3E. GET SERIOUS: Clarify our self-interest, goals, and strategies.

3E. GET SERIOUS: Clarify our self-interest, goals, and strategies.

We can't come to agreements with our neighbors until we are sure what we want; and that includes goals we maybe don't like talking about. Let’s be clear about what we want, make it clear to others, and take responsibility for it.

• Talk about our own self-interest and the risks of change.
A socialist activist once told a labor educator: You’re just a careerist, whereas I do this work because I love the working class. What an orifice. Somebody said that to me, I’d say: Lie to yourself all you want, but don’t imagine the rest of us are so blind. The people who start out saying they are smarter/stronger/holier than you and me, don’t take but a minute to decide that they can make better decisions than we can-- so we should just leave it all up to them.

I’ve seen people do hard things, I’ve seen people do stupid things; I’ve never ever seen anyone persist in a course of action without reward of some kind. Maybe I turned down that promotion because I want to be down with the rank and file; maybe, too, I don’t want to give up my nice-guy posture, and couldn’t stand the stress of more responsibility. Sure I put in all those extra hours at the homeless shelter; they love me there; not to mention, so long as I give and the clients take, they’re in no position to question my attitudes or authority.

There are a lot of people we expect to be selfless. We still expect women to set aside their personal needs for the good of their families. Firefighters, soldiers, teachers, health care workers, political workers, they are all supposed to put society’s needs before their own. At least the wage earners can form unions. Still, their status depends heavily on a posture of sacrifice, and their training makes it hard for them to talk about self-interest.

The fact that we ourselves get something out of the good things we do doesn’t mean at all that we should stop doing them; only that we should understand why. And the reason is, again, that to believe myself to be uniquely selfless is not a harmless fantasy. It means I will consistently misunderstand the people around me, and, misunderstanding myself, will surely betray them. I won’t recognize my own investment in the status quo, and others’ in revolution. So long as we keep lying to each other, how can we come to an agreement about our common interests?

So the first thing to do is to admit how our choices benefit us.

One choice many of us make is to accept benefits from the existing arrangements of power. I've heard these, as a bundle, called privilege. Some that apply to me are whiteness, maleness & wealth. I didn't invent these advantages, but I make use of them. More shameful is the fact that the way I live, I could not get along without them. I can barely imagine getting along without them, and that only in a society where we all share the costs and benefits fairly.

Some people resist every privilege rooted in injustice. More of us, I think, take the benefits; big benefits to some of us, crumbs to the rest. Black people and immigrants get to feel superior to each other. Moms get to stand on a pedestal, however narrow and shaky. Many advocacy group and union staff rake in several times the average income of their constituents. I get to buy cheap products made by starved and beaten children in far-off corners of the world. I get to drive wherever I want, and crank up the A/C in April, while poisoning my neighbors with smog and radioactive waste. I get to sit around, typing up my little rants, while elsewhere people fight each other for scraps of food.

It's easier for me here in the suburbs. I can almost take for granted the benefits cranked out by institutions set up decades or centuries ago, and operating partly beyond my sight. When I went overseas, I was struck by how close by rich people and poor people had to live. Rich people had servants all around. But maybe for them privilege and theft are as much part of the accepted, unremarked background as they are for me.

There are a number of common workshop exercises to identify our investment in business-as-usual. Many are variations on the claim-that-privilege theme, by which we locate our social selves with respect to the continua of power and privilege of the groups we belong to. The point is to recognize the unfair distribution of privilege, especially when our personal advantages are rooted in robbing or murdering other people; a good starting point for a very wide discussion. It also helps us pay attention to how we discuss things-- who gets to talk, about what.

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“All of us have become accustomed to the totalitarian system, accepted it as an unalterable fact and therefore kept it running . . . . None of us is merely a victim of it, because all of us helped to create it together.” -- Czech poet and post-communist president Vaclav Havel (Service 362).
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Carelessly done, this kind of exercise can also provoke more defensiveness than problem-solving. Until we see acceptance of privilege as a daily choice instead of an inheritance from long ago, it's easy to disclaim responsibility. Nor does naming privilege always lead to action steps; instead, sometimes we’re left with an unharnessed feelings of guilt and resentment. (With the Dismantling Racism process, the DRworks folks move quickly from acknowledging racism to specific action plans.)

Myself, I hate being defined by class and gender. It’s just not true that what I care about is influenced by my wealth, genitalia, advanced age and melanin deficiency. I’m not some automaton pushed around by selfish concerns or special interests; I look at the facts and make up my own mind, free from any prejudices. I can think for myself. Hey, I’d vote for an immigrant, if you could find a qualified one. Really, I’m a citizen of the world, and I’ll thank you not to put me in one of your social engineering boxes.

I grant you, some other people may be influenced by their backgrounds and stations in life, and by the careful scripts they have memorized in church, at school, and from TV. So maybe, as we talk about self-interest, we can start there. But if self-interest were no more than a fixed input, there would be no point in expecting anyone to change. Sometimes the discussions political workers provoke don’t acknowlege that folks have quite complicated sets of identities, or leave much room to move beyond what we start with.

To bypass the blame game --taking responsibility can come later, and from a different direction-- and because talking about what we really want can be shocking at first, we can go down the list, group by group: how do women, children, homeowners, businesspeople, fast food workers, sick people, etc. benefit from the current system? Even if our discussion partners are less than accurate about themselves or others, the exercise gives us a rough measure of the task we have ahead of us, in terms of reconstructing our individual and collective self-interest.

Then we can go back to asking what the costs are-- and how these compare to the costs and benefits of struggle and change. We have to consider such substantial costs as the effort of democratic cooperation, versus top-down obedience. This is another way to get at the envisioning alternatives piece. And the clearer we can be about our self-interest now and in the future, the clearer it will become how to move ahead.

Or we can start with the issues and frame such a discussion in terms of stakeholders. What's your stake in the fate of polar bears, health care in Africa, education for immigrants, access to business loans, access to abortion services, the cost of housing, the Halliburton wars? This might help us identify conflicting interests, prioritize those that overlap, and indicate why some groups have a bigger stake than others. Interests are not as fixed as our social identities. It would be easier for me to shift my priorities than my gender, for instance.

After we do everything we can to get the broadest possible range of voices in the discussion, me might also leave an empty chair or two for the folks who cannot attend. Here I'm thinking of future generations in particular. We can't speak for them, but we can say what kind of world we think they might face.


There’s a big possibility that, in laying out our interests, we will conclude we better stay put, hunker down, let other people take the risks of political change. A guy on the board of a union health fund was trying to recruit a labor educator to "read the riot act" to members about using too much health care. He felt so responsible to the HMOs behind the fund that he was losing sight of the welfare of his members. The educator asked him if he'd seen Michael Moore's Sicko, about the failures of the U.S. health care system. She tried to get him to think about taking a problem-solving approach to the fund's financial squeeze, and using the union's greatest resource, its members, to mobilize for long-term reform. But all the rewards were for this guy to keep his head down and look for short-term patches.

Some of us are quite clear about the advantages of what we have now. In her discussions with women about equality, Henry turned up some responses like this:

'It would scare me— my husband might put me to work,’ said a 30-45 Memphis homemaker.
'I’m just real old-fashioned. I’ve noticed that with all this equality, the men don’t hold the doors. I mean, they just slam the doors and you’re like, "Gosh, what’s this!" I like being treated like a lady. I’m not out in the workforce, I’m not trying to step on people to get ahead. I’m at home with my children— I’m happy!' (195-6).

First of all, I don’t really know what you mean by equality, but I’m going to assume that it’s like a kind of cosmic edict: ‘You will be equal.’ And for me that would mean that I couldn’t treat my work as a hobby anymore. I would have to be serious and maybe get a real job instead of fooling around with magazine work (203).

I could make a longer list of my own. It's good to be a gringo! But in the right circumstances, I might talk about other things going on in my life that aren't so very nice. Other people might recognize these from similar experiences they have had.

Minnie Bruce Pratt writes about the precarious privileges some of us enjoy in this parasite society, and what we and others have to pay for them:

The place I wanted to reach was not a childish place, but my understanding of it was childish. I had not admitted that the safety of much of my childhood was because Laura Cates, Black and a servant, was responsible for me; that I had the walks with my father because the woods were 'ours' by systematic economic exploitation, instigated, at that time, by his White Citizens Council; that I was allowed one evening a month with women friends because I was a wife who would come home at night. Raised to believe that I could be where I wanted and have what I wanted, as a grown woman I thought I could simply claim what I wanted, even the making of a new place to live with other women. I had no understanding of the limits that I lived within, nor of how much my memory and experience of a safe space was based on places secured by omission, exclusion, or violence, and on my submitting to the limits of that place" (Minnie Bruce Pratt 25-6).

Why was I surprised when my husband threatened and did violence, threatened ugly court proceedings, my mother as a character witness for him, restricted my time and presence with the children, took them finally and moved hundreds of miles away? I was no longer 'the best of women'; what did I expect? But I had expected to have that protected circle marked off for me by the men of my kind as my 'home': I had expected to have that place with my children. I expected it as my right. I did not understand I had been exchanging the use of my body for that place.
I learned, finally: I stepped outside the circle of protection (26-7).

"It was the 'safety' offered by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1867 as 'an institution of chivalry' for the purpose of 'protecting the homes and women of the South' . . . . What this 'chivalric' behavior has meant historically is the systematic rape of Black women; the torture, mutilation, and killing of Black men (over 1000 lynched between 1900 and 1915, many on the pretext of having raped a white woman); the death of Leo Frank, a Jew (accused of being the 'perverted' murderer of a young white girl; falsely convicted) . . . . This 'knightly honor' also meant the harassment and attempted intimidation of any of 'their women' who rejected the 'protection': the women who came South to teach Blacks during Reconstruction, women who asserted their sexual autonomy during the '20's, women who spoke out against segregation, racism, anti-Semitism from the '40's to the '60's, women who asserted economic autonomy by fighting to work in the mines in the '70's, women who were openly lesbians at the International Women's Year Conference and women who are now doing anti-Klan organizing as open lesbians.
"It is this threatening 'protection' that white Christian men in the U.S. are now offering" (37-8).

Later Faludi wrote a whole book (Stiffed) about the high price many men have had to pay for an exalted position that turned out to be mostly mirage. Other costs accrue to other groups: what kids learn from their roles as consumers, the shifted costs of jobs in dirty industries, the lost opportunities of the cheap-oil economy . . . you know the list, it hasn't changed much in generations.

Starting with the status quo allows us to remind ourselves that, like it or not, the ground is shifting beneath us. The endless war, ever-intensifying commercialization, ever-greater work demands, increasing conflicts over resources, et cetera will not permit us to cling to our flimsy shelters for long, no matter how hard we try. Even for those of us who grew up with extra money, status and access, the foundations of these are splintering to bits in the hurricane of capitalism. Storm-tossed traditionalists thrash desperately for something solid to grab onto, and end up with a fistful of floating corpse. Better to have a boat!

Even so, the shakiness of our privilege is a hard message to hear, because I know it already, and have spent most of my life covering my eyes and ears. But to hear someone say it, and not be struck by lightning, and not demand that I say it too-- that gives me a little more space to let go of my denials.

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Castles made of sand
slip into the sea
eventually.
-- Jimi Hendrix
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Cutting chains of privilege is not just preparation for fight or flight, nor merely an expression of solidarity with the oppressed. First, I think, it’s the down payment for being able to see more clearly. It’s pretty hard to learn about the world when we are wrapped in layer upon layer of insulation --gloves & goggles & hazmat suits-- lest we be contaminated by real life. It's scary to wander from our gated anti-communities, but also liberating.

I used to wonder how I'd react if the manager of our local atom bomb factory came by to join our community group. I sure would like to welcome him. But his business threatens my community, all our communities. For me to work with him, would it be enough if he just quit his job? Or would I expect him to use all his expertise, and all those hundreds of thousands of dollars he made, to campaign actively against these terrible weapons? Or would I expect him to join the crews who risk their lives cleaning up 65 years of radioactive waste, and help organize a union? Maybe people in other communities look at me that way, and the unearned advantages I have.

We can link our privileges to responsibilities. The advantages we derive from the community imply a responsibility to conserve the community’s ability to offer them. If I’m pleased to not have to worry about rape as I walk to my car at night, I have some responsibility to make sure all my neighbors enjoy that privilege. Safer streets are totally in my self-interest, and I can help achieve that.

Bulkin puts it this way:

[Racism] raises for me too the broader question of why anyone who does not share the most immediate impact of some oppression makes a commitment to combat it. I find one answer in the link between ethics and self-interest. The most effective work by white Jews against racism, for instance, emerges, I think, from some combination of the two, the belief that racism is simply wrong and the belief that struggling against it will benefit us personally and politically, that such work, as Black feminist Alice Walker has said about opposition to any oppression, 'lightens the load on all of us' (143).


So one very important step is to acknowledge the benefits we want to protect and extend. I think of things like economic security, libraries, drinkable water, relative safety and peace, partners, kids. How can we reestablish these on a basis that benefits everyone?-- so that what was privilege for some becomes the norm for everyone. In various uprisings people end up trashing their own communities, because they feel they have no stake in the physical and social infrastructure. (Which, by the way, is the flaw in Jared Diamond’s glowing report on how well transnational resource companies can safeguard the rainforest, by keeping out poachers and squatters. Everywhere in the world, if local folks feel no responsibility for the environment, we plunder whatever the corps don’t get first.) We can talk about privileges in a positive way that guides our political strategies.

At least when we acknowledge from the start our vested interest in keeping everything the same, that we expect to be most comfortable where we are, we might feel a little freer to explore alternatives without the stress of having to commit. But there have to be some incentives even to undertake the risk of Just Suppose . . . .

More thorough discussions also touch on how the advantages and disadvantages we experience also condition our thinking, assumptions, expectations for ourselves and others, and the political choices we make. Having never been laid off, I might think, what do these jobless people have to complain about? They get food stamps, after all. As we know more about ourselves, we come to recognize that we can indeed trespass the unjust social boundaries that have been set for us, not by ignoring them, pretending they’re not there, but by taking them apart brick by bloody brick. I like the title of the DRworks education process, Dismantling Racism; seems like an accurate description of the task.

Finally, we can help each other sharpen our sustaining stories. These are the stories we keep in storage, in case our plans don’t work out. Here are some examples: At least I tried that job / romance / religion; I had to know if they would work out, even at the risk of my security. Or: At least I stuck to my principles. Or: She died so Halliburton could live. These are the stories that let us take action in circumstances of great risk and uncertainty. They establish secondary goals that we can accept when we fall short of the main goal. Just as important, they also allow us to work in groups, with all the disappointments that come with that territory. If I can't buy my own private island, loaded with luxuries, well maybe I wouldn't mind living in a just and peaceful community, instead. What are our stories for risking democracy?