Your leadership is Needed

The phrases "your leadership is needed," and "thank you for leadership," have been tossed around so much they went from being meaningful, to being a joke, to not even being funny anymore. But there's something there.

Anti-Authoritarian Leaders
What we looked at in our final sessions was what it means to be a leader and how to call forth the leadership in each and every person. In anti-authoritarian circles, there is this desperation to assert - there are no leaders! We are all equal.  But as Chris Crass's article, "But We Don't Have Leaders" points out by evaluating tendencies within Food Not Bombs, this claim masks the truth that some people are leading, and not being able to identify the leaders shields them from accountability as well as hinders other people from seeing how to step up their own involvement. It also prevents other people from truly being able to share the responsibilities of leadership.

Betita Martinez says "As organizers, we need to reject the idea of leadership as domination, but without denying the existence and need for leadership. Denial can lead to a failure to demand accountability from our leaders. That demand must be embraced, along with anti-authoritarian methods, in leadership development. Accountability takes the measure of a person's responsibility; it means being accountable to one's fellow organizers, to the goals of one's collectivity, and ultimately to the people one claims to serve."

What is suggested instead, is the recognition that all people have the potential to be leaders and that organizations work best when many people are taking leadership in different areas - and then sharing skills and rotating those leadership positions.  A key here is the skills sharing.  I have come to see that the skills I possess in certain areas are actual resources that I need to share with others.  That my real job, if I want to move from being an activist to being an organizer, is not to take on a project and do it because I'm the one who best knows how to do it, but to train someone else to be able to take on that project. We need to shift the expectation and the culture from "Just do it" to "Each one, teach one."

The idea here is COLLECTIVE LEADERSHIP.  We looked at the model developed by Sista II Sista as they stepped away from non-profit structure and into a volunteer-run collective focused on developing leadership among their communities.  They say "Although we do not promote individual leaders, we recognize the uniqueness of every individual involved.  Our experiences continue to show us that real and long-lasting change comes through collective leadership and struggle."  There are clear leadership circles within the organization - for accountability and clarity of responsbility - but people are rotated in and among those circles of leadership as new people are trained and encouraged.

Another key is encouragement.  It is egging people on to step into something (and then providing support and training when they do!). It is listening to what they want to do, and telling them that they can do it, then helping them figure out how. It is building the confidence of others! And this doesn't always happen in a formal way, it can happen all the time within a friendship or authentic relationship.  That work counts!

Heres are a couple definitions of a leader:
* A leader helps everyone understand that their role is necessary.
* A leader is someone who takes someone else somewhere they wouldn't have gone alone.

Leadership Styles

A fun thing we did is look at this article on Leadership Styles, learn about the variety of ways that people lead others, and graph our own leadership style out. I encourage you to do it!  The styles that are laid out are:

• Idealist - the person who keeps clarity of the ideals that motivate the work
• Mentor - the person who focuses on developing the leadership of others via coaching, etc
• Achiever - the person who focuses on getting the team to get tasks done
• Innovator - the person who brings new ideas and methods into the group
• Synthesizer - the person who analyzes the situation and sees patterns
• Partner - the person who likes to team up with peers to do things together
• Enthusiast - the person who infuses energy into the group and keeps people excited about the group's mission
• Advocate - the person who will do anything to keep the group staying true to the group's mission and getting everyone involved
• Diplomat - the person who are genuinely wise about working with people and their various needs, mediating, and respecting individuals

10 Key Commitments of Leadership:

Challenging the Process
1. Search out challenging opportunities to change, grow, innovate, and improve
2. Experiment, take risks, and learn from the accompanying mistakes

Inspiring a Shared Vision
3. Envision an uplifting and ennobling future
4. Enlist others in a common vision by appealing to their values, interests, hopes, and dreams.
Enabling Others to Act
5. Foster collaboration by promoting cooperative goals and building trust
6. Strengthen people by giving power away, providing choice, developing competence, assigning critical tasks, and offering visible support.
Modeling the Way
7. Set the example by behaving in ways that are consistent with shared values.
8. Achieve small wins that promote consistent progress and build commitment.
Encouraging the Heart
9. Recognize individual contributions to the success of every project.
10. Celebrate team accomplishments regularly.

Inspiration
Jacob, a participant in the program said, and I paraphrase, : If you want to build a ship, you don't just ask people to help you put lumber together, you strive to make them long for the endless beauty of the sea.

The Nuts & Bolts of Anti-Racist Organizing

So, in the last two sessions, we've been looking at actual organizations that are working on social justice issues from an anti-racist perspective, led by people of color or white people. How are people ACTUALLY doing all this anti-racist work we've been gearing up for? What are the particular pieces that organizations weave into their work? From this I draw both from reading about organizations as well as looking at the organizations where participants in this program have been placed as volunteers.

Leadership Development
For real social change, we need to have the people at the bottom (most oppressed/most impacted, whatever terminology you prefer) leading the movement. Not out of some altruistic , affirmative action type standpoint, but because that is the only way to actually bring true change that will be good for everybody. People who suffer from the heaviest oppression are the ones who are going to know best what needs to change and how. But also because of the oppression they have suffered - which may lead to financial stress, lack of education, trauma from violence, substance abuse, or any other number of obstacles - their capacity to lead the movement may not be fully developed. Thus the need for leadership development - training and guidance on how to organize, how to run meetings, how to develop strategy, how to defend rights. None of us is really born knowing that, but those of with certain types of privilege get taught those things. I am really beginning to see how the knowledge of how to organize is a resource that I have because of privilege and not only do I need to use it, I need to share it with those without that privilege.

So how does one develop leaders?
For some organizations, it's theoretically straightforward: at La Raza's Day Labor Program, they had a 10 session training course for newly elected coordinators - teaching skills on facilitiation, strategy, legislative process, fundraising, etc. They also have a weekly popular education workshop series. Other organizations use more one-on-one mentorship. Or the idea that when assigning roles, such as talking to the media or running an event, you choose a team with one person who has experience and who person who does not.

A big hunk of leadership development is constantly showing how the things that individuals are experiencing are part of larger social phenomenon, as well as pushing people's politics to see how their struggles are connected with other people's struggles. Like how transgendered people's trouble around having ID's that match their name and gender leads to the same issues that undocumented immigrants face.

Another component is having various ways for people to plug in, participate, and lead that makes room for the various circumstances in someone's life. Someone may not be able to make it to scheduled meetings, but perhaps they can make phone calls from home.

Accountability
In the anti-racist organizer world, which I know is a very particular subculture, people talk about accountability a lot, but still it can seem ephemeral. Like what the hell is it? We came up with some good concepts:

1. Personal Level: Doing what you say you are going to do when you are going to. Creating clear structures can be really helpful in this - having workplans, a supervisor/lead that you regularly check in with, and clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
   
2. Organizationally: Making sure that the people who are impacted by your work have a strong voice in the organization, that you hear from them how the work you are doing impacts them and their communities. Part of this is also doing the work to meet people's needs so that they can participate, which also goes back to leadership development. For instance at the day labor center in Lake Worth, we really wanted there to be some workers at every organizational meeting, and the invitation was put out. When they didn't come, our director often said, well we invited them, that's the best we can do. No, we have to do more. We have to find out what they will need in order to be able to come - which might also entail changing the way we seek out input from them. Maybe it's a simple matter of changing the time, or providing food or childcare, or maybe the meeting structure itself doesn't work.
   
3. Politically: Keeping your politics and vision in mind, and making sure that the work you do is staying true to your politics

Sometimes these things may not point in the same direction, so there is a challenge of staying true politically while also meeting the needs, desires, and strategies of the grassroots people or "base." Some challenging examples of this is say that you are an abolitionist group (meaning that you think prisons should be totally abolished and no one should be imprisoned), then there is a cop that kills a young black man. The community is outraged and many sectors want to see that cop convicted and sent to prison. So here you have a community, young black men, who are the main targets of the prison system, who are advocating the prison system as a just way to deal with a terrible situation. Does your organization stay accountable to its abolitionist mission, or accountable to the population most impacted by the prison system? That is a choice that each organization, or each person, must make according to their own judgment. Of course, the long term answer is to constantly be in discussion with those communities about your politics and the vision behind them.

Multi-racial Relationship Building & Alliance
We didn't go too far into this but a couple things include having effective language translation so that people can talk to each other!, and working to find common issues to unite around. One example is that over here in the Bay Area, there is a strong "Brown-Black Unity" in resistance to the attempts to pit African-Americans against new immigrants over competition for jobs - when really both groups are deliberately being locked out of employment opportunities by a system that doesn't want either group to succeed.

Point from the Panel
We had yet another awesome panel that shared with us their experience in different organizations with different strategies and tactics. Some highlights

• That in the post-civil rights era, the right wing has been successful in delegitimizing race as an issue - meaning that they have convinced people that race is not a factor any more and it doesn't make sense to talk about it.
• The concept of "dog whistle racism" - where people are calling white supremacists to arms without ever using racial terms. One example is the current "tea party" movement.
• That meshing domestic anti-racist strategies with global anti-racist strategies are hard because everyone in the US benefits from imperialist capitalism - even black youth who are so targeted by domestic racism, are attached to the material goods, i.e. Nikes, that are produced as in sweatshops of imperialist transnational corporation.
• Two purposes, among the many, that the visibility of anti-racist white groups serves is to be a reliable partner in the struggle against racism - organizations/people of color knowing that you exist and can call on you when needed; and creating an alternative to right wing politics - people get to see options of how to interpret situations and can choose your side instead of right wing conservatism being the only visible option. This to me was something of a revelation, even though I know I have thought about it in the past, but the idea that just by existing and being visible, you help to provide options that can help shift the culture, that seems easier to me. Not that that's all you do, but that you're mere existence alone does something, helps.
• We got guidance from Linda Burnham on how to talk to people about structural racism - many people think of racism only as interpersonal, and we know it as structural and institutional as well, and how do we distill the 4 months of learning we've done on this into one conversation? Well, of course, it doesn't come down to one conversation, but what Linda said was that the important thing to do is to listen to people, figure out where their thinking is at, "enter their frame of mind", celebrate what's positive about it, and then MOVE IT FORWARD. Like if someone really believes in multiculturalism - then recognize that yes tolerance and diversity is needed, that their commitment to it is beautiful, and then show how their desire for racial equality requires some steps beyond the limits of what multiculturalism can achieve. Linda also referred us to john a. powell, director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University as someone who has done lots of thinking on structural racism.

We also talked a bunch about the scale of the movement we need to build - that we need to be reaching millions - much more than we can get via dooknocking. We didn't come up with "the answer" to how to do that, but one thing I think is that is where culture comes in. People talk about cultural workers - the poets, musicians, rappers, filmmakers, dancers, etc - and we need to recognize that this is one of the ways to really reach the millions, and their work is truly work and truly valuable. They/we are creating a culture of resistance and liberation that we hope will be more appealing than the current culture of domination. When it's "cool" for youth to be rapping along to Dead Prez's songs about black power or singing along with Riot Folk anthems about fighting global capitalism or reciting Alixa & Naima's words on Colombian struggles - instead of mindless songs about bling or obsessive monogamy or singing commercial jingles - that's when we will have a chance at succeeding on the scale we need to be.

Personal Transformation

So as we've moved away from the really painful histories of oppression and towards more practical sides of doing anti-racist liberationist work, it's been easier to step away from the emotional aspects. Today's session really asked us to move deep into ourselves and get in touch with our most personal fears and motivations. So I'm going to get really personal in this blog (though I'm already pushing to intellectualize it and get away from the emotions) - and I ask that if you want to read that, that you do it when you have some emotional space.

Idealized Self-Image
We did a lot of work around "idealized self-image"which is essentially the person we want people to see us as. We looked at it specifically around the theme of being a white anti-racist activist. So I was asked to describe the person I wanted everyone to think I was, and I include it here not only to expose my psyche, but to help describe the idealized self-image:

• An activist with burning passion
• A go-to resource for advice on political issues
• Someone who knows my place/role within multiracial settings/movements
• Someone who can always take criticism or being called out really constructively and never be hurt or defensive about it
  
• Someone who always calls out/critiques others in the most loving, supportive way possible

Our facilitators asked to focus on how demanding our idealized self-images are - requiring us to be awesome all-the-time, perfect, not make mistakes, etc... I know that we all say that no one is perfect, but really, sometimes it's hard to believe that people will really love you (personally or politically or ideally both) through your mistakes. As a side note (or not so side), one big transformation we need to make is creating a culture that really allows mistakes and has protocol for dealing with them loving, constructively, and supportingly. I lately feel like I've been taking a lot of risks and making a lot of mistakes which have hurt people and in turn become really painful for myself.

Fears, Doubts, and Negativity
Then we looked at the fears, doubts, and negativity inside ourselves that the idealized self image sets out to protect. For me a really serious thing is racial inferiority - that as a white person who recognizes the slant of racial supremacy over many centuries - I will never be as valuable as a person of color; that because being white is my "original sin", I am inferior to non-white people, and can only be valuable insomuch as a I contribute to the struggle for racial justice. My work is valuable, not my person. Someone in the group talked about similar feelings, and looked at how ingrained capitalism is into ourselves that we think we are only worth as much as we can produce. Yes, that feeling is really ingrained, and it's hard for me to imagine a living society where people value each other just 'cause. I know I strive for that, I long for that, and I believe a lot of time I love my friends not because of what they do, but because of who they are. But I oftentimes don't believe people will love me that way.

I also worry that I have no real place in the struggle for racial justice, or not a place that will feel good to me - and as much as I want to have something important to contribute, that I am only useful as a shuttle of resources and support to people of color who are the real activists and organizers. This is a distortion of white anti-racist analysis that says that I need to be supporting people of color led organization. One of the Catalyst staff referred to a conversation he had with a black organizer who said that he was tired of really powerful white organizers going to anti-racist trainings, getting an over-inflated sense of the negative impact of their actions on people of color, and essentially dropping out of the movement because they felt like they had no place. (this also replicates white supremacy by saying that white people's actions can make or break people of color's movements) Yes, we need to be conscientious of things, yes we need to be accountable to people of color, but we need to be doing things to be conscientious of and accountable for. I don't know if I am recreating this sentiment fully enough, it's something I'm still struggling with.

core strengths, values, and motivations
Then we were asked to look deep into ourselves with a loving lens and look at what our core strengths, values, and motivations were. This got real intense as the facilitators would ask people to step up and actually announce one of their own strengths, and then asked the rest of the participants to reflect back to them a moment when they noticed that person exhibiting that strength. For me, a lot of my motivations and values boils down to straight up love and a belief that anything is possible if we want it. That's what moves me. The love part is also a vulnerability for me because I'm real in touch with love, and crave more of it than I think I get.


Impacts
We then looked at how the idealized self-image impacted our anti-racist work and our relationship with other whites and people of color. One person brought up that she was projecting her idealized self-image so well that people believed she was all those things, got intimidated by her, and then pulled away. Another thought is that having unrealistically high expectations of ourselves then leads to others feeling that if they don't meet the same standard, they shouldn't be participating in the movement. That we often set the bar too high for ourselves or others to be able to participate.

The exercise we did at the end was joining in a circle and holding hands, then one at a time, turning to the person on your right, calling them out by name, and saying "Your leadership is needed,". Then the person on your left says that to you. It's a little hard to take seriously because the person is saying it because they're supposed to, but it's amazing how vulnerably I need to hear that from someone who I admire and believe. How do I balance believing that I am my leadership is needed and also believing that leadership by people of color is primary?