Word Food: Slavery & NGO-ish

Pushback Talks Season 9 is here with "Word Food"!

This season, Fredrik & Leilani return with their signature bite-sized episodes: sharp, surprising, 15-minute explorations of the words that shape our world. Each week, they pick a single word (or two) and unpack how its simple surface hides deeper social, political, and economic realities.

Think of it as thought-provoking “intellectual snacking” -  quick enough for your commute, rich enough to shift how you see power, privilege, and the systems around us.

This week’s episode:

Slavery: a critical look at how the contemporary world has been built on slavery and where slave labour still exists today.

NGO-ish: an immersion in the NGO world and their jargon - an appell to use a language that reaches everyone.

New episodes drop every week.

Make this your ritual for keeping your curiosity - and your resistance - alive!

Transcript

Fredrik Gertten 0:02

I'm Fredrik Gertten and I'm the filmmaker.

Leilani Farha 0:05

And I'm Leilani Farha, and I'm the advocate.

Fredrik Gertten 0:09

Hello, advocates. This is Pushback Talk. And this is our, you know, the way of us keeping alive, you know, putting words to each other, and we call it word food. So let's play with words, Leilani. It's your time. It's your time. I have a heavy, I have a heavy word for you today. Oh my gosh.

Leilani Farha 0:33

Yeah. Ready? Slavery.

Fredrik Gertten 0:39

Oh, slavery. Something we thought was out of fashion. And then we find out that it's not really out of fashion. Or at least that the structures of slavery lives on. I actually saw a film called The Alabama Solution. I think it's competing to be Oscar's nominee. It's filmed in a prison in Alabama.

Leilani Farha 1:08

Is it a doc?

Fredrik Gertten 1:09

Documentary, the Alabama Solution. It's on HBO or in Warner or whatever. Yeah. I met the filmmakers now in Amsterdam. But it's shot inside one of these prisons, and people who've been in there for life, some of them for almost doing nothing, but they are still stuck there for life. And they are basically used as slave labor. So they lock them up as a business idea. It really tells a story. I mean, in especially in the US, where the prisons is now a private enterprise. So there is a political interest and a lobby who want to lock up more people because it's good for their business. And the business is, of course, selling the space to the state, but then it's also slave labor who works for one dollar an hour or something like that. So yes, the structure is there. That's the US. But then we see how slavery. I mean, I know it also exists still today in some parts of northern Africa, that it's actually still working. But it's there is so many ways of own other people. You know, in in my last film breaking social, we talked about uh Amazon, and we had uh Chris Smalls, who had been also in our podcast, who founded uh Amazon Labor Union, and how they managed Amazon managed to get declared like that they could run the operations even during the pandemic, and they were packing, you know, the protection stuff and everything, but there was no protection for the workers, and there was no sick leave, you know, so the workers had to work even if they were sick. So, I mean, isn't that some kind of slavery?

Leilani Farha 2:54

Modern slavery, as they call it, absolutely.

Fredrik Gertten 2:57

Yeah.

Leilani Farha 2:57

I was in South Africa recently, as you know, and you've been many, many times. Uh I was in Cape Town, and I came to this place, you know, where they put uh there's a stone in the ground, and it is the place where slaves stood and were bought and sold. And it just filled me with this, it's almost like a disbelief I have that much of the contemporary world was born of this slavery and the work of slaves. And more recently, I was at a team meeting with my organization, and uh one of our team who works on this podcast is African American. And I don't, it's not for me to tell her history and her story, but she did mention or talk about the idea of what it's like to not know your own family history really, like to really know it as a result of slavery, of course, and to not know your family lineage, if you know what I mean. If you're brought over as a slave, then you lose your connection to your family lineage. And I found it so incredibly moving. So for my book, I've been reading a little bit about slavery and home and trying to make some connections. And I've been reading really, there's actually some beautiful stuff out there about the role that home played for slaves. You know, even if it was a shack, a hut that they could go to from time to time after working in the fields, it became a place, the home place became a place to shore up dignity, to shore up identity. A really beautiful idea in the midst of all this complete darkness. I mean, slavery is just, as I said, unthinkable. Anyway, that's where I go with the word. That's why I put it to you, slave.

Fredrik Gertten 4:51

I mean, I have two thoughts that run it. First of all, the film I'm doing together with my friend Sylvia Vollenhoven in South Africa, is also about her family, her roots, which are also slave roots. And they have lost the language, they lost the family history, the family records. There are none. Yeah. That's very much an experience for a lot of people that they have been, they've lost so much, also their own family records. But I actually read a book about my own country, my own part of southern Sweden, because we had here on the countryside uh a system where farm workers, the contract was included a house to stay, and they got some money.

Leilani Farha 5:31

Yeah.

Fredrik Gertten 5:32

But then the wife, she didn't get paid, but she had to milk the cows. There was like the duty of milking.

Leilani Farha 5:41

Right.

Fredrik Gertten 5:41

And that meant like nine hours a day, and from early morning, midday to night, you know. And it was such a tough system, so brutal. So people, the contract ended at like in October, so people moved. So a lot of these families they moved 30 times in the lifetime.

Leilani Farha 6:00

Oh, wow.

Fredrik Gertten 6:01

And this is this system where you got paid by a house and it's ended in 45. So it's kind of recent. Right. And I've been thinking of when I read a book, is also that a lot of people who walk around here have these kind of pain and wounds within them.

Leilani Farha 6:20

Yeah.

Fredrik Gertten 6:21

Uh, in their family history. They don't really know where it comes from. Those workers were also very late to get unionized. So they were kind of in some way so oppressed, so they almost accepted that this is how life is. We can never change anything. It became a part of their identity, which is compared to the factory workers who organized and you know really could improve their conditions, those workers had a big problem. And in Sweden, basically the system fell because suddenly the industry needed them elsewhere.

Leilani Farha 6:59

Right.

Fredrik Gertten 6:59

And the farm work got modernized and mechanized and so on, so they could move on. So we I mean, slavery also existed in some kind of form also in a country like Sweden. So I think we should keep an eye on slavery. Me too. We should talk about it.

Leilani Farha 7:16

Well, and what you said too about the intergenerational trauma, it's not over yet. Even like the slavery of you know, many centuries ago, the intergenerational trauma is alive now, for sure. And the legacy is alive now.

Fredrik Gertten 7:32

That's the film we are doing. Cool.

Leilani Farha 7:35

There it is.

Fredrik Gertten 7:36

So are you ready for one coming from me?

Leilani Farha 7:39

Yes. You are keep it light, keep it light, baby.

Fredrik Gertten 7:43

This is this is light, and this is like uh a word from our when we work together doing push when I try to tell you something. So the word is NGO-ish.

Leilani Farha 8:02

Oh, NGO-ish. Yeah. At the time I remember being deeply offended, like, what the frick? You're talking about.

Fredrik Gertten 8:11

Can you explain what NGO-ish is?

Leilani Farha 8:13

Yeah, so according to Frederick Gerton, NGO-ish is when people of the NGO world speak in a certain way using acronyms and I don't know, insider talk. I don't know how to how to describe it, but something that the general population, the masses, wouldn't understand and wouldn't care about.

Fredrik Gertten 8:38

And I mean, even NGO is one of those, you know.

Leilani Farha 8:41

Sure. Non-governmental organization. For those of you who don't know, that's what an NGO is. Many NGOs actually receive government money. Just saying, I do not. Yeah. I actually extend the definition. And you don't know this, Frederick. I never told you this story, but when I was a very young activist, very young, the beginning of the year. Even younger than now. Even younger than now. At the very beginning, I was at a conference on women's human rights, and a bunch of my friends were there, colleagues, and I had occasion to look down at this conference. And I was looking at the footwear of my colleagues, the shoes that they were wearing. And I decided that it was shameful, that the shoes were very NGO-ish. So I gathered my phones. How did they look? Oh, you know, earthy like Birkenstocks before Birkenstocks were fashionable, you know, like granola kind of shoes, not fashionable. And it really irritated me. Yeah, granola kind of shoes. It irritated me. And uh, I hope my friends are out there listening. They will remember.

Fredrik Gertten 9:56

You can use that word granola-ish. I like that. Yeah, granola-ish.

Leilani Farha 10:00

So I gathered my friends. We're in Toronto. I took them to Queen Street, which at the time had a bunch of independent stores, not multinationals. And I really required all of them to buy new shoes. And we went to a place, it's a very trendy place called John Fluvog. And a bunch of us bought new shoes. And my friends refer to that all the time. My resistance to being NGO-ish. And even now, when Kirsten is our comms person at the shift, she produces a report, and I'm always saying, please make sure it doesn't look NGO-ish. When you're on the inside of it, you know what I mean.

Fredrik Gertten 10:43

Yeah, but I used it seriously, and I always do it when I talk to people who are active, and is to use a language that can be understood by everybody instead of excluding people with your language. And I can hear that a lot of people who are doing working will really doing cool stuff, that they still have a language that is excluding people.

Leilani Farha 11:07

Yeah.

Fredrik Gertten 11:08

And I think we should try not to do that because we need we need people. We need to reach out to people, and then we can't have a language that is excludes.

Leilani Farha 11:20

Yeah. And that's a much better definition than mine. Mine is like a little bit. It's not that I think we should look governmental by any means when I say like I don't want a report to look NGO-ish. I definitely don't want it to look governmental where they use these terrible templates and boring, always pictures of houses all the time for anything housing related. But I want things to feel here and now, and I want them to seem of the world, not of my micro world, you know, of something bigger, to have a bigger vision beyond our little organization, you know.

Fredrik Gertten 11:56

So you remember how we opened pushed the film, the opening scene at the bar in Toronto. I do. No, that's it's an image of what's under threat, what we can lose.

Leilani Farha 12:08

Yeah.

Fredrik Gertten 12:09

So it's this kind of people coming together and singing and having fun. I think that's also it's we should not only talk about the hard stuff, also the soft stuff.

Leilani Farha 12:22

Yeah.

Fredrik Gertten 12:23

And that sometimes the NGOs uh forget and it becomes all these really hard facts and very important all the time. But important can also be boring.

Leilani Farha 12:40

No, and you're right, it we there is often a lack of levity, a lack of a certain kind of creativity, a lack of love, a lack of joy in the NGO world. I I agree with that. I'm trying to fight that.

Fredrik Gertten 12:56

Let's let's keep trying to fight that, Leilani. And I think you do fine. I mean, you're you are now world famous for your hairdo.

Leilani Farha 13:06

Absolutely.

Fredrik Gertten 13:07

Yeah. And that's kind of also some kind of resistance, you know, to the NGO-ish world.

Leilani Farha 13:18

That's absolutely correct.

Fredrik Gertten 13:20

Yeah. Talking about that, I I I like your glasses. Have you seen mine? They also I also have new I thought they were new.

Leilani Farha 13:27

Your glasses.

Fredrik Gertten 13:29

Yeah, I actually went to the what do you call it, the optician. Oh, yes. For the first time in my life.

Leilani Farha 13:36

Wow.

Fredrik Gertten 13:36

And they told me that I need glasses.

unknown 13:39

Wow.

Fredrik Gertten 13:39

For what? Seeing far away or close up? Yeah, a little bit of everything. So it is kind of progressive. I'm still not used to it.

Leilani Farha 13:47

But uh I thought those were new. Yeah. These are new too.

Fredrik Gertten 13:51

Yeah, and I like them a lot. Yeah. So yeah, it's good.

Leilani Farha 13:55

Statement, making a statement. I don't know what statement. You tell me, Fred.

Fredrik Gertten 13:59

No, no, no, no. I mean, we we we just want to get laid. I mean, that's the story, but still.

Leilani Farha 14:05

Oh my god. Maybe that's your world, man.

Fredrik Gertten 14:09

Oh. What about you? You're married. Sorry. Yeah. Yes.

Leilani Farha 14:18

Okay.

Fredrik Gertten 14:18

But you look good. And I'm happy to be your friend.

Leilani Farha 14:21

I look good now. I just got over a terrible flu. Even if you're it was ugly.

Fredrik Gertten 14:29

Here I am. So stay cool and see you, I guess, next week. See you next week. Or next year. Who knows? The next year is all is already now.

Leilani Farha 14:41

Oh.

Fredrik Gertten 14:42

It's already now. This is 2026.

Leilani Farha 14:46

Okay.

Fredrik Gertten 14:46

You're thinking about 2025. That's last year.

Leilani Farha 14:49

That was last year.

Fredrik Gertten 14:50

You have to be, you know, you have to be on time.

Leilani Farha 14:54

On time.

Fredrik Gertten 14:55

In time.

Leilani Farha 14:56

Welcome to the new year.

Fredrik Gertten 15:00

A new year of of struggles and fun.

Leilani Farha 15:04

And joy. I've I've named 2026 the year of joy.

Fredrik Gertten 15:08

Good. Let's go for it. The year of joy is coming up. It's coming up. It's here. It's going on. It's ongoing.

unknown 15:16

Okay.

Leilani Farha 15:17

I'll see you later, Freddie.

Fredrik Gertten 15:19

See you. And to friends, if you want to support the podcast, send us some money on Patreon. It's not bad. Patreon.com pushback talks. See you. See you.

Kirsten McRae 15:34

Pushback Talks is produced by WG Film. To support the podcast, become a patron by going to patreon.com slash pushback talks. Follow us on social media at make underscore the shift and push underscore the film. Or check out our websites makeshift.org, pushthefilm.com, or breaking socialfilm.com.