[Deep canvass conversations, storytelling, acknowledges people’s
experiences while suggesting a different way to understand and
respond. Race-class narrative highlights the stake that white people
have in fighting racism and ways to take action.]
[[link removed]]

CAN WE CRACK THE RIGHT’S WHITE BLOC? THESE ORGANIZERS SAY YES  
[[link removed]]


 

Marcy Rein
January 12, 2021
Organizing Upgrade
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ Deep canvass conversations, storytelling, acknowledges people’s
experiences while suggesting a different way to understand and
respond. Race-class narrative highlights the stake that white people
have in fighting racism and ways to take action. _

,

 

“I’m a Trump supporter,” the man told Danny Timpona, and went on
to say that as much as he needed affordable health care, he absolutely
was not in favor of any plan that included undocumented immigrants.
“This country’s too damn free. We need to take care of our own
people,” he said. That wasn’t the end of their conversation on a
front porch in rural North Carolina. It was the beginning.

Timpona shared a bit of his own story, said there were many people he
knew and loved who’d moved here from other places. He asked the man
what his experience with immigrants has been. Turns out a lot of the
people he worked with were immigrants. “They’re hard-working,
family-centered, love ‘em to death.”

“Anyone in particular?” Timpona asked. Turns out the man had a
friend named María, and she got notice that she could be deported.
“I wrote a letter to the judge for her, wrote about six pages, got
my buddies to bother the judge too,” he said. Maria stayed, at least
for the time being.

The man was diabetic and really needed health care. Timpona asked him
if he thought his friend Maria was to blame for the hospital bills
piling up, the prescription medicine he couldn’t afford. “He said,
‘I never thought about it that way.’”

Timpona, who is the deputy director of distributed organizing for
People’s Action [[link removed]], had that conversation
in Fall 2019, as part of the group’s research
[[link removed]] leading into the 2020 election
cycle. Over the next year, volunteers and organizers would have
hundreds of thousands of such “deep canvass” conversations.
Organizations in the People’s Action network reached out in
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Colorado, Arizona,
Wisconsin and North Carolina. Showing Up For Racial Justice
[[link removed]] (SURJ) called in to
Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, ultimately focusing on Georgia
before the presidential election. Both organizations were active in
the Georgia runoff election.

They were mostly, though not exclusively, interested in talking to
poor and working class white people, folks largely overlooked by the
Democratic Party—and the white people with the greatest stake in
deep change. Their conversations gently challenged racist explanations
that have become the common sense, offering people a different frame
and path.  The approach they took also challenged the liberal taboo
against talking about race with white voters, and yielded some insight
into what those voters feel and need.

“Black and brown and indigenous communities are building power and
we need to bring enough white folks to the table to make that a
winning strategy, both for the immediate fights right now and the
longer-term change we need,” said SURJ co-founder Carla Wallace.
“If we are not organizing white folks and we are not being explicit
around the issue of race, then the right is going to build. It’s the
best messaging used with white people: those Black and those brown
people are going to get something, and you’re going to pay for it.
It’s the divide and conquer that’s been used since the beginning
of this country and the reason race was created.”

SHARING STORIES

“Deep canvassing is based in storytelling,” SURJ Electoral
Campaign Manager Ash Overton said. They were among the first to work
with the method when they were on staff at the Los Angeles LGBTQ
Center’s Leadership LAB. Jolted by the 2008 passage of a California
ballot measure banning gay marriage, organizers and activists took a
hard look at how they were communicating. They discovered that
exchanging stories can move people past talking points and ground them
in their lived experience.

A typical deep canvass conversation begins with an open-ended
question. It aims to engage rather than persuade. The canvasser will
offer a bit of their own story in response to the answer, then ask the
person they’re talking with for their experience, and try to engage
them with a “cone of curiosity”—simple questions like “When
did this happen? How did it feel?” As appropriate, the canvasser
shares more story. Both the listening and vulnerability are key. In
the process the canvasser listens for doubts, conflicts, openings to
suggest a different way of seeing.

Overton helped organize around Los Angeles County Measure R
[[link removed](March_2020)],
which was placed on the ballot in the March 2020 primary by a
Black-led community coalition. Measure R gave subpoena power to the
newly minted commission to oversee the Sheriff’s Department, and
directed the commission to look at redirecting $3.5 billion away from
jail expansion to alternatives to incarceration. SURJ door-knocked
white voters in less affluent neighborhoods, mostly in eastern LA
County. To ground the discussion in people’s lived experience, SURJ
asked voters about cycles of harm and trauma in their lives, how they
worked through those, and whether continuing the hurt had helped.

“It’s very vulnerable to talk about cycles of harm,” Overton
said. “There was a shame and secrecy that had kept people from
processing these experiences. To be asked questions and not judged was
significant.” One of the voters they talked to was a grandmother who
was raising her daughter’s children. She started out saying she had
family in the Sheriff’s Department, didn’t know anyone who’d
gone to jail. After a bit, she volunteered that her daughter’s
boyfriend had done time for drugs, “and came out worse than he went
in.” She reflected that she was trying to do better with her
grandchildren than she had with her own children. “If I raised these
guys the way I raised my kids, I’d be in jail. I was raised, you
know, with a belt.” She and Overton shared about struggling, and
anger, and the need for mental health support. By the end she said she
favored Measure R “if it’s going to make life different, not just
helping people but helping them understand so they can help the next
person.”

Deep canvass conversations follow the arc of
organizing—acknowledging people’s experiences, suggesting a
different way to understand and respond to them. The race-class
narrative frame [[link removed]]
highlights the stake that white people have in fighting racism and
points to ways to take action.

FINDING A PERSONAL STAKE

The right wing has built cross-class solidarity on whiteness.
Organizers using the race-class narrative aim to break that up. In
doing so, they cross a taboo. Liberals and many leftists have shied
away from talking about race with white people. “We think a
different approach is necessary, one that links, rather than
counterposes, class and race,” wrote Professor Ian Haney López.
[[link removed]]
The race-class narrative understands racism as both violence done to
people of color and the elites’ most effective tool for preserving
their power.

“We should not be sacrificing racial justice concerns in order to
pander to racist stereotypes,” López said
[[link removed]].
At the same time, white people need to understand how racism hurts
them. In practice, this means identifying experiences and concerns
that white people and people of color share.

Members of SURJ went door to door in Louisville’s white
working-class neighborhoods to build support for an effort to end cash
bail. “Kentucky is overwhelmingly white and it’s some of the
poorest white folks in the country,” Carla Wallace said. Poor and
working-class white people have been hurt by the criminal justice
system, and relate to the unfairness of jailing people before trial
just because they can’t make bail. But then SURJ canvassers
introduce race.

“We say ‘a lot of black families have been impacted by that, a lot
of struggling families like yours.’  … Then they say, ‘well, it
depends. If someone does something…’ and we go back to their
experience. ‘Was it fair for your uncle to be held before he was
even found guilty?’ ‘No, no, that’s not fair.’ So we say,
‘Who’s making all that money collecting those bails? It’s not
your neighbors, it’s the people at the top.’ I have found there
will be a hesitancy around the conversation about race, but once you
say, ‘I wonder who’s getting rich?’  a lot of people will be
open to the conversation,” Wallace said.

Part of the conversation has to be calling out the racist tropes.
During the fall 2020 elections, Pennsylvania Stands Up
[[link removed]] made deep canvassing calls into each of the
state’s 67 counties. “We trained people to really talk about race
and class,” said Jules Berkman-Hill, the group’s deputy organizing
director. “Part of the methodology in deep canvassing is inoculating
people against the right wing’s strategic racism and xenophobia. We
would say, ‘It’s not your immigrant neighbor who’s the problem,
it’s the one percent who’s dividing us,” Berkman-Hill said. 
The conversations explicitly identify people’s needs and
self-interest.

WHITE PRIVILEGE?

SURJ and People’s Action don’t dismiss the problem of “white
privilege” – but they don’t lead with it either. The work of
bringing white people into multi-racial coalitions is less about
making “better white people” and creating “allies” than about
developing a genuine identification among white people with people of
color.

“In any of this work that we do to build a broad-based multiracial
working class movement in this country, we have to be able to speak to
everyone’s pain and their experiences of oppression and
suffering,” said Adam Kruggel, director of strategic initiatives for
People’s Action. “Everyone is situated differently. There’s
anti-blackness and terror directed against immigrants… We have to
recognize that white people aren’t suffering because we are white.
We have strategic advantages because of our race but it doesn’t mean
that we don’t suffer or have disadvantages or difficulties or
struggles…That is the basic question that we are trying to ask: Can
our pain be a bridge instead of a barrier? We believe these are things
that can bring us together, but what the right has been able to do for
centuries is weaponize them and use them as a wedge to divide us. Once
you begin to pull back the curtain and you can start to build empathy
and you feel seen….we can have honest, meaningful transformative
engagement with people.”

MAKING MEANING: REDNECKS FOR BLACK LIVES

Being seen is critical. Racist right-wing rhetoric not only explains
people’s pain, but also affirms white identity by exclusion.
Sometimes that’s done with dog-whistles like characterizations of
people as either “makers” or “takers.” Sometimes it’s
broadcast full-volume by white nationalists and neo-Nazis and the
soon-to-be-ex President.

Either way, interrupting the right is complicated. It begins with
engaging people through the deep listening conversations, as well as
connecting to their values and history, and creating alternative ways
to affirm their human worth.

At the height of the 2020 racial justice uprisings, Beth Howard, who
is the organizing director for SURJ’s Southern Crossroads
[[link removed]] project, felt the need to speak with
people in majority-white places in the south, and “interrupt the
racist narratives around looting and rioting, the pro-police and
anti-Black Lives Matter rhetoric.” She wrote “Rednecks for Black
Lives”
[[link removed]]
as a letter, “an appeal”:

“For decades the label ‘redneck’ has been thrown at us to
degrade us but it’s time we reclaim it. The term redneck actually
comes from the nation’s largest labor uprising, the Battle of Blair
Mountain in West Virginia in 1921
[[link removed]],
when a multiracial group of 8,000 miners fought coal company operators
to unionize. . . Even though the miners did not get their union at the
end of that battle, it laid the foundation for a much bigger labor
movement in years to come, exposed the dangers miners faced in the
West Virginia coalfields, and maybe more than anything created power
in the multiracial solidarity of poor and working people. The miners
were called rednecks because of the red bandannas tied around their
neck to indicate they were union.”

Talking about the piece, which went viral, Howard stressed the need to
“uplift this history that’s very hidden from mainstream culture,
to say ’this is who we are also’.” Drawing on her own experience
growing up working class in Eastern Kentucky, she said, “When you go
through so many struggles, you start to believe the things people say
about you. . . We internalize the stereotypes, and/or start to think
‘I need to change, I need to disown all these parts of myself.’ A
lot of our work is to be with people and help them see their
worthiness and their dignity. Once people start to say, ‘actually, I
do matter, I do deserve safe housing, a job that treats me well and
pays a living wage, health care, clean drinking water,’ we start to
see people say, ‘I’m not going to put up with this anymore, I’m
going to stand up and fight for what I deserve and I’m going to
fight for my neighbors too.”

WORD ON THE DOORS: POLITICS SUCK

The worries and problems canvassers heard on the phones and at the
doors were no surprise: COVID. Losing, or being afraid of losing, work
and housing. Needing unemployment benefits, COVID relief and health
care. High utility bills, hospitals closing in rural areas. Scratch
the surface, dig under the Fox News talking points, and most people
felt the government had abandoned them.

“People feel lonely and isolated especially during COVID,” Jules
Berkman-Hill said. “They feel their government abandoned them with
not providing enough relief. Small business owners, people
experiencing housing insecurity, getting laid off. People were really
angry, really upset, and really scared.” People don’t identify as
left, right or center, according to Berkman-Hill. “The most common
political position was alienation,” she said. At the December 2020
Rootscamp [[link removed]] panel on building multi-racial
organizing, organizers from different regions confirmed this
assessment.

Corruption emerged as the top issue for 10,000 voters surveyed by West
Virginia Can’t Wait [[link removed]] in summer 2019.
“That didn’t imply any allegiance to the Democratic Party,” said
panelist Cathy Kunkel, who ran for Congress as part of the group’s
effort to bring in a “people’s government.” West Virginia voters
feel “disenfranchised” by both parties, she said. Eighty-seven
percent of rural voters “believe government reflects the will of the
rich and influential,” according to a March 2020 survey by
RuralOrganizing [[link removed]].

“A lot of people don’t vote,” Beth Howard said. “But for so
many working people where I grew up, things didn’t really change for
them no matter who they voted for. In the 80s and 90s when I grew up,
when they voted for Democrats NAFTA happened, their jobs were gone,
unions were broken up. They’ve been lied to by both parties. The
party that is supposed to be taking up for poor people isn’t.
They’re also run by billionaires.”

The right, ironically, runs a more persuasive critique of elites than
many Democrats. “A lot of folks love Trump because of who and what
he hates. The media. Academics and experts. The ‘liberal
consensus’ and the language of inclusion. The Washington
establishment and its insiders. And all the snooty liberals who
embrace these things,” writes Anthony Flaccovento in “Overcoming
the Urban-Rural Divide
[[link removed]].”

Yet faced with pressing need and profound alienation, the Democratic
Party persists in running to the center. The establishment refuses to
learn from the appeal of candidates like Bernie Sanders, or Charles
Booker [[link removed]] – the progressive Black state
representative who ran in Kentucky’s 2020 primary for the chance to
take on Mitch McConnell.

“To not be able to communicate bold proposals and a bold plan
that’s exciting and motivating is the most demobilizing thing I’ve
seen,” Danny Timpona said. He has had deep conversations with people
in North Carolina and in rural Appalachia about the Green New Deal,
about cancelling student debt, about Medicare for All. Some people
have been pinched by rising premiums and deductibles under Obamacare.
“People aren’t dumb,” Timpona said. “It’s their experience,
and people are living it. They put two and two together. We
shouldn’t believe that this imaginary center is beneficial in this
moment when the need is so desperate, and politics has been shifting
to the right.”

POINTING FORWARD

The victory in the Georgia runoffs testifies to decades of organizing
in the state’s Black communities and among its growing numbers of
Latinx and Asian American voters – as well as a brave and skillful
ground game in the election itself. Ahead lie the challenges of
getting concrete results from those wins, and building out organizing
among poor and working-class white voters.

“We can’t stop now that the election is over,” said SURJ
National Coordinator Erin Heaney. “We’ve got to do everything we
can to force the Dems to provide some relief to people, so when
we’re knocking on doors again we have something to show for it.
It’s going to be incredibly hard to get people to vote for Democrats
again in two or four years if they haven’t been able to deliver
anything.” Helpful as the race-class frame is, “our approach has
to be more than narrative work and more than just one conversation. .
. We have to organize around issues and in a way that is more
transformational.”

Southern Crossroads has a tenant organizing project
[[link removed]?]
in middle Tennessee, and is preparing work in Kentucky and Georgia.
They hope to network with existing groups and to bolster community
organizing infrastructure in the rural South. Phone banks for the
presidential election and the Georgia runoffs recruited more than
6,000 people interested in their work.

Pennsylvania Stands Up did deep canvassing around the COVID crisis and
Black Lives Matter, and plans to take up work on the eviction crisis,
utility shutoffs, and other issues.

“What our deep canvass conversations have taught me is that we need
more of them,” said Jules Berkman-Hill. “We need much more
infrastructure, much more scale, much more training and investment in
leadership development, and we also need ways that people can be in
long-term organizations with each other.”

The movement moment provides a springboard, and “Black and
Indigenous leadership have created a lot of opportunities for
advancing a progressive agenda,” said SURJ National Organizer Sarah
Stockholm. “People get fixated on those who are furthest to the
right… Our goal is not to move them.  it’s to diminish their
power, and we’ll do that by moving the folks who are in the middle
or uncertain or can be swayed. And then we create an irresistible
movement for them to be in, give them a sense of collective purpose,
space to have internal transformation, and a belief that they can be
an active part of a multi-racial democracy.”

_Marcy Rein is a writer, editor, and organizer who has engaged with a
wide range of social movements and organizational forms. She
co-authored Free City! The Fight for San Francisco’s City College
and Education for All (with Mickey Ellinger and Vicki Legion),
forthcoming from PM Press in Fall 2020; with Clifton Ross, she
co-edited Until the Rulers Obey: Voices From Latin American Social
Movements (PM Press, 2014). _

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]