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Timothy Harris
Executive Director |
This week began with a cross-class retreat for members of our organizing project: eight vendors, eight “advocates,” a seasoned facilitator, and myself spent Sunday and Monday together working through the impact of class on our lives and building the foundation of trust that long haul organizing requires.
The high point came when we faced each other across a room — working- and poverty-class backgrounds versus middle and owning class — and asked the questions that might help us understand. Did you ever consider that your offers of “help” might create resentment? Why didn’t your families value education? How did you see people of our class at the time?
We didn’t group by present economic status, although for many there had been no change. We grouped by class when we were about twelve, when our ideas of who we are were first formed. This meant seeing class with the naiveté of a child, and appreciating how the blindness of youth is sometimes uncritically carried forward. We reached a level of honesty and emotional openness that is rarely achieved in these sorts of settings. All of us were profoundly moved.
I learned that, for some of our vendors, the life narrative goes something like this: I was born poor, and then I was poor, and now I’m poor. The bottom 20 percent of the economy — and as income inequality widens, the spread increases — has little chance for a more secure life. Those of us who’ve seen more opportunity face heightened economic vulnerability as well, though our challenges pale in comparison.
We found that we’re in this together, and have more in common than not. This is how real organizing gets built. |
