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Building Social Spaces, Everyday, Intersections

Elijah Anderson on Cosmopolitan Canopies

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9303616I am becoming more and more interested in the ethnography of public space — or perhaps urban spaces in general, and Elijah Anderson’s conception of Cosmopolitan Canopies emerges from such an ethnography to think about what works.

This ethos of getting along, as well as the tremendous growth in immigration, has given rise to the emergence of what I call cosmopolitan canopies — settings that offer a respite from the lingering tensions of urban life and an opportunity for diverse peoples to come together. Canopies are in essence pluralistic spaces where people engage one another in a spirit of civility, or even comity and goodwill. Through personal observation, they may come casually to appreciate one another’s differences and emphathize with the other in  a spirit of shared humanity. Under the canopy, this sense of familiarity often breeds comfort and encourages all to be on their best behavior, promoting peaceful relations. Here racially, ethnically, and socially diverse peoples spend casual and purposeful time together, coming to know one another through what I call folk ethnography, a form of people watching that allows individuals informally to gather evidence in social interactions that supports their own viewpoints or transforms their commonsense understanding of social life. In this context of diversity and cosmopolitanism, a cognitive and cultural basis for trust is established that often leads to the emergence of more civil behavior. (xiv-xv)

Such an ethnography allows Anderson the ability to capture the nuances of race and space and the ways in which people who use such spaces develop their own sense of community and diversity.  It’s important to note, too, that we are not all just city residents in the wider social gaze:

Wirth and Simmel describing urbanites blase indifference to one another, but given way to wariness, especially towards anonymous black males

As Anderson later writes:

A hierarchy of comfort can be discerned: white women, black women, white men and then black men. In public, ethnicity is not always visible and discernible, but color and gender are. When people look for a read visual cues, these characteristics become significant, and even operative, in determining who means what to whom in the public space. (226)

The book opens with a center city walking tour, Anderson describing a walk through the city spaces he will be describing in more detail through use of his journaled entries in italics. His focus is on those places where such typical wariness described above breaks down:

Yet there are heterogeneous and densely populated bounded public spaces within cities that offer a respite from this wariness, settings where a mix of people can feel comfortable enough to relax their guard and go about their business more casually. In these areas people display a degree of cosmopolitanism, by which I mean acceptance of the space as belonging to all kinds of people. (3)

I like this definition of cosmopolitanism. Also interesting is that the places under study here are not just public spaces:

Such goings-on peg this place as a hybrid institution, whose ostensible purpose is to provide fast food but which also serves as a site for slow-paces sociability. The Barnes & Noble bookstore up the street in the next block serves a similar hybrid purpose. (21)

Also key to the dynamic of the whole is the segregated city and spaces that segregation creates. No matter where you are, tehse segregated spaces are part of your map of the city and your commonsense understandings of its people — although almost all cities work to marginalise communities of colour, the ghetto remains constantly present in people’s interactions:

The most powerfully imagined neighborhood is the iconic black ghetto, or “the hood,” often associated in the minds of outsiders with poverty, crime, and violence. This icon is by definition a figment of the imagination of those with little or no direct experience with the ghetto or contact with those who live there, and yet, when a black person navigates space outside the ghetto, those he encounters very often make reference to this residential area in order to make sense of him, although their interpretation is often erroneous. (29)

What is interesting, then, are the kinds of interactions that cosmopolitan canopies make possible, and this idea of how people perform race differently depending on the space they are in:

Segregated neighborhoods and the cosmopolitan canopy exist simultaneously in Philadelphia. Under the canopy, people perform race. When they present themselves as civil and friendly, they may simply coexist. On occasion, however, they may interact, learning something surprising about others they had not known before. This practice can have an affect that extends far beyond the canopy. (30)

It is through the use of ethnography — and clearly long and intimate familiarity with these spaces, that Anderson examines where such interactions are possible. Interestingly, these are enclosed spaces, destinations:

Physical separation from the surrounding streetscapes and freedom of movement through the space it encloses are defining characteristics of the cosmopolitan canopy. (277)

Reading terminal

This is a calm environment of equivalent, symmetrical relationships — a respite from the streets outside. (33)

An enclosed, monitored version of public space:

Few public spaces have an ambiance that generates such closeness and allows people to express themselves so openly. This ambiance is engendered at least in part by the physical closeness patrons experience int his space. The aisles are narrow and crowded; the dining tables are close to one another, creating a cafeteria feel, reminiscent of hundreds of high school students packed into a lunchroom. People literally rub elbows, overhear each other’s conversations, and make eye contact despite any attempt at avoidance. Such physical proximity yields a familiarity, an increased comfort level, and often direct engagement among diverse patrons of the market. (57-58)

This is the most successful space in creating both long term and short term encounters with the potential to be meaningful between different people. Part of this success, I think, is in changing people’s perceptions in ways that have the possibility of rippling outwards through their wider lived geographies and communities.

The Gallery Mall: The Ghetto downtown

People here are more ethnocentric, suspicious of outsiders, especially whites.

In these respects, the Gallery Mall and its food court both challenge and extend my thinking about cosmopolitan canopies. Interaction between racial groups is observable here. Patrons do find a certain comity and goodwill, but their sociability seems cramped by the ever-present awareness that ghetto street violence — the violence commonly attributed to black ghetto streets — may intrude at any moment. Hence there is an edge to the quality of public interaction here, an edge not so prominent in the other canopies I have described. (74)

As such, the relationships formed here are less likely to have a broader impact:

Many relationships formed under the canopy are one-dimensional: they exist in a  specific space and do not develop further, or progress deeper, outside that setting. (88)

This remains an important kind of space, however it may fall short of the conception of cosmopolitan canopies that is the subject.

The Gallery is essentially a black community under a canopy, not cosmopolitan in the same way as the other canopies I’ve observed, but nonetheless a place where diverse elements of one racial community may mingle peacefully and express themselves more fully. (93)

Rittenhouse Square

Here Anderson looks at the racism often visible in the treatment of people in the upscale restaurants, the nervousness in La Colombe cafe when someone of colour without obvious class status walks in through the door, and significantly writes:

Where black males seem to fit comfortably into the scheme of things at Rittenhouse Square is in the role of parking valet and doorman. (142)

A telling description of US public space. Just as telling as this:

But no forward movement in this long process is possible unless the races share space at close enough range to interact with one another. (148)

The Color Line and the Canopy

This book becomes its hardest hitting near the end, I can’t help but think that this is strategic to help ease white readers into uncomfortable truths about how people of colour must constantly navigate through all spaces. A good thing, everyone should read this.

The promise and real achievements of the civil rights movement have not remedied structural inequalities, and black skin color remains a powerful marker of second-class status. Norms of “color blindness” coexist with persistent patterns of discrimination, and interpersonal relations across the color line are highly charged. (152)

At any point this veil of politeness can be torn, W.E.B. du Bois invoked:

… blacks can still find the color line sharply drawn at any moment. … In the “nigger moment” the black person is effectively “put back in his place” — a situation that many in the middle class thought they would never have to negotiate.

The most problematic aspect of social relations under the cosmopolitan canopy appears when the color line is suddenly drawn… (154)

It is drawn too often, and its drawing outlines the limitations of all these nice, friendly conceptions of space in ways rarely written about.

In examining the places, times, and circumstances in which the color line is drawn, we learn not only about the social dynamics of racial inequality but also about the possibilities and limits of cosmopolitanism as an organizing theme of public life. (157)

From these more public kind of spaces, Anderson goes on to examine the workplace as canopy. He makes a distinction between two different ways, a spectrum really, in which people navigate workspace. It is between ethnos and cosmos — Between sticking only to your own — making this racialised moment impossible — or sticking to an ideal of cosmopolitanism where you are friendly but not too much so, making such a moment impersonal, not a betrayal. Just people doing what they do.

But first, a sense of what this moment actually means:

Emotions flood over the victim as this middle-class, cosmopolitan-oriented black person is humiliated and shown that he or she is, before anything else, a racially circumscribed black eprson after all. No matter what she has achieved, or how decent and law-abiding she is, there is no protection, no sanctuary, no escaping from this fact. She is vulnerable. (253)

Interesting to me — and not just because this is so much what I study — is the way that much of this continues to be based upon geographies, upon segregation. Civil rights and affirmative action have certainly changed things and achieved more racial incorporation, they have changed the complexion of both workplaces and public settings.

Yet the simultaneous existence of impoverished inner-city neighborhoods complicates the situation.’ (254)

Anderson continues:

Black people continue to be associated with ghetto. ‘Hence, the anonymous black person carries historical and social baggage, and thus may move somewhat self-consciously when in mixed company. Far too often, the treatment black people receive in public is based on negative assumptions, as strangers they encounter fall back on scripts, roles, and stereotypes that raise doubts about the black person’s claims to decency and middle-class status. (255)

More importantly, especially in thinking about a deeper transformation towards a non-racist society:

Hence the “nigger moment” turns on the issue of social place. (256)

He sees this as the biggest threat to the canopy, this fragile creation of relationships, these spaces that can positively challenge negative ideas of the other by supplying positive interactions. The cosmopolitan canopy as he describes it is visible in certain places, he argues:

The challenge of developing a more inclusive civility that extends beyond these magical but bounded settings involves changing what transpires in neighborhoods and workplaces as well as in public. (281)

In many ways Anderson is trying to grasp here what Gilroy is working towards as well through the concept of conviviality — trying to understand what is working. And it is working. But there is so much on the other side of the equation we need to work to dismantle. Cosmopolitan canopies are both a method and a measure of our success.

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Empire, Intersections, Struggle & Movement

Vijay Prashad: Polyculturalism and Kung Fu

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17608Kung Fu! Finally we learn some lessons from one of my favourite things… Vijay Prashad’s Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asan Connection and the Myth of Cultural Purity lives up to its name, and provides much food for thought as it tries to uncover a useful antiractist ideological framework that destroys the standard binaries of Black and white. It starts (and ends) with the idea of polyculturalism:

Polyculturalism, unlike multiculturalism, assumes that people live coherent lives that are made up of a host of lineages–the task of the historian is not to carve out the lineages but to make sense of how people live culturally dynamic lives. Polyculturalism is a ferocious engagement with the political world of culture, a painful embrace of the skin and all its contradictions. (xii)

I like his use of adjectives, and of course this comes much closer to capturing the reality of our lives, the intersectionalities we all experience.
On Xenophobia as Opposed to Racism
Like Albert Memmi on racism, this book goes back a little ways to try and untangle what we actually mean by it.  Back in the old days before the rise of slavery, what we faced was a little  different. Prashad explores this through a look at the Indian Ocean where many cultures had come together to trade for many centuries:

It would be inaccurate to reduce this ethnocentrism or xenophobia to racism, mainly because there was little sense that the difference was predicated on the body (biological determinism) and that those who are biologically inferior can be put to work in the service of their biological betters. (4)

Thus, while there were ‘undoubtedly fear and feelings of superiority in the face of difference…’ (5) among the various cultural contacts and even empires that have arisen over our history, what has arisen in modern times is qualitatively different.

Modern notions of “race” and modern, capitalist racist institutions render most of the fluidity of cultural difference moot. From da Gama’s arrival onward, traditions of xenophobia in the Indian Ocean world were transformed into the hidebound theories of race that emerge from Europe’s experiments with the enslavement of human beings for profit, most notably in the Atlantic slave trade, With the invention of race and the advent of racism, the Afro-Asian world would alter dramatically. (6)

He places the origins of these new theories of race here, where ‘Two sixteenth-century developments indicate the beginnings of raciology: the Iberian Inquisition and the slave trade’ (15). The Inquisition required tests for the purity of blood, and the justification of slavery, the fundamental difference of African peoples. These distinctions lie at the birth of a new era:

Columbus and da Gama operate as metaphors for how our world entered modernity: by the genocide in the New World (Columbus) and by the end to the cosmopolitanism of the Old World (da Gama). (35)

The antidote, as it were, consists in moving beyond all of this rather than embracing it —  ‘raciology’ has not been limited to whites (though of course, they have wielded it in dominance):

The Brahmin accommodation to, and the Diopian reversal of, the Aryan Myth shows us how those outside the camp of whiteness nourished the categories of raciology, and, more specifically, of white supremacy. Atlantic racism, then, is not the special inheritance and legacy of those who deep themselves to be “white.” (19)

So we move from xenophobia through raciology to modern racism, and from there to fascism:

Fascism (in the European and U.S. core) and colonialism (in the Asian and African periphery) exemplify the highest stage of racist statecraft. (20)

I like this distinguishing of different kinds of racism, different kinds of fascism groups around a core of ideas:

While all fascisms are not identical, there is something Gilroy call the unanimist principle that unites most fascisms, whereby the “people” are one, division is not integral to social relations, and the members of a nation are interchangeable and disposable. Furthermore, the unanimist principle perverts the idea of democracy into a racial hierarchy of the population in which those who sit atop the totem are seen as chosen by God or destiny. (20-21)

Specifically for our purposes, fascism or a movement with fascistic tendencies has at its core hierarchy, racism and militarism. (21)

An oppositional politics requires a new model that will move beyond the challengers already failed — essentialised identity politics and multiculturalism:

The desire to go beyond skin does not necessarily mean to plunge oneself into the socially impossible world of individuality. We are social beings who make communities with an urgency…human identity is constructed…multifaceted and multivalent…(36)

On The American Ideology:

We have come some way since da Gama and Columbus, in analysing it, Prashad reworks the famous phrase from de Bois in ways that I am still thinking through.

neocolonialism was replaced by the theory of neoliberalism in which freedom came to mean liberty of the moneyed to act unburdened by notions of justice and democracy. Neoliberalism threatens us with the reproach of equality, and forbids us to create organizational platforms based on our historical and current oppression. To fight against racism is twisted into a racist act, for to invoke race even in a progressive antiracist agenda is seen as divisive.

The problem of the twenty-first century, then, is the problem of the colorblind. (38)

I am still thinking about whether I find this useful, or if it might not be better to cleave to the problem of the ‘color line’ from de Bois’s original formulation. Not that I disagree with any of the ways he formulates the problem of colourblindness, which seeks to understand racism as nothing more than wrong-headed individual actions rather than ‘the coagulation of socioeconomic injustice against groups.’ (38) I rather like that definition. I also like this description of its effects:

Color-blind justice privatizes inequality and racism, and it removes itself from the project of redistributive and anti-racist justice. This is the genteel racism of our new millennium. (38)

It sounds so elegant — I am not sure I quite know what the privatization of inequality and racism look like, I need to think about that more too. But it becomes a little more clear further on:

Since the state deems the differences within civil society as “nonpolitical distinctions,” it is able to arrogate for itself the role of being above those very distinctions. The formal democratic state can then manage difference with such strategies as “unity in difference,” or, much later, in the United States, as multiculturalism. (57-58)

Thus the state becomes a manager above the justice fray, and multiculturalism becomes its management method.

Beyond the color blind and the primordial is the problem of multiculturalism. (39)

Why problematic? Because this idea of multiculturalism arose to ‘undercut the radicalism of antiracism.’ The difference between the two:

The difference between antiracism and diversity management, then, is that the former is militantly against frozen privilege and the latter is in favor of the status quo.(63)

So we need something different, something that is not primordial and essential, something not colourblind, something not just a management of difference in support of a racial hierarchy with whites at the top.

The theory of the polycultural does not mean that we reinvent humanism without ethnicity, but that we acknowledge that our notion of cultural community should not be built inside the high walls of parochialism and ethno-nationalism. The framework of polyculturalism uncouples the notions of origins and authenticity from that of culture.

He draws from Robin Kelley’s idea of polyculturalism which plays with the idea of polyrhythms, bringing together multiple drummers…

A polyculturalism sees the world constituted by the interchange of cultural forms, while multiculturalism (in most incarnations) sees the world as already constituted by different (and discrete) cultures that we can place into categories and study with respect… (67)

This is a world that is changing, growing, becoming.

A broad antiracist platform would not (like liberal multiculturalism) invest itself in the management of difference, but it would (like a socialist polyculturalism) struggle to dismantle and redistribute unequal resources and racist structures.

Instead it concentrates on the project of creating our humanity. “Human” is an “unfinished product,” one divided by social forces that must be overcome for “human” to be made manifest. In the nineteenth century near Delhi, Akbar Illahabadi intoned that we are born people, but with great difficulty we become human (aadmi tha, bari muskil se insan hua). (69)

Coolie Purana — chapter title for this look at polyculturalism in action. There are lots of little awesome facts in here, like this one on the origin of thug:

“to cover up” in Hindustani, but came to mean “deceiver” in the nineteenth century when the British colonial officials identified certain brigands as thuggees. (70)

On the working class, where this idea of polyculturalism is rounded out and given a little more flesh:

not syncretic (two distinct entities melding with a consciousness of difference), but forged together from the beginning through the byways of Jamaica, the streets of Hartford, the avenues of New York, the dole queues of London, and beyond. Polyculturalism exists most vividly among the poor and working class. (71)

There are, of course, tons of examples. All of his are very different from the ones I grew up with, there is a lot that resonates but border culture is rather different that the crazy mixings that emerged out of the British Empire. I never knew this though:

from 1834-1916, British took almost half a million East Indian people to work as indentured labour in Caribbean and South American plantations. (87)

I’d never heard of Albertha Husbands leading domestic workers on strike — she was amazing, I found a little more from this article from the Trinidad & Tobago Guardian on women’s labour.

But I love this point about struggle in Trinidad — the leaders approach was ‘that in struggle cultural forms would be reshaped to accord with the need for popular dignity.’ Rastafarianism is one example. (87)

I like to be thinking with terms that allow for this change to happen, this growth and becoming are part of the term rather than bending or breaking it. Prashad argues that this bottom-up lived experience of polyculturalism is often greater than its leaders understand…

The will of the polycultural working class, then, drew from, and exceeded, the attempts by Gandhi and Garvey to retain the boundaries set up by imperialism. (95)

It’s not always that simple of course, and some of the dangers and obstacles are explored in the chapter on Merchants — starting with the importance of place to culture and identity:

If there is nothing else to own, at least I own my own body and I have my ‘hood. The anti-Jewish and anti-Korean tendencies in the ‘hood come from this profound desire for dignity among the working class who labor for others, but who do not have the means to produce the services to run their own territories. (115)

I have to think more about this, think more about status and turf and power, but also topophilia and the importance of living well and coming to know intimately the place you live in for survival, the importance of transforming neighborhoods into positive places. Still, this rings very true.

When the working poor has lost every other asset, it holds on to its place of residence and life as the most precious resource ever… a subaltern nationalism, one that demands the protection of territorial sovereignty as the only resource at one’s command. When all else has been stripped away, it is land (place) that must be defended.

And it is often the immigrant who is seen as colonizer, against whom the battle rages… (121)

Kung Fusion:

The final chapter, the hopeful chapter, the chapter I realised I had no idea Bruce Lee had written a book and was ashamed of that. Quoting Lee’s The Tao of Gung Fu: A Study in the Way of Chinese Martial Art, Prashad writes:

Kung Fu, Bruce pointed out in his sociology of the art, “serves to cultivate the mind, to promote health, and to provide a most effective means of self-protection against any attacks.” It “develops confidence, humility, coordination, adaptability and respect toward others.”

I am educated further on the women stars in martial arts world — Pauline Short, Ruby Lozano, Graciela Casillas (Bellflower!), Judith Brown. Prashad quotes Jim Kelley, describes solidarities — Aoki with the Black Panthers, Ho Chi Minh in Garveyite Halls in Harlem and swapping stories about it with Tobert F. Williams, Nkrumah hanging out with Stokely Carmichael. Quotes Nehru speaking at the Bandung conference, 1955:

There is nothing more terrible, there is nothing more horrible than the infinite tragedy of Africa in the past few hundred years. When I think of it, everything else pales into insignificance; that infinite tragedy of Africa ever since the days when millions of them were carried away in galleys as slaves to America and elsewhere, the way they were treated, the way they were taken away, 50 percent dying in the galleys. We have to bear that burden, all of us. We did not do it ourselves, but the world has to bear it. We talk about this country and that little country in Africa or outside, but let us remember this Infinite Tragedy.

To end with a little inspiration:

History is made in struggle and past memories of solidarity are inspiration for that struggle. Indeed, the Afro-Asian and polycultural struggles of today allow us to redeem a past that has been carved up along ethnic lines by historians. To remember Bruce as I do, staring at a poster of him ca. 1974, is not to wane into nostalgia for the past. My Bruce is alive, and like the men and women before him, still in the fight. (149)

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Building Social Spaces, Environment & Justice, Gardens, Intersections

Enrique Salmón: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity and Resilience

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13226644I came to Enrique Salmón’s Eating the Landscape through The Colors of Nature, this covers some of the same territory, but I learned even more about the Colorado Plateau that we had just been driving through. The landscapes of my baby-self, and so many of my dad’s stories. But no one in my family ever had anything as awesome as this:

I recall the many plant-related lessons I learned in my grandma’s herb house. this latticed structure was filled with hanging dried and living plants as well as pungent and savory smells from the many herbs hanging from the ceiling. The roof was no longer visible through the layers of vines that draped over its eaves to the ground. (3)

I love this connection between food and landscape, so obvious and yet I had not quite seen it in this way before.

…because so much of the food we are discussing in this book comes directly from the land, food landscapes remain intact when old recipes are regenerated. The food itself, and the landscapes from which it emerges, remembers how it should be cooked. This can happen because the food itself activates in us an encoded memory that reminds us how to grow, collect and prepare the food. (9)

Thinking about what our food teaches us about our landscape…well. I have learned a lot through my short time on smallholdings, through growing up in the desert, but I don’t know enough.

An essential lesson for us, as we continue on our current self-destructive path of monocropping, genetically modifying our food using artificial irrigation, and overfertilizing, will be to relearn how to cook our landscapes: the manner in which we sustainably steward our food crops, relying on a process that began in our home kitchens. (10)

It is not just loss of knowledge through city living or supermarkets, I think of Vandana Shiva writing about just how much the proponents of monocropping have actively destroyed. Yet there is so much happening that gives me hope. Like Emigdio Ballon, come from the highlands of Bolivia to Tesuque Pueblo of New Mexico. Working now with the Pueblo to grow fruit trees and beans, and maintaining a seed bank of heirloom crops.

I think too of settler and scientist arrogance, the kind that has driven unsustainable agricultural practices through the fields and lives of small farmers on the land for generations. Not seeing the complex systems these farmers were often embedded within:

For the longest time, the conservation and environmental movement had assumed that the human-environment equation would always result negatively for the land…until recently, researchers had not considered the possibility that humans could actually enhance their landscapes; that human communities might actually play a role in enhancing diversity; or that humans could be a keystone species of some ecological systems. (75)

In southern Arizona the Hohokam are everywhere, I remember hearing stories, imagining their presence across the land. There is a chapter on the Sonora desert and this:

The word Hohokam from the Pima language — always translated as ‘”those who have gone,” or “those who have vanished.” Archaeologist Emil Haury, who has studied the Hohokam, provided a more literal translation of “all used up.” (82)

Damn.

Up near Phoenix, along the salt river, they built extensive irrigation systems. Left them. Salmón writes that this is possibly because they became salinized, silted up. Instead of upping the ante, the people returned to a simpler agricultural system, one that was more beneficial to their landscape and more sustainable over the years.

Damn. I can’t imagine that conversation, our current reality is worlds removed from that kind of thinking. Perhaps this is a great part of the problem. One other thing I never have experienced, but so want to:

The diversity of the Sonora Desert seems more obvious the farther one travels through its namesake Mexican state. (128)

There are lots of stories here of the Colorado plateau, the fields in canyons and along washes hidden from sight — oh, I wished so much we caught just a glimpse. He writes of Peabody Coal’s draining of the aquifer and the drying up of springs. An enterprise bringing death to extract energy, destroying place to facilitate movement. A mindset alien to the people here, and to me. I loved the description of a concept from Juan Estevan Arellano:

Hispano querencia: that which affords his people a sense of place. Querencia is also simply the love for the land and place. (118)

Salmón continues:

To Hispanos, querencia is a blend of mental spaces not only involving bioregionalism but also including emotional, spiritual, cultural and ecological health. When people think of land the concept is enmeshed with notions of cultural memory. These and other mental spaces merge into a multidimensional blended space… (118)

This is the space of resilience, of community, of words. The thing evoked so powerfully in Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poetry describing these same places. It is strange finding the language of development I am so familiar with rewritten, recoded in this way:

Story is at the core of community resilience. It comprises the matter, substance, and adhesive of human capital. Stories communicate our values through the language of our heart and our emotions. Stories are what we feel. In northern New Mexico, enough of the viable land remains in which the story of querencia can be housed. (121)

More ways to reframe development debates, from The Declaration of Seed Sovereignty that came out of the Traditional Agriculture Conference held March 10-11, 2006 in Alcalde, New Mexico:

Sustainable stewardship and cultural resilience are neither decisions nor rights. Nowhere in the Declaration of Seed Sovereignty does the notion or term of rights arise. Instead, the associations conferred to include in their “living document” concepts of relationships, generational memory, embodied practices, spirituality, caring, respect, traditions, and celebration when declaring their revival and survival of their way of life. Together, these concepts reflect identity connected to responsibility towards one’s place in a community within a landscape. (150)

Everything is relational and connected.

Salmón, Enrique (2012) Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity and Resilience. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Archaeology, History, Intersections

Quarai and Abó, dust and rain

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After the Turquoise Trail, after Los Cerrillos and Madrid, we headed south to Quarai, south through Moriarty (!) and McIntosh, Estancia to Mountainair.

screen-shot-2016-09-11-at-17-14-58

1143647We were driving through the countryside poet Jimmy Santiago Baca writes about so compellingly. I read Martín & Meditations on the South Valley, look how time and evil rewrites the nature of towns — driving now we would only know Estancia as home to yet another prison, networked into the US carceral nation. This is how Baca knows it from Martín:

III

The religious voice of blind Estela Gomez
blackened the air one day.
“92 years mijito. ¿Que pasó? There were no more
beans to pick, no crops to load on trains.
Pinos Wells dried up, como mis manos.
Everyone moved away to work. I went to Estancia,
con mi hijo Reynaldo.
Gabachos de Tejas, we worked for them. Loading
alfalfa, picking cotton for fifty cents a row. (11)

Here too, are the ruins of Quarai. Before looking for the hotel we stopped at the ruins, hoping for a sunset peak. It was all closed off, sadly, but the town’s church was beautiful:

Quarai

the countryside golden:

55

We came back in the morning, the church is mostly what is visible:

Quarai Ruins

There was once a great pueblo here too, up to three stories. It sat along the trails by which salt was once traded, another place of encounter (Three such church and pueblo complexes form the Salinas Pueblo Missions Natinal Monument — Quarai, Abó, and Gran Quivira, which we weren’t able to see).

Here is it’s reconstruction from about 1300 — fascinating that it seems to have been left to the ancestors for many years just around this time, and reoccupied just before the arrival of the Spanish:
IMG_7073

Like Cicúye / Pecos, this was a place of coexistence for a very long time after the Spanish Entrada. This is a reconstruction of the church.

IMG_7178

It is huge, making us feel small.

Quarai

Quarai

Called El Misión Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Cuarac, it was completed around 1629, and for a while served as a seat of the Inquisition. That gives me chills, though the park service information boards focus on the inquisitions struggles with the army more than its actions surrounding native beliefs and religions.

Like Cicúye, there are kivas here too amidst the Christian buildings. Like this one, square. That sits in my heart somehow. Change, contrariness built into stone and ceremony.

Quarai

The pueblo ruins remain at peace beneath great mounds, covered with melons.

Quarai

Jimmy Baca writes of how this place continues to live.

VIII

***

Dawn in the Manzano mountains.
Pine and piñón from chimneys
smoke the curving road
with resinous mist.
My black feathered heart
effortlessly glides
in the clear blue sky
above the pueblos
de Manzano, Tajique, Willard and Estancia.
At the foothills
my grandmother herded sheep
and my grandfather planted corn y chile.

I turn my motorycle off
next to QUARAI RUINS
and silence drops
into the canyon
sounding like an ancient song of sadness,
like a distant boulder
echoing into the blue sky and stubble grass

I step into the open rock pit
hollowed in the earth
with flat rock door facing east,
pinch red clay and chew
my teeth black with earth prayer,
then speak with QUARAI–

O QUARAI! Shape
the grit and sediment I am,
mineral de Nuevo Mejico. (38-39)

I am not sure how much work had been done here when Baca arrived, it it was closer to what we could see, or this view of the church in 1935.

Quarai was abandoned in the 1670s and fell to ruin. Above, the mission church before excavation and stabilization, c. 1935 Courtesy of the National Park Service
Quarai was abandoned in the 1670s and fell to ruin. Above, the mission church before excavation and stabilization, c. 1935
Courtesy of the National Park Service

 

We traveled down Highway 60.

Route 60

Abó is very similar, but people still live just to one side, and more recent ruins of settlement make this place feel a bit less like a ‘monument’. This is nice. They believe that while Quarai was of the Southern Tewa or Tiguex people, this was the place of the Tompiro. My favourite picture:

Abó Ruins

It is more lush here:

Abó Ruins

Another massive church here:

Abó Ruins

Abó Ruins

Again a kiva.

Abó Ruins

The pueblo hidden beneath mounds of earth. Bordered by flowers.

Abó Ruins

Abó Ruins

From here we drove on, drove on home

Route 60

A final poem from Baca’s Meditations on the South Valley:

IV

Send me news Rafa
of the pack dogs sleeping
in wrecked cars in empty yards,
or los veteranos
dreaming in their whiskey bottles
on porches
of the past, full of glory and fear.
The black smell of wet earth
seeps into old leaning adobes,
and prowls like a black panther through open windows.
Austere-faced hombres
hoeing their jardines
de chile y maíz in the morning,
crush beer cans and stuff them in gunny sacks
and pedal on rusty bicycles
in the afternoon to the recycling scale.
and at Coco’s chante
at dusk tecatos se juntan,
la cocina jammed like the stock exchange lobby,
as los vatos raise their fingers
indicating cuánto quiren.
There is much more I miss Rafa,
so send me news. (57)

Route 60

We ate lunch in Truth or Consequences. Were too tired to stop in Hatch. We hit rain and a huge dust storm just outside of Deming. Pulled to one side. They are terrifying if you live here, have grown up with the news of 10 (20 to 30 to 100)-car pile-ups along these freeways. Fatalities. People drive like where they got to go and the time they got to get there are more important than life.

I-10

Finally then…good to be home.

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Environment & Justice, Intersections, Struggle & Movement, Sustainability

The Colors of Nature: Deming & Savoy

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The Colors of NatureI loved The Colors of Nature, edited by poet Alison H. Deming and scientist Lauret E. Savoy, one white and one Black. I took it with me as mum and I drove through the desert, read pieces of it in Tuba City, Chama, Mountainair.

Both women understand that human history and natural history are braided strands in the weave of their existence. This, too, is a common ground given to them by their differences. But no monochromatic sens of human history will suffice to express their certainty that the pain at the foundation of American culture–whether one’s ancestors have been on the side of the wounding or the woundedness–informs our sense of place on Earth and our connections with each other. And so the women begin a new conversation. (5)

First things first though:

…nature writing remains, for the most part, the precinct of the Euro-American privileged class. The editors of this anthology are convinced that the “lack” of nature writing by people of color reflects the limited perspective of both the defining audience and the publishing community more than the lack of interest in the natural world by writers of color. (6)

So now that is out of the way, I loved the conversation between the editors that serves as introduction:

Savoy: What I’ve seen as a great potential strength of writing about nature is that narrative inquiry of a larger world extending beyond human institutions could refocus our attention outward, situate us, and ultimately help us understand better how to live in that world responsibly and ethically. Such writing, and the visions created in story,  can inform and illuminate the processes of understanding ecological relationships, pattern and community within and beyond the human realm. But I also see this strength as only partially realized in that too many experiences of people not of Euro-American descent–experience that transcend history and point to deeply embedded cultural values and conflicts on this continent–seem to lie outside of the genre’s domain. (7)

Yet these are vital. Again and again it all comes back to where white experience is rooted. From Savoy:

The fulfillment of Euro-America’s exploration and empire–of land acquisition and use and expansion of a new nation on what was believed to be a clean slate of wilderness–owed much to the processes of colonization, of slavery, of dispossession and forced removal from homeland to reservation. (9)

From Deming:

Deming: Because the American past is stained with the ugliness of genocide and slavery (“No nation,” wrote James Baldwin, “has ever made so successful and glamorous a romance out of genocide and slavery”), most Euro-Americans continue to prefer seeing their lives as stories of rugged individualism rather than of culture making. And yet, just as every day of one’s life is embedded in nature, every day of one’s life is also embedded in this complicated cultural legacy. (12-13)

So these are writings that re-embed us, in community, in world, in culture. They do it beautifully, and so these selections — as so many of my ridiculously lengthy selections — are what happened to resonate most with me just now.

‘In History’ by Jamaica Kincaid (16-27) — a visceral reminder that our world was once so different. A reminder just how much has changed. A wondering about how we deal with that, think about that, write that.

What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me?
Should I call it history?
If so, what should history mean to someone like me? (16)

Before Europeans brought slaves to these Caribbean islands, the genocide was almost complete…

It is when this land is completely empty that I and the people who look like me begin to make an appearance, the food I eat begins to make an appearance, the trees I will see each day come from far away and begin to make an appearance, the sky is at is always was, the is as it always was, the water surrounding the land on which I am just making an appearance is as it always was; but these are the only things left from before that man, sailing with his three ships, reached the land on which I eventually make an appearance. (21)

I have Kincaid’s book on gardens sitting in England, still unread. But a taste, here, of this tension filled love of plants and acknowledgment of the brutal history behind so many gardens and our botanical knowledge:

The botanists are from the same part of the world as the man who sailed on the three ships, that same man who started narrative from which I trace my beginning. And the botanists are like that man who sailed on the ships in a way, too: they emptied the worlds of things animal, mineral and vegetable, of their names, and replaced those names with names pleasing to them; the recognized names are now reasonable, as reason is a pleasure to them. (22)

From ‘At the End of Ridge Road: From a Nature Journal’ by Joseph Bruchac (49-66):

What European cultures call “wilderness,” carefully separating it from “civilization,” remained an intimate part of human nature in indigenous cultures. Rather than pasting human masks over the faces of the animals, we recognized the animals as people with nations of their own. (55)

I learned that all turtles have 13 large plates on their carapaces, and 28 smaller ones ring them!

There are thirteen full moons in any given year, roughly twenty-eight days between one full moon and the next. So it is that native people of the northeast say that the turtle’s back is a lunar calendar… (58)

Amazing.

From ‘Earthbound’ by bell hooks (67-71):

Humankind no matter how powerful cannot take away the rights of the earth. Ultimately nature rules. That is the great democratic gift the earth offers us–that sweet death to which we all inevitably go–into that final communion. No race, no class, no gender, nothing can keep any of us from dying into that death where we are made one. To tend the earth is always then to tend our destiny, our freedom, and our hope. (68)

I loved this story, loved the strength to be found in the land.

My sharecropping grandaddy Jerry would walk through neat rows of crops and tell me, “I’ll tell you a secret little girl. No man can make the sun or the rains come–we can all testify. We can all see that ultimately we all bow down to the forces of nature. Big white boss may think he can outsmart nature but the small farmer know. Earth is our witness.” This relationship to the earth meant that southern black folks, whether they were impoverished or not, knew firsthand that white supremacy, with its systemic dehumanization of blackness, was not a form of absolute power.

This reminded me of some of the thoughts of Wendell Berry, some of the ways I’ve been struggling with this difference between city and country.

…when black people migrated to urban cities, this humanizing connection with nature was severed; racism and white supremacy came to be seen as all powerful, the ultimate factors informing our fate. (69)

From ‘Sharing Breath: Some Links Between Land, Plants, and People’ by Enrique Salmon (72-89)

All of these authors are now on my list to be read more fully, to inquire deeper. I loved this exploration of the meaning of plants in indigenous world systems. Again, we are back to the wholeness, the interconnectedness of everything.

Iwígara is the soul or essence of life everywhere. Therefore, iwígara is the idea that all life, spiritual and physical, is interconnected in a continual cycle…. Iwígara is the total interconnectedness and integration of all life in the Sierra Madres. (85)

We are back to throwing out that distinction between us and world, that idealization of pristine nature that permeates Romanticism and continues into our present.

When the people speak of the land, the religious and romantic tones so prevalent in Western environmental conversation are absent. to us the land exists in the same manner as do our families, chickens, the river, and the sky. No hierarchy of privilege places one above or below the other. Iwígara binds and manages the interconnectedness of all life. Within this web there are particular ways that living things relate to one another. All individual life plays a role in the cycle. (86)

Salmon briefly describes how through gathering techniques, plant dispersal, controlled burning, and selective pruning and coppicing, the Rarámuri have enhanced their ecosystem, increased diversity … all of these things theorised and practiced through permaculture, and the same knowledge found around the world in indigenous and peasant communities. It isn’t rocket science to understand that such communities have developed immense stores of knowledge that can only come through daily work in the same landscape over generations — but it is only recently, slowly, becoming recognized ‘officially’. Generally, where those groups aren’t getting too much in the way of quick profits.

Cultural survival can be measured by the degree to which cultures maintain a relationship with their bioregions. Ecologists and conservation biologists today recognize an important relationship between cultural diversity and biological diversity. (88)

A more foundational text from one of the founders of environmental justice theory — ‘Confronting Environmental Racism in the Twenty-First Century’ by Robert D. Bullard (90- 97). I find this useful:

The environmental justice framework attempts to uncover the underlying assumptions that may contribute to and produce unequal protection. It brings to the surface the ethical and political questions of “who gets what, why, and how much.” (91)

From ‘Dark Waters’ by Yusef Komunyakaa (96-112), a different view of Bogalusa than I am used to, I am looking forward to reading poetry, but I loved this:

I realized that I had attempted to present how toxicity taints the social and natural landscape. (101)

From ‘Burning the Shelter’ by Louis Owens (142-145), again back to deconstructing euro-american understandings of nature, of distance and difference:

Gradually, almost painfully, I began to understand that what I called “wilderness” was an absurdity, nothing more than a figment of the European imagination. An “absolute fake.” Before the European invasion, there was no wilderness in North America; there was only the fertile continent, where people lived in a hard-learned balance with the natural world. In embracing a philosophy that saw the White Pass shelter–and all traces of humanity–as a shameful stain upon the “pure” wilderness, I had succumbed to a five-hundred-year-old pattern of deadly thinking that separates us from the natural world. (144)

‘Becoming Métis’ by Melissa Nelson (146-152) was so useful in thinking through how to move forward, how to decolonise the mind of old ways of thinking, how to embrace other ways of thinking without appropriating. It is a fine line, no? One you hope to walk well:

To indigenous people, the basic tenets of deep ecology are just a reinvention of very ancient principles that they have been living by for millennia before their ways were disrupted, and in many cases destroyed, by colonial forces.

Decolonizing the mind is not disregarding rationality or European heritage. It is transcending the self-centered, ethnocentric, and exploitative patterns of Western hegemony. It is explicitly questioning the so-called objectivity and universal character of the Western scientific paradigm. decolonizing the mind allows other more diverse and mysterious ways of knowing the world to enter the field of perception. (149)

It is not an essentialised kind of thinking, does not depend on blood though it is certainly conditioned by culture. For many, it means abandoning much of what we think we know. It certainly requires great humility.

…there are no special spiritual “goodies” in being part Native American. Traditional knowledge is really a deeper knowledge of the self within a wider ecocultural context. It comes with patience, hard work, and sacrifice.

The reality is that white, academic culture does not teach this or even respect it. It does not demand the inner knowledge, nor the ways in which we must wrestle with history, fight current injustices, make our stands. It is also, to a great extent, about place.

‘They must learn to honor the local, the distinctive, in the place where they live.’ (150)

I want to think more about that.

Environmental justice is so much about place — how certain people are pushed into places, other trapped in places, and everyone fighting for those places where toxicity abides because they are not just places — they are homes, communities, relationships. In ‘Hazardous Cargo’ by Ray Gonzalez (163-170), he describes El Paso, and the I-25. We were driving the I-25, but a little further north. This opened my eyes to a different aspect of this freeway — the running of trucks up and down it to dump hazardous waste. Did we see the HC signs in white on green backgrounds? I did not know to look. We just knew it was beautiful. I suppose corporations only see emptiness, not the beauty, the life.

I-25

From a 1997 report on the waste generated by the maquiladoras that fills many of these trucks — Mexico insisted that it be dealt with north of the border when they signed NAFTA. But in 1997, only 12 percent of 8 million tons were found to be adequately treated (167). 8 million tons. I can’t even imagine where this quantity stands now. Where it is dumped, buried.

And finally from ‘Crossing Boundaries’ by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston (171-180), this description of the concentration camp at Manzanar.

…we finally emerge into glaring light, Mount Williamson rising before us in the distance, my spirit’s life, as I remember how that peak inspired us during our imprisonment. Solid and steadfast, it remained immovable through all times. (176)

Manzanar monument

There was so much more here, so I have an expanding list of people to read more of — Al Young, Sandra Jackson-Opoku, Gary Paul Nabhan, David Mas Masumoto, Diane Glancy.

A wonderful book.

[Deming, Alsion H and Lauret E. Savoy, eds. (2002) The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World. Minneapolis: Milkweed.]

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Intersections, Violence

A Black Monday (for white supremacists) — Tom P. Brady

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br0120p1sJudge Tom Pickens Brady served as the ‘intellectual leader’ of the White Citizens’ Councils, not as famous beyond the South as the KKK perhaps, but just as set on preserving white supremacy. Eyes on the Prize, which documents the civil rights struggle, had a few excerpts from this little number to show what they were up against. Judge Brady first delivered Black Monday as a speech to the Sons of the American Revolution, then expanded it into a 92 page booklet, which is excerpted here. I almost want to read all of it, but it is hard to find, and I am not spending a dime on something like this. It was a best seller in its day though.

The Black Monday in question was Monday, 17th May 1954. The date the Supreme Court gave out its decision in Brown v Board of Education to integrate schools. I don’t know if this helps me any in understanding this crazy, deep-rooted fear that seems so alien, but it helps show some of the web of ‘civilized’ rationalisations built around the fear, and the violence and hate that emerged from it. This may be from the deep South, but permutations of these arguments could be heard everywhere, and it’s not like you won’t hear them today, though perhaps worded just a little differently than they were in 1954.

“Black Monday” is indeed symbolic of the date. Black denoting darkness and terror. Black signifying the absence of light and wisdom. Black embodying grief, destruction and death. (83)

The violence and hurt in these words, that alone is unbearable. I’ve been thinking so much about the white gaze since reading Hilton Als and June Jordan, this right here is how some people look at into the world, it is the hate that fills their stare. And they are pointing it right at human beings like a weapon. This lies underneath all of it, so it is confusing when Brady suddenly swerves into his kind-but-firm and I-know-what-is-best-for-all-of-us slave master talk:

“Black Monday”is not written primarily in behalf of the white people of the seventeen States affected by the Segregation decision, though it is hoped it will be beneficial to them. It is, however, written with the fervent desire that it will be of material benefit to both the white and colored people of this country, wheresoever situated. It is written to alert and encourage every American, irrespective of race, who loves our Constitution, our Government and our God-given American way of life….It is dedicated to those who firmly believe that socialism and communism are lethal messes of porridge for which our sacred birthright shall not be sold. (84)

I am still not sure how this connection between Socialism, Communism and race equality were forged with such lasting bonds, I know communists worked hard and well for it for a brief time before Moscow decided different. Of course, these are also versions of Socialism and Communism that bear no resemblance to real theories or beliefs, being a caricature of Stalinism (though impressive to caricature what is already a caricature) as far as I can tell. But this connection and the straw-man of socialism standing in for equality of all kinds continue strong as ever.

There is some rewriting of history here:

…the saddest and most terrible of all American dramas was enacted–the Reconstruction period–the pious greed of the New England slave trader had brought the negro to our shores and now his insatiable hatred and envy was to be placated. (85)

A lot about how whites won the country, it is stated clearly that ‘negroes’ played no conceivable part in that effort. Not that genocide and conquest are much to be proud of, but Buffalo soldiers played their part. There’s a little hymn to Booker T Washington:

the first great American negro this country has produced. His wisdom transcended his time…(90)

Followed by more about how the wisest of his race knows their place, labouring manually rather than writing poetry. Or worse. A judgment on Mr. Washington, just read Up From Slavery and it’s pretty clear why.

Back to Brown v Board, Brady quotes Major Frederick Sullens’ editorial in the Jackson Daily News. We are back to chilling threats emerging from ‘common sense’…

Members of the Nation’s highest tribunal may be learned in the law, but they were utterly lacking in common sense when they rendered Monday’s decision, common sense of the kind that should have told them about the tragedy that will inevitably follow.

**

Human blood may stain Southern soil in many places because of this decision, but the dark red stains of that blood will be on the marble steps of the United States Supreme Court building. (92)

It is a kind of hysterical ‘common sense’, which to me makes it no kind of common sense at all. One that already feels besieged, threatened. One that denies others their humanity, which at bottom people must know is wrong — nothing common about that at all. Yet the wrongness is turned outwards,  Brady calls the decision ‘the creation of this Frankenstein’s monster’ by the Supreme Court (92). A reference that threw me a little, but of course so much of this is around terror and the psycho-social drama of miscegenation. I once thought racism was all just about power and status and wealth and privilege, but there’s definitely some deeper psychological shit going on here. Which helps explain, along with the power and status and etc, the power of this strange formulation of racism to endure, along with its enduring links to some strange straw man of communism, and definitions of white liberty and freedom that depend on the absence of freedom and liberty among all those who are not white.

Communism disguised as “new democracy” is still communism, and tyranny masquerading as liberalism is still tyranny. The resistance of communism and tyranny, irrespective of whatever guise they may adopt, is not treason. It is the prerequisite of freedom, the very essence of liberty. (93)

This is still the mantra of the Tea Party and others, still fighting for states rights and racial integrity. Seems like most of it is the fear of having others do unto them as they have done unto others. That might be at the bottom of all of it.

997330[excerpt from Carson, Claybourne, David J. Garrow, Gerald Gill, Vincent Harding, Darlene Clark Hine eds. (1991) Eyes on the Prize: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts From the Black Freedom Struggle. New York: Penguin.]

Intersections, Migrations, Struggle & Movement

Septima Clark — The Glorious Complexities of Identity

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Ready From Within - Septima ClarkSeptima Poinsette Clark’s background is found in the second part of Ready From Within, you can read more about the first on her life and work here. Once again I found myself bumping against my own unconsciously contained ideas of identity.  The editor Cynthia Brown noted her own surprise when she saw Rosa Parks let her hair down and it fell below her waist… Rosa Parks smiled at her, and said kindly she was part Native American. How had I never heard that before? Septima Clark’s background is just as wondrously complex — exactly the complexity that the U.S. brand of racism strips away by reducing everything to the absurdity of a drop of blood defining a status that whites have long tried to hold forcibly down at the bottom.

Clark writes that her mother was born free, and that she:

…had three distinct sets of brother and sisters. The first set was mulatto, two girls with soft curly brown hair. then came three ginger-colored boys with soft black hair. Then came three girls including my mother, Victoria. They were medium-brown with soft straight black hair. Their father was Indian, from the Muskhogean tribes who lived on the sea islands from Charleston to Savannah, Georgia.

Born free, her mother, and then raised in the heart of the 3rd great revolution (and much more revolutionary than the US revolution if we’re at all honest):

My mother was born in Charleston but reared in Haiti…those three little girls were sent to Haiti to be raised by their older brothers, who were cigar makers there. (89)

Her mother was very proud of this claim, that she never was in slavery. Very unlike Clark’s father who was freed by the civil war as a teenager, and remembered this freedom as a worrying time. His surname Poinsette came from his former master, a botanist for whom the Poinsettia is named.

I think about the connections between language, culture and place embodied in the intertwinings of this single family’s history — and the simple identity assigned to Septima Poinsette Clark fairly boggles the mind. How soon can we leave these damn binaries behind us?

There are also fascinating insights here into the early traditions of education and how they play into these complexities. There was a local public school, but Clark would have been one of 100 students for the one teacher. Her mother worked to get her into a private school:

There were lots of black women who had little schools in their homes–in their kitchens, in their dining rooms, or in little shed rooms. (98)

These schools ran on their own hierarchies — and this whole story of education resulted in a class pride that Clark had to work hard to undo through the rest of her life in struggle. She remembers that her teacher:

didn’t take  just anybody who had the money for tuition. She chose her pupils from the blacks who boasted of being free issues, people who had never been slaves. These people constituted a sort of upper caste. (99)

From there she went on to the Avery Institute, getting her teaching certificate in 1916. The Avery Institute is hell of fascinating — itself emblematic of the complexities of identity and the immense possibilities opened up by Reconstruction. Francis Louis Cardozo founded it, his father the Jewish editor of a newspaper, his mother half black and half Native American. They sent their son Francis to school in Europe; after his return he became the first black Secretary of State for South Carolina during reconstruction. (101)

The racist laws against marriage meant Cardozo’s parents never officially married — two such interracial families lived on Clark’s street while she was growing up, but her mother always looked down on them for living together outside of wedlock. Not everything was nice and friendly back in the day.

Clark’s first job was on Johns Island, part of a network of islands along the South Carolina coast. It took nine hours in a boat to get there from Charleston. She talks about the prevalence of African words, Gullah. She taught how that idiom as spoken related to ‘correct English’ (de to be written down as the…). She worked there several years, and then moved back to teach in Charleston.

How did she become fully radicalized? It took a little while:

I want to start my story with the end of World War II because that is when the civil rights movement really got going, both for me personally and for people all over the south. After World War II the men were coming home from fighting in Europe and Africa, and they weren’t going to take segregation any more. (23)

It was still some time before a fellow teacher introduced her to Highlander, the kind of space that encouraged her to step into her full potential and change the course of the growing civil rights movement. From there she never looked back, and never lost her faith in the ability of people to develop:

You know, the measure of a person is how much they develop in their life. Some people slow down in their growth after they become adults… But you never know when a person’s going to leap forward, or change around completely. (103)

One of my favourite quotes from her, and I’ve used this once already, is on growing old, and the opportunities that change and chaos bring:

But I really do feel that this is the best part of life. It’s not that you have just grown old, but it is how you have grown old. I feel that I have grown old with dreams that I want to come true, and that I have grown old believing there is always a beautiful lining to that cloud that overshadows things. I have great belief in the fact that whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking. I consider chaos a gift, and this has come during my old age. (125)

Maybe if more righteous elders were like her and celebrated such things, we would be in a better place. To end, the one thing we all have to remember:

The only thing that’s really worthwhile is change. It’s coming. (126)

You want to see my new favourite photos?

Septima Clark and Rosa Parks:

Image Courtesy of Highlander Research and Education Center
Image Courtesy of Highlander Research and Education Center

parks-and-clark-sitting

Senior power!

 

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Struggle & Movement

Septima Clark: Ready From Within

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Ready From Within - Septima ClarkSeptima Poinsette Clark… words cannot express how happy and humbling this tour of freedom fighters and popular educators has been making me. I only hope I have within me an ounce of their courage, and that my life could have a fraction of their meaning. I believed I could make a difference by writing, I am trying to continue a tiny piece of their legacy and remember their example when I face this academic article (and book) writing with fear and trembling, because I do not feel it is an audience of my people though I know some of my people are out there.

Anyway. This is short, wonderful, and everyone should read it. Cynthia Stokes Brown helped Septima Clark bring it together, and the introduction is her narration of how they met, how this book came about. In it she quotes part of a speech given by Rosa Parks at a dinner given by the East Bay Friends of Highlander where Mrs Clark was also present:

However, I was willing to face whatever came, not because I felt that I was going to be benefited or helped personally, because I felt that I had been destroyed too long ago. But I had the hope that the young people would be benefited by equal education…

I actually did not think in terms of non-violence and Christian love in connection with the Movement (we didn’t call it the Movement–we just called it survival) until Dr Martin Luther king came to Montgomery… (17)

These words shook me, regrounded me. Reminded me of the reality that all of this work was grounded in — survival.

I felt that I had been destroyed too long ago.

This is still where change has to start, where people are at. Septima Clark might have fought hard to do things the way she thought would be best, but it didn’t mean she closed herself down to change. Rather it meant opening up to a collective way of changing:

But I changed, too, as I traveled through the eleven deep south states. Working through those states, I found I could say nothing to those people, and no teacher as a rule could speak with them. We had to let them talk to us and say to us whatever they wanted to say. When we got through listening to them, we would let them know that we felt that they were right according to the kind of thing that they had in their mind, but according to living in this world there were other things they needed to know. We wanted to know if they were willing then to listen to us, and they decided that they wanted to listen to us.

…I found out that I needed to change my way of thinking, and in changing my way of thinking I had to let people understand that their way of thinking was not the only way. We had to work together to get the changes. (53-54)

She talks a lot about how she had to change her thinking about middle-class people, poor people, white people… but I’m getting ahead, because Mrs Clark fully came into her own with some help from Highlander, and this was a process the way getting rid of our prejudices is always a process.

Highlander Years

She was a teacher, and a colleague recommended Highlander to her. They offered free room and board for those attending the workshops (it’s clear this was important, it’s not at all clear how they funded it). Clark writes:

Myles used to open the workshops by asking the people what they wanted to know, and he would close it with, “What you going to do back home?” (30)

Clark, Thurgood Marshall, and others at the Highlander Folk School.
Clark, Thurgood Marshall, and others at the Highlander Folk School.

I liked that particular practice of questions, as much as the importance of music to the experience, and the singing that always went on there. When Clark lost her job as a teacher through the Southern push to destroy the NAACP and the mass firing of teachers who wouldn’t abjure their membership, she was hired on to Highlander’s staff.

An aside — Mrs Clark remembers Rosa Parks attending her first workshop while all the time fearing that someone would report her presence there back to the community and she would lose her job, even be in danger. No idle fear. Three months after that, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus.

While at Highlander, Clark was instrumental in helping set up the citizenship schools. She herself had been a teacher on Johns Island in South Carolina, so she knew a great deal about the situation there when Esau Jenkins came to talk to her and Myles Horton at Highlander about setting up a school to teach adults literacy there. He was a bus driver among other things, and had begun educating people about the constitution so they could qualify to vote while driving his route. But he couldn’t teach literacy while driving the bus.

Highlander provided the funds to buy a building. They set up a cooperative grocery in the front rooms to disguise what they were doing from the white people of the island — this also allowed them to make enough money to pay Highlander back for the cost of the building and created a loan-fund. They used this to rebuild a woman’s house after it ‘got burned out’ (no mention of how, why), to help people through sickness and etc.

This is floating around the internet with no credits I can find...
This is floating around the internet with no credits I can find…

Cooperative efforts and mutual aid within communities are a running thread throughout all of these stories of social change and struggle. So is respect. You’d think that would be easy, but everyone knows it can be pretty hard for some. Like Horton, she emphasises the importance of finding someone who could teach with respect for their students:

‘We wanted to find a person who was not a licensed teacher, one who would not be considered high falutin’, who would not act condescending to adults. (48)

They settled on the amazing Bernice Robinson, and the schools grew and grew with wildly success. A few more thoughts on her work at Highlander and the white supremacist actions to shut down it’s challenge to the establishment through charges of interracial gatherings, the illegal selling of alcohol, and communism. This hodgepodge contains the real reason, the fabricated reason, and the fear-mongering reason for Tennessee’s hate, highlighting the particularly long-standing tradition of red-baiting to shut down all attempts at social change. This deep-rooted hatred of socialism has been, and continues to be, an effective demonising label for anything that troubles privilege and promises change. Clark writes:

But anyone who was against segregation was considered a Communist. White southerners couldn’t believe that a southerner could have the idea of racial equality; they thought it had to come from somewhere else. (55)

Shit, imagine being so limited of vision and spirit. You’d think anyone could look around them and think shit, we must be able to do better than this. So how do we do it?

There are some light moments in here. For all her radical politics, she’s that fierce church/mother figure in her disapproval of alcohol (and by extension all that goes with it), though you love her just the same. I love it too, so much, every time she mentions Stokely Carmichael’s ‘black power boys’. That phrase will never leave me. You can love her for it, because she always stayed in conversation with those black power boys. Saw them sharing a struggle, even if she disagreed with everything they said.

Then there’s that memory of Harry Belafonte (swoon) coming to Highlander and teaching them ‘Michael Row Your Boat Ashore’, and a return to harsh reality when she talks about singing it to keep her spirits up after being arrested as part of that effort to destroy Highlander. One thing Myles Horton never quite got into was the racism Septima Clark faced every time she set foot in Sewanee, the nearest town to Highlander. She had to do without so much while she worked and lived there — like shopping at the store, or being welcome in church. Such ugliness. You realise this, and then it is followed by her arrest while Horton is away. She’s fierce all right, but I can’t imagine her not terrified when the cops took her the long way round to jail.

That must have made it easier when she, Horton and King decided to spin-off the citizenship schools to the SCLC to ensure they weren’t affected (and a few more reasons, they were already getting bigger than Highlander wanted to manage). Clark moved with them, though remained tightly connected to Highlander.

SCLC years

So she moved house (though never fully left the street she grew up on in Charleston — but more about that in the next post) and started a centre called the Dorchester Cooperative Community Center in McIntosh, Georgia. There they held five day trainings for people from local communities who wanted to go back and open up citizenship schools. They also increased recruitment of teachers. They had only three qualifications: teachers had to be respected in the community, had to be able to read aloud, and they had to be able to write their names in cursive writing.

Back then in the South, whites made sure your signature didn’t count unless it was your name in cursive. I don’t know why that detail alone makes me so angry.

Clark describes a back and forth and a flexibility, people wanting literacy teaching for various reasons beyond voting. They tailored programs to local needs — like teaching people to write checks. They got a grant so were able to compensate poor tenant farmers for their time studying and allow them to come.

Even then we didn’t have too many to come. There was so much pressure from the whites in the community that too many of them were afraid. Those who came had to feel that we could get away with it or that we didn’t mind if we had to die. (65)

More grounding.This was about power, and whites never did yield power easily.

‘But before we could send anyone to Congress, the white people tried some of everything.’ (71)

White supremacists killed thirty people engaged in the civil rights work of registering people for the vote from northern Virginia to Eastern Texas. You want more grounding? Clark remembers arguing with white volunteers, who would sneak out after work to see the town and run back home scared after threats or worse. She would tell them:

“Well, I tried to tell you not to go out at night. it’s bad enough to try to go out in the day, you know.” (72)

I don’t know how well I’d do myself in that kind of claustrophobic environment and under that kind of pressure. I guess you never know until you’re in it. Septima Clark understood as well as anyone that the people she worked with in these towns were facing this for life, not just the little while they were stepping outside their own reality to volunteer for a cause. But she didn’t much care for the high-falutin’ folk who refused risk, not when she saw so many others stepping forward… She talks a lot about class, about middle-class preachers and teachers too afraid to risk their standing, and in preacher’s cases their traditions of accepting gifts from white businesses in return for their mediations with Black community. It was mostly the other members of the community who pushed through, some giving their lives to do so. But together they managed to form 897 citizenship schools between 1957 and 1970. In 1964 alone there were 195, and Fannie Lou Hamer and Hosea Williams both entered the movement through their participation in them.

Even more than class, Clark talks about the sexism:

I was on the executive staff of SCLC, but the men on it didn’t listen to me too well. They liked to send me into many places, because I could always make a path in to get people to listen to what I have to say. But those men didn’t have any faith in women, none whatsoever. they just though that women were sex symbols…That’s why Rev. Abernathy would say continuously, “Why is Mrs. Clark on this staff?” (77)

I feel that tickle of rage here. Imagine anyone not respecting this woman. Imagine it. She went right ahead and spoke her mind anyway, and she didn’t hold back any punches.

I think there is something among the Kings that makes them feel that they are the kings, and so you don’t have a right to speak. You can work behind the scenes all you want. That’s all right. But don’t come forth and try to lead. That’s not the kind of thing they want. (78)

Of course, she didn’t see herself as a feminist at the time, but looking back she saw the intertwining of the women’s rights movement and the civil rights movement, one did not come out of the other.

This is a slim volume, too slim for such a life! And curiously split in two parts, the second dealing more with her growing up and her family. So I’ll talk about that in a second post.

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Environment & Justice, Intersections, Role of the intellectual, The Wilds

Linda Hogan: Dwellings

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3592266A beautiful meditation through a series of essays on the world and our place in it from Linda Hogan…our place as part of it, and our place sharing it with a host of other things full of wonder. A world that is greater than our comprehension, though dominant ideology attempts to constrain it within words and models of profit and loss.

Even wilderness is seen as having value only as it enhances and serves our human lives, our human world. While most of us agree that wilderness is necessary to our spiritual and psychological well-being, it is a container of far more, of mystery, of a life apart from ours. It is not only where we go to escape who we have become and what we have done, but it is also part of the natural laws, the workings of a world of beauty and depth we do not yet understand. it is something beyond us something that does not need our hand in it. As one of our Indian elders has said, there are laws beyond our human laws, and ways above ours. We have no words for this in our language, or even for our experience of being there. Ours is a language of commerce and trade, of laws that can be bent in order that treaties might be broken, land wounded beyond healing. It is a language that is limited, emotionally and spiritually, as if it can’t accommodate such magical strength and power. (45-46)

The world continues to be greater than our small understandings.

There is so much here that resonates with the very theoretical work emerging around the crisis we face, the working through in academic ways of the meaning of the anthropocene. Dwellings emerges from the bottom up, from earth and people and out of a tradition whose attempted destruction demanded the rationalisations emerging from immense intellectual work. The theorising that justified genocide, that continues to justify the world’s destruction, shares much the same abstracted kind of language as that of academics now working in their own ways to understand this moment of crisis we are in. This is not entirely a critique, people speak in the language that they know. I love some of this work. It is just a dissonance I always feel, an alienation that is always there. Because in many ways, academic language cannot really cope with what matters, and what it learns it hides away behind an impenetrable wall of words in books as heavy as bricks.

We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, have no place of our own within the creation. (60)

I’m not sure English can cope at all, the way we have stripped it. Funny how words that try to grapple with meaning and emotion too often just sound cheesy, like Hallmark cards packaging things for slick consumption. This should not damage the quality of those meanings, but our language seems to try.

We have no home, have no place.

Hogan quotes Lynda Sexson from the article ‘What do Stars Eat?’ in Left Bank, which expresses so much of the barrenness I find in the imagination, that works like Andrea Hairston’s Mindscape highlight through their rich textures and hopes, no coincidence that language should also be a focal point of her work.

We are so accustomed to myths (sacred stories) of extinction, that we are not as practical at imagining that greater gap–continuation. . . .  Would the earth or our existence be in such peril if we did not harbor a profound desire for extinction? “They lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick,” resonates Isaiah. The crisis of Western culture is ecological. The source of that crisis is in Western culture’s own version of reality; the myth of the urge to eradicate: earth and images of earth, body and song. (94)

Everywhere we see the smoking charred proofs of this urge to eradicate.

It manifests partially, I think, in simple arrogance, so deeply ingrained people don’t even know its there. I guess centuries of Colonialism, Imperialism, Slave-owning and genocide haven’t been too good even for those at the top of the chain. Academics especially always need to be discovering, inventing. Need to be owning, taking credit. The establishment demands it, we are caught up in a system just as Marx described manufacturers, and so too many of them (us) bluster through the world not listening, but extracting and abstracting and generating money and status from what other people already know, when they are not busy working on things that probably don’t much matter.  A poem by Jimmie Durham, Cherokee writer: The Teachings of my Grandmother

In a magazine too expensive to buy I read about
How, with scientific devices of great complexity,
U.S. scientists have discovered that if a rat
Is placed in cage in which it has previously
Been given an electrical shock, it starts crying.

I told my grandmother about that and she said,
“We probably knew that would be true.” (55)

all these things that are ‘discovered’, and  — we probably knew that would be true. There are meditations here on Cortez, conquistadores, and I think that’s a big part of where all of this started. That attempt to completely destroy other ways of knowing, other ways of being. In an article on Ishi (last of his tribe), Linda Hogan writes:

A change is required of us, a healing of the betrayed trust between humans and earth. Caretaking is the utmost spiritual and physical responsibility of our time, and perhaps that stewardship is finally our place in the web of life, our work, the solution to the mystery of what we are. There are already so many holes in the universe that will never again be filled, and each of them forces us to question why we permitted such loss, such tearing away at the fabric of life, and how we will live with our planet in the future. (115)

On the opposite side of a culture that creates holes in the universe is one that celebrates people, strangers, potential, and welcomes them inside:

The lands around my dwelling
Are more beautiful
From the day
When it is given me to see
Faces I have never seen before.
All is more beautiful.
All is more beautiful.
And life is thankfulness.
These guests of mine
Make my house grand.
–Eskimo song

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Role of the intellectual, Struggle & Movement

Myles Horton: Popular Education and Social Movement

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200275Myles Horton lived and contributed to some of the most pivotal social movements in the US, making his thoughts on social movement as interesting as his experiences of education as liberatory and revolutionary. Both before and after the founding of Highlander, he studied with and learned from other movements and institutions working on projects of transformative change. As a young man he briefly attended the Union Theological Seminary in New York. He then took classes at the University of Chicago — argued and learned from Robert Park and Jane Addams at Hull House:

I learned a lot about social movements, the concepts of how organizations work, while I was at Chicago. I knew that people as individuals would remain powerless, but if they could get together in organizations, they could have power, provided they used their organizations instead of being used by them. I understood the need for organizations, but I was always afraid of what they did to people…they end up in structures and structures become permanent and most of them outlive their usefulness. (49)

This tension is a constant one. It is at the centre of so much argument over what the nature of social movement and just how we should go about both creating and consolidating change. Some, like Piven and Cloward, argue against all organisation that goes beyond a basic capacity for supporting mobilisation, others argue uncritically for organisation at all costs (especially those most invested in them). Myles Horton is naturally quite dialectical about it all.

There is a tradition of folk schools in Denmark, which Horton visited, then came back to his home country of the Appalachians and cofounded Highlander in 1932 with Don West and James Dombrowski. They raised money from subscribers through the Fellowship Of Reconciliation (FOR — another movement organisation to be further explored), which they had ties too, as well as socialist networks.

Highlander
Highlander, Monteagle, Tennessee

During the Great Depression, it came to be central in the rising labour movement. I myself have never been lucky to be part of or witness anything like the power of the 1930s labour movement or 1950s-60s civil rights movement. Horton writes:

The best educational work at Highlander has always taken place when there is social movement. We’ve guessed right on two social movements–the labor movement in the 1930s and 40s, and the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s. During movement times, the people involved have the same problems and can go from one community to the next, start a conversation in one place and finish it in another. (84)

Of course, most of the time you’re not this lucky.

Now we’re in what I call an organizational period, which has limited objectives, doesn’t spread very rapidly and has a lot of paid people and bureaucracy. It’s completely different from what takes place when there is a social movement. During organization times you try to anticipate a social movement, and if it turns out that you’ve guessed right, then you’ll be on the inside of a movement helping with the mobilization and strategies, instead of on the outside jumping on the bandwagon and never being an important part of it. You try to figure out what’s going to happen so that you can position yourself in such a way as to become part of it: you do things in advance to prepare the groundwork for a larger movement. That way, you’re built into it when the momentum begins. It’s like learning to ride freight trains. (84)

This ‘figuring out’ isn’t remote or terribly theoretical, it involves listening to people and remaining connected to struggle:

Years later we anticipated the civil rights movement, not because we did an analysis and concluded there was going to be one, but because we found that with everything we tried, we’d get only so far before we’d run up against the playing off of blacks against whites. It was a barrier that stopped us from moving toward our goal of economic democracy. (87)

Part of the reason they were so aware of this, is that Highlander was for decades the only place in the south where people both black and white could stay, eat and meet together. This alone was revolutionary as for decades, beginning with its educational work in the labour movement, Highlander fought segregation through its daily practice.

For more on the difference between long organizational periods and periods of social movement:

It’s only in a movement that an idea is often made simple enough and direct enough that it can spread rapidly. Then your leadership multiplies very rapidly, because there’s something explosive going on. People see that other people not so different from themselves do things they thought could never be done. They’re embold­ened and challenged by that to step into the water, and once they get in the water, it’s as if they’ve never not been there.

People who work to create a decent world long for situations like this, but most of the time we are working with organizations. We cannot create movements, so if we want to be part of a movement when it comes, we have to get ourselves into a position-by working with organizations that deal with structural change-to be on the inside of that movement when it comes, instead of on the outside trying to get accepted.

When you’re in an organizational period, which is most of the time, there can be many organizations without there being a move­ment… (114)

Citizenship Schools

Highlander was at a crossroads in the late 40s and early 50s, phasing out of union organizing as they had succeeded in helping the unions become ready to further organize and work on their own. They tried to start up conversations around building a liberal labour-farmer coalition, but that went nowhere. Quite naturally they also began to focus on racism. They had been confronting this for many years,  also they had more and more people from Africa and Asia arriving for conferences unable to feel comfortable anywhere else in the south. Education director Septima Clark (there will be more about her) made a proposal for schools to help people learn enough to pass Jim Crow literacy tests so that they could vote.

Bernice Robinson taught the first classes and helped craft the program. A niece of Septima Clarke, she also worked as a black beautician — her business a social centre, as well as a job of status and independence in the community with its economic independence of whites. Bernice and the first 14 students decided to call it a citizenship school. The first thing on the wall that they learned to read was the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. (In Septima Clark’s memory it was the constitution they learned from — there are some interesting minor differences in the ways she and Horton remember things, but more on that in another post).

Horton describes that decision:

Since we were operating from the basis that these were adults with dignity, it was important to challenge them with something worthy of the attention an concern of an adult. (103)

also the other aspect of the curriculum:

Along with becoming literate, they learned to organize, they learned to protest, they learned to demand their rights, because they also learned that you couldn’t just read and write yourself into freedom. You had to fight for that and you had to do it as part of a group, not as an individual. (104)

None of the teachers were formally trained — it was thought teachers would be unable to resist recreating traditional models of education which did not respect the knowledge and life experiences of their students or succeed in teaching adults differently from children. All of them came from the communities they taught in. I particularly liked how he described his advising role in the founding of the programme:

I made up a movie in my mind of what would happen during those three months, and when I’d see certain tings going wrong in my mind’s eye I’d re-edit the film or erase the movie and start over again. Then I replayed the film until I finally got most of the bugs out of it…I’d sit by the hour… (101)

The citizenship schools became wildly successful, an idea whose time had come.

The job of Highlander was to multiply leadership for radical social change. The Citizenship School during the  civil rights period is an example. It’s been estimated that more than one hundred thousand people were reached by the Citizenship Schools. In my opinion, the truth is that nobody knows how many people were involved. They could’ve just said, “a helluva lot of people” and it would have been about as accurate. (115)

Given the dialectic between organisation and structure and programming, and innovation and flexibility in a supportive role more to do with creating space for people to come together outside of the limitations of the structures they worked within, the citizenship schools were spun off to become part of SCLC programme. Horton writes:

We tried to find ways of working that did not duplicate what was already being done. To be true to our vision, it was necessary to stay small and not get involved in mass education or in activities which required large amounts of money… We solved the problem of staying small by spinning off programs that were already established and were willingly taken over by organizations less interested in creating new programs… These spin-offs enabled Highlander to concentrate on cutting-edge programs that no one else in the region was undertaking. (138-139)

The Larger Civil Rights Movement

Septima Clark, Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King and  Ella Baker along with the whole host of organisers from SNCC held a number of important meetings here.

The ante went up and finally escalated into demands that they do away with all public segregation. (116)

This of course put Highlander at risk. In 1961, Tennessee District Attorney shut down Highlander — raiding it and arresting those who were there on charges of selling liquor without a license and for holding interracial classes. The trial resulted in the State’s confiscation of the property. Within two months of being locked up, someone had burned it down. Highlander temporarily moved to a big house in the black community of Knoxville. There they faced arson and firebombing attempts, the puncturing of their tires, and the shooting out of their windows. They survived there ten years, before moving back to another farm in rural Tennessee.

Horton again emphasises the conflict and violence involved in achieving meaningful change described more fully in the first post, and the ways that this is brought to the for during a period of social movement:

A large social movement forces people to take a stand for or against it, so that there are no longer any neutrals. You’ve got to be on one side or the other. It’s true that it forces some people to be worse than they would. be, more violent than they would be, but it also forces some people to get behind the cause and work for it and even die for it. People have to understand that you can’t make progress without pain, because you, can’t make progress with­out provoking violent opposition. If enough people want change and others stand in their way, they’re going to force them out of the way. A revolution is just the last step of a social movement after it has taken a pre-revolutionary form. (114)

Leadership

Another aspect of social movement is its leadership — and most prominent is always leadership of a different kind than that provided by Highlander.

The only problem I have with movements has to do with  my reservations about charismatic leaders. There’s something about having one that can keep democracy from working effectively. But we don’t have movements without them. That’s why I had no intellectual problem supporting King as a charismatic leader. (120)

This issue of charisma is an important one, brought up by Aldon Morris, Piven and Cloward and others theorising social change. I like Horton’s very practical approach:

One thing I especially like about social movements is that even though they throw up charismatic leaders, most of the people who are part of them can learn to be educators and organizers. High­lander was able to play a role in developing educators because we were asked to do the educational work by both SCLC and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). We trained the people who ran the Citizenship Schools and the voter registra­tion drives, the noncharismatic people. That was when I learned, just as I had in the earlier industrial union period, that educational work during social movement periods provides the best opportunity for multiplying democratic leadership.

There is another important thing that social movements do: they radicalize people. That is, people learn from the movement to go beyond the movement. It may only affect a minority of the people, but there are so many people. involved that thousands of them get radicalized. (127)

A final point. For Horton the struggle was never just within the local area, the region or the nation — he emphasised that this approach must be international.  He traveled widely, part of building a network of people involved in this kind of liberatory praxis, and believed their approach connected Appalachia to other oppressed regions and areas, as well as other struggles and other people engaging in similar work such as the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Paulo Freire… What is not to love?

This is the second of three posts on Myles Horton’s The Long Haul, the first is on popular education basics, and the next will be contrasting popular education with community organising.

For more posts on popular education and struggle…

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