This post is part of a series: What is an Organizer? Where I will seek define what makes a real community organizer, and what are the traits necessary for someone to become one.
When we decide to organize, decide to stop accepting the injustices of life, decide to build stronger relationships with our friends, neighbors, and community, and reach for the levers of power, the first step is usually a meeting.
This can be a dangerous thing.
Inevitably when a group of people that is pissed off about the state of their community gathers there is going to be some complaining. Which is fair. There’s a lot to complain about, and doing so in a group of sympathetic people is a real human need. There’s a temptation to spend a lot of time commiserating about all the injustices we face and all the grief it causes, and the injustices are real and the grief is real and it’s all a big mess and people need and deserve to be validated for feeling angry and sad and confused. The world is an infuriating, sad, and confusing place much of the time. But at some point, someone has to force the conversation along. Someone has to ask, basically, yes these are problems. What are we going to to about them?
This is where a good organizer can make all the difference. And a bad organizer can make things much, much, worse.
A true organizer is capable of empathizing with peoples real pain and frustrations, but there is a limit to his patience for complaining. He is looking for something to do about the problems, something, specific and attainable that can make peoples lives better. Wallowing in self pity gets us nowhere. He looks to drive the conversation forward toward some action. Sometimes doing so means he has to be willing to be the asshole for a minute, and hour, or even the whole meeting.
A few weeks back I sat in a meeting of clergy and community leaders in an urban center in Michigan. It was 90+ degrees out and we were in an un-airconditioned church basement, so I was already short on patience as I felt the sweat drip down my face and arms, and I assume everyone else was too. But still, the meeting dragged on. Everyone had to get their two cents in, and they weren’t necessarily being concise about it. One of my staff was facilitating, and he’s a new organizer. He’s really good but he was struggling to reign people in and drive the conversation forward. I was sitting in a back corner mostly observing, but after the 100th time I heard about how this city was facing a “spiritual and cultural crisis” or that we need to do a “better job of listening to the youth” I realized that this meeting was sorely lacking for agitation. So I interrupted my organizer.
What I said went something (roughly) like this: “I’ve been sitting here listening to you guys complain for over an hour now. If I was a pastor here for the first time I wouldn’t come back. I happen to know for a fact that the mayor has 40 million bucks he’s just sitting on that is supposed to go to our people to help them stay in their houses. And I know that most of you know this too. And I know you’re all pissed off about it. So why are we sitting around blaming ourselves instead of figuring out how to go after the mayor? I’m not even from here. Do I really care about this city more than all of you? I hope not.”
It would be stretch to say that this went over well, but it got the job done. After a few seconds of silence and then a few moments of argument the conversation moved in a more strategic direction. My new young organizer had a frantic look in his eyes but I think he was pleasantly surprised by how it worked out.
It was a risk to do this, as it always is to agitate. And that’s a lesson for the would be organizer. An organizer needs, as my Mexican friends would say “ganas” (a slang word roughly translating to a combination of courage, desire, strength, and balls). Courage. No where is the need for it more apparent than at the moment agitation becomes necessary. Con ganas ese. Like you want it.
From the outside, a few things made my agitation particularly risky. I was in a basement with about 35 leaders. I was the only white person there. And this was in a town already, for good reason, suspicious of outsiders. The white guy from out of town trying to shake things up could go badly. It has gone badly for me before. That’s part of the job. That’s why it’s a risk.
But I also understood a few things going in to this meeting that made it a little bit of an easier decision. First of all, I knew there was some urgency around getting to the mayor before that money disappeared, trickled out, lining the pockets of his friends and family 50 grand at a time. And I knew the leaders in that room felt the urgency too, because I had talked to them about it. Perhaps more importantly, I knew most of the leaders in the room. The most powerful ones, the key ones, I knew well. And they knew me. They trusted me, and they knew that my concern for their community, their congregants and neighborhoods, was neither performative or fleeting. They knew I was pushing them hard, not to feel badass but because I actually gave a shit. We had established a trust that was palpable to those in the room.
It’s important to have that buy in from key leaders. Even if you don’t have a strong relationship with all of them, if there are a few that do trust you it can bail you out in a key moment. In my case when some of the attendees are like “who the hell does this white guy think he is??” Others step in and say “no no, Luke is cool.”
The old “organizing fundamental” saying for this is “agitation without relationship is just irritation”. That’s the gist of it, but I think sometimes young organizers take it too far, use it as an excuse to avoid agitating. There will be meetings where you don’t have a strong relationship with everyone in the room and you will still need to push, to agitate. It might not work. If it was a guaranteed success it wouldn’t be a risk, wouldn’t require courage. The point is, we know the alternative doesn’t work. Sitting around complaining all day doesn’t win for our communities, and it doesn’t build power.
But you do need to know the context you are in before you decide to agitate. To help you with a quick and subconscious cost benefit analysis. A 21 year old white kid walking into a black church and calling them all cowards on his first day is obviously never going to do any good. There needs to be some level of trust established. Perhaps a better organizing saying would be “don’t agitate without having built trust”. Or, simply, “don’t be an asshole”.
None of this is an exact science, and there will be times, if you organize long enough, that it will backfire. At some level, you have to trust your gut on this stuff, and the longer you’re involved in organizing, the more likely your gut is to be correct. But I also think ordinary people can usually tell when your heart is in the right place, and they will likely receive agitation with an open mind and heart in that case, even if it’s clumsy. They can also tell when someone is a part timer slumming it in their community on their way to law school, however. I’ve seen it happen. As with so many things, a pure heart and a commitment for the long term makes agitation easier. That’s a hard-won lesson that life will teach us all, eventually, one way or another.
A tangential benefit is that a well-landed agitation can help deepen a relationship in leaps and bounds. I’ve had relationships with leaders that were strengthened exponentially, to the point that they were stronger within a month than they would have been with years of 1-1’s, because I was the only person around with the ganas to call them out on their bullshit, when they were procrastinating, or being fearful, or talking a lot without saying anything. Agitation, if done well, is a risk in the moment but it’s benefits can be bountiful in the long term. That team of black leaders, I know for a fact, trusts me more than before that meeting, is more committed to working with me, because I didn’t just go along with their nonsense forever.
If you are an organizer, professional or otherwise, agitation should be a regularly used part of your toolbox. But I think there’s something to it for regular people in their personal lives too. All of us. At some point we all have a friend or family member that is acting like a jackass, or spinning their gears, or needs to pull their head out of the sand. We need to have the courage to agitate them, the tact to do it in the most loving way possible, and the trust of the person to allow it to land. And if this person receives the agitation well, and starts to pull it together, we need to stand with them and help them. Side by side. With a deeper respect for each other and a shared mission.
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