SuperWeed

Sarah Palin, proud of her ignorance, asks “What is a community organizer?” her sneering tone making clear that she thinks anything she doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing. (Oddly enough, she used the same tone when asking what a Vice President does all day, implying that the tasks associated with that job might not be worth her precious time. I notice the networks aren’t playing that clip so often anymore.)

A number of bloggers have elected to answer the question anyway. Let me jump in too. (I’ve also posted a 1999 history of a community organization over on my text archive.)

Yes, it can be a real job. I’ve been an unpaid organizer around many social justice issues, but let me focus on when it was my job. As a tenant organizer in the 1990s, my job was to give tenants the tools, information, and support they needed to work together to enforce their own rights. When a group of tenants in a building or complex had shared grievances, sometimes all I needed to do was attend a few meetings, deftly dropping facts and tips into the conversation, and then melt into the background as a newly formed tenants association collectively took care of business. At other times, I needed to stand shoulder to shoulder with embattled tenants in protracted struggles with powerful interests.

“You better get over to Baker Commons right quick. Those old folks are going crazy!” That was the call — from the leader of a city wide public housing tenants association — that alerted me to the trouble brewing at a high-rise apartment building for low-income seniors and people with disabilities. The air conditioning was out, tempers were flaring along with the temperature, and scalding hot water was bursting from the cold water pipes. After alerting city authorities to the most hazardous conditions, I called a meeting for tenants to come talk about the problems and decide what to do.

Founders of the organization where I worked, back in 1969. Their story is here.

Now, normally, tenants want to try everything in the book before withholding rent. And it is usually a good idea, legally, to exhaust all other avenues before taking that step. But these seniors really were fired up. After going around the room and coming up with a list of 24 major repairs, many quite urgent, the tenants asked me what they could do. Before I got halfway into my first sentence about their options, a visually impaired senior in a snappy suit from the seventies interrupted to clarify: “What we want to know is: How can we go on a rent strike?”

They all agreed to rush through the formalities of demanding the repairs in writing in order to be able to declare the strike on the Fourth of July. Eighteen months, one lawsuit, and countless picket lines and public meetings later, they got everything they asked for. A new roof, new plumbing, guard rails in the parking lot — 24 urgently needed major repairs. And they got to keep all of the rent money they’d withheld in the interim!

But not without a struggle. After the tenants announced the strike, the housing director went door to door, warning the elderly women that I was a lesbian with whom it was not safe to associate and telling the people with disabilities that participating in the strike could jeopardize their Social Security. Only a handful of brave strikers held on after that. They were then served with eviction notices, which were suddenly withdrawn when they showed up at court with two lawyers and a posse of picketers outside. Then came the foot-dragging period during which the housing authorities agreed that the repairs were needed but still didn’t make them. Only after we took the step of suing them did the wheels really begin to turn.

25 years later: Same window, same desk, same struggle. That’s me in the back.

I still remember the Housing Authority public meeting at which we announced that lawsuit. I wanted the tenants to talk but they insisted it should be me, believing (perhaps accurately) that the members of the Authority would listen more carefully to me. So, I made sure to draft up exactly what they wanted me to say and we agreed to meet later at the Housing Authority. As we broke up, some of the striking tenants gathered around, slapping me on the back and saying “we’re with you!” “we’ve got your back!” and the like. My partner at the time, who was waiting to give me a ride, said that she was unlikely to see a sight like that again: a 30 year old obviously lesbian white woman in torn jeans being cheered on in that way by conservatively dressed 70 year old African American men.

But that’s the beauty part: Interactions like that happen all the time when community members cross the constructed boundaries that too often divide us in order to do something meaningful together.

Here’s another story. Another call from the public housing tenants association: “The police are going door to door, making black men give blood.” What?!? Turns out the cops, in search of an African American serial rapist who allegedly targeted white women, were going door to door in black neighborhoods, telling any black man who refused to give a blood sample for DNA testing that his refusal made him a suspect. Not a housing issue, exactly, but certainly a situation crying out for community organizing. I got off the phone and went downstairs to see my organizing mentor, who had learned his skills from Ella Baker when he was a black college student in the days of the lunch counter sit-ins. He’d heard about it too. We agreed that a coalition of feminists (especially including white women) and anti-racist activists (especially including black men) needed to denounce this police tactic as both racist and unlikely to catch a rapist. He got on the phone to black ministers and leaders of local branches of the NAACP. I called the Lesbian Avengers and women who worked for rape crisis and domestic violence projects.

We came together as the Coalition for Community Unity, demanding that random stops of black men (and some black women with short Afros!) cease immediately. Sure enough, once the police quit trying to catch a black rapist by testing the blood of every black man in town and started using logical detective work, they caught the rapist — who not surprisingly turned out to be a sociopathic rapist of opportunity who grabbed any woman he could, not an angry black man deliberately targeting white women. Next, we set about making sure all data gleaned from those wrongful DNA tests were expunged from state records. Some of the men wanted their actual blood back — this was very important to them — and so we took care of that too. Along the way, we created a handy “know your rights” card that was picked up by a national civil liberties organization and is now passed out all over the country.

But what I remember more than those victories are the early meetings in the basement of a bookstore and how eager we all were to make what seemed — looking around the room at the purple-haired punk in the Lesbian Avengers t-shirt (”We recruit”) sitting next to the business-suited deacon of a conservative church — like an unlikely coalition work. And people did make mistakes! Not meaning to do so, group members sometimes tripped over a word that in another setting might have set off a blast of indignation around race or sex or sexual orientation. Every time that happened, those who caught the mistake would hold our breaths for a moment. And then you could see somebody who might have been offended take his or her own deep breath and think, “nope, I’ll let it slide this time. Maybe I’ll bring it up after the meeting. But not now. I want this to work.”

And it did work. And conversations did happen after and between meetings, that let men know they needed to speak more carefully about rape or let white people know that a certain term is sometimes used as a racist code word and thus ought to be avoided. Other conversations happened too. Friendships formed. Trust grew. Several years later, when some black pastors were supporting a homophobic ballot initiative, one of those business-suited NAACP leaders took it on himself to write a letter condemning the initiative in the strongest terms. That turned the tide. The ballot initiative failed. He told my mentor, “They were there for us.” He replied in kind. That’s the power of community organizing.

I could tell more stories. Like the time a city-funded provider of SRO low-income housing decided to evict all of their tenants with mental disabilities, Americans with Disabilities Act notwithstanding, putting people with schizophrenia or severe anxiety out on the street. Or the 101 times that slumlords put low-income children at risk by ignoring safety codes. When the heat’s off in the middle of the winter, when you can’t buy groceries because your former landlord refuses to give your security deposit back, when you’ve gotten an eviction notice because the battering ex-husband who’s now stalking you has disturbed the neighbors, you feel helpless. You feel hopeless. You don’t know what to do. Then comes a community organizer saying, “You’re not helpless. It’s not hopeless. Here are your options. What do you want to do?”

Community organizers aren’t heroes. In fact, the point of being a community organizer is not to be a solo hero but, rather, to empower communities to organize themselves more peacefully and equitably. My point in telling these stories is to illustrate that all over the place, everywhere, there are people doing that often deliberately thankless work. And dramas like those I’ve just described — they’re going on everywhere right now. Lives and livelihoods often hang in the balance.

So, if Barak “Let’s bomb Pakistan” Obama was sincere when he was a community organizer, doing the work because he believed in it rather than because it would look good on his resume someday, then that makes me feel a lot more friendly toward him. We’ll see if he really is as different as he says or just one more power-hungry politician who boosted his liberal credentials with a quick bout of insincere street work. (I’d say that Palin’s comments about community organizers make me feel even less friendly toward her, but my feelings toward her were already as cold as the arctic ice she denies is melting and as hot as the blood bursting from the animals she shoots, so nothing she could say at this point could make me hate and fear her any more than I already do.)

Check out this brief history of community organizing, which mentions organizers like Jane Addams, Saul Alinsky, and Cesar Chavez and offers lots of how-to links. And don’t forget Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and all of the other women who were doing the hard work of actually organizing people while MLK and other men were giving glorious speeches. Learn about creative tactics — like the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program of the 1970s or present-day community gardens in East LA — that community organizers have used to give people some of what they need now while empowering them to collectively seize what they need into the future. Understand why that’s so dangerous to the powers-that-be.

Most importantly, find out what community organizers in your area are doing or, if you work with an organization that strives for systemic change but isn’t using community organizing as a tactic, think about what kinds of local projects you could join or initiate to make connections between issues and among people. Lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables in impoverished urban neighborhoods, for example, is a problem that veg*n, anti-racist, and anti-poverty activists can all agree — whatever their other differences — needs to be solved. Work together, with other activists and with community members, to solve such problems. You might be surprised by the reverberating results!

September 16th, 2008 | Category: Activism, Direct Action, Intersections | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL