From the perspective of someone organizing
by
xtymcg
09/08/2008, 4:00 PM #
I'm disappointed in Slate for not soliciting more thoughtful comments on on the Palin jabs. This drivel was so obviously written by someone who has never worked as an organizer.
Here's to jumping into the Fray, and some of my own thoughts post RNC:
There have been a lot of themes thrown around during the Republican
convention. Two have caught my attention: the constant references to
the physical violence inflicted upon John McCain while serving in
Vietnam, and the numerous disparaging comments made tonight about
Barack Obama's work as a community organizer in Chicago.
Interestingly, the Republicans were also ready to invoke two of the
major U.S. social justice movements (the Civil Rights movement, and the
Women's movement), in an effort to buttress their standard
shrink-the-government populist talking points—anything to whip up the
crowd into paroxysms of frenzied fervor. So, this is what I gleaned
from the speeches tonight: The sky is the limit! All you need to do is
work hard and you'll be rewarded with public accolades and the fruits
of a trickle down economy! "They," might have nominated a black
candidate, we got a woman! We are color blind and we don't care about
gender, we promise! We're saying it in front of lots of TV cameras, hot
cha cha!
Setting aside all the problems with frantic assertions that all of our
problems have been fixed and we no longer need to fight racism and
sexism, I was shocked and disgusted by the glib and off-hand way in
which the Republicans took credit for the work that community
organizers have done, while literally snickering and sneering at the
profession itself. What a slap in the face.
Back to those first two themes: John McCain got the crap beat out of
him in a P.O.W. camp, and community organizers don't really do
anything. I think the real problem is that Republicans either a) don't
understand community organizing, or b) they understand it quite well
and are actively working to disseminate an inaccurate picture of what
it entails in an effort to undermine social change.
Lets start with a): I would like to take this opportunity to briefly
explain community organizing for anyone who hasn't had the privilege of
working as one:
Community organizers do something much scarier than attacking their
enemies with guns and bombs. They work to undermine unjust power
structures in creative, compelling, and lasting ways. Community
organizers work to give other people agency over their lives, and they
work to redistribute power in an equitable way. Rosa Parks was a
trained organizer. Martin Luther King Jr, was heir to a long line of
organizers that built the movement that he stepped in to lead.
Power is never conceded. It is taken. What happens when you organize to
take power and give it to other people? People in power retaliate—often
with violence. Lynching is a fate that met many community organizers in
the Civil Rights movement.
Mike Huckabee sanctimoniously reminded people of the horrible
inequities, and violence, faced by people of color in days of yore. He
was also quick to celebrate the fact that we no longer have to pay
attention to color. Well, Mike, the reason we are even having this
conversation in a national context is because people of color and their
allies have been fighting, and dying, for four hundred years to get
here. Ignoring "it" is completely disrespectful, and quite frankly
another tool to prop up existing power structures, so please stop
acting like ignorant "colorblind" bliss is a goal to aspire to.
Granted, far from of being heroes in a state sponsored war, most
community organizers working in the Civil Rights movement were fighting
against state sponsored violence. That probably has something to do
with the way that their work is characterized by Republicans.
It would take far too long to go through examples of all the state
sponsored violence faced by community organizers, but I think it's
helpful just to remember a few poignant examples. Alice Paul didn't
spend time in the Hanoi Hilton, but she was jailed in the United States
of America for organizing as a suffragette. She was beaten and force
fed for having the audacity to say that women are human beings and
deserve to participate in the political system. I wonder what she would
think of Palin, accepting the nomination of Vice President, while
simultaneously making disparaging comments about the women who fought
before her for that right. The sheer audacity makes my jaw drop. Labor
organizers are physically threatened on a daily basis—in fact there
were several recent notorious murders of labor organizers in South
America working to unionize Coke bottling plants.
So, Mr. Giuliani and Sarah Palin and anyone else who might be confused about what community organizing entails:
Yes, community organizing means fighting for something bigger than
yourself--without the U.S. military backing you up. It means giving
hundreds of other people the training, the skills, and the confidence
to do the exact same job that you are doing, and hopefully when you're
done they do your job better than you do. It means walking into rooms
and situations where you know you are not welcome, and making yourself
even more unwelcome. It means fundraising your own paycheck. It means
going to work and sometimes not getting a paycheck, and just doing the
work because you care that much. It means making enemies. It means
making enough friends to take your enemies on. It can mean physical
violence, and it often has. It means discovering all the stories that
you weren't taught in your high school history class. It means being a
part of everything good about America. It means giving credit to other
people, and working to make sure that everyone is recognized for the
contributions that they have made to the collective effort. It means
putting other people in the spot light. It means being a part of the
underground rail road, the wildcat strikes of the 1930s, the burgeoning
community gardening projects providing food to City of Detroit, the
communities fighting to maintain access to clean, safe drinking water,
the Rape Awareness Project, the March on Washington that ended in the
"I Have a Dream," speech, and the list goes on. And on. And on. Because
the work will never be done.
This brings me to b):
Republicans, at least some of them, probably do understand what
community organizing entails, which is why they are so quick to
denigrate it. I am reminded of that famous quote from Ghandi, "First
they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you
win."
So I suppose that I shouldn't be too rankled that Republican
strategists saw the need to laugh at Obama's work as a community
organizer. That puts us at an interesting point in that continuum of
retaliation.
