Steven Covey, author of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People talks about our “Emotional Bank Accounts”. Despite the fact that it’s weird to talk about banking in this context,  I think the concept of making investments in our relationships – actions that demonstrate trust, understanding and support – is a good one. He takes the metaphor further to suggest that when we violate trust or make a mistake, it’s akin to making a “withdrawal” against the investments that we’ve already made. I have often thought of this metaphor when I think about building trust with movement colleagues.

The more that I work with this metaphor the more I become aware that this grounding is only useful when it is broadly understood and reciprocal. There is much that gets in the way of us treating each other with deep respect, including ego, competition, lack of self-awareness, and oppressive conditioning.

At times the lack of respect that I experience make the work almost unbearable. I also have said and done things that I’ve regretted, made lots of mistakes and treated people with less respect than they deserved. I am in no way saying that I do not exhibit problematic behaviors.

I am also working on improving my practice.

I think the thing that I’ve been most harmed by is that people that I’ve invested in heavily – that I’ve given jobs, provided opportunities, supported, mentored, helped, not over the course of months, but over the course of years, have been able to turn on me as a result of a real or perceived “withdrawal” that feels so asymmetrical – especially in light of our history of multiple, sustained investments of trust. That kind of betrayal really pains me. There has to be a way to understand, overcome and avoid it outside of simply not trusting anyone ever again, or being made to feel ashamed for being taken advantage of – like I’m the one at fault for “having it happen to me”. Also seems important to note here that every single person who has ever behaved this way toward me was a man.

Relatedly, I’ve recently been reflecting on the things that are getting increasingly difficult for me in the course of doing this work. There are a lot of narratives out there about how we are supposed to expect that movement work is a hard and never-ending slog through shit. However, I am very much interested in improving our practice and not having the work produce a lot of collateral damage. If the work that we are doing serves to re-traumatize ourselves and others, how exactly are we getting free? We are already situated within an economic, political and social system that prevents us from being our fullest selves. We have no choice but to transform it. However as we do that, the ends don’t actually justify the means when the means are bullshit. We all have to make sacrifices and compromises, and our hands aren’t clean. We can’t stand outside the system to do our work. However, as we make the road by walking, we have to clear the path through our actions, and act – create systems, structures and processes – in ways that liberate instead of oppressing, for ourselves and others.

As I’ve been doing these reflections, here are some places that feel like they are becoming untenable for me in terms of the emotional labor that I’m doing on top of the intellectual and physical labor of movement work.  It’s not any one of these that’s untenable, it’s the fact that sometimes it feels like I am doing all of these things, all of the time. No single one of these is a deal-breaker, but taken together, and when performing these tasks of emotional labor actually crowds out my ability to be well myself, and do the things that I really love, like strategy, base building, and study, they become unbearable.

• Constantly mediating conflict between people for the good of the work
• Absorbing people’s emotional outbursts, when targeted mistakenly at me or others; being expected to de-escalate and mend the situation even when it is re-traumatizing
• Anticipating and troubleshooting problems and providing extra support proactively in order to avoid re-traumatizing other people – ie trying to solve problems before they happen
• Accepting people being impatient, judgmental, negative or demanding in ways that are very challenging to deal with because of where they are in their leadership development process
• Cleaning up after other people’s bad behavior, playing a reassuring or ameliorating role to calm people’s feelings because of someone’s unaware or intentional bad actions
• Being someone that people come to when they have problems, being someone that is expected to fix people’s problems and make them feel better, rather than them fixing their problem on their own, or offering to help fix my problems
• Constantly being expected to absorb negativity, people unawarely not balancing their critiques, complaints and problems with affirmation and appreciation
• Making issues personal instead of understanding them as part of the process, organizational, and co-created (ie acknowledging their own role)
• Being the object of the assumption that I am able to do a tremendous amount of work without strain, stress or pain
• My ideas being repeated as if they were the original ideas of others who then get credit and recognition for them
• Despite fighting for people, helping them and defending them, being treated as if I am not worthy of the same, being turned on quickly for the convenience and benefit of others
• Having a position of non-conflict and nonviolent communication used as an excuse to be an “easy target” or scapegoat as needed because I won’t make the kind of scene that others will
• Perceiving my work and my ability as a threat rather than an asset because of ego and behaving in ways that lack integrity as a result
• Working with people who are afraid of conflict, therefore if conflict arises, quickly exit the scenario rather than take a principled stand for the sake of no one “being mad at them”; can’t distinguish between reasonable or justified accountability and unprincipled attacks
• To not have the role of oppression acknowledged in situations, to have people around me not acknowledge power when being treated badly by someone that society imbues as more deserving of respect and dignity than I am. To have the oppressive component of the mistreatment ignored or minimized, to exhibit a complete unwillingness to assist the person doing the behavior to achieve greater awareness.
• Being a constant cheerleader, having to maintain hope and continue to be inspirational during moments when others are lost or feel hopeless. Having to maintain discipline around hope and a clarity of vision that carries other people through difficult times.
• People who use their privilege to step on you, using your emotional and intellectual labor for their own benefit and using it to maneuver themselves into positions of power or influence without giving credit or assistance to help better your situation.
• Constantly getting the unaware and oppressive feedback that I’m aggressive, threatening and intimidating simply as a reaction to my natural way of speaking and being.
• Not being allowed to express anger or frustration at the above treatment, expected to always appear to be okay with whatever is happening even when it is unacceptable, receiving reactions of anger and frustration for my reactions because they are seen as a distraction and an inconvenience when none was given for what caused them.

“Building a Diverse Working Class Movement to Transform America”

From the description of the epidsode: What is to be done? How can I get involved? Those are questions that a lot of people are asking now that Donald Trump is about to become president of the United States. Today, I speak to Nijmie Dzurinko, a Black woman who grew up poor in the deindustrialized Western Pennsylvania steel town of Monessen. Nijmie is one of the smartest and most experienced organizers we know. In the past, she has been Executive Director and organizer with the Philadelphia Student Union, was a co-founder of the Media Mobilizing Project, and is a co-founder and currently co-coordinator of the group Put People First! PA.

A year ago today I spent much of the day on planes coming back from 10 glorious days with the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil. I attended their National Congress and spent a few days visiting MST settlements with a delegation put together by the Friends of the MST.

The MST is one of the largest social movements in the world, with over a million members. The movement has won land for over 350,000 families, and has a three part program: reclamation of land, collective production and transformation of society. The movement celebrated its 30th anniversary during the time I was there, and the National Congress functioned as a massive birthday party, agricultural fair, political education school, and a time of strategy, visioning, and building community.

The trip I took one year ago could not have come at a better time for me on my personal/political journey. I am someone who has found myself driven to collective action through my own early life experiences in the context of my family, and an early visceral sense that there were larger forces and structures at play on the people in my household, which were invisible to me at the time. My experiences within organizing communities in Philadelphia and throughout the country have provided both beautiful and extremely painful experiences – sometimes feeling more like the culture of a dysfunctional family than a force for good and liberation.

Over the last few years in particular, I’ve been driven to evaluate and transform myself, and my approach to and practice of organizing, after asking myself the question “If we (loosely defined as those working for social justice) were in charge tomorrow, what would that be like?” and not liking the answers that come to mind.

Over the past 30-40 years, the time period in which I have grown up, have arisen three (to me, inter-related) phenomena: 1) the ascendance of neo-liberalism, 2) the emergence of the non-profit industrial complex and 3) the primacy of organizing based on identity categories. Although we don’t often look at connections between these three developments, it seems more than co-incidence that all three have occurred together. Delving deeply into the implications of this is a subject for another time.

In working to transform my own practice, I have committed to increasing myself awareness through my own healing work. There is a lot of trauma in our people, and the saying “hurt people hurt people” really is true. There is no way to move forward when we are simply acting out trauma onto each other under the guise of organizing.

There are a number of lessons that I drew from Brazil that I’ve committed to incorporating into my own practice:

Collective action should bring us back to life. It must activate us as whole people. What we do must be connected to a long term vision and strategy. It must develop us into better people – not just people who know the right things to say. We must live by a new set of values, not just speak them. We can use the immediate to secure the future – if we prioritize political education. Our work is not sustainable if we organize as individuals – we must organize as families and communities. If we can’t presume to lead our society, and not just people who look like us, then the system that we are working to transform has already won.

For me over the past year this has looked like:

• Prioritizing 1 on 1 time with leaders
• Building an organizational culture where values and principles are a focus internally as well as externally
• Creating a separation between my paid work and my organizing work
• Seeing individual expressions of oppression as symptoms, not causes
• Focusing on my own healing work and sharing it in my organizing community

Here’s to a 2015 filled with humanization of our movements.

I was raised in Monessen, PA.  My maternal grandparents and I lived in a one-floor house on Reeves Avenue, almost at the top of a hill.  There are some huge hills out that way.  My family’s move up the hill from “down-street” (closer to the mills spewing out black smoke, poorer, and lower elevation) was a symbol of slight upward mobility that was afforded by my grandfathers’ lifelong employment at Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel.  My grandmother’s two brothers also worked in the mill (she even did a stint there during World War II when there was a shortage of male workers), and one of her brothers died in the mill, crushed by a molten hot beam.When I was 10 years old, the steel mill closed for good.  When I was 11 my uncle moved us away.  In the 2010 census the population of Monessen was 7,720, down from a high of 20,257 in 1940. Per capita income is now $16,627. My memories of Monessen as a place are fond.  I spent a lot of time outside, we grew our own vegetables, and when I tested into 4^th grade at the age of 7 after being homeschooled by my grandmother, I wasn’t the only kid of color or of mixed heritage, not by a long shot.

Over two decades after I left, I reconnected with friends from elementary school on social media.  Many of them are still in Monessen or in the surrounding towns of Donora and Charleroi.  I’ll always love and care about my first friends because I grew up with them.  I notice their positive qualities and I see their shortcomings and challenges through a lens of loyalty, as is customary among friends.  Their way of seeing the world shows up in my news feed.  There are lots of family photos, struggles with health, relationship drama.  Some of them – not all – are angry about recent waves of immigration.  Some don’t like Obamacare much.  Some aren’t in favor of raising the wage for fast food workers to $15 an hour.

Surprisingly perhaps to you, there’s a lot of resonance between their views and the views of people on my block of row houses in the Cobbs Creek section of West Philly (with the possible exception of a positive, as opposed to negative disposition to Obamacare), in a city of 1.5 million people, with a per capita income of $16,509.  When there are fewer and fewer means to survive, and we don’t have answers that get to the roots of why or a way forward (instead – powerlessness, isolation, scapegoating and false solutions) we tend to become less – not more – magnanimous.   We’re influenced to believe that if we have something it’s because we outdid someone else, and whatever anyone else “gets”, whether that’s a pension, a raise, healthcare, or some form of assistance, it means less for us.   And because we don’t have any guaranteed means to survive or the power to mold the world to our benefit, as our true opponents do, that worldview has a certain logic to it.

I don’t feel the need to apologize for the people that I grew up with any more than the people who live on my block.  To do so would be insulting and dehumanizing.  At the end of the day, my people out in Monessen and Southwest PA are struggling, in a way that is similar to my people on the block.  They are not calling the shots, making laws, creating policy, buying candidates, granting tax breaks, or ruthlessly exploiting our very real and justified fears of survival.

That’s why I’m involved in a movement to create more connections between people who both the politicians and the pundits seem to want to see at odds.  To disrupt the two-sides-of-the-same-coin ideology that makes people in Philadelphia feel fear and loathing for people in Monessen in the same way that people in Monessen are made to feel fear and loathing, instead of closeness and friendship, for us.

I’m a fan of Game of Thrones.  Before the opening credits are over, we get a short lesson in each of the “sigils” of the major houses – the symbols of the people who are vying for power.   Well beneath those who are vying for power are “bannermen” – vassals who owe their service and allegiance to the feudal lords. They get their name because as they ride into battle they carry the banner of their lords – they are, in essence owned and controlled by the interests of this banner.  They do not show up as real actors in the story, but extras who merely serve a function for the ongoing quest for power between different factions of elites.

There are women and men throughout our state of 13 million people that have a capital D or capital R next to their name on the voter rolls.  That designation is the basic thing about their lives that matters to the powers that be.  It’s not all that matters to me.

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.  We must love each other and protect each other.  We have nothing to lose but our chains.” – Assata Shakur