- [Alison] On the season finale of "The A List," I talk with a woman with a remarkable family legacy who has carved out her own path fighting hate and oppression.

- When I actually stood behind the altar and stood in the pulpit, I realized that this is my place and it is my place because of me, not because I am my father's daughter, though that has a role to play in who I am.

But I am not Desmond Tutu Jr. Reverend Naomi.

I am a priest for myself, in myself, from my own experience and my own call to this ministry.

- Join me as I sit down with activists and educator, Reverend Naomi Tutu.

Coming up next on "The A List."

(upbeat music) Reverend Naomi Tutu is an Episcopal priest, an activist, and an educator who speaks regularly on issues of human rights, race and gender justice, and reconciliation.

For those who recognize her name, you probably won't be surprised that Naomi has answered the call to preach and teach.

Among many honors and titles, she is also the daughter of Nobel Peace Prize winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Her experiences growing up in a remarkable family and being both Black and female in apartheid South Africa, set the stage for a lifelong commitment to fighting injustice, hate, and division.

I had the chance to sit down with Naomi at All Saints Episcopal Church in Atlanta, where she preaches, leads worship, and teaches as priest associate.

Well, Naomi, welcome to "The A List."

- Thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

- And as I said earlier, it feels inadequate to call you Naomi with the many accolades, the history of you and your family.

Say your full name for me though.

- You really want the full name?

- Give all of it to me.

- The full name is Nontombi Naomi Cecilia Nozizwe Elsie Tutu.

And the Elsie, no one claims that they gave it to me.

We still don't know where.

It's on my birth certificate, but nobody in the family claims that they gave me that name.

- Now, is that common to have so many names?

- So I was born during apartheid, and I was born in my grandparents' house in a Black township outside of a white town.

And at that time, the law was if you wanted your child to be able to stay in the township, you had to register them within 36 hours of birth.

So I was born at my grandparents' house, my dad was at seminary, and so they sent my uncle to go and register me.

And he just took the names that everybody yelled at him in the house.

So my grandmother admits to Nontombi, my paternal grandmother.

My maternal grandmother admits to Nozizwe.

My parents admit to Naomi, Cecilia.

Elsie, nobody is claiming.

No one, but it's there.

(both laughing) - And for you, name is important.

I mean, you grew up not just with all of these names, but with a name that resonates across the planet, which is Tutu.

- Tutu, yes.

- What was that like growing up in the home of your father and mother, both who played huge roles, impactful roles, in terms of civil rights and equality, but especially with your father?

- Right, and you know what is funny is that my dad was known in South Africa when we were growing up as a priest, but he was not a global figure.

So he was known as the priest who stood with the students at Fort Hare when the police tried to kick all the students off campus.

He was known as a priest who opened his home to young people to have the conversations about our opposition to apartheid.

And so our home was actually a place where I got exposed to all manner of people.

And we also, because of daddy getting an opportunity to go and study in England, we also were given the opportunity to see that South Africa was not the only reality possible in the world.

And lived in a small village in Surrey where we were the only Black family, and yet felt welcomed, and received, and recognized as the priest's family in a way that we wouldn't have in South Africa.

And so it has been really a mixed bag for me growing up.

Coming back from England because my father and mother were able to have support from people who he had served with in England, we were able to go to boarding school in neighboring countries rather than go through Bantu education in South Africa.

And what made it even more poignant from my perspective was that we actually lived at the Federal Seminary in Alice in the Eastern Cape.

And the Federal Seminary was the one place in South Africa where Black and white families lived in the same neighborhood.

We lived on the campus of the seminary as Methodists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, but mixed, all the races were were represented.

But the white children who lived on the Federal Seminary could walk to school and home.

And the Black children were forced to go to Bantu education schools, or as our parents chose, sent to boarding school in neighboring countries.

So it has been a journey.

It has been a journey.

- And I see you wearing, you know, the collar today, but that wasn't always your intention.

- That was not just always not my intention, it was the furthest thing from my mind.

I always tell people that my origin story is that my father was at seminary when I was born, and a friend of his, Val Leslie, who was a white family in Johannesburg, who basically adopted all the Black seminarians who were living at St. Peter's, which was the only place they were basically allowed to be because it was in a white neighborhood.

And so she came to see me when I was born, and when she went back to tell my dad, said, "Oh, this one, all we need to do is put on a cassock and glasses, and she is you."

And so being raised with that story and being raised in a priest's house and seeing how much my father gave of himself to the community, I was straight from early on that I didn't care if there was no other job available on the planet, I was not gonna be a priest.

It didn't matter what anybody said, the priesthood was not even an option.

- You wanted to be an economist, I understand.

- I was an economist.

I started off as an economist.

I actually wanted to be a diplomat.

- Okay.

- And I had promised myself that I was going to be a free South Africa's first ambassador to the UN.

And then I started working as an economist and had interactions with different diplomatic stations and meetings, and realized that I did not have the diplomacy to be a diplomat, that I would not be the person who could have civil conversations with people I was angry with.

- So you became a priest.

- Well, it took me a long time to get from diplomatic dream to being a priest.

When I finally went to seminary, they had a group for people, older people, coming into seminary that they called second career seminarians.

And I was like, "I don't qualify.

This is my sixth career.

We need a new group just for me."

So, yeah, and then when I was at Virginia Theological, one of our homiletics professors asked us to name a tune that would be our path to the priesthood, and mine was "The Long and Winding Road," so.

- The road to priesthood may have been long and winding, but the desire to make the world a better place was instilled in Naomi from an early age.

When she moved to the United States, she began sharing her experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa and found that education was a path to creating meaningful change.

I wanna go back a little bit though, and I want to talk about your lived experience through and after apartheid.

And I know even the word itself, I understand a lot of us mispronounced, let's say, apartheid, but it's very clear apartheid.

- Apartheid.

- Apartheid, and first tell me why it's so important, the pronunciation, but then share about what you felt during that era, and then consequently, you know, at the end of that, what that meant for you.

- You are right.

So apartheid, so it's an Africana word, probably a made up word.

But I think that it portrays exactly what the policy was, apart/hate, that it kept South Africans apart and taught us that hate was the natural order of interracial relations.

That we, by being kept apart, never got to know each other as human beings.

And therefore, it was easy to simply identify somebody as Black and therefore give characteristics to what it meant to be Black.

It was easy to identify a group as Asian, or colored, or African, or white, and have identities that were built into that racial identity.

And, you know, I mean, apartheid was founded on the belief that white is inherently superior in every way.

And so as a Black South African growing up in a family and a community, that was very clear that this was not true.

The ongoing struggle, daily, to walk in your humanity in the face of a whole system that is telling you that you are less than.

And starting off from very young.

I mean, I tell people that I remember as an 8 or 9-year-old going to pick up my grandmother, my mother's mother, who was a domestic worker for a white family.

And hearing the young children my age and younger in that household calling my grandmother by her first name, which I would never have done.

I didn't even call my older siblings by their first name.

We always put an honorific in front of the name of anybody who is older than you.

So it's big sister so and so, big brother so and so, aunt, uncle, grandma.

That to then hear these children calling her by her first name and ordering her around was, I mean, I felt it in the pit of my stomach.

And I was so angry and upset.

And I was angry with them that they had no respect for my grandmother, but I was also angry with my grandmother that how do you allow yourself to be disrespected in this way?

And she said to me in the car, she said, "You know, your worth as a human being is not determined by how people treat you.

Your worth as a human being is how you carry yourself and how you treat others."

And at nine, it did not compute.

It just seemed to me to be an excuse to apologize for allowing herself to be disrespected.

But as I have grown older, the wisdom in those words and that attitude is the wisdom that I have seen in people like President Mandela, that I have seen in my parents in the face of apartheid, of so many who faced the violence of the apartheid system and yet held on to their dignity and their sense of self and had compassion for others, including those who dehumanized them.

- It's amazing to me though, that with all of those lived experiences you come across and the work you do is full of such grace, and understanding, and patience.

And I know it's been, you know, many, many years to build that, but, you know, it's understandable what was instilled in you at even a young age, the youngest age, about this sense of giving back to the world and making it better, and deciding on gender issues and equality, and racial tensions being the cornerstone.

But how do you approach it without being bitter?

How do you approach it without being cynical?

- Mm, mm, and I would say that goes back to the experience of being raised by my parents and in a community that over and over would say to me, "You are here because God wants you to be here.

You are in this body, you are in this skin because God wants you to be in this body, in this skin.

That the gifts you have are gifts that our world needs.

And what you need to do is discover what your gifts are and what ways you can then use those gifts to make this world a better place."

And I was telling our church in a sermon that I used to say, "You know, why do I have to work hard in school?

Because apartheid has a job reservations act which means that as a Black woman, it doesn't matter how well I do, it doesn't matter what I achieve, the jobs that are open to me are limited by apartheid."

And my grandmother would always say, "But this is not the end of the story.

And you cannot be preparing yourself as though this is the end of the story.

You have to work as someone who believes the end of the story is a just world."

And so I really do think it is a family, a community.

And when I say a community, I mean a community, the churches that I attended, the priests that I had, the people who lived on our street who always were interested in how are you doing in school.

"What?

Oh, you failed?

How did you fail math this year?

What were you doing instead of studying?

Oh, you passed, you got a great grade.

Oh, here have some pocket money for doing well."

That this having a sense of a community that showed to me what in South Africa we call Ubuntu, that showed to me that I was an integral part of their joys and their pains, and therefore I had a responsibility.

As much as I had people who had a responsibility to me, I had a responsibility to them and to the greater community to be the best person I could possibly be.

- It's clear that the early influences of family and community made a significant impact on Naomi's life and helped shape her trajectory going forward.

Her experiences serving as a priest, as an educator, as a speaker, and as an activist have allowed her to bring people together to celebrate both our differences and our shared humanity.

Though she may have resisted following in her father's footsteps, she is undoubtedly carrying on a legacy of advocacy for equality and justice around the world.

Was there ever a time where you said, "It's too much," right?

Like, "Let me live my life.

Let me take on that responsibility in the lanes that I navigate, but this is too much."

That legacy is just something that no single person, much less family, should have to shoulder because that's a lot to live up to.

- It is, it is.

And there were times, there were definitely times, when I was like, "No, no.

This is not who I am going to be.

I am going to be my mean and ugly self as much as I want."

But really, I give credit to my parents, particularly to my mother in this instance because from the time we were very little, my mom would always say to people, "There is one priest in this house, and he chose that path."

So it is the Reverend Desmond Mpilo Tutu.

That was his choice.

He went to seminary.

I am not the Reverend Leah Tutu, and my children are not the reverend anybody.

Of course, now I can't do that.

I can't claim that one.

But growing up, having that freedom, if you like, to say my mother and father telling us, "You are going to find your own way.

You are going to find the place that you fit in the world, and we will encourage you in that space, whatever that space is, as long as it is a space that is around working for justice and freedom around the world."

And so when I finally put on this collar, and I did not try on my collar until the day of my ordination, I was still so nervous about this that when I actually stood behind the altar and stood in the pulpit, I realized that this is my place and it is my place because of me, not because I am my father's daughter, though that has a role to play in who I am.

But I am not Desmond Tutu Jr. Reverend Naomi.

I am a priest for myself, in myself, from my own experience and my own call to this ministry.

- And in that vein, what's the legacy you hope to leave?

What's the legacy you hope to leave not just for your children, for your community, but in a way that we know all the ways you are similar to your father, what's going to differentiate you?

- I think what will differentiate me is that in being more willing to express anger.

Now, my father did not hide from anger when it came up for him, but he recognized that his role in South Africa in the transition was one of a bringer together of people.

And so even he would say, you know, "My emotions come really close to the top," but his emotions tended to be emotions of sadness, of joy, that, you know, he cried very easily, and it was the feeling of people's anguish and pain.

I believe that my legacy is to say to people that anger is actually a healthy emotion that we need.

Because people got angry about injustice, that people will willing to fight for justice.

And there is nothing wrong with giving voice to anger.

And I think I come to that because of the phrase angry Black woman.

And for much of my life, I worked so hard not to be an angry Black woman, and realized that the places that I needed to be angry and I had stopped myself being angry were eating away at me and that I had to claim that title.

And in fact, you know, I've introduced myself at different places where I'm speaking that, you know, "Good afternoon, I am Nontombi Naomi angry Black woman choochoo.

So let's get it out of the way, and let us be able to have the conversation as to why I would be angry as a Black woman."

And so I think that my legacy is to say to people that anger actually can be an emotion that moves us forward and to not be afraid of anger.

To be willing to harness your anger.

To recognize that there are times when anger is just poison.

It is just poison and you have to let that go.

But that there are times when anger is the energy, the fuel, that you need to allow you to keep going in the face of brutality, inhumanity, dehumanization.

- Well, for someone who avoided answering the call for most of your life, it's true, you found your calling.

- Thank you.

- Thank you, Naomi.

- Thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

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