Decompiling Oppression #126
Sam McVeety
This week, I find myself in the mood for planning and organizing. I'm trying to be intentional about this, building on a practice that started a few years ago. Then, as well as now, I wanted to step back and look at where I was spending my time across various groups and causes. I drew up a table (I know!) about what might be interesting to try next, and after going to an event, I reflected on how it made me feel and what values of mine it aligned with. Underlying all of this was a desire for sustainable engagement; I had noticed that some spaces left me feeling energized, whereas others left me feeling drained.
A key realization driving this was that I really needed a relational component to make this work sustainable. If I'm looking forward to the people, it makes it a lot easier to stay looking forward to the work, as well. Over the past two weeks, I've found it especially fulfilling to spend time with other people, in spaces where we are offering to help each other make sense of the current moment.
I've also reaffirmed the need to protect some spaciousness and down time in my life. During these quiet moments, I've noticed some of the fatigue I'm feeling, and tried to calibrate my commitments accordingly. As much as it was helpful to find those community spaces, there was also a danger in losing my intentionality, blurring one thing after another into an endless series of actions that started to fill all the available space. Having some stillness has helped me keep this intentionality and agency.
I've been trying out Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) as an organizing home for national work, and there are many aspects of their approach that are resonating with my values and needs. One of the things that particularly stands out is the clear way that they are prioritizing relational organizing. For example: in their phone banks, new attendees go through a training, with pauses to check in with each other in small groups. Once people are on the phones, they are divided into smaller pods with coaches, whose role it is to support everyone else on the call. If anyone is struggling, whether from technology issues or a tough call, someone is there to talk it through. There are group debriefs and a chance to recommit; everyone has the opportunity to feel seen and heard.
There are a couple of important themes to highlight here. One is the embrace of bringing everyone along (in other words, the opposite of disposability). There's no "figure it out on your own" in the name of efficiency or some hypothesized greater good. The structure itself is designed with support in mind, so that people feel seen and heard through their struggles. The people are just as important as the work. No one is left behind.
Another theme is that there are different ways to participate in movement work, and they are all valuable. For many of us, I think there's a valorization of being on the front lines of the work (whatever form those might take), and feeling somehow less than, if we aren't emotionally (or physically, or financially, or ...) ready to take on those roles. (If we're being honest, this is probably rooted in patriarchy, and the societal devaluation of support roles vs. more visible ones.) I felt this myself when considering whether to be one of those coaches, since it might mean I'm making fewer phone calls.
Despite this doubt, being a coach turned out to be a tremendously fulfilling experience. It meant helping other people realize their goals for having impact, and taking responsibility for the collective success of the group. SURJ has reprised these coaching roles for mass meetings in the wake of the election, pairing meeting hosts with a coach to talk them through the plan, and just as importantly, their hopes and fears. It underscored how meaningful it is to simply offer to be in the work with someone else, even when you don't have all the answers.
I mentioned "organizing home" earlier, and I want to expand on that idea. One of the main tools of authoritarians is chaos. It is easy to create chaos, and create so much of it that we become numb as a means of protecting ourselves, because we can't sustain the energy to respond to each new outrageous thing. (There's a parallel to Brandolini's law about misinformation: it takes only a fraction of the energy to say something outrageous that we're tempted to spend decrying it.) At the risk of stating the obvious: the opposite of chaos is organization.
Having an organizing home helps us develop some of that discretion, while also having the accountability and trust in ourselves that we are meaningfully engaged. When you're an individual, it's easy to feel like you need to respond to everything, and that nothing you do matters. Neither of these is a recipe for sustainability. This isn't to say that there's one right organizing home (another place we can get stuck). The point is that, for each of us, finding such a home is important for what lies ahead. This is the essence of collective power: that none of us have all the answers, and, we will figure this out together.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: What (and who) do you need to help set boundaries around doing enough?
Communal: What values are important for you in an organizing home? What values can we incorporate into our spaces to make them joyful and sustainable (irresistible, even)?
Solidarity: Support Showing Up for Racial Justice Education Fund and their work to end white support for white supremacy, as part of a multi-racial movement led by organizers of color.
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