2D. CONDITIONS AND CONSTRAINTS: The challenge of sharing political stories.

LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE, LEARNING FROM EACH OTHER:
Apply understanding to action.

2D. CONDITIONS AND CONSTRAINTS: The challenge of sharing political stories.
• Some goals of political education.
• Where we share and develop political stories: common venues and conditions.
# Campaigns.
# In the course of mobilizing constituencies.
# The corporate mass media.
# The ‘net will set us free.
# Structured discussions.
# Casual conversation.
• Stress is a necessary but not sufficient condition of change.


Helpful dynamics.
• It’s not easy to make us obey gangsters.
• We have more than one idea.
• I count at least 3 chances to change our minds.
• Dissenters can move groups, sometimes.
• We learn and change because we need to, not to please each other.


* * * * * * * * * * * *

2. LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE, LEARNING FROM EACH OTHER:
Apply understanding to action.

We don’t need no education.
We don’t need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom--
Teacher! Leave them kids alone!
All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall.
--Pink Floyd


2D. CONDITIONS AND CONSTRAINTS: The challenge of sharing political stories.

Some months back I attended a teaching class about Equity in the Classroom. A couple friends presented about Latino kids. They passed around good background information about the growing community in Tennessee, and the fact that, nationally, Latinos are now the largest minority group. They told us the major heroes and holidays, and sang a pretty good song. They talked about different cultural expectations.

After the lecture some of the teachers complained privately that they couldn’t understand the presenters because of their accents. The presenters have been around for years, they work at the university, and I had not the slightest trouble understanding them. Possibly that’s because I teach immigrants, but I don’t think so. The complaints about accent are really complaints about having different kinds of people in the community; freaks some people out.

A little later I had occasion to correspond with one of the Latinas. I suggested that next time she could address the fears more directly. Tell them the stat about Latinos as the largest group, I wrote, and then ask, “How does that make you feel?” I wrote that we can’t get at the underlay of prejudice, suspicion, and plain old culture shock unless we can get it on the table first.

My friend disagreed.

Paul, I see and hear that every day in one way or another. In my class at UT, we go beyond the cultural presentation and examine racism, bigotry and prejudice. I do it there because we have a semester together and I can guide the dialogue in a constructive way. In presentations like the one you heard I go by the request of the people who plan it. They want a cultural presentation and I do that (and I have 2 other requests for July) hoping that they start looking at the immigrants from a different angle. Two hours is not enough to have a meaningful dialogue and to confront people with their prejudices. But hopefully they start having a feel for what immigrants go through to be able to survive.

I replied that we should also figure out how to respond to folks when we don’t have a semester. I wrote that if we can get a discussion going, folks can hash through the issues themselves and some will say all the things we would say. My friend didn’t buy it.

If what you are talking is setting the record straight, you are correct. I can add that kind of conversation when we talk about how immigrants get here. But racism is something more ingrained and need to be handled in a process. The socialization that has gone on for many years is not discarded because we tell them how incorrect they are. The deconstruction of racism takes breaking stereotypes and beliefs and can not be dealt by a two hour presentation. This is something we are talking about at the Race Relations Center. Hopefully soon we will have something substantial to offer.

I share my friend’s concern. We’ve seen how impenetrable our prejudices can be. And she’s right to see that time and trust are basic requirements for dealing with such explosive issues. I’m not going to take any risks with you if I don’t know you. You ask me a loaded question, I’m going to keep my mouth shut, especially if you’re in a position of authority. I’m going to nod and smile and cuss you out where you can’t hear. I won’t learn anything. For folks who have been excluded, belittled, betrayed, and punished for speaking, trust is absolutely essential to any serious talk.

Furthermore, I’m downright stupid to expect that a member of a group under attack should invite further abuse, with herself as lightning rod. Someone as well-protected as I, on the other hand, could safely do more. The question is, how I can engage folks, so that we learn together over the long term? Just as important, how can we engage early on, while our stories are still fluid, before early misunderstandings harden into well-defended lies? Because we’ve seen that there’s a narrow window of opportunity, where we are open to new ideas.


• Some goals of political education. The point of learning is to act more effectively in the world. This is what I want from political education:

-- most important, that my neighbors and I change what we do, in order to solve our problems more effectively. That’s the long-term goal. And I don’t mean changing human nature. The revolution needs people, not saints. I’m looking for changes more like the kind lovers bring to each other; growth.
-- that we disrupt the way our bosses make the rules, from brown-nosing to gay-bashing and flag-waving, without being easily isolated and dismissed
-- that we establish the relationships and intellectual basis for the much wider, deeper discussion we’ll need. How could we measure that? One measure: can we spread the challenging conversations? That’s how we get to the long-term goal.
-- that we organize majorities and extend the base for democracy.

To my understanding, democratic education is not about laying The Program on The People. As political workers we have little-p programs, because we want to move things in the real world. Workers’ coops, affirmative action, solar power, and inclusive decision-making are among the many practicable democratic responses to specific, important problems. In working out the immediate problems we necessarily lay bare the connections among them, and begin to build more and more comprehensive approaches.

Nevertheless, I figure that, as educators, we have no need to sell a pre-packaged panacea, because
a) we can’t outsell the pimps
b) no model is completely accurate, and anyhow the world changes
c) to the extent our models work, others will see that too, and join the work because they need solutions more than daddy’s approval
d) democratic education, education for action, means considering and trying out ideas from everyone who would just as soon not live off the suffering of their neighbors.

Anyhow, do you know how to put Halliburton out of our misery? I don't. And do you know what to do after that? We’ll get closer to the big solutions the more people help out.

That’s what I want from political education. How about you?

One way to think about learning is as a process of changing our stories. Our minds are designed to learn from experience, but also to conserve resources, to make decisions whether or not we have complete information, to build on what we know (or think we know). When the stories we have already no longer help us solve problems, or even make the problems worse, how do we move on to better stories?


• Where we share and develop political stories: common venues and conditions.
Let’s consider for a moment some of the circumstances in which we develop our political stories:

# Campaigns. These are the principle product of a lot of community groups and advocacy organizations: demonstrations, speeches and petition drives to win a union certification vote, elect someone who hasn’t killed quite as many people as the other guy, pass or block some legislation, stop some new corporate horror or take care of its victims . . . usually what we’re doing is selling a pre-packaged program or policy. Campaigns don’t lend themselves to two-way communication. The real discussion takes place among the folks on the campaign committees, as they try to figure out what they should do and how they can recruit others to help. Often our immediate goal is simply to mobilize the people we know agree with us already; we want to push them to prioritize the campaign issue and act on it. We also want to let the community know how many we are, as if that's a good reason to join us, or at least to stop messing with us; Christians are especially systematic about this kind of witness. Over time we aim for a broader cumulative effect on the general public: Gosh, maybe there really is something to this climate change stuff after all!

Again, the highest education value in well-run campaigns is that participants can learn a lot about the ruling institutions by pushing them. In confronting Jim Crow, at the cost of so many lives, civil rights workers exposed all the violence and corruption of that sacred institution, to people in other parts of the country who didn’t know much about it.

Rightists are still scrambling to paint over that great embarrassment. The scary thing is that in part they have succeeded, by becoming more mobile in the fast-moving hate market. No more expensive, ponderous, patently absurd segregation laws, aimed boringly at the same old victims, but a rather a just-in-time inventory of repackaged hate products in the latest designer colors-- talk show attacks on affirmative action one day, ballot initiatives to punish gay people, rounding up Asian and Latino families the third, not to mention our newest pastime, bombing Muslims at random. Millions deny that discrimination exists or that it’s result of policy, and racist and sexist fear still wins elections. When we push the institutions of control, we see how quickly they turn on even folks in the privileged groups (see especially Minnie Bruce Pratt). But while we push, the gangsters are running their own very vigorous counter-campaigns of divide and conquer.

One shortfall of our own campaign mode is that efforts to mobilize the base necessarily give little attention to the very fundamental question of what moves folks to political action in the first place. (As always, I think of political action in the broadest terms; it includes covering for a co-worker or getting an abused kid to a shelter.) Millions of us breathe poison air every day, after all; what moves some folks to take action?

And how do particular issues emerge from the sea of troubles which choke us? I remember decades ago a reporter saying, This fair trade shtick sounds nice and all, but most folks don’t really care about it, and so newspapers needn’t either. I said to her, women have been beaten and murdered for many generations, and it wasn’t “news” for all that time, but it sure is an issue. Likewise, now there is a much broader awareness of the impact of globalization, thanks in the first place not to the mass media but to the left critique of the intensifying trend. Campaigns help educate the media, but many kinds of education take place to mobilize people into campaigns in the first place.

Finally, some very important kinds of democratic action don’t lend themselves to the campaign approach. Let’s say we were able to derail “free trade” for the time being. Then we’d have to figure out how to establish a very complex set of fair trade policies and institutions, through negotiation with hundreds of governments, unions, and community organizations. A friend of mine who’s worked on forest policy for years laments the turf battles among grassroots and advocacy groups that undermines any chance for fair and comprehensive solutions to these urgent economic and environmental problems. I wonder if one of the barriers is the campaign mentality we’ve developed; we even campaign against each other. It’s not surprising that pooling our knowledge and developing a big-picture analysis should sometimes take a back seat to more immediate battles for funding, campaign victories, coalition politics, internal rivalries.

But what are we going to do to overcome these destructive dynamics?


# In the course of mobilizing constituencies. The most savvy organizations, whether unions or churches or grassroots groups, also do a lot of groundwork before full campaign season --perhaps with months of housecalls or other community outreach-- so that potential issues and conflicts get hashed out thoroughly. Permanent committees are the venue for ongoing discussions about anything pertaining to the organization’s work. At their best, when a lot of people are dealing with important questions, these are key sites of democracy.

At one time pros in the politics biz counted on “leaders” to educate their neighbors or co-workers-- leaders being those folks we assume have unofficial positions of respect and influence in the community or workplace. Once we involved them, the thought was, they would engage the folks around them and everyone would reinforce each other’s learning and action. Steelworker Johnny Metzgar played just such a role:

He knew the contract line by line. He was one of the mill’s shop-floor lawyers even before he became a ‘grievance man’. He could patiently explain why this or that provision was important, what it would be like without it-- not only to ‘the men,’ but even to those of us who had never been in the mill. But though his practical knowledge enhanced his general credibility, it was nothing compared to the broad moral and historical context in which he placed it (Metzgar 20).

He was constantly tuned to the needs and moods of his co-workers and reflected that in how he interpreted union policy; presumably he also made sure the higher-ups understood what was happening on the shop floor, and so helped make policy, too.

I’ve met other folks whose standing in the community or in the workplace was such that, when they began to raise questions about racism or wages or toxic waste, their neighbors and co-workers took them seriously and joined their work. Black railroad and post office workers were key figures of the early civil rights movement, because they were relatively independent of local employers, and had access to wide networks of people and ideas. Miles Horton used to advise organizers to check in with beauticians, who are professionally plugged in to major flows of local information.

But the kind of leaders described in the organizing manuals pre-supposes a level of community solidarity and integration that I don’t often see. I’m not the best judge of these things, having minimal social skills myself, but it seems like a lot of thoughtful, committed people live and work in very transitory situations, where the kind of long-standing relationships we take for granted just don’t have the time to develop, nor the opportunities for cooperation. This too is a function of the way insanely competitive capitalism and consumption dissolve communities. If once upon a time every town had its Jimmy Stewart aw-shucks pillars of the community, in close, long-term interdependence with his neighbors and beloved by all, that sure isn’t the case now.

Featherstone writes about the ongoing struggle with Walmart:

Labor activists talk a lot about involving the ‘community,’ which all agree is an important component in the struggle to unionize Wal-Mart. Yet one advantage Wal-Mart has in this regard is that with 70 percent of its stores located outside of metropolitan areas, and ‘Main Street’ dying everywhere, it’s doing business in many places where there isn’t much of a community. In urban areas like Inglewood, and in some small towns, black churches, small-business associations and other institutions have been able to facilitate a discussion about whether Wal-Mart serves or thwarts the common good. But in many of the rural and exurban counties and townships where the retailer has traditionally operated, there has been no basis of such a debate: only isolated families struggling to get by, grateful to be able to load up their cars with cheap groceries from Wal-Mart. As is often the case, rhetoric about ‘community’ can blind us to the crucial problem of its absence (16).

I’ve met plenty of grassroots activists who find it just as hard, just as risky, to generate political conversations among the neighbors as I do. Indeed, some get so used to being the lone voice crying in the wilderness it’s very hard for them to learn accountability to organizations. It’s curious: in my family, I’ve had the lengthiest debates with the sister farthest from me politically, perhaps because we are simply practicing on each other, while relatively minor differences with my brother cause much anxiety to us both.

How much less well equipped I feel to talk with folks whose politics I don’t know, with whom I have at best a casual, coincidental relationship. And yet how else are we going to reach folks? Most people don’t have the time or clear incentive to give up weekends, never mind months or careers, to tackling the ugliest problems of our time.

Instead, for many of us, demonstrations are the normal means of political communication. At one time picketers could actually block business as usual, but that happens so rarely nowadays it’s like trolley cars. Much more often we use demos and marches to bring new information to public attention (that company that dumped trichlorethylene in your water supply, and so forth), and to encourage friends and discourage local creeps. But chanting The People United over a sign is not the best way to change anyone’s mind on long-contested issues. It’s no way to get beyond the existing congregation of the faithful, to build a democratic majority.

I confess to an absurd resort to sloganeering. A few months before Halliburton invaded Iraq the guy across the street held a Christmas party. Several neighbors and their friends attended. It was all very friendly. At some point we began talking about terrorism and our host said that The Muslims were out to get us. I could easily have disputed that, very politely, but I let him get away with it and here’s why: I’d just prepared a couple fancy anti-war signs, I’d just gotten them back from the sign shop, and I was planning to set them up in my front yard right after Christmas. I didn’t want to challenge my neighbor because I didn’t want him to see my signs as a hostile response to his comment. I had a perfect opportunity to encourage a friendly discussion with several people, but I passed it by to protect my elaborate, impersonal, non-participatory bloody signs.

I was a fool. We cannot wait on perfect conditions to start the discussions. We can’t wait until people sign up for classes, because we want to reach the folks who haven’t already committed to democracy. We certainly can’t wait for schools and churches and companies to surround folks with democratic values, because that’s the change we have to mobilize to fight for. I can’t wait till everyone likes me, because I won’t live that long.

Fortunately, we know some things that make political learning possible even outside our comfort zones.