what would saul alinsky do?
So I've been working with the Texas Campaign for the Environment for four months now, and I've fallen into the rhythm of working for a nonprofit and a political organization. In spite of how mundane it seems to me right now though, it pays to consider every now and then the fact that I am involved in what is looked on as a somewhat radical (and, recently, somewhat reviled) method to effect political and social change.
And so I think it's a good idea to examine my motivations in working for such a group, what I am getting from it, and whether or not I should move to full time (currently working 4 days a week) and accept a promotion - making a somewhat significant commitment to this type of work. And making more money.
Right. Community organizing. Obama began his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago and was openly mocked for it during the 2008 election.
The ACORN scandal, which was a result of lazy, unethical employees looking to get paid for work they didn't do, has been so hugely maligned that people will come to the door and threaten me with violence if I have come on behalf of ACORN, even if they agree with the work that I am doing and are willing to donate.
The $8-an-hour employees were charged with providing false information on voter registration forms, and in one case with making a false statement to a public official. Five of the seven who were charged pleaded guilty. ACORN was fined for exercising insufficient oversight, but it was not charged with masterminding any kind of deliberate fraud.
- factcheck.org
What about the work makes it so hateful to so many people? Why do people confront me with outright hostility when I engage them about a non-partisan, environmentally and economically beneficial initiative that seeks, if nothing else, to reduce the amount of suffering we heap on developing nations and their poverty-stricken populations? Well, there are many implicit associations with the work, I suppose. To get a better perspective, I read up a little bit on the father of community organizing, Saul Alinsky, about whom folk singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens has penned a song.
From what I gathered from wikipedia (I know, I know unreliable internet lolz etc. - but it's apparently more accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica and I don't got no more JSTOR so fuck it) it looks like Saul Alinsky was a man who was viewed by contemporaries as a dangerous radical but who, in reality, worked fucking hard to gain ground in the struggle for civil rights. At a time when that kind of thing got you murdered. He stood up for something. And, accordingly, I think he frightened people. He earned a great deal of hatred. The following excerpt, from a 1972 Playboy interview with Alinsky, illustrates my point quite nicely.
...he flew to the West Coast, at the request of the Bay Area Presbyterian Churches, to organize the black ghetto in Oakland, California. Hearing of his plans, the panic-stricken Oakland City Council promptly introduced a resolution banning him from the city, and an amendment by one councilman to send him a 50-foot length of rope with which to hang himself was carried overwhelmingly. (Alinsky responded by mailing the council a box of diapers.)
- Playboy, 1972
What kind of reaction is that? How is it possible that educated adults are sent into such a frenzy that they must resort to empty, immature threats by a man whose goal is empowering poverty-stricken black communities to lift themselves up and out of their situation and to strive for equality?
Ahh.
Yes, I think I get it now.
And that's very interesting. Armed with this information, I can now return to my original question: Why does this form of activism draw such ire and cause such fear? Is it racism, really? At some level, I would say yes. And this is somewhat more abstract an answer to my original question than I had intended, but I'm learning a lot as I write this entry.
The link between economic depression and racism is not exactly shrouded in mystery. Economic disenfranchisement, in this country, equals political disenfranchisement. How is it possible that, in the 50+ years since the supposed end of the struggle for civil rights, let's-pat-ourselves-on-the-back-we-beat-racism, we have only had 5 (FIVE) black US senators? Why is Sotomayor the FIRST Hispanic Justice on the Supreme Court, when they are 15% of the population? Presumably the entry into politics is not a cheap affair. There must be advanced degrees, high levels of education, and money to pour into high-profile campaigns. Many qualifications are required to even begin walking the road to office, and all of those qualifications cost money. When even standardized test scores are linked to income levels, there is a realization that working income communities, composed largely of minorities, are denied - by the very structure of the education system, where all opportunities in life begin - the chance to be relevant in modern society; to make a difference.
When someone attempts to enter a poor community and organize it, to give it a sense of belonging and consequence in the grander scheme of American history, the reaction is the same as it was when the issue was about the color of your skin. By keeping minorities poor, affluent white culture is able to keep them out of sight and out of mind, relegating them to inner cities and the desperate scramble to eke out a living in a world whose doors are almost all closed to you. It's about racism. And breaking the cycle of poverty admits those people into the world of education and true opportunity. A predominantly white world. And that is why they hate us.
Before I continue, I would like to clarify that this new economic racism negatively impacts caucasians trapped in the cycle as much as any minority, and that classifying it as 'racism' per se is a product of the proportionality of the thing.
But Maria, you ask, what does racism have to do with you? You organize on environmental issues and recycling. Aren't you getting a big head?
Possibly. But thinking about it, I realize that a lot of power is generated from grassroots democratic campaigns and community organizing. And that even though I am working to keep third world countries from drowning in our electronic waste, my work is part and parcel of a larger philosophy; one which seeks to amend wrongs done to disenfranchised and poor populations by a predominantly white class of people who do not care about them because they are poor. Environmental justice is social justice. Environmental injustice is racism.
I don't really think it's my place to preach, so I don't want anyone to misunderstand. It's just that I have always been deeply concerned with matters of ethics, about morality and what my duties are as a citizen as well as an individual. The idea of making a career out of something that in no way satisfies my perhaps selfish desire to uphold my personal ethical standards does not appeal to me at this time. At all. But I felt it wise to consider the job fully, as complacency comes from all directions and having a more fully-formed understanding of the work I do has really helped me mentally in the ability to rationalize the decision to either pursue it seriously or not. And I think that I will be making the decision to commit more of my young, active life to a serious cause that not only fights environmental degradation, but upholds principles of equality, justice, hard work, and tolerance. So I ask myself: what would Saul Alinsky do?
I think I've earned myself a cigarette on the porch swing.
And so I think it's a good idea to examine my motivations in working for such a group, what I am getting from it, and whether or not I should move to full time (currently working 4 days a week) and accept a promotion - making a somewhat significant commitment to this type of work. And making more money.
Right. Community organizing. Obama began his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago and was openly mocked for it during the 2008 election.
The ACORN scandal, which was a result of lazy, unethical employees looking to get paid for work they didn't do, has been so hugely maligned that people will come to the door and threaten me with violence if I have come on behalf of ACORN, even if they agree with the work that I am doing and are willing to donate.
The $8-an-hour employees were charged with providing false information on voter registration forms, and in one case with making a false statement to a public official. Five of the seven who were charged pleaded guilty. ACORN was fined for exercising insufficient oversight, but it was not charged with masterminding any kind of deliberate fraud.
- factcheck.org
What about the work makes it so hateful to so many people? Why do people confront me with outright hostility when I engage them about a non-partisan, environmentally and economically beneficial initiative that seeks, if nothing else, to reduce the amount of suffering we heap on developing nations and their poverty-stricken populations? Well, there are many implicit associations with the work, I suppose. To get a better perspective, I read up a little bit on the father of community organizing, Saul Alinsky, about whom folk singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens has penned a song.
From what I gathered from wikipedia (I know, I know unreliable internet lolz etc. - but it's apparently more accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica and I don't got no more JSTOR so fuck it) it looks like Saul Alinsky was a man who was viewed by contemporaries as a dangerous radical but who, in reality, worked fucking hard to gain ground in the struggle for civil rights. At a time when that kind of thing got you murdered. He stood up for something. And, accordingly, I think he frightened people. He earned a great deal of hatred. The following excerpt, from a 1972 Playboy interview with Alinsky, illustrates my point quite nicely.
...he flew to the West Coast, at the request of the Bay Area Presbyterian Churches, to organize the black ghetto in Oakland, California. Hearing of his plans, the panic-stricken Oakland City Council promptly introduced a resolution banning him from the city, and an amendment by one councilman to send him a 50-foot length of rope with which to hang himself was carried overwhelmingly. (Alinsky responded by mailing the council a box of diapers.)
- Playboy, 1972
What kind of reaction is that? How is it possible that educated adults are sent into such a frenzy that they must resort to empty, immature threats by a man whose goal is empowering poverty-stricken black communities to lift themselves up and out of their situation and to strive for equality?
Ahh.
Yes, I think I get it now.
And that's very interesting. Armed with this information, I can now return to my original question: Why does this form of activism draw such ire and cause such fear? Is it racism, really? At some level, I would say yes. And this is somewhat more abstract an answer to my original question than I had intended, but I'm learning a lot as I write this entry.
The link between economic depression and racism is not exactly shrouded in mystery. Economic disenfranchisement, in this country, equals political disenfranchisement. How is it possible that, in the 50+ years since the supposed end of the struggle for civil rights, let's-pat-ourselves-on-the-back-we-beat-racism, we have only had 5 (FIVE) black US senators? Why is Sotomayor the FIRST Hispanic Justice on the Supreme Court, when they are 15% of the population? Presumably the entry into politics is not a cheap affair. There must be advanced degrees, high levels of education, and money to pour into high-profile campaigns. Many qualifications are required to even begin walking the road to office, and all of those qualifications cost money. When even standardized test scores are linked to income levels, there is a realization that working income communities, composed largely of minorities, are denied - by the very structure of the education system, where all opportunities in life begin - the chance to be relevant in modern society; to make a difference.
When someone attempts to enter a poor community and organize it, to give it a sense of belonging and consequence in the grander scheme of American history, the reaction is the same as it was when the issue was about the color of your skin. By keeping minorities poor, affluent white culture is able to keep them out of sight and out of mind, relegating them to inner cities and the desperate scramble to eke out a living in a world whose doors are almost all closed to you. It's about racism. And breaking the cycle of poverty admits those people into the world of education and true opportunity. A predominantly white world. And that is why they hate us.
Before I continue, I would like to clarify that this new economic racism negatively impacts caucasians trapped in the cycle as much as any minority, and that classifying it as 'racism' per se is a product of the proportionality of the thing.
But Maria, you ask, what does racism have to do with you? You organize on environmental issues and recycling. Aren't you getting a big head?
Possibly. But thinking about it, I realize that a lot of power is generated from grassroots democratic campaigns and community organizing. And that even though I am working to keep third world countries from drowning in our electronic waste, my work is part and parcel of a larger philosophy; one which seeks to amend wrongs done to disenfranchised and poor populations by a predominantly white class of people who do not care about them because they are poor. Environmental justice is social justice. Environmental injustice is racism.
I don't really think it's my place to preach, so I don't want anyone to misunderstand. It's just that I have always been deeply concerned with matters of ethics, about morality and what my duties are as a citizen as well as an individual. The idea of making a career out of something that in no way satisfies my perhaps selfish desire to uphold my personal ethical standards does not appeal to me at this time. At all. But I felt it wise to consider the job fully, as complacency comes from all directions and having a more fully-formed understanding of the work I do has really helped me mentally in the ability to rationalize the decision to either pursue it seriously or not. And I think that I will be making the decision to commit more of my young, active life to a serious cause that not only fights environmental degradation, but upholds principles of equality, justice, hard work, and tolerance. So I ask myself: what would Saul Alinsky do?
I think I've earned myself a cigarette on the porch swing.