Risk It Anyway

A report from Baltimore

I spoke to several combined classes of Master of Social Work students at the University of Maryland-Baltimore Campus last night. Of more than 50 students in the room, many were preparing to work in, or already working in, organizing and advocacy roles in the Baltimore area. They’re ready to go out and take action and rearrange their cities. Good for them. We need them to be well-prepared.

I gave my 40-minute lecture, and then the students brought lots of questions. We talked a lot about the work my neighbors and I did in organizing the West Side Community Land Trust. They were thinking about repair and redress and about how to get things right in their own context. A few highlights from our back-and-forth went something like this, as best I can remember, though I know as I type the first draft of this that I’m editing my answers as I go:

Q: How have you reconciled yourself being a white minister, a representative of institutions that have done so much harm, working in the spaces you work in? How do you avoid the “white savior” mentality?

A: I haven’t reckoned with it all. I’ll never reckon with it all. You just have to commit to learning, failing, and being trustworthy enough that people will tell you when you’re fouling up. 

Q: I’m interested in a project that would tear down an elevated freeway and create a community land trust that can rebuild housing and help move people back in whose families have been displaced, but it seems like that will be really hard to do in a couple of years.

A: You need ten times that and you still won’t get it all done.

Q: How do you prevent an organization’s board members or staff from making decisions that harm the community they want to serve, or that benefit themselves rather than the people in the neighborhood?

A: You don’t. It happens. You can try to inoculate the organization against that by building cultures of care and accountability. Some organizations do all that and still wind up failing their people.

Q: How do you prepare people you are organizing with to bounce back from defeat?

A: You start small and build your organizing muscles. And you never forget that sometimes you lose, and no matter how much you prepared, things may fall apart.

There were lots more questions from many perspectives, but the theme of those above came through the most strongly. The students were thinking about failure and how to avoid it. Perhaps another way of saying that is that they were thinking about the perfect project or campaign or service.

There’s a lot at stake when we’re organizing for another world. That’s why it is important not to try to be perfect. You can’t do it anyway. The attempt is a distraction or a strategy for self-protection or minimizing risk. But everything is already insanely risky. You’re going to hurt some people along the way. And someone is going to wound you, probably someone you really love. And the world, or at least those who run most of it, aren’t particularly interested in change. The odds are long, the failures will come all too frequently. Be smart. Be prepared. Then go ahead and risk it anyway. 

Greg’s Travel Agency: Some people like restaurants, some like shows, still others prefer museums and monuments. When you travel with me, we do two things. One is self-guided walking tours, like the one I followed around DC’s Shaw neighborhood yesterday morning. That neighborhood was where lots of things came together–an historic Black neighborhood, several immigrant neighborhoods, a popular shopping district along 7th St. NW. Several factors led to its decline. An Urban Renewal project contributed, as did fires during the 1968 riots following the assassination of Dr. King. So did the following decades of disinvestment. You can see the history commingling together alongside all the new development and the convention center by following the Shaw Heritage Trail.

 The other arrangement with my travel agency is a visit to the local Catholic Worker house. I knocked on the door of Dorothy Day Catholic Worker unannounced and was received with great warmth for nearly an hour. The community there felt like home. I observed that the decor of my own house might be called “Catholic Worker Chic.”

Worker houses are covered in street art, inside and out.

They also distribute the Catholic Worker newspaper. Here’s a re-print of a Peter Maurin “Easy Essay” from a recent issue

.One Last Note: One of the groundbreaking drummers of the swing era was Baltimore native Chick Webb. Here’s Webb with Ella Fitzgerald.

Tomorrow, a report from Baltimore’s “Highway to Nowhere.”