In 2010, the family of Monica Harris’s partner held a reunion in southeastern Montana. “She says, ‘Hey, babe, would you ever want to go?’ And I don't know about you, but Montana was one of these places that had always been on my bucket list. It's Big Sky country, you know? So I said, ‘Sure, let's go. And we were there for a week, and it was just — I think it was life-changing.”
Monica is a Harvard-educated entertainment lawyer, author of The Illusion of Division, and the new Executive Director of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), which advocates for Martin Luther King’s vision of a color-blind society. The organization, on whose advisory board I sit, is currently supporting a former DEI executive who says she was fired for questioning woke ideology. I interviewed Monica last week for this podcast.
Instead of going back to L.A., Harris and her wife drove through Montana. “We're passing all these little towns, and I'm wondering, ‘What’s that town like?’ Population 2,000 — or 200. ‘What's that about?’ We got off at one of them. They were holding a chili cook-off. I thought, ‘My God! A chili cook-off at Montana! What's that about?’
“We're creeping through town. There are no black people to be found. Just white guys in pickup trucks with shotguns in the back and the big cowboy hats and boots and women looking like they’re from 30 or 40 years ago. I wanted to check it out. But there's a part of me that was kind of afraid. You see a lot of white guys with guns in their trucks and you're thinking, ‘Was this the right move? Am I going to be a statistic? Is someone going to jump out at us as we're walking back to our car?’
“We walk up to the woman who's selling the tickets to the cookoff and I'm bracing myself. She looks at us and she says, ‘Y'all here for the cookoff?’ I'm like, ‘Yeah, we are.’ ‘Well, get yourself a ticket. Settle on in. You're going to have lots of fun.’
It was like something out of a movie. It was great. And we spent like a couple of hours there. Everything was fine. That was the first shift in my thinking. The first clue I got was that, ‘Huh. This isn't what I expected. I wonder what else isn't what I expect?
