale and Harvard, working at Lehman Brothers, creating a successful nonprofit and then, at the height of his success, walking away.
I want you to read from the book because I really want to get at the heart of what you were feeling, what had been revealed to you, what you understood, once you're making all this money at Lehman and once you have, like, created this nonprofit and you are, like, in the world. I want you to start third paragraph because you made - you arrived at this place, and you are the One.
GERALD: (Reading) It is tempting to become the One - to feel special with your little seat at the big table. But we have seen too much to kid ourselves.
We know the One does not get fed. Some scraps, OK.
But not enough to nourish, never enough to take home to your people, the folks you thought you'd played the game for. The One always loses the game, collects $200 and never passes go, or passes go and passes go and passes go and passes go and dies, having passed go many times and gone nowhere but crazy.
(Reading) To be fair, the One does on occasion inherit the kingdom, the country, takes on its values, makes its dreams their dreams, makes its dreams come true, becomes a star in, quote, "the national fantasy in such a way that the fantasy will be left unchanged and the social structure left untouched," unquote. Each One who penetrates serves as a spoonful of hope that helps to make mass suffering go down and thus prevents, I bet, at least 1 million people from revolt.
That's just my estimate. Therefore, whole industries exist to circulate great stories about the Ones and awful stories about the Ones who suddenly someday hurl their scripts and scream, this makes no sense.
MOSLEY: Thank you for reading that. And what is so fascinating for me about you, Casey, is that you were the one, and you also have made the choice. You made the choice to be that other person - to say, this makes no sense. This makes no sense for me.
GERALD: Well, people talk about the American dream, OK? And I like fantasy as much as anybody.
I'm not opposed to the American dream. Sure, there's a Casey Gerald.
There's a Tonya Mosley. There's a Oprah Winfrey.
There's a Sonia Sotomayor. OK.
But what I'm interested in is the American machine - this conveyor belt that takes young people from neighborhoods like mine or JD Vance's and - from nothing to nowhere while picking off the chosen few like me.
GERALD: So if I hadn't had Demorris Vance in the fifth grade and Gwendolyn Davis, my other fifth grade teacher who just passed, my whole life was falling apart. My parents had gone.
I was - I didn't know where I was staying day to day. I felt like the most worthless child in the history of the universe.
And these two women saw me. And Miss Vance always says, Casey Gerald, boy, you got little big old eyes.
You just - Davis and I said, this boy just watch us everywhere we go. He just watch us.
He sees everything. So I happened to have a sensibility at that time where my response to the horror of my life was to submit to anybody, usually strangers, who could give me what I needed.
MOSLEY: You know, while reading your book, there were a couple of different things that were just happening at the same time. And it's funny how that happens sometimes, when you're in the midst of one thing, then all of these messages come around you.
And there's this particular clip from Josh Johnson, the comedian, that I want to play. It's from his stand-up, and it speaks to this broader sense of what you are saying happened to you individually, may be happening to us collectively.
Let's listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOSH JOHNSON: You graduate, and people are like, look, I think humanity's almost done anyway. So why don't you...
(LAUGHTER)
JOHNSON: ...Just move back in with your parents for a little while, let the robots get legs going and, like, let the - give the AI legs, and then let's all just wind down as a society.
(LAUGHTER)
JOHNSON: Because it's an insane thing to do now to send these kids into the world where they're like, look, you could work hard, or - I'm going to pitch you something crazy - or if you get popular enough, you could make your own coin. All right? Now, if you make your own coin, and if you pump and dump fast enough, the SEC won't even catch you like that. So then...
(LAUGHTER)
JOHNSON: ...You can at least hold on to that nest egg for, like, 10 years, use some of that to pay off your loans if we're still on the dollar. There's nothing backing up the dollar. The debt is at 40 trillion, so who knows? We might be on the end soon. We have no idea.
(LAUGHTER)
MOSLEY: That was comedian Josh Johnson in one of his recent stand-ups. There are so many little moments in this that he even goes back to this idea of, like, what is this all for, participating here? But in particular, that clip, what's your response to that?
GERALD: Rejoice. Hallelujah. Thank you, Lord. It's over. Ken Lacovara, a great paleontologist who I met years ago, we were having a conversation about mass extinction. And he said, well, Casey, you know, we've had five mass extinctions already. We're going to have - mass extinctions are just a fact of life. But mass extinction is not total extinction. About 97% of all living organisms - somebody fact-check me - you know, they go extinct.
MOSLEY: I've heard him speak about this before. He said, you know, humans is just what the world is doing right now.
GERALD: Hello. So this is why it's so important to remember who you are.
When I was - this was early pandemic, May 2020. And I was really - I felt that I was slipping back in a crisis mode.
And I had just had my mother, you know, tried to get her some help, some mental health help. And that was taking a toll on me.
A lot of things were taking a toll, and I found a new therapist, Robert (ph). And our first session, he says, well, Casey, how are you feeling?
And I said, Robert, I'm having a hard time. And he said, well, you're not having a hard time.
Casey's having a hard time. I was - you know, at this point, I'm getting kind of upset.
So he says, have you ever driven a car? And I said, yeah.
He said, at any time when you were driving the car, did you become the car? I said, no.
He said, that's how I want you to think about your life - you, your soul, as a driver. Casey is a vehicle.
And just like your car breaks down and it goes to the junkyard, that doesn't mean you stop driving. That's what your soul does.
So I say that to say, it's so important that we understand that this is not our first time. This is not our first rodeo.
It will not be our last rodeo. And we didn't come here just to suffer.
We came here to play some role. Could be just growing a tomato, which, incidentally, is very difficult, I've learned in the past six months.
It's damn hard to grow a good tomato. But to play some role in the unfolding of the universe...
So the end of a world is not the end of the world. Worlds end all the time. I had horrible breakup a couple years ago. A world ended, OK? And I grieve it all the time. There is a great cry inside each of us that we ought to just let out.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is writer Casey Gerald. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF DANIELE DI BONAVENTURA'S "HOW MY HEART SINGS! - INSTRUMENTAL")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guest today is writer Casey Gerald.
He's written a new book called "The Great Refusal: A New Vision Of Resistance." It's a follow-up to his 2018 memoir, "There Will Be No Miracles Here." Prior to his writing career, he opened for President Barack Obama at South by Southwest in 2016, and his TED Talks have been viewed more than 4 million times. He's also a New America fellow and resides in Texas.
You know, I mean, I know you've heard this. You heard this during the first run when you were talking about "There Will Be No Miracles Here" and your op-eds - nice of you to say.
What a privileged place for you to say this. There are people who are just truly struggling to get by, who want to opt out of everything right now, who want to have the time to think, to even get to the ideas that you are talking about.
GERALD: Well, I don't want them to get to my ideas. I want them to get to their life.
When I say the great refusal, I'm not trying to lure people into refusal. I'm trying to let people off the hook.
I'm trying to help people see or zoom out and grasp that they're already living refusal - their hatred of certain policies, their anger, their despair, their frustration, their fatigue. Your exhaustion isn't saying, go to sleep.
Your exhaustion is saying, wake up. There is a refusal at the soul level.
The soul screams, no. I don't want this anymore.
I don't want to tolerate it anymore.
And as a great mentor of mine, Evelyn Henry Miller, told me once when I was 24 - I was in this awful job. And she says, Casey, sometimes it's not about knowing what you're going to do.
It's about knowing what you're not going to do. And you are not doing this anymore, so you go quit tomorrow.
OK? So - and I did.
And so I say that to say, refusal is devotion. So every time you're refusing, every time you say no, you're actually - underneath that, you're betting on devotion to the thing that really matters to you, the thing you really want, the thing you're really here to do.
And so every time, you just let it go. Maybe we could call the book "The Great Surrender." Just let that stuff go that ain't yours, that you don't want, no way, that you've been really up at night for years and months and crying, really talking yourself out of letting go. Let it go.
MOSLEY: You've talked about Oak Cliff, this neighborhood that you are from in Dallas, Texas. What does that place mean, for those who don't know?
GERALD: Well, Oak Cliff - the Oak Cliff of my youth, where my grandparents integrated - my aunt - my mother's sister - and my father's brothers were the first Black children to go to South Oak Cliff High School. My grandfather was a pastor in this neighborhood.
When they moved in, you know, people egged the cars and toilet-papered their homes. And they didn't leave.
So, part of what Oak Cliff is to me is the same thing I saw in these fires when I'd heard these stories about Altadena, which I didn't know about.
MOSLEY: In California.
GERALD: In California.
MOSLEY: They had the fires last...
GERALD: Right.
MOSLEY: ...Year.
GERALD: I heard these stories of these enclaves of Black people who, in absolutely impossible situations, made a pretty marvelous life on their terms. And so that's what it means to some degree.
But it also, in some ways, is the best preparation for what we're living through right now and what we will be living through in time to come, which is - when nobody has any money, and very few people know what dinner is going to be tomorrow, you get to sharing pretty quickly.
MOSLEY: It's that kind of community...
GERALD: Absolutely.
MOSLEY: ...Working-class community. You grew up in the '90s. And so looking outside of your front door, what did you see?
GERALD: Well, depending on the day, I saw a lot of pecans. That's for sure.
And sometimes I'd see our neighbors. We knew everybody on the street.
And they knew us, and they knew our mamas and daddies. And we saw people helping people.
And we also saw, you know, crazy stuff. And we saw, you know, our classmates be killed.
And we saw our parents straggling home high. And we saw, you know, that old cutlass that our uncle had that somebody had, you know, put some candy paint on, you know?
And we saw Double Dutch, and we saw the leaves running down the street in a rainstorm. We saw life.
And that is, perhaps - if you want to talk about hope, my experience was not necessarily working-class. My experience and the experience of my friends was horrific.
There's really no other word for it. And yet I cannot tell you, Tonya - we had a hell of a time (laughter).
You know, we had a great time. So that's partially - when you talk about, oh, privileged of you to say, you know, from your perch you can say, but everybody else is trying to get through it - I'm not talking to you as Casey Gerald, the Yale graduate, the Harvard MBA.
I'm talking to you as having recovered that child who had nothing - who didn't even have a mother and a father - and who had a great time (laughter).
MOSLEY: Your mom, as you mentioned to us, suffered from mental illness, and she disappeared around 13. When did you understand that she wasn't coming back?
GERALD: That's a great question. When a person disappears and they've been gone for two or three years and you've heard nothing - I just assumed she was dead.
Now, she wound up - my sister found her. Five years - almost five years later, she came back, which is a whole other complication.
But in my teenage mind - and my mother was my - you know, the only person in the world that I really liked. That was my buddy, you know?
And so it was a lot easier for me to just conclude that she was dead than to keep spending all that energy, figuring out when she was coming back.
But it took much longer to do something more interesting, which was to realize that she had taught me perhaps the greatest lesson that anyone's ever taught me. I don't know that this book or this disappearance to save my life - this walking away from everything that I had set out to do, this willingness to endure a lot of scorn and criticism to walk away - I wouldn't have that frame of reference.
And I might not have the guts to do it if I didn't have the example of this woman, who I know loves me more than anything in the world, who got to a certain point in the psych ward where everything around her was killing her, and she said, I got to get away. And she ruined her reputation to save her life.
MOSLEY: Who was it that signed your permission slips and fed you and tended to you during those years?
GERALD: Everybody. Everybody.
That's why I say, the one - I'm accountable to people. My sister dropped out of college and adopted me.
She was 19. I was 15.
I tell people we were like "The Boxcar Children." Both of my grandmothers, whether they wanted to or not, they never let me go. My aunts let me stay there, and my aunts would pick me up from school, my teachers.
I had - what does Blanche DuBois say? I've always depended on the kindness of strangers.
I choose to believe, because I can't prove it, but I don't have to. I choose to believe that for some reason, God, the universe, my people, beyond this world, beyond their bodies, have conspired since the very beginning to get me my daily bread so I could get on about whatever business I'm here to do.
MOSLEY: My guest today is writer Casey Gerald. His new book is called "The Great Refusal: A New Vision Of Resistance." We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE CURE SONG, "IN BETWEEN DAYS")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, I'm talking with writer Casey Gerald, author of the new book "The Great Refusal: A New Vision Of Resistance." It picks up from his previous book, "The Will Be No Miracles Here," which is a memoir that chronicled his life growing up in Oak Cliff, Dallas, attending Yale and Harvard, working at Lehman Brothers, creating a successful nonprofit, and then at the height of his success, walking away.
How does refusing or letting go for people during a time of great division look like when many people are upset about the direction that this country might be going?
GERALD: Two things. One, it might look like you turning off CNN.
MOSLEY: But don't turn off NPR. (Laughter) I'm joking.
GERALD: Don't turn it off until, except for those times where you can feel your stomach tightening up, you can feel yourself getting mad. It's not to say, don't be informed.
But really ask yourself, how much of this news diet, information diet, media diet is making me more capable of being useful on this issue? Now, I go out and have to get gas almost every day.
And I live in Texas. And it's horrible.
And, you know, it's really unbelievable what it costs to live every day. OK, but you see that in the grocery store.
I don't actually need to watch an hour on the latest action in the Strait of Hormuz to know that gas is high (laughter). OK, I don't need it.
So really, trust. Trust what you are feeling.
Trust that there's something in you that don't want this no more. Sometimes your news diet, your media diet, your conversation diet with your friends, sometimes it will feel much like when you've had too much to drink, or you had two double cheeseburgers from McDonald's.
You know, you just feel sick. Pay attention to it.
Put the burger down. (Laughter) You know, the other thing on this is, this is a great example of what I mean that refusal is devotion.
If you hate what ICE is doing anywhere in this country, everywhere in this country, you also love something else.
You actually have a vision of how a just and fair society would treat people. You have a fundamental belief about the sacredness of a child's relationship with their parent.
So stick with your frustration enough to see that you actually have a vision of the good and the beautiful and the righteous. And from that creative energy, that's the energy that creates worlds.
We can't win just by saying, boy, I hate that. But we can use, boy, I hate that as a starting point for saying, oh, but I know something that I really want...
MOSLEY: That I love.
GERALD: ...And I love and I'm willing to fight for, and I'm willing to jam on. Every time you think about going to a protest, throw a party.
Put on some good music, have some drinks, have some snacks. And then start talking with your friends about the stuff you really want to see happen.
And I promise you, you're sitting on some clue. Every seed of angst you have, the other side of it is a seed of the world to come and of the country that you really want.
MOSLEY: What is the difference between refusal and giving up?
GERALD: Sometimes there is no difference. I don't really care what you call it.
You can call it refusal. You can call it giving up.
You can call it peach cobbler. I don't care.
All I care about is, are you in tune with how you're feeling? Are you in tune with the courage and capacity that you have to let go of things that are harming you, that are hurting you, that are dragging you down, that are killing you.
Do you have - have you developed enough faith to know that if I let this go, if I let this man go, this isn't the end of love.
You know, I always come back to love because, you know, really, I just want to be on the beach with a lover...
MOSLEY: Right.
GERALD: ...That's all.
MOSLEY: Right.
GERALD: I don't want to, you know.
MOSLEY: OK.
GERALD: But so, so, so, so, so, so, so don't worry. You don't know what the end is going to be.
Stay prayed up. Stay in tune with who you really are, your inner guidance.
Stay in tune and accountable to the people that love you, to your friends. Make the most honest, righteous, thorough choice you can of a next right step.
And trust that, as Miles Davis used to tell his band, we can play the mistake. You can't get it wrong.
Try something, and trust that even if that next right step leads you to a dead end, you can turn around and go a different way.
MOSLEY: What about the power of protest to create change? What might we lose if people opt out?
GERALD: Well, first off, I'm not telling anybody to opt out of anything. My hope is that people opt in to who they really are and what they really want and what their gifts are and what they've come here to do. My dear friend, who is a very important part of this book, DeRay Mckesson - DeRay...
MOSLEY: Civil rights activist...
GERALD: Civil rights activist.
MOSLEY: ...Who came - became prominent during the Mike Brown protests after he was killed in Missouri.
GERALD: Right. So, you know, DeRay, that was his natural environment.
When we first met, he was spending every day. We'd be sitting at my house, and it'd be 2 in the morning, and he'd be planning a boycott.
And he wasn't frustrated or stressed. He was having a great time.
So trust that there is something that is your thing. If you're the protest type, and that's what's calling you, what did Whoopi Goldberg say to Lauryn Hill in "Sister Act Two"?
Girl, you can quit the choir all you want to.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
GERALD: But if you wake up and you want to sing and you go to sleep, and you want to - you're a singer. Trust it.
You ain't got to listen to me. Listen to your soul.
Listen to 5-year-old you who really loved a certain thing. At 5 years old, there was probably something in Tonya Mosley that had some thing that makes total sense to you now.
It's the same thing for somebody who wants to protest, who wants to lead a revolution, who wants to, you know, stage a coup in Sri Lanka. You know, follow the cut of your jib, blow your horn as true and as strong as you can and trust that that is some note in the universal symphony.
Don't do what I'm telling you to do. Do what you in your most private righteous moment, would have yourself to do.
And I trust it. I support you.
I might not be there, but I'm cheering for you all the way.
MOSLEY: Casey Gerald, as always, thank you.
GERALD: Thank you. This is a great gift as always, Tonya.
MOSLEY: Casey Gerald's new book is "The Great Refusal: A New Vision Of Resistance."
Coming up, TV critic David Bianculli reviews the Canadian sketch comedy series "SCTV," which is now streaming on Netflix. This is FRESH AIR.
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Author Interviews
Author Interviews