What is an Organizer? The World As It Is
The true organizer must embrace reality or be smothered by it
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.
In the summer of 2009 I moved from Bear Lake to the North End neighborhood of Detroit, into a little studio apartment on the back of a big rambling dilapidated house owned by a cool older guy named Quincy. I’ve been told by old friends from that neighborhood that it’s a very different place now, following the typical hippie-hipster-yuppie trajectory, but in 2009-2010 I was the only white person for miles in any direction and the neighborhood could have fairly been called “rough”. Across the street was a an abandoned house, next door was another one that caught on fire while I was living there. There was a lot of blight and, unfortunately, a lot of addiction and a lot of violence. Once a week or so I would lay on the floor as gunshots rang out. Yes, I did witness someone being killed, but that’s a story for another time.
Despite it all, I loved it there. For a small town kid it felt exciting, I could easily ride my bike to midtown or even downtown, and at midnight I would stand in the middle of my street, Brush Street, four lanes completely empty, and look down the straight shot at the Renaissance Center, glowing blue in the night like some kind of urban spaceship. When the Tigers played I could hear the crowd in the distance roar when Cabrera would homer, 5 seconds before I heard it on the radio.
In the evenings, I would sit on the tiny porch and talk to all the neighbors, and I became tight with many of them quickly after we had all shared a few Miller High Life’s. Quincy was cool too, he’d have big parties that all the neighbors would come to and he’d introduce me around. Talking to my neighbors in the North End was the first glimpse I got of the duality of Detroiters attitudes toward their city, but it was a pattern that would solidify over years of living there. It goes something like this: half of Detroiters talk about their city as a post apocalyptic hell hole, and half of them brush aside any problems and implore you to focus on the positive, they love the city. Quincy was in the latter group. He would often recommend some cool spot to me, a record store or coney island, and I’d go check it out. Upon return he’d ask what I thought. I normally thought it was awesome, and would say so, but would also naively comment on the amount of blight in the area, or the sheer number of abandoned lots. Quincy would get uncomfortable when I brought it up, and always dismiss it as typical of any major city, like they have all the same problems in Chicago or LA. But I’ve been to other major cities and it’s not typical. Not at all.
Out here in rural America, where I live now, there’s a similar thing going on. A lot of people want to turn a blind eye to the problems and focus on the beauty of our area, our many lakes and streams, our beautiful forests and quaint small towns. The fact that our beaches are some of the most beautiful in America. I have had pastors tell me that people in their congregations literally didn’t know there was poverty in Benzie county, which seems absolutely nuts to me (drive around a little bit!).
The flip side of this is the people who, quite simply, hate the place they live. Or at least act like they do. In rural areas like mine it often comes out among young people, a very high school type attitude of “I can’t wait to blow this cow town, there’s nothing to do here”. But older people can succumb to it to, with a sense of nostalgia as if all the good things that they loved about this place are dead and gone. In a place like Detroit, I would often hear from people that bemoaned the violence plaguing their neighborhoods. A very real problem, but the way they talked about it you’d think the bullets were flying like mosquitos and all you could do was hunker down in your basement. That any time you ventured outside you were taking your life in your hands. Which simply isn’t true. Even in the most violent neighborhood, a little common sense will get you a long way. A lot of these people had only rarely ventured out to places like Belle Isle or Rouge park, the many jewels of the city.
This bifurcation contains a lesson for organizers, professional and otherwise. The true organizer should get suspicious when he hears talk like this, because the organizer should live firmly planted in reality, with all of it’s messiness and nuance. The true organizer doesn’t minimize the problems facing a community or city, indeed, in many cases his job is to force the people to face them head on. Recently, in Flint, I had a conversation with a group of clergy and lay leaders who were all bemoaning their mayor, how corrupt he was, how incompetent. At some point I got frustrated and asked them why they keep reelecting him then? Who does he work for? Who allows him to be corrupt and incompetent? You! You’re his boss! A true organizer has to be unafraid to agitate.
Neither, however, should an organizer minimize the assets a community has, for the simple reason that it is these assets that can be used to get what we want. In my work, I often conduct listening sessions and a useful exercise I employ sometimes is a facilitated discussion centered on the question of “our city/region/county as it is vs. our city/region/county as it could be”. It’s a simple exercise: basically you just generate three lists 1) a list of good things about our area as it is right now, 2) a list of bad things about our area as it is right now and 3) a list of characteristics we would like our area to have in a utopian, mid-range future (i.e. good paying jobs, quality schools, safe parks, etc.). At the end of this exercise we ask the obvious question (it’s important to ask the obvious questions) that moves us into the next phase of our work, and starts us on the path toward a power analysis: how do we get from here to there? And what or who is stopping us?
When we fail to live in the world as it is, most often we end up living in the world as we want it to be. In our heads. And when we do this while trying to organize we are crippling our ability to win.
I think an example or two might be helpful: one way we fail to live in the world as it is has to do with the “who” and the “where” of our organizing. I’ve written about this before, but often in the world of organizing we make the mistake of doubling down, trying to build a new base with the same people, in the same cities/regions, that we’ve been organizing for decades. This leads to all sorts of silly turf wars, but it also leads to ineffective organizing. It happens mostly due to funding, but also due to an inability to live in the world as it is: we want these people (poor POC’s in major urban centers mostly) to be the key to a powerful governing coalition, so we build a strategy that acts as if that is already the case. But of course it’s not.
Obviously, the “sexy” regions and people to organize (i.e. Detroit etc.) should and must be organized. It is both a moral and strategic imperative. But a strategy based in the world as it is would recognize that, to win, this organizing must be partnered with organizing in much less sexy places: the Macomb and Wexford County’s of the world. This is precisely because those places are less sexy, less organized, and therefore can get you more bang for your buck as an organizer, in terms of attention from decision makers and media. It is also because, as I am constantly at pains to point out, they are not permanent strongholds for the Democrats or Republicans, thus necessitating a degree of attention from their elected officials that doesn’t exist in less purple places. If we don’t live in the world as it is, these are the kinds of strategic questions we fail to face head on.
Another example of a failure to live in the world as it is occurs when we refuse to deal with the people that have power; right here and right now. This is a problem endemic to hard core lefties in their organizing efforts, and frankly radicals and idealogues of all stripes. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard some version of: “why would we meet with him? He’s a (fascist, centrist, racist, etc.).” The thought seems to be that instead of meeting with them or trying to influence them that we should just build power and replace them electorally. How’s that working out so far?
I hate to tell you this, but fascists, racists, centrists…they all have power in our current political system and society as a whole. Some of them have quite a lot of it. (Less often, but still common, I’ve heard right conservatives say the same thing but replace “fascist” with “communist” or “Marxist”. Of course this is pretty laughable. I don’t actually think there are any communists or Marxists with meaningful power in America and this probably stems from a misunderstanding of what Marxism actually is, fed by Fox news and social media… but ANYWAY...). Whatever “ism” you want to call it, whether its true or not is beside the point. The people that have power in our society very likely disagree with us on any number of things. Pretty often they are awful people. Even the ones that aren’t can’t be trusted further than you can throw them. The only good politicians, to my mind, are the ones that obey their constituents like a well trained dog. That’s not too common, and maybe it never has been.
But guess what, they’re not going any where. They have power. And they’re not going to give it up overnight. Even an effective campaign to replace a small percentage of these people would take years if not decades. In the meantime, whether we like them or not, they are making decisions every day that affect our lives and our communities. Moreover, if we don’t meet with them, don’t try to influence them, others certainly will. Do you want the only person your representatives hear from to be a corporate lobbyist? Do you want the only voices in their ear to be the exact people that are causing the problems in our communities to begin with?
I will occasionally be criticized for this line of thinking by hard-core lefty friends. They will usually say something to the effect that it makes me a “centrist” or that I am somehow moderating my beliefs if I meet with these people. This is the same criticism that is applied when I talked about organizing rural, working class, white people. That this somehow makes me a sell out or a conservative. My answer is always that it doesn’t make me anything other than someone who actually wants to win.
And you never know, maybe you can win with some of these people, even the shitty ones, if you actually try. In another city in Michigan, a couple years ago, we were working to get some “fair chance” affordable housing built. We felt was important that this housing be available to convicted felons, as this city contains a large prison and thus a lot of returning citizens (this lack of a requirement for a felony free record is what makes it “fair chance”). We needed approval from the city council for one part of the process and were worried about one very conservative councilor. Many of the citizens we organized felt he was a hopeless case, and would never support this effort, that he hated poor people and wanted to be “tough on crime”. But we met with him any way, and a couple of our people who were returning citizens themselves led the meeting. It turns out his brother was locked up and, as a result, he had recently begun to care deeply about the plight of returning citizens. It didn’t take much to swing him, and in the end he was celebrated at the groundbreaking of the new fair chance housing apartments, right downtown.
I don’t think this guy was, or will ever be, a “good guy”, or an ally on much of anything else for us. But on this specific issue he was, and we never would have known if we didn’t at least talk with him. The point of course is that in all levels of organizing, as in life, we must deal with people, and that people are endlessly complicated. Those who you think might be your enemy may turn out to be your friend. Those who you think are righteous and pure may betray you. It makes things hard but it also makes life interesting. Living in the world as we want it to be is easy, simple, and clean. But living in the world as it is is much more fascinating. There’s always a chance to be surprised at least.
It’s not crazy to think that we can work to influence these people at the same time as we build power to replace them if necessary. We can walk and chew gum. In fact, through our efforts to influence those in power we can often expose their flaws in a way that makes it easier for us to build the power to replace them, recruit candidates from within our own ranks, engage in the electoral process. Pull the shroud away from the whole system and expose it as fraudulent. These two pieces of organizing can, and should, feed each other if done right.
But to do it right we have to live in the world as it is. A world that is full of beauty and hope, love and joy, but also oppression, corruption, violence and poverty. A world where bad people have too much power and good people too little.
Those who refuse to live in this world and instead live in the world as they want it to be are resigning themselves to failure, but it’s an enticing form of failure. It’s enticing to feel above it all, to think you don’t have to live in the world as it exists and deal with the people that are hard to deal with. It means you don’t have to do anything. At the end of the day you are right and just. You can be a shining martyr for the truth.
I often think that, at the end of the day, the biggest problem with “the movement” or whatever you want to call it, nowadays, is that too many people are more worried about being right and just than winning. But being right and just doesn’t matter. Changing things for the better does. And the first step toward that change is grappling with the real world, in all it’s chaos and messiness. Step into reality. It’s not so bad. You might have fun.
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