CONCLUSION
What Next?
What will you do when you put this book down? Many readers are already involved in change efforts. The conversations in Stand Up! should help you deepen your commitment. In a world on fire, we all need to dig deeper, not necessarily work longer hours, but open our hearts wider, be more honest with others and ourselves, and take greater risks. I especially hope the book will help you find ways to do more to dismantle racism and other forms of human hierarchy as part of any social justice work you’re involved in.
Each of the five conversations in the book is meant to make us better leaders—more aware of our emotions (purpose), clearer about the experiences and values that drive our choices (story), able to build closer relationships across differences (team), more powerful in the world (base), and more courageous and effective in confronting oppression (power). These are habits of the heart. They help us become better people with greater awareness and consciousness in the world. The conversations and the practices that flow from them are not magic solutions though; we already know them instinctively but don’t always do them under stress. That’s why they need to be practiced and repeated (wash, rinse, repeat) so they become who we are and what other people expect from us.
If you have the ability to influence how the organizations you’re part of operate (which we all do, more or less), then I hope that you can turn these conversations into rituals (through repetition) and that these rituals become part of your organizational culture. For example, you can include reflection and evaluation at the end of any important activity you undertake, or you can intentionally create community by regularly asking people to share their stories with each other. We need more organizations that are humane, racially conscious, and outward facing, that recognize people as the most valuable resource for changing society and give their members real decision-making roles. Organizations that do this are more likely to develop the strategic capacity (discussed in chapter 7) to adapt in the face of conflict and uncertainty. And by creating in our organizations a slice of the world that we’re working to bring into being, we make participation more attractive and valuable to people. Our organizations become spiritual homes for people seeking to feel and act more human.
If you’re part of an organization that treats you as a means to some other end, that asks you to do small tasks without involving you in strategy, that isn’t speaking to your soul, then you need to change the culture of the organization or look for or create another home for your social change work. A simple test is whether you are on a real team that meets regularly. Be truthful! Here are other measures: Are you learning something new about yourself? Are you having experiences that tap into strong emotions? Are you bringing new people off the sidelines and building high-trust relationships with them? These questions will help you figure out if you’re on track or not.
The sad reality is that most of the organizations involved in social justice work in the United States don’t ask much from their members or constituents. And even organizations committed to leadership development can struggle to keep people engaged and growing. Sustaining social change organizations of any kind is hard, especially when they’re grappling with difficult entrenched issues and reliant on ordinary people’s time and money. Organizations often run out of steam, devolve into cliques, become captured by their staff, or fracture. Organizations need to be renovated regularly. Sometimes they need to be shut down completely so that we can start anew. Never be afraid to say, “Let’s rebuild” or “Let’s start from scratch” or “Let’s shift our focus given how things are changing around us.” What results is almost always better.
Never be afraid to say, “Let’s rebuild” or “Let’s start from scratch” or “Let’s shift our focus given how things are changing around us.” What results is almost always better.
If you haven’t yet answered the knock at your door (or heard it), if you’re looking for a way to plug in, perhaps by getting off the Internet and into face-to-face organizing, then you need to find or build an organization that will ask enough of you to make it worth your while. Too few organizations are structured around regularly meeting small groups, let alone bring people together across race, class, and other differences; engage in strategic campaigns; and invest in the growth and development of their members.
When my son was thirteen, he had to do a community service project. His first choice was to volunteer with an organization fighting climate change. It turned out to be surprisingly hard to find a chapter of an environmental group in Northern Virginia that met regularly. He ended up volunteering at a soup kitchen in Washington, DC. It was a valuable experience. He did useful work and had some good conversations with people. One thing that surprised me was that the soup kitchen had a waiting list for volunteers—a sign that there’s more demand among people to contribute than a supply of opportunities to do so.
I think this imbalance between supply and demand is even more the case for chances to be part of organizing designed to get at the root causes of injustice. So be realistic about what may be limited options for joining existing organizations. Set a high bar for how you spend your time, but expect that you’ll need to contribute your leadership to influence the culture of any organization you join—if you want to be part of something that both matters and feeds your spirit. And as Bill McKibben said about community, if you cannot find an organization that meets your needs, build one. If you do that, I hope the example of the autism campaign in chapter 1 and the five-conversation framework can be a useful guide.
One of the most promising shifts taking place in community organizing is that more people are taking the plunge into politics. More and more grassroots leaders are deciding to run for school board, city council, mayor, state legislature, and Congress. The push to elect prosecutors and sheriffs committed to ending mass incarceration is especially exciting. People should see running for office as one of many different roles that they can take on as part of the organization they belong to. That way, if they win, they’re accountable to an organized base of people and can work with that base to advance policy change together.
People should see running for office as one of many different roles that they can take on as part of the organization they belong to.
It might be your turn to run. After all, we cannot just complain that the car we’re in is being driven over a cliff; we have to be willing to claw our way into the front seat, grab hold of the steering wheel, and drive our communities and country to a better place. If you do choose to run, and have an organized base behind you, then you can use the principles and practices in Stand Up! to design your campaign. You can recruit large numbers of volunteers and organize them into teams that have clear goals and roles; you can spend your resources talking to people face-to-face to hear their concerns rather than sending them advertising; you can focus on the voters that other candidates and parties write off as mattering less; and you can speak from your heart to people’s hopes and dreams, inviting voters into a shared vision of community and purpose, rather than trying to sell them a laundry list of issues. You could even become president by using this kind of approach!
The hardest part about standing up and getting involved today may be the experience of not knowing whether we’re making progress. Like the Chilean miners, whose story we began with, it feels like we’re underground for an indeterminate amount of time without certainty that we’ll get free. It can take decades of sustained and strategic organizing to create enough pressure for large-scale social change. We don’t have that much time given the threats facing the planet and our society. The vicious cycles that we’re in and the resources and will of our opponents make it hard to know if matters are just going to keep getting worse or if we’ll reach a turning point. And sometimes victories look like big steps forward but turn into mirages. The notion that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” (coined by Theodore Parker, a nineteenth-century Unitarian minister, and made famous by Martin Luther King, Jr.) is a statement of faith, not a description of how politics works.1 Social change has no guarantees. Periods of progress followed by reaction and backtracking can be long and arduous.
What we do have control over, though, is what we do in the meantime. Through organizing, we can make a dent in virtually any problem that we’re able to identify as a cause of pain to people in our lives and communities. Organizing works when applied with discipline. And elected offices at all levels can be filled with our members if we focus our energies on those positions and are willing to run people for them over and over. Small and medium-sized victories don’t transform everything, but they build our muscles and give us a taste of our true power. To go back to Lawrence Goodwyn and the populists, organizing victories build in grassroots leaders the “somebodiness,” the “high level of personal political self-respect” that makes people willing to challenge arrangements that are said to be natural and unchangeable.2
When we do win, we still have to figure out what to do next; and this is often more difficult than it seems. The Utopian Flaw (discussed at the end of chapter 3) is the slip in our consciousness that makes us think that if we can only achieve this change, everything else will be okay. It won’t. Our challenge is to find the will to keep going. In his short book The Dip, Seth Godin lays out a framework for deciding whether you’re on the right track in your work or life. It applies well to social change. He says you should ask yourself if what you are doing now is something that you believe will make you very happy and that you can eventually be the best at. If you’re not confident that you can answer yes to both questions, then quit. But if you’re certain, then persist, knowing that you’ll need to pass through a long and difficult period of doubt and probably failure—the dip—to get to greatness.3 Organizing for change takes that kind of determination to pay off.
The true value of the conversations and practices in Stand Up! may be that they help us stay human amid darkness and uncertainty. They give us courage not only to keep fighting but to care for one another. As the Chilean miners learned, survival under stress depends on our capacity to see each other as brothers and sisters. In times of trouble, we need to resist the temptation to turn on one another. If we can do that in the face of hate, abuse, and confusion, if we refuse to give up hope and continue to experiment with our resources, then we have a chance to make it through to a promised land. As Ibram Kendi wrote in the epilogue of Stamped from the Beginning, “There will come a time when we will love humanity, when we will gain the courage to fight for an equitable society for our beloved humanity, knowing, intelligently, that when we fight for humanity, we are fighting for ourselves. There will come a time. Maybe, just maybe, that time is now.”4
In times of trouble, we need to resist the temptation to turn on one another.