Tell me more about your everyday conversations with working-class or middle-class Black people. What about the members of your family? What are their political views like? Have you had any influence over them?
This is the practical knowledge that I seek.
I'm trying to approach organizing from the bottom, not from the top.
Art -----------------
Here's what I do. I stay away from ideology and race, because I am white and the people I work with everyday are mostly black, on welfare and in wheelchairs. First of all, I have to decide whether somebody wants to be propagandized. A fair number are pretty pissed and want confirmation that things are going to hell and they are not the only ones who think so.
So, given that ground, I pick concrete issues. Healthcare is an obvious one. I don't advocate or lecture, but inform. I tell people how the system works and why, and let them come to their own conclusions, make their own deductions and revelations. But our commonalities don't end with healthcare and wheelchairs, since there is a world of other issues, everything from computers to schools, to what to do about the grandkids who live with them. Everyone of those issues takes very little examination before it opens out.
What to do about all that is the hard part. But since there are plenty of activists and organizations around here for just about every issue--and I have met many in these groups, because there are always one or two who are also in wheelchairs or have friends or relatives in chairs, I who to talk to or call, and where to go and meet other people working on whatever.
I won't call this organizing. It is more like the radicalizing referrals approach. Call it the Yahoo of bleak streets.
Chuck Grimes
PS. Just read Doug's post:
I know there's the danger of appearing arrogant and patronizing by advertising that knowledge, and the risk of alienating people by attacking their common sense understanding, but shouldn't we be honest about this? As usual, those are all real, and not rhetorical, questions.
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Most of the organizations I refer people to are grassroots, but have been around long enough to become 'professional.' This is a real problem because the leadership almost invitably has boot-strapped themselves out of the conditions that lead them to organize in the first place--through organizing--and have lost touch. There is no way around this, except to trust that enough people in an organization have figured out they have to stay toned to the conditions that brought them there. There are organizational methods that keep this going and depend on a re-cycling or peer to peer contact. In other words the newest recruits are in the front office and do most of the ground level work. So, that is a general method to keep from becoming too patronizing. Organization also have to actually care about what they are doing and not be just a front for grant money and career building. This is another insidious danger that arrives through professionalization and privatization of fund raising.