Category community organizing

Progress on water (and two ways to celebrate)

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This next week I will be participating in two events that celebrate progress on water for all children in Jersey City’s schools: a book launch on Tuesday (the book is about populism, but from my perspective it’s about water), and our Jersey City Together water action on Friday, October 28.

Thanks to the advocacy of Jersey City Together as well as the work of public servants such as Superintendent Norma Fernandez, as school started this fall more kids have access to working drinking fountains than has been the case for more than a decade. Almost half of Jersey City Public School children are in schools where water remediation has already happened; one quarter of students are in schools where water remediation is in progress. For one quarter of the students, plans for remediation are not clear. For more details, see this summary. This wonderful graphic is by graphic designer Greg Nelson. Brigid D’Souza has also written an update over at Civic Parent.

To get to this point has taken several years of work by a strong team of families and community members, pushing public officials to work together to fix the water systems and install new water fountains. It was one of the first things we heard when we started listening to families: why don’t the water fountains have potable water? We first asked for this publicly at our action back in March of 2019, and then Superintendent Franklin Walker promised to, and did, start this work.

Thanks to my Rutgers colleagues Arlene Stein and Sarah Tobias, I had the opportunity to talk about my work with Jersey City Together on a panel with two amazing organizers: Heather Booth and Scot Nakagawa. This was in February 2020, and was one of the last public events I attended before the pandemic. It was also right after we had gotten the first tangible movement on water, with installation of water fountains at PS15.

The conversation was really amazing and fun, and it has now been published as a chapter in a volume edited Professors Stein and Tobias, The Perils of Populism, which will have an official virtual launch event on Tuesday October 25 at noon. Should be fun, so come if you can. I’m just an ordinary, local leader in an organization, so it was really fun to talk with these veteran organizers about the work.

Now, more than two years later, we have more progress on water, with still more to do. For me, this is why we need broad based power organizations that are in it for the long term. It is not glamorous work, learning all of the details of the process that is followed by various public agencies, finding the places where pressure can be exerted, while building and maintaining the organized people who can exert that pressure. But it is necessary.

Every fall I teach a class on community organizing, and for the past two years we have read Reveille for a New Generation, with many essays written by leaders and organizers of local IAF organizations. One piece some students have found puzzling is an essay by organizer Alisa Glassman titled “Don’t Win Too Quickly”. Her point is that the work of getting to victory is also the work of organizing, of building the network of organized people to not just win but keep on winning, because there is always more work to do. The progress on water is great; there is a little more work to do.

We’re in it for the long haul.

Building inequality

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“At the very least, public things press us into relations with others. They are sites of attachment and meaning that occasion the inaugurations, conflicts, and contestations that underwrite everyday citizenships and democratic sovereignties.” Bonnie Honig, Public Things, p. 6

Public schools are a crucial necessity for democratic life: the last few months have made that abundantly clear. School buildings are a central part of that equation; school buildings are public things per Bonnie Honig’s definition: they are one part of the physical infrastructure that makes public life possible.

In all the conversations about whether schools will be “open” in the fall, what we are talking about is NOT schools: schools will open on schedule, even if the instruction is done remotely. What we are talking about is school buildings.

But school buildings in the U.S. are not and have never been created equal. This is especially true in New Jersey, which has deep structural inequality in its schools, both in the delivery of education, and in the buildings where education usually takes place. In New Jersey, the poorest school districts also have many older buildings in need of repair or replacement. And funding those needs is the state’s responsibility.

One of the many decisions in the Abbott v. Burke litigation in New Jersey was a 1998 case that required the state of New Jersey, not the chronically historically underfunded districts commonly known as Abbott districts, to pay for school repair and for building new schools in those districts. The state established the School Development Authority (SDA) in 2002, and for a few years built new schools and repaired old buildings. And then about ten years ago, the state legislature just stopped funding the SDA.

To be fair, the SDA has been a site of a number of corruption scandals. Corruption stinks. But it can also serve as a distraction, or an excuse. Failing to fund the SDA is now having life and death consequences for kids, teachers, and families.

In a global pandemic, when the ventilation conditions inside buildings, and the facilities for keeping people and things clean are crucial, the children in the state of New Jersey who will be in the oldest and most poorly maintained buildings in the state are kids in the Abbott districts. These buildings are the least likely to be conducive to reducing transmission of the virus. As with so many circumstances of this pandemic, school buildings in New Jersey will make people who are already vulnerable, more vulnerable.

When and how will it be safe for school buildings to be the site once again for public education? As Danielle Allen points out, no country that has reopened school buildings after closing them because of the pandemic has done so “until after they had achieved near zero case incidence and low community transmission rates.”  Not to mention that they also have in place a solid infrastructure for testing, tracing, and supported isolation including for students and school staff.  And they have school buildings that can be made as safe as is possible. None of these circumstances are true of New Jersey right now.

Given those facts, reading the guidance from the New Jersey Department of Education, “The Road Back,” will make you want to weep. It will certainly make you want to turn to Alexandra Petri’s satire: “So will there be testing? Of course there will be! It’s a school! Probably there will also be essays and pop quizzes!”

Several provisions of the “Health and Safety” required minimum standards stood out to me as I read the report. First, “Schools and districts must ensure that their indoor facilities have adequate ventilation” (p. 19) and this includes, for example, the ability to open windows if there is no air conditioning. The majority of older buildings in Jersey City do not have air conditioning; indeed the district has had to shut down school on some sweltering summer days. In many of these buildings, the windows cannot be safely opened–this was true at PS 25 when my son attended there, until the SDA actually did fund window replacement, one of the only older buildings in Jersey City to have this funded. So this minimum standard is impossible to comply with in many Jersey City buildings, and this is directly due to the lack of state funding for these repairs. “The Road Back” makes no reference to this fact.

The other provisions that struck me were the next two, which designate the need for and locations of hand sanitizing stations, and provisions for frequent hand washing. In Jersey City, we have been fighting to get school facilities to have adequate provisions for potable drinking water, and as we have listened we have heard about non-functioning bathrooms, sinks falling off the wall, and never present soap. All because of the failure to provide funding to repair aging schools, making the underfunded district pay out of operating funds to address these problems.

Let me be clear: we have dedicated leaders in our district administration, we have great teachers, paraprofessionals, and security and cleaning staff in our district. What we don’t have is enough money. And this is made worse by the state failure to fund our school facilities, as it is obligated to do.

The effect of the lack of funding for SDA in Jersey City, chronicled in this document, is that the majority of school buildings in the district are not equipped to provide the bare minimum of what “The Road Back” expects. Jersey City is not alone in this circumstance, but you would not know this from reading “The Road Back”. There is some discussion of funding for additional costs due to the pandemic, but there is no discussion of the background conditions for those decisions of school buildings that are already inadequate.

Public things are deeply contested, sites of inequality, sites with different meanings to people situated differently in relation to social and political power. Bonnie Honig notes just briefly in the first chapter of Public Things that public schools in America were part of the regime of white supremacy, and thus are part of the hierarchy of citizenship. Public things act to exclude as well as to include. “Thus, when public things are democratized, the response of the powerful is often to abandon them. White flight is not just from the urban to the suburban; it is from the public to the private thing.” (24-25) This is precisely what the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has written about extensively, on white flight from public schools and how even in multi-racial school districts white parents often work to maintain racial inequality. In a state like New Jersey, where the state refuses to provide adequate school buildings in its poorest districts, a global pandemic means that this building inequality is deadly.

Public school buildings are public things. That means we need to fund them, fairly, equitably, fully.

Grief

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“…democratic politics is a response to the grief generated by the distance between the world as it is and the world as it should be.” Luke Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy

When I first read that passage, I thought, how is democracy about grief? Anger at injustice yes, but grief?

As we find ourselves in a world that most of us could not have imagined just a few weeks ago, it is hard to know what to feel, let alone what to do. There are many ways to respond, but here I want to talk about two responses: grief, and collective action.

We are in the midst of overwhelming grief: many people are dying, sooner and more painfully than they should. People’s lives are being completely upended. And many more people will suffer, and will die in the U.S. and elsewhere, because of the failure to plan, and a deep and ongoing failure to place our collective capacities at the service of the common good. And this common good is so basic: life and death. As with any “crisis” in the U.S., this is a product of decades of systemic failures and disinvestment as well as immediate lack of leadership and coordination.

Americans have a terrible time understanding the complex system of our own individual grief. David Kessler (co–author with Elizabeth Kübler-Ross) notes the common misunderstanding of his work with Kübler-Ross that the stages of grief are linear, a point he discusses more deeply in this lovely conversation with Brené Brown. People in the U.S. often express that misunderstanding as “moving on” from grief, with the very strange notion that one passes through these stages in a linear way and then no longer feels anything about the loss of those close to our hearts. As Kessler says clearly in both interviews, denying the existence of grief is a way to contain our feelings. It is also a turning away from what it means to be human, separating ourselves from the pain and sorrow of the truth that all of us die, and all of us will lose those most dear to us.

Grief is painful, and there is no way to avoid that. But our individualism often turns us away from each other, into ourselves, whether our grief is for an individual, or for the damage that our broken political system is inflicting. The grief of losing a loved one can leave us feeling shattered, like our world has been broken apart and will never be reassembled. This is true: losing someone close to your heart requires you to remake your world, slowly assembling what sometimes feels like a parallel universe, complete with black holes and antimatter. For me the grief of this present moment feels similar.

In my communities, everyone is exhausted: trying to work, required to work and feeling unsafe, or recently out of work and not sure what comes next, trying to finish their studies in ways very differently than planned,  trying to hold institutions together through newly virtual spaces or old-fashioned telephone calls, while also caring for children and keeping them in touch with their teachers, or trying to just survive, in a world where nothing is what it was. People we know are dying, are sick at home and unable to get tested, have lost parents or friends or coworkers. Grief and exhaustion are all mixed together, and yet we can’t be physically together in our grief, and that too is painful.

We are also exhausted because we are grieving for a world that will not be the same again. We want to get back what used to be normal, even if there were parts of normal that weren’t so great. And we are only just beginning to realize that that normal world is gone, and what we will have once we emerge from this present will be utterly different. Maybe that world will be  better, maybe it will be much worse. Pushing the new world we are entering closer to the world as it should be will require that we work together, and think beyond our individual lives and in terms of the complex social and political worlds that are crumbling and that need reshaping. We will need to look up beyond our exhaustion and see each other with empathy, and rebuild our communities.

Because we need each other. Physical separation–and the way that so many people have so much difficulty practicing it–makes this so clear. Humans need each other.

Some of the best parts of the past few weeks have been meetings organized in our new spaces where we just check in and listen to each other. Listening to each other: it is such a gift. In our physical distance, it is good just to hear familiar voices, to virtually see familiar faces, even when those voices sound weary or afraid. And this is why our existing institutions and organizations are so important especially now.

Living in a society and a political system that works against us because of racism, economic inequality, mass incarceration, misogyny, homophobia, we feel anger, rage, fear, and also grief. There are ways that this crisis feels all too familiar for the ways it is already making existing injustices worse. But I also need to feel hopeful about this moment. This really colossal failure to choose life over death through our collective institutions might make us see some injustices more clearly, and make it possible to change some of our complex social systems so that they work for a better common good. Maybe it could work to bring us together in new ways. I hope so.

The tension and grief between what is and what should be is a common teaching in IAF community organizing. Organizers argue that the only way to bring those worlds closer together is to have enough power to push the world a little bit closer to where it should be. Change doesn’t happen because something is right; it happens when you have enough collective power to make it happen. If health care workers and first responders and even governors had enough collective power, we wouldn’t be worried about the lack of enough medical equipment right now.

Frequently what we do with our political grief is to become accustomed to the world as it is, to feel cynical and powerless, to deny the possibility that anything that we might do might make a difference. We are afraid to hope for new possibilities that might push us towards a world closer to the world that we want to see. Grieving is exhausting, and political grief also wears us down, makes us feel dull and tired. When we are just trying to survive in this crisis, it is easy to retreat to cynicism.

For example, what I have been experiencing regarding the lack of enough personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers is blinding rage. I have family members who are being put at risk because of this absolutely criminal situation. The federal government should have ensured, in advance, that the equipment that hospitals and health care workers need is readily available in sufficient quantity to ensure everyone’s safety. That is what government is for. People are dying because of this failure. That is not hyperbole. It is fact.

But my rage is not going to bring about a change in this situation. Here is where our existing organizations and institutions can also make a difference, and maybe push the world more towards what it should be. Metro IAF has tried to step in and function essentially where government has failed. And recognizing state failure, we are asking for better corporate responsibility. We shouldn’t have to. But here we are.

Kessler points out that grief requires movement. “There is something powerful about naming this as grief….When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you. Emotions need motion.” Such a wise way to think about emotions, and this is key to understanding grief from the point of community organizing: we have to be able to imagine change, movement, the world as it should be, to understand our feelings about what is happening.

Establishing and reestablishing democratically responsive decision making also requires a lot of people working together. This is where Kessler has added another way to think about grief, both personal and political: the idea of meaning-making.

Kessler is very clear that we make meaning, not from the loss itself, but from how we respond to the loss. You aren’t grateful for the death of your mother. You might be grateful for the meaning that you were able to make in your own way of acting, responding, to the grief. Probably only after many years of feeling many other things.

We could respond to this crisis by saying, we are all in this together. We could have empathy for each other, across all of our divisions, and try to build our communities as we help each other survive. This will be a marathon, not a sprint. We will continue to lose, even as we also make some progress in some places. Maybe I’m bargaining right now. Maybe I need to hope that what we do right now can make the world just a bit better. Maybe that is true.

There are many ways this situation might change us; many for the worse, perhaps some for the better. Maybe we can engage, already, in some meaning making while we are in the process of experiencing this situation. We already see and will continue to see, in ongoing, horrific detail, the effects of the failings of a government that does not seek to actually solve social and political problems. Maybe at least some of us can work together to push the world a bit, so that our collective decision-making bodies–civil society organizations and governments at all levels–actually work for the common good.

Discipline is action

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“Intelligent action, even public confrontation, is at bottom an attempt to engage and relate.” Michael Gecan, Going Public

I have been thinking over the past day about a story that Michael Gecan tells in his book Going Public about an action that East Brooklyn Congregations (EBC) did in the early stages of their organizing. They were trying to get the city to repair a neighborhood pool that had been closed for several years. Funds for the repairs had been allocated, but the repairs were not happening, and children in the neighborhood–children of leaders in EBC–did not have a place to swim in the summer.

The action was a meeting with the public official whose department was supposed to be doing the repairs. EBC had done their research: they knew that most of the money allocated for the repairs had been spent, but very little repairing had occurred.

The plan for this action was simple: keep the focus on the agenda, to get an answer to the question, when will the pool be repaired? The leaders expected the public official and his staff to talk about everything except this. And so they had planned carefully, to keep their focus on their agenda, to be persistent and disciplined in asking for an answer.

After rounds the leaders presented the results of their research, and then persistently asked their key question: when will the repairs on the pool be completed? In response to every effort by the public official to distract from this question, EBC leaders returned to their question.

You should read the chapter–Gecan tells the story very effectively. By the end of the meeting the public official has begun screaming, and EBC leaders quietly gather their things and leave his office. And within a few days, work has begun on the repairs. Within a few months, the pool is renovated and EBC attends a grand opening celebration and thanks the public official.

Why was this so effective? They had done their research. They knew what they wanted, and it was very specific. They had prepared carefully for the meeting, including practicing how to respond to unexpected scenarios. As Gecan notes, “The discipline, as the director unraveled and became more and more volatile, was superb.” And they kept their focus on what they wanted. They kept asking for it. And when they didn’t get the commitment they sought in that meeting, they left. And within a few months, they got the reaction they were seeking, and the public resource that their children needed.

We don’t always win. Sometimes it takes time to win. And it certainly takes organizing. It takes building power. It takes doing your research, knowing what is possible and what is not. It takes making a clear request for something specific. You have to know the reaction that you want. And it takes focus and discipline.

As Emily Farris says, local politics is the best politics. You can often actually get things done–get a park renamed, get a public pool repaired. Maybe you can even get your children’s public schools to be fully funded. But to do that takes organizing, and it takes discipline. And sometimes, the discipline is the action.

 

 

Money does matter

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We invest public resources into the education of the public for the benefit of the public. (Bruce Baker, Educational Inequality and School Finance, 2018, p. 18).

Two key points: in public school funding, money matters, and cuts cause harm.

How much money a school system has available, as well as how that money is spent, make a big difference in the experiences kids have in school, whether their educational needs are met, and whether they go on to flourish in their adult lives. This seems like a common sense statement regarding U.S. public schools.

Yet for decades there has been an active campaign to claim the opposite. While the main point of Bruce Baker’s book is to argue how to think about and analyze school finance systems, Baker devotes his third chapter to discussing and debunking this misleading literature. If you are inclined to believe that money doesn’t matter, I urge you to read at least that chapter, or this report, which discusses some of the same sets of arguments.

Baker is careful in the language he uses to critique these studies, but honestly, how seriously can one take a study (for example) that assumes that all state court orders on education funding led directly to appropriations by state legislatures fulfilling those orders? Researchers just made this assumption, and did not bother to collect any information about actual appropriations and implementation, and claimed that court orders didn’t matter. This assumption flies in the face of American history. The history of New Jersey is a history of court orders ignored and resisted, and only slowly and grudgingly implemented, with ample backsliding in economic downturns. Nationwide this is more the rule than the exception.

Indeed, the New Jersey state aid formula that the legislature itself adopted in 2008 has been underfunded by the state legislature basically since it was adopted; see this coverage from 2015. Yes, that shortage from four years ago is more than one billion dollars. This year’s state budget proposes to increase school funding by about $200 million dollars, which is an improvement, but still means that the state is not fulfilling its own promises. (To see more details for Jersey City, check out Civic Parent’s analysis and visualizations.)

I don’t study education policy, but the arc of the argument that money doesn’t matter is very familiar to me from the literature on gender, race, and social policy in the U.S. Baker talks about the persistent but false narrative that U.S. public schools have bloated costs and have shown no progress on student achievement. Just like the false, racist, and intentionally misleading story of the “welfare queen”, this education policy narrative persists despite clear evidence to the contrary. The narrative serves the same purpose: discrediting public goods, in this case public schools, and indeed the very idea of a common public life. And it hurts our kids.

But it is more pernicious and counter-intuitive than that, because schools in the United States have always been unequal in their access to resources, and until Brown v. Board this was official, legal and legally and violently enforced public policy. This argument that money doesn’t matter is based on an ideology that some kids don’t matter, or at least that some kids in some schools matter more than other kids in other schools. In case it wasn’t clear, this is an anti-democratic ideology.

In Other People’s Children, Deborah Yaffe mentions an encounter between two New Jersey school board members, one a white man from Westfield, one an African-American man from Paterson, brought together in a meeting not long after the first Robinson v. Cahill ruling in 1972. Yaffe reports that the white school board member had this question for his counterpart in Paterson: “‘Why are you people making such a big deal out of money? After all, your kids don’t need what my kids need.'” (Yaffe p. 33). Again, in case it wasn’t clear, this is not just racist, it is factually incorrect and also anti-democratic.

Reading this made me think of this point, made years ago by leaders in WTOS, the west Texas IAF affiliate organization. These leaders described the first time they tried to get the city of Lubbock to do something for their majority Latino neighborhood–this was before WTOS was organized–and went to a city council meeting to testify, only to be told “there’s no money”. As they left the meeting, a city employee followed them out, to tell them, “Don’t give up, keep asking. What they are saying is that there is no money for you. Keep coming back. There is money.”

Money matters. It matters for kids whether their schools have adequate funding. And while the New Jersey state funding mechanisms after the Abbott v. Burke decisions began to actually be implemented is actually one of the better state school finance systems according to Baker, he notes that the actual appropriations from the state started to decline around 2005, even before the recession, and the adoption of SFRA in 2008 (pp. 112-113 and see this report).

A second point: cuts matter. Social scientists often look for “natural experiments”, and the recession of 2008 and subsequent cuts to education funding throughout the U.S., unfortunately for kids, provide such a phenomenon. Did cuts to state and local spending on education as a result of the recession cause changes in student outcomes? Kenneth Shores and Matthew Steinberg have analyzed the effects of the recession on a variety of education finance and equity outcomes, including student achievement. The recession had a negative effect on student achievement, and had the largest effect in districts with the largest cuts to school personnel. Cuts have negative effects on kids. Again, this seems like a common sense conclusion, one that we could see just by talking to middle school students in Jersey City, who had their sports budget completely eliminated last fall. But in case you trust social scientists more than kids, there is your evidence.

Kids need schools that have enough funding to meet their educational needs. Money matters. Our promises to our kids matter. Our democratic public life matters. School funding cuts in districts where school funding is already inadequate hurt kids.

Let’s try to keep at least some of our promises to our kids. All of us will benefit.

 

 

Public schools are public goods

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Parent leaders in Jersey City Together are consistently saying this in our public conversations: public schools are a public good. This essay is inspired both by their consistent leadership in making this point, and our shared frustration that we must keep making this point; that is, that it is not already a common public understanding that public schools are a public good in democratic public life:

Almost never is there an expressed concern about the public realm; there is silence about renewing the common world and about what that common world should be. What is it that lies in between, that holds us together, that we can cherish and try to keep alive? Where, when we ponder it, are we to turn? Questions like these move me to explore the role that might be played by public education in bringing into being an authentic public space, one that might give rise to a significant common world. Maxine Greene, 1982.

I recently came across the address given by the late Maxine Greene in 1982 when she served as president of the American Educational Research Association. The title is “Public Education and the Public Space,” and she speaks of the possibilities that are part of the purpose of education: “…we are educators, and education has to do with new beginnings and with reaching toward what is not yet.”

Greene speaks of what is missing in the conversation about public education in the 1980s, and it is equally true today. Discussions of funding formulas and graduation rates are important, but frequently these conversations divert our attention from any focus on the public purposes of public schools. Greene is speaking to educators, but she is also speaking at a time when the movement for our current regime of testing as accountability was on the rise. Just before the passage quoted above, she says, “literacy is talked about as though it were part of the gross national product.” What about the intrinsic joy of reading? What about the democratic civic purposes of an educated public?

We have become accustomed to speaking of schools in terms of achievements on tests, graduation and drop out rates, per pupil spending. Even Dennis Shirley, in his (very useful) discussion of the Alliance Schools program in Texas, speaks of test scores as one measure of the success of this community school program. All of these are important. But they are not all of what public schools are or can be.

Public schools serve public purposes for democracies. This is a simple, straightforward, necessary idea. This is not a new or original idea. But it is crucial.

 

 

In an article on the growing number of teacher strikes last year, Sarah Jones argued that one of the reasons for these strikes and for the conflicts over public schools more generally is that public schools “are some of the last public squares in this country”. Discussing the requirements in U.S. state constitutions for public education, she notes that three common words that describe public education are “Free, common, and efficient. These words tell us that public schools should be accessible and ubiquitous, and that they should function. ”

Yes. Public schools should function. They should help children to develop their human potential. They should provide appropriate, supportive environments for all students to learn. They should have space to play, to create, to imagine. These things are happening every day in Jersey City Public Schools. But there are many, many challenges as well.

In order for public schools to function, school facilities need to function. Public schools should not have classrooms that are dangerously hot or cold, that are infested with cockroaches, that are falling apart. They should have potable drinking water. They should have functioning bathrooms. That we are fighting for these very basic, functional facilities in Jersey City is shameful.

The story of why this is so is long and complicated, of course, implicating state as well as local officials and the failure to fully fund the School Development Authority despite the Abbott court’s order. Some beautiful schools have been built in Jersey  City.  But funds for repairing our ageing schools have not been appropriated. And the lesson of who is valued, and who is not, is starkly clear to young people in Jersey City. We have beautiful, new high rises, and crumbling high school facilities.

Greene goes on to cite Dewey, and his notion of the “eclipse of the public” articulated in The Public and its Problems (originally published in 1927). The persistence of this concern tells us that we should resist the temptation to refer to some nonexistent golden age; attention to the public realm and to public things is one of the key ongoing problems of democratic public life. Civic life requires us to be engaged in the ongoing project of renewing the democratic public realm. We have to organize.

At the end of Deborah Yaffe’s book Other People’s Children, about the long effort by the state of New Jersey to refuse to provide a thorough and efficient education to all of the children in the state, despite decades of court orders to do so, she notes that she is often asked “did it work”? People mean different things by that question, and one of the problems with answering it is that in some arenas, the state never did really comply with the court orders. But at the very end of the book, she makes reference to the public purposes of public schools, quoting one of the named litigants in the Abbott cases, Hector Figueroa. “‘You’re not guaranteed a home life, but you should be guaranteed a school life.'” And Yaffe says, “Public institutions matter, even if they are not the only things that do.”

Public schools matter. We must create more possibilities for schools to be the kinds of public spaces that are so vital to democracy. We have to dare to try.

On cold anger

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“Well pastor,” Cortes says, “anger gives you energy.”

In my community organizing class, we read a book by Mary Beth Rogers titled Cold Anger. The book is about the Texas Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) organization, about Ernesto Cortes, and about public life.

And it is about anger. Cold, patient, relational, optimistic, calculated, hopeful anger.

Alinsky talks about anger a bit in Reveille for Radicals, but Mary Beth Rogers explains the concept very effectively.:

“…it is an anger that seethes at the injustices of life and transforms itself into a compassion for those hurt by life. It is an anger rooted in direct experience and held in collective memory. It is the kind of anger than can energize a democracy–because it can lead to the first step in changing politics.” (p. 10)

The hot anger that gives us energy comes from lived experiences of injustice. On Saturday at the Marion Thompson Wright lecture series, the amazing Alexis Pauline Gumbs urged us to listen to the Lorde; excellent guidance. Audre Lorde gave a powerful keynote address about anger in 1981 to the National Women’s Studies Association.

The speech, titled “The Uses of Anger”, was addressed to an organization in the midst of internal conflict over racism in the women’s movement and within the organization. Audre Lorde was calling on the membership, and especially on the white members, not to fear anger, nor to turn away from it, but to recognize the importance of anger in movements for social justice.

Lorde says: “My response to racism is anger.” And she is specific: she tells specific stories of the racism that she has experienced in academia, and in the world.

In community organizing stories are important to the work: it is one thing to say that the schools in Jersey City are currently underfunded by $100 million dollars per year, according to the state of New Jersey’s formula for a minimally adequate education. It is another thing to say that many of the schools do not have drinkable water, and that this has been true for decades. These schools have bottled water. And public officials at the state and local level have been turning away, refusing to be accountable for this situation, for decades. My response to this lack of accountability for our children’s health and well-being is anger.

What do stories do? They give you information, and they help to capture the essence of a public problem. And the under-funding of Jersey City’s public schools is a deeply public problem, and requires that we collectively step up and take responsibility.

Lorde says: “Anger expressed and translated into action…is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.” Angers compels us to action. We should not be afraid of anger, Lorde says; we should not wallow in unproductive guilt. We should act.

Part of the action that Lorde was calling for was action within the organization, among the members, seemingly allies, but in the midst of a set of internal tensions that might build relationships and power, create greater understanding and greater ability to act, or might tear the organization apart. Lorde is clear that the process of “translat[ing]” anger “into action” is painful, filled with risk, but also with possibility. And also, that it is the only way forward.

Lorde reminded her audience that, whatever their conflicts, they were united by the larger social forces of oppression at work in creating those conflicts. And she noted that those who want no change to the status quo of oppression, inequality, racism, and misogyny would benefit from the refusal of the organization’s members to face anger, and tension, and to listen to each other, and to move forward toward action for change.

I have been angry about the situation with water in the Jersey City Public Schools ever since my son, now ten, was in pre-school, and I learned that there was no potable drinking water in his school, only bottled water. And that situation was already more than a decade old at the time.

There has been an astonishing lack of leadership on public education in Jersey City on the part of all elected officials. There are a lot of talented young people in this city, and lot of talented educators. Our kids deserve much better leadership from all of the adults in the city.

Jersey City Together needs to stand in the breach, and we need many more people of good conscience to join us. We have to lead. If that causes a little bit of tension, then so be it.

I will leave the last word to the Lorde:

The angers of women can transform difference through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.