From D to D, Chapters 8 & 9: Where Are The Carpenters?

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D).  Recent posts in this series have dealt with the important subject of the strategy of nonviolent struggle. As I said in recent posts, strategic nonviolent resistance does not rely on the weapons and resources of the holders of oppressive power, and one big reason why is that those who are oppressed do not have access to the weapons and resources of the powerful. This is why strategy and strategic thinking is so important. If the strategy of a struggle group is solid, the struggle group can achieve great shifts in the balance of power between the powerful and those without power. If the strategy of a struggle group is weak, foolish or nonexistent, then that group will lose.

A key to the winning strategies of successful nonviolent liberation struggles of the past has been the achievement of shifts in the power balance between the oppressor and the oppressed which come about by the oppressed building the sort of righteous parallel society of self-government, communal self-determination and of communal self-reliance that displaces the society ruled by the oppressor. To quote Gene Sharp, "Combined with political defiance during the phase of selective resistance, the growth of autonomous social, economic, cultural and political institutions progressively expands the 'democratic space' of the society and shrinks the control of the dictatorship. As the civil institutions of the society become stronger vis-a-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control..." - From D to D, Chapter 9.  This was, for instance, a key element of the strategy of swaraj employed by Mohandas Gandhi in the struggle to liberate India from the British empire.

As I mentioned in the most recent post in this series, this building of a righteous parallel society with parallel institutions that meet the needs of the oppressed was conspicuously absent from the so-called "resistance" against the Trump administration from 2017 to 2020.  And it seems to have been painfully absent from the resistance by the African-American community to renewed racist oppression over the last decade.  This absence has not escaped the notice of honest and trustworthy scholars of nonviolent civil resistance.  For instance, Erica Chenoweth commented repeatedly in YouTube interviews from 2018 onward that the "resistance" against Trump seemed to be too one-dimensional, too much of a one-trick pony whose participants spent too much time shouting loudly in the streets against the world they saw coming into being and too little time articulating - in word and action - the vision of the world they actually wanted to see.  The articulation of this vision - a "vision of tomorrow" as described by Srdja Popovic - is much easier for bystanders to see and to embrace when it is embodied in deep, strong organizing of righteous parallel institutions for meeting social needs.  (See "Protests in Perspective: Civil Disobedience & Activism Today, with Erica Chenoweth & Deva Woodly", and "Social Movements in the Age of Fake News with Erica Chenoweth."  Note especially that second citation.  In it, Chenoweth discusses the pivotal role played those who built parallel institutions in the Polish struggle against the Russian-backed Jaruselski regime.)  As I have also mentioned repeatedly in this series, the combination of over-reliance on hasty mass mobilization and hastily thrown-together mass protest, combined with the lack of deep, long-term organizing, has allowed the holders of concentrated wealth and economic and political power to frequently inject violent agents provocateurs into many of the mass protests and mobilizations that have taken place in the U.S. over the last five years.

It may well therefore be asked why this parallel institution-building, this parallel society-building, has been so frequently neglected over the last decade or so by those who call themselves activists and who consider themselves to be leaders of struggles for liberation.  The answer lies in part in the endemic laziness of us humans who tend to "demand" change rather than creating that change ourselves - both as individuals and as self-conscious, self-organized collectives.  (Organizing is hard work, lemme tell ya!  I speak from experience.)  But I would argue that part of the answer lies in the bad advice many of us have received in answer to our questions about how to create liberating change.  

Some of that bad advice was discussed in my post titled, "The Poverty of Pivenism."  In particular, I took aim at the teachings and intellectual legacy of Frances Fox Piven and highlighted the spectacular failures of many of the mobilizations of recent years which embodied a Pivenist strategy.  I also took aim at a book by Mark Engler and Paul Engler titled, This Is An Uprising, a book which claims to teach the principles of successful strategic nonviolent resistance.  The Englers' praise of Pivenism combined with their disdain for long-term deep organizing leads me to believe that they are, at best, rank amateurs.  And yet not all bad advice is given by the ignorant rank amateur.  Some bad advice is given by those who deliberately seek to mislead.

I am thinking just now of June of 2020, in which there were massive protests over the police murder of George Floyd, and in which agents provocateurs had already begun to make sizable inroads into these protests for the purpose of looting and vandalism.  During that month an article was published in a weekly magazine called the Nation, and the title of the article was "In Defense of Destroying Property."  The article was written by R. H. Lossin, a white woman with blond hair and blue eyes.    (At the beginning of this year, she also taught a course with an even more provocative title, namely, "Sabotage: Violence, Theory, and Protest.")  Her White privilege insulates her almost completely from the consequences of saying such things, as well as the consequences that people of color would surely have suffered for following her advice last year.  Yet from her position of privileged safety she was advocating that we who belong to communities of the oppressed should engage in violence.  And yes, my definition of violence includes sabotage and property destruction, for these activities have the same effect of weakening movements for liberation that would occur if movement activists physically attacked their opponents.

But I am also thinking of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), and the difference between my first discovery of this group and my attitude at the final parting of our ways.  I go back now to the horrible and frightening days of the close of 2016, when many Americans discovered that our democracy had been broken and that we were getting a genocidal tyrant as the 45th President.  The discovery of the fact that Trump would be our next President combined with my anger and my commitment to Christian ethics moved me to seriously research what strategic nonviolent resistance had to offer.  So I discovered Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution, and I eagerly read How Nonviolent Struggle Works.  I watched a ton of YouTube videos which featured Gene Sharp.  I downloaded the audio of From Dictatorship to Democracy and listened to it over and over again while washing dishes, mowing the lawn, and doing whatever other mindless work was conducive to listening to audiobooks.  I discovered Jamila Raqib and her special emphasis on parallel institution-building and the constructive program as part of a successful nonviolent liberation struggle.

And I discovered the ICNC and the many YouTube videos produced by them.  These videos, produced between 2010 and 2016, were a source of fascinating information, deep insight, and hope.  I am thinking especially of the videos from the yearly Fletcher Summer Institutes which were hosted by the ICNC, particularly the videos from the 2013 Fletcher Summer Institute.  That summer seminar featured seasoned veteran activists and leaders of liberation struggles from South Africa to Bolivia and beyond.  In watching those videos I got to (virtually) know such people as Oscar Olivera of Bolivia, who led the successful struggle of the citizens of Cochabamba against the Bechtel corporation in the Cochabamba water war.  And Mkhuseli Jack of South Africa, who played an integral role in the initial victorious anti-apartheid struggle there.  And the Reverend James Lawson, who played an integral role in some of the more coercive nonviolent boycotts which ended de facto segregation in the American South.  And Shaazka Beyerle, who has done extensive research into the use of civil resistance against state corruption.

Unfortunately, the ICNC stopped hosting its Fletcher Summer Institutes from 2017 onward.  (A rather interesting coincidence, given the start of the Trump presidency in 2017, no?)  But I was pleasantly surprised (or so I thought) when in 2018, I read on their website that they were hosting a free online course on civil resistance during the fall of that year.  I eagerly signed up, and was glad to be accepted.  What I thought I was getting into (even though at this time I had never heard of Zoom and did not know the role that videoconferencing would play in online instruction especially in the present moment) was an engaging, instructive, live series of videoconferences with renowned experts and practitioners.  In other words, I thought I had signed up for a chance to converse with and ask questions of people such as James Lawson, Mary Elizabeth King, Hardy Merriman, Jack DuVall, Peter Ackerman, Erica Chenoweth, Maciej Bartkowski, Shaazka Beyerle, and others who had become something of a constellation of guiding lights to me from 2017 onward.

Instead, I merely got to participate in a series of online forums which were moderated by people I had never heard of, so-called "activists" and academics who, it seems, had never led a successful movement in their lives.  One of the main moderators was a guy named Steve Chase, and another was a guy named Daniel Dixon.  Mr. Dixon is the gentleman I mentioned in an earlier post who suggested that sometimes violent and nonviolent movements can combine in ways which increase the synergistic effects of both.  As I mentioned in that post, all the available research strongly suggests otherwise!  When I mentioned that I disagreed, and that I wanted to learn how parallel institution-building works to strengthen a nonviolent movement, both Dixon and others kept mentioning the Zapatistas as an example of a struggle group which combined violence with parallel institution-building, and they suggested that I had much to learn from the Zapatistas.  They were right.  I learned that the Zapatistas lost to the Mexican army and had chosen to renounce violence.  End of discussion.

But the ICNC staffers kept throwing up the suggestion that there was some sort of room for violent actors in a successful strategic nonviolent liberation struggle.  An academic named Veronique Dudouet kept citing an article by some guy named Ben Case which suggested that "'...ignoring civilian violence or assuming that it is always and necessarily harmful to movements limits the analytical reach of civil resistance research'. He then uses the case of the Egyptian revolution to prove that sometimes the use of limited 'protestor violence' might prove beneficial to civil resistance..."  Not only this, but the focus of much of the discussion on these online forums was solely on protest as a resistance tactic.  (This was not surprising, since many of the forum participants who were Americans identified themselves with "Antifa.")  I expressed frustration at this, noting that relying solely on protests was leading to incidents of violence occurring every time people came together, and asking why this online "course" wasn't exploring some of the other 197 of Gene Sharp's 198 methods.  Steve Chase responded by suggesting that other tactics were not as "disruptive" as mass protest.  (I guess he never heard of the Montgomery bus boycott!)  And he held up himself as a good example of movement organizing in that he organized an anti-fascist rally which included some organizations that use violent protest tactics, but which were persuaded by him to not engage in violence during his rally.  As I wrote to him later, that move of his was like playing with matches in a paper house, since if the government had instituted a crackdown on protest groups, they could have arrested him because of his association with the violent group he worked with.

To make a long story short, I dropped out of this online "course" after about six weeks or so.  They had nothing to offer.  And later, in 2020, when I saw that ICNC staffers were teaching that there were situations in which property destruction could actually help a civil resistance movement, I was completely turned off to them (though not surprised).  (See also, "Civil Resistance Tactics In The 21st Century", pages 66-67.)  In short, if the ICNC staffers are genuine and sincere, they have to me become like a minor league baseball team run by toddlers.  Where are the heavy hitters of successful movement building whose faces I saw in those Fletcher Summer Institute videos?  Why is the advice of the ICNC so lame now?  Why does much of their most recent advice contradict the research, scholarship and guidance of successful practitioners of nonviolent liberation struggles over the years - including the advice which the ICNC used to give back when I regarded them with respect?

But perhaps the ICNC contains people who are not sincere.  Erica Chenoweth hugely popularized the application of scholarship to the study of civil resistance.  I still have great respect for her because her advice is most definitely not lame.  But in her wake, I am afraid that there are "scholars" who have arisen to study civil resistance not for the sake of helping the oppressed to liberate themselves, but rather to derail the liberation of the oppressed by misleading them.  In this, they are like many people nowadays who go to school in order to obtain advanced degrees in psychology and behavioral sciences - not to help those who are hurting, but to land lucrative jobs with tobacco companies, the Republican Party and other outfits whose success depends on misleading people and turning them into addicts.  Meanwhile, where are the builders who will construct a righteous parallel society in today's oppressive world?

From D to D, Chapter 5: Dealing With Infiltrators

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D. As I have said in previous posts, the consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. Among the crimes committed by this select few was the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on the 6th of this month in an attempt to prevent Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris from being certified by the U.S. Congress as the legitimate winners of the U.S. Presidential election held in November of 2020.  Though that attempt failed, these who lust for their own supremacy are continuing to organize and to plot how they can maintain their own supremacy by disenfranchising, dispossessing and oppressing everyone else.  Therefore, it is up to us who are not counted among the "chosen few" to learn to organize ourselves in order to thwart the power of the few and to ensure the emergence of a world which is shared equally by all of its peoples.

A previous post in this series stated that a group of oppressed people who organize to nonviolently liberate themselves from oppression can exercise great power if they organize themselves and their struggle according to high moral and ethical principles combined with wise strategy. For these principles and this strategy can amplify the contrast between the oppressed struggle group and the members of the corrupt oppressor group. This combination of high principles and wise strategy is also the most effective means of shifting the balance of social power away from the oppressors. For this reason, oppressors who understand the power and potential of strategic nonviolent resistance are very interested in doing all they can to render that resistance ineffective.  The most recent post in this series explored the use of the agent provocateur as the tool of choice used by oppressors in order to render a nonviolent struggle ineffective.  

The power of a nonviolent movement derives from the high moral and ethical principles of the movement participants and from the resulting contrast between these participants and the members of the oppressive regime.  The greater this contrast is, the stronger the nonviolent movement and its actionists are.  Therefore the role of the agent provocateur is to infiltrate a nonviolent movement in order to tempt the members of that organization to commit violent or otherwise illegal activities (in order to discredit the organization and legitimize the use of State violence against its members), or to cause the organization to fall apart by making false accusations about certain of its members to the rest of the membership.  Some cases of the use of these agents were cited in the most recent post in this series.  There are certainly other cases as well.  (For further reading, you can start with "Thoughts on a Neglected Category of Social Movement Participant: The Agent Provocateur and the Informant," or, "Agents Provocateurs as a Type of Faux Activist," both by Gary T. Marx.  There are also the posts I have written about violent white infiltrators at Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.)  As a result of the activities of these agents over the last several months, broad American support for the right to engage in mass protest has been declining (although most of that decline has occurred among people who identify as Republican).

So then the natural question is, how can organizers of a movement or of a movement campaign guard against the threat of infiltrators?  I'd like to suggest that the answer to that question depends on the attitude which movement participants have toward the likely costs of living in truth.  For I believe, based on my reading of the Bible and of various books on the dehumanizing nature of oppression, that it is the duty of people everywhere to resist oppression, and therefore to resist the oppressor.  This is true even when such resistance is undertaken against one's own oppressors.  The Biblical command to love one's enemies does not negate the Biblical requirement for the oppressed to speak truth to power, including the power of their oppressors.  As Paulo Freire states in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the resistance against the oppressor by the oppressed is an act of love, in that this resistance provides the oppressor with an opportunity to recover his own humanity - a humanity which he damaged when he chose to become an oppressor.  This is why Harriet Beecher Stowe's depiction of the so-called "Christianity" of Uncle Tom is in fact not Christian.

But since this resistance is to be nonviolent, it takes on a certain character which requires certain  characteristics in and among the resisters. The nature of this resistance is captured in the Greek word hypomone (ὑπομονή, meaning "an act of remaining behind", "an act of holding out," "enduring to do"), and is illustrated by such New Testament passages as Revelation 3:7-13.  Resisters remain behind and hold out by holding forth the truth in the face of hostile and violent opposition.  Part of the resistance of these resisters consists of remaining nonviolent even as they resist.  (As it says in the Good Book, "Here is the hypomone and the faith of the saints.")  Because the nature of this resistance requires resisters to live in truth even though they will be punished for it, and to refuse to retaliate against the punishment, this kind of resistance requires a special courage - a willingness to abandon fear (even the fear of death), or at least to control fear so that it is not the overriding force controlling a resister.  This is pointed out by Gene Sharp in From D to D (pages 33-34), How Nonviolent Struggle Works (HNVSW) (pages 53-54, 62-64), and Part 3 of The Politics of Nonviolent Action (pages 456-458, 481-492).

Those who have not achieved this fearlessness and willingness to openly bear the cost of living in truth will be tempted to try to use secrecy and internal conspiracy to guard their movement against infiltration.  Such people may attempt to create movements that have a "healthy security culture" as described in an essay which appeared on the website of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict titled "Insider Threats: A Closer Look at Infiltrators and Movement Security Culture."  Such a "security culture" will inevitably limit the ability of potential participants to contribute as much as they are capable of contributing to the movement.  Such a culture will also hinder the democratic nature of what is supposed to be a movement for liberation, and will introduce a potentially authoritarian element into the movement, as in leaders telling subordinates to "Do x and y.  Don't ask why; just do it!  Because I said so!"  And there is the problem of what to do once an infiltrator is outed within a movement organization.  Will the infiltrator have gained access to sensitive information?  Will the information be of such a nature that "If I told ya, I'd have to kill ya"?  (Killing informers is not very non-violent, is it?!)  Note that there is a very, very high likelihood that the oppressor will be able to infiltrate your organization and obtain just such information, no matter how hard you try to prevent it.  It happened frequently during the anti-Tsarist uprisings in Russia in 1905, during some of the labor strikes in Britain and the United States in the 1800's and 1900's, and among the resisters against Nazi rule in World War Two.  Total secrecy is wickedly hard to achieve.  Lastly, how will movement secrecy limit the ability of movement organizers to build a truly strong, durable and intelligent mass movement?  Gene Sharp notes that during the history of the Indian liberation struggle against the British, campaigns that relied on secrets and conspiracies tended to collapse before they ever became powerful.

On the other hand, movement organizers can choose to build a movement that can survive, thrive and prevail even though the oppressor knows everything about it.  Building such a movement involves the following steps:

• Choose an ultimate strategic goal that is utterly good and utterly blameless.  For instance, if an ultimate goal of your movement is the creation of a society in which everyone has an equal share of the rights and resources needed to fulfill his or her own human potential, no one can legitimately object to that.  If on the other hand, your ultimate strategic goal is the creation of a society in which you get to indulge evil and harmful pleasures at the expense of others, try to be as secret in your intentions as possible, since if you are open about them, your intended victims will sooner or later begin to organize against you.  If your organization exists to harm others, beware also of infiltrators, since they will at the least tip off your intended victims!  
• Create a movement strategy that does not depend on secrecy for its success.  This will be easy if your movement goal is utterly blameless.  If on the other hand, you have formed an organization whose goals can be summarized by slogans such as "Child Molesters Of The World, Unite!" or "People for the Torture of Animals," creating a strategy that does not depend on secrecy will be much harder.
• Your movement goals and strategy should not involve physical harm, sabotage, or property destruction.  Then if informers or other agents discover it, they will not be able to accuse you of any intentions of wrongdoing.
• Your movement goals and strategy should include a road map for building up your oppressed brothers and sisters through your own self-reliance.  This will show that you are actively managing your own affairs for good, and will neutralize the oppressor's claims that you need to be oppressed because you are disorderly or shiftless or lazy.
• Once you have created your movement goals and strategy, make them known to as many people as possible.  This will put informers and other agents out of work, as there will be nothing left for them to inform on.  And if a provocateur comes to cause trouble, you can point to him and say, "Remember the strategy we publicized.  This man does not represent our brand!"  You will be believed if you have made your strategy open and have conducted yourself honorably and with high moral and ethical standards.  To quote Jawaharlal Nehru (a contemporary of Gandhi), "Above all, we had a sense of freedom and a pride in that freedom. The old feeling of oppression and frustration was completely gone.  There was no more whispering, no round-about legal phraseology to avoid getting into trouble with the authorities. We said what we felt and shouted it out from the house tops. What did we care for the consequences?  Prison? We looked forward to it; that would help our cause still further. The innumerable spies and secret-service men who used to surround us and follow us about became rather pitiable individuals as there was nothing secret for them to discover. All our cards were always on the table."  (Quote taken from HNVSW, pages 63-64.)  
• Do not seek to grow too quickly.  Quality is much more important than quantity at the beginning, and high quality is the most durable way to obtain high quantities of powerful participants.  This is yet another reason why the sort of hastily thrown-together mass protests that have characterized the second decade of the 21st century do not represent real power.  When one man teaches a small group, and that group learns its lessons well enough that each of its members can in turn skillfully teach others, you have the beginnings of real power.

Such openness will aid the creation of a movement that is extremely durable and powerful.  On the other hand, a climate of secrecy not only promotes fear and dampens the movement, but it also makes the movement vulnerable to the second kind of agent provocateur: the infiltrator who sabotages a movement by spreading false accusations against movement leaders in order to foster distrust between the members of a movement organization.  This is why when Cesar Chavez began organizing what would become the United Farm Workers Union, he rejected secrecy and made his organization open.  

P.S. For an example of the hypomone mentioned above, consider the case of Clarence Jordan and Koinonia Farm during the 1950's and 1960's.  Jordan was a white evangelical preacher - yet when you consider what he did and what he stood for, you can see that he really "got" Christianity, because he was a real Christian.  Too bad that the modern white American evangelical church no longer has such people as Clarence and his wife Florence.

From D to D, Chapter 3 (Continued): Who Made Thee An Organizer?

 At aalis, magbabalik

At uuliting sabihin 

Na mahalin ka't sambitin

Kahit muli'y masaktan

Sa pag-alis

Ako'y magbabalik

At sana naman...

- from Nobela, lyrics by Christian Blanca Renia

(My title being a nod to the 7th chapter of the Book of Acts...  Note: as I've been listening lately to music from other corners of the world, you may find me including some of the lyrics in future posts if I think they are relevant to the topics being discussed in those posts.  So if you're from outside the U.S., please keep making good music!  For the rest, if you want to know what the lyrics mean, try Google Translate.  However, I must warn you that using Google Translate is sometimes like trying to ride a horse that has a couple of broken legs.)

This post is a continuation of our discussion of Chapter 3 of Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  I chose to dedicate a series of posts to the discussion of this important book because of the current global political climate, in which many democracies around the world (including the United States) have been hijacked by fascists, supremacists, strongmen and would-be dictators.  (Yes, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are among the hijackers.)  I have argued in my posts that the oppressed peoples who want to liberate themselves from these strongmen must do so through the means of strategic nonviolent resistance, as the nonviolent method has the greatest chance of success and the best social outcomes.  From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in my posts to From D to D) describes what is involved in building a successful nonviolent liberation struggle.

Chapter 3 of From D to D began with what Gene Sharp called "the Monkey Master fable" (originally titled, Rule By Tricks in Chinese), an illustration of what happens to an oppressor when his oppressed victims choose to massively and collectively withdraw their cooperation from the oppressor.  Sharp went on to make the important point that the noncooperation of the oppressed applies the greatest pressure when it is collective rather than being just a bunch of random, uncoordinated acts of isolated individuals.  Thus, the emergence of collective, coordinated noncooperation depends on the emergence or existence of groups and institutions of the oppressed that are independent of the oppressor - that is, groups and institutions that are neither financed, supported, or controlled by the oppressor.

Note that Sharp lists among these independent groups a number of types of groups and institutions that are not overtly political, such as families, sports clubs, music groups, gardening clubs, and the like.  Therefore, although the existence of such groups is a necessary precondition for a liberation struggle, it is not a sufficient condition.  My most recent post in this series therefore discussed how it is necessary for such groups to be politicized (or co-opted) by movement organizers if such groups are to contribute to a nonviolent liberation struggle.  In that post, we explored the writings of feminist scholar Jo Freeman in her description of the birth of the women's movement and other movements of the 1960's in the United States.  One point she makes is the importance of the organizers of a social movement.  For successful social movements are never spontaneous - that is, they never just "happen" out of the blue.  And there are only two kinds of social movements: the spontaneous and the successful.  Successful movements are organized by smart organizers.  The organizers have to be smart, because their job is to co-opt existing groups and institutions so that their members begin to support the goals of the movement.  Their job is also to create new movement organizations from scratch (a topic which will be explored in a future post, God willing).  So what kind of person is an organizer?

To answer that question, we turn today to the writings of another movement scholar, veteran organizer Dr. Marshall Ganz of Harvard University.  Ganz defines organizing as a particular kind of leadership.  He defines leadership as "accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty."  And he defines organizing as "leadership that enables people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want."  Ganz makes the important point that leadership - specifically, organizing - is a calling.  People are called to become organizers when life confronts them with the following questions:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  If I am only for myself, what am I?  And if not now, when?

-Hillel (Pirkei Avot Chapter 1:14)

So if organizers are people who have experienced a calling to organize, what kind of experiences lead them to hear that call?  And where do these called people come from?  To answer that question, let's look at three kinds of people:

THE LIMINAL

The word "liminal" literally means "on the threshold."  The word can also be defined as, "on the edge."  In the context of liberation struggles, liminal people are those members of an oppressed group who live on the edges, on the boundary between the oppressed group and the oppressor group.  In many cases, such people are born into such liminal spaces.  Moses from the Bible is such an example.  He was born into a nation of slaves, and he was born at a time in which the Pharaoh, the earthly master of the Hebrew slaves had decreed that all male Hebrew infants were to be killed by being thrown into the Nile River.  His parents did not throw him into the river, but instead hid him for three months, and then they carefully placed him into the river in a floating basket, trusting that God would take care of him.  (Exodus 1 and 2).  In a twist of Divine irony and providence, the basket was found by the daughter of Pharaoh, who decided to adopt Moses and raise him as an Egyptian.  In another twist of Divine providence, Moses' mother was hired by Pharaoh's daughter to be his nurse from day that Pharaoh's daughter found him until the day that she adopted Moses as her son.

Moses was thus raised as a member of the most privileged group of the most privileged class of people in Egypt.  (To put this into perspective, imagine Ivanka Trump adopting a dark-skinned, non-English speaking child from among the groups of human beings now caged in "detention centers" by the Global Far Right and raising him as her own son with all the earthly privileges attached to the Trump name.)  But he also learned of his identity as a Hebrew from his mother.  Thus there were two potential identities within Moses.  However, the sight of the treatment of his people by the Egyptians became an attack on his birth identity which Moses would no longer tolerate.  The attack on the people of his birth became in his soul an attack on himself.  So it is that "By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter; choosing rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God, than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin..." (Hebrews 11:24-25)

That is frequently the experience of those who are liminal.  This was the experience of many African-American servicemen from the American South who fought in World War Two, as for a time they inhabited a world which offered many more opportunities than the Jim Crow South.  From their experiences came a set of rising expectations combined with an intolerable sense of shame and frustration at the Southern status quo that would serve as one of the motivations for the most important struggles of the Civil Rights movement.  Other liminal figures include Robert Moses (one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC), Ella Baker (of the NAACP and one of the founding organizers of SNCC), James Lawson and others who had the means and took the opportunity to attend college (something that many African-Americans could not do because of financial constraints).

And it has been my experience, for as an African-American child, I was a military brat and my dad was an officer.  Therefore I got to inhabit a world in which there were not many kids who looked like me.  I was "educated in all the learning of the Egyptians," to borrow a phrase from Acts 7.  But I was subjected to constant attacks from children (and sometimes parents) from the "dominant culture" who treated me as if neither I nor my people had any right to inhabit the world which they enjoyed.  An incident from the summer before middle school comes particularly to mind just now.  The experience of possibilities combined with persecution on account of those possibilities had, shall we say, a radicalizing effect on me.

THE CONSCIOUSLY HUMILIATED

As noted above, the liminal are often very conscious of their humiliation under a system of oppression.  But many who do not inhabit that liminal space often allow their sense of self to be submerged by that system to the point where they passively accept the structures of their humiliation as merely part of the background scenery, "just the way things are around here."  While this happens often to members of minority groups who are oppressed by a dominant majority, it also happens when an entire society is taken over by a dominant dictator.  So in his essay, The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel writes about a grocery store owner in a dysfunctional country who is ordered by his government to place every day in the store window a sign which reads, "WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!"  The government's purpose in ordering store owners to put up such signs is to convey the message that the government is on the side of the workers, and that the government is the sole legitimate leader of these workers, the sole legitimate treasury of their hopes and dreams.  

But what if the government which makes grocers put up such signs actually treats the workers like animals?  What if, in putting up such signs, workers are actually being forced to lie to themselves?  Is not this act of forced lying a form of humiliation, an insult to the intelligence of these workers?  And how long can someone be forced to lie to himself before his sense of shame becomes so overwhelming that he refuses to lie any longer?  That is the point of Havel's essay.  When that happens, people refuse to put up signs, or they start to put up signs that say "THIS ISN'T PARADISE AFTER ALL!"  So Trump is trailing Biden in the polls right now because many people are beginning to realize that he hasn't made America great, and that voting for him will not "Keep America Great!"  Rather, the United States is suffering from a number of wounds inflicted on the entire nation by Donald J. Trump.

THE ACTIVIZED

A sense of human possibility combined with an awareness of shame under the denial of that possibility is what produces many of the people who step up to become organizers.  These organizers then go on to call others to become organizers.  And they do so by opening the eyes of these others to the human possibilities that are being denied to them by oppressors.  In other words, they produce in others what dwells within them - the same sense of possibility and the same refusal to tolerate ongoing humiliation.  Thus it was that organizer Fred Ross found a young Latino laborer named Cesar Chavez and showed him "how poor people could build power."  Thus it was that SNCC organizers persuaded poor African-Americans in Mississippi to fight for equal access to the polls.  

The characteristic of organizers is that they have come to a point of "cognitive liberation".  This term, "cognitive liberation", is defined in various ways by social movement scholars.  But I define its beginning as a point in which an oppressed person decides that he or she will no longer tolerate the oppression and its accompanying humiliation, and that he or she will begin to live in truth from now on - even if it means suffering. (For an example of this, consider the life of Fannie Lou Hamer.  "And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives even to the point of death.")  This cognitive liberation spreads when the liberated organizer sets before others not only a sense of possibility and an awareness of humiliation, but a plausible road map of change that can achieve the possibilities now denied to the oppressed.  This is how an organizer becomes a "social arsonist who goes around setting other people on fire," as Fred Ross said.

But this setting of other people on fire is rarely instantaneous.  Often it involves long, hard work in building relationships of trust among people whose experiences of hardship have taught them not to be trusting, and who must operate in an environment in which bad things can happen to them if they "step out of line."  As Ella Baker once said, it is "spade work" - like the unglamorous work of hand-digging a field before one plants vegetables.  And organizers frequently find that people will disappoint them - sometimes after the organizer has spent much time trying to build a relationship.  So the organizer must be patient and resilient.  (At aalis, magbabalik, at uuliting sabihin, na mahalin ka't sambitin, kahit muli'y masaktan...)  You have to be kind of crazy (at least as some people count craziness) to do this kind of work - or at least you need the kind of undying righteous anger combined with a sense of enduring justice that will compel you to stick it out for the long haul.  But there are tools which can help make the organizer's job easier.  I will discuss those tools in my next post, God willing.