interviews
When Voting Fails
by Dr. Martha Jones
July 9, 2020
This interview with Dr. Martha Jones, a Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Hi! I’m curious to know what’s on your mind right now.
Dr. Martha Jones | I live in Baltimore, Maryland. It's where I teach and where I live. When the spring 2020 protests began, for a moment my city was of interest to the national media. As uprising began to break out in other places across the country, the country recalled that we had had a major uprising here in 2015 after the killing of Freddie Gray. And still, in 2020 national gaze quickly turned away when Baltimore didn't comport, somehow, with expectations. The demonstrations here didn't look like Minneapolis. They didn't look like Louisville. They didn't look like LA or New York.
Media is essential to amplifying and projecting the voices of the disenfranchised. At the same time, the media is moved by the sensational.
There is something untenable for me about the view that we must rise to the sensational in order to be heard.
It's not just that we have to raise our voices. We have to raise them, and that spectacle must be sensational before journalists will deeply partner and become embedded in the scene.
What did Baltimore teach itself in the time between Freddie Gray in 2015 and George Floyd in 2020?
It's important to say I didn't live here in 2015, so I'm learning in real-time about my city.
The city had not only its own sense of outrage but its own vision for how to be. This comes in part from the roles played by seasoned community activists, folks who were part of the 2015 uprising who are still here and have remained deeply committed. In 2020, they have helped to shape an extraordinary series of demonstrations here in Baltimore.
In Baltimore, we were also getting ready to elect a new mayor in June, though with a limited capacity to get to the polls. Maryland had committed to mail-in voting without much debate or objection. But there were troubles with getting the ballots into people's hands and getting the right ballots into people's hands, so in-person polling places had to be opened up. People, in the midst of protests, in the midst of a pandemic, showed up here in Baltimore to cast their ballots. That evidenced another side of the civic culture here. People were tuned in to the fact that there was an election, and people came out for that.
Participating in democracy need not be an either-or proposition. We can simultaneously be in the streets, engaged in direct protest, a democratic tradition in this country, and we can show up to the polls.
That is what I saw happening in Baltimore, and it happened in the midst of a pandemic that encouraged us to stay home and to do nothing at all. Of course, that is complicated by important public health concerns. But I think an insistence that democracy is a participatory culture and not simply a set of principles or a structure, is an important part of what I play out here in real-time.
How does civil unrest and protest lend itself to more civic participation?
The story of the 1960s is instructive for me. It was simultaneously the scene of voting rights and the scene of uprisings. The two facets of that time may not often be told together. But they were not wholly antithetical to one another at all. Immediately in the wake of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the number of African American voters grew importantly and significantly. It is that context that we move into an era of uprisings in cities like Detroit and Los Angeles and New York. Part of what can be learned by voting, are the limits of the ballot. Yes, political power is embodied in casting a ballot and in electing a candidate. At the same time, harnessing political power requires more than showing up at the polls. Demonstrations are another way of being heard and influencing law and policy. I am an historian of Black politics in 19th century Baltimore, which may seem like a very long time ago. Still, that history includes important lessons in how people created their own power in an era, time, and place when they could not vote at all.
I'm interested in what we do when voting fails us, which it almost certainly will.
On this, I draw from the lessons of African American women in history. African American women have been engaged with politics for a long time, and for most of that time, they could not vote. They organized, they lobbied, they used men as surrogates. And when by a state constitution, or the 19th Amendment, or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they received legally sanctioned political power, they were ready. When African American women got the vote, they were ready to use it as fully formed political actors because they had been constructing their own power for a very long time.
I want to talk more about the prominence of Black women through the history of protest and civil unrest in America.
One of the moments most well known to people during the civil rights movement is the march in Selma, Alabama. Among the best remembered of those marchers, is a young man who is today among our most venerated members of Congress, John Lewis. Lewis was among the scores who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the name of winning voting rights, only to be met with brutal police violence.
Behind the scenes was a Black woman named Diane Nash. She cut her political teeth organizing sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee as a student at Fisk University. She played a critical role in the work of the Freedom Rides in 1961 by sending young people from Tennessee further South to replenish the ranks of the Riders after many had been brutally attacked. It was Diane Nash who, long before Martin King and the SCLC assented to the strategy, came to Selma to wage a voting rights campaign.
Nash was an organizer, planner, and orchestrator, but we don’t see her photo as folks make that fateful march across the bridge. In those long moments, she was back in Selma making sure that there would be medics available when people are brutalized. To me, this is an example of a woman who taught us how leadership takes many forms. She taught that political leadership must embrace many forms of action. Nash never took the stage as a charismatic, upfront character. Still, she was someone who, when we look closely at the scenes in Selma, becomes critical to that story.
Contrast Nash with someone like Mississippi’s Fannie Lou Hamer. The two were peers but worked very differently. Hamer not only understood, she deliberately looked to exploit the cameras to propel her image, and her message, and project efforts to win voting rights in her home state and transform Democratic Party politics nationally. The two women worked by way of different philosophies and differing styles. They adopted divergent tactics even. Taking the work of Nash and Hamer as two parts of a whole during the Modern Civil Rights Movement helps us think in expansive ways about how political power can be won and how it can be wielded.
Looking back is one style more effective than the other?
It's difficult to say, because they are parts of a whole. The thing that knits them together, in some sense, is violence. Nash is deeply committed to nonviolent direct action, the sit-in, the march – but she still sees violence as essential. There's an often-quoted moment when she speaks with federal officials from Washington who tell her to desist from sending young people to join the freedom riders: “You know, we understand that we are walking into a brutal scene. The young people had made their wills the night before they left.” Hamer also knew violence and had a defining moment early in her career when she was stopped, detained, jailed, brutally beaten and sexually assaulted by police after attempting to register to vote.
The women I write about are all, each in their own way, wrestling with the violence that is woven into American politics. They know that violence will be directed unashamedly at their very bodies.
That core insight, one that sits at the foundation of Black women’s political consciousness, extends back to confrontations between enslaved women and their enslavers. In our own moment, the tragic killing of Breonna Taylor is the latest example of how Black women's bodies remain the targets of a brutal politics of violence. This thread runs through Black women's political philosophy and their practice, across time.
African American women have always been plagued by a specific form of violence: sexual violence. So many of the Black woman activists who I write about eventually explain their confrontations with either sexual violence or the threat of sexual violence. This not only informs their tactics, but sets the goals for political power must accomplish. When Tarana Burke gave us the Me Too movement in the 21st century, she was echoing a long-standing critique. Black women aim to use their power to end the scourge of sexual violence, a story that has an origin in the history of slavery but doesn't end with emancipation. It continues until this day.
Thank you for your time, I appreciate having this conversation.
One of the dangers of a conversation like this is to leave the impression either that nothing changes or nothing can change. I struggle with that. History is a tough endeavor in that regard. It is possible to look across two centuries and recognize what hasn't changed.
And still, I am inspired. Black women have been the conscience of this nation since its inception. They have studied the lay of the land. They have thought very hard about our founding ideals. They have also set the bar when it comes to what liberty, equality, and dignity mean. They have shared their ideas, pointing us where the bar is. Listen and Black women will remind you of the ideals that we all should aspire to, individually and collectively. The women I write about say no racism, and no sexism. Period. They say that in 1820 and have waited ever since for us to catch up as a nation. I've watched Breonna Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer, speak, and I think I recognize something familiar in that act. She is an African American woman, representing her deceased daughter, and at the same time speaking to all of us about the violence which, as a nation, we must not, cannot, and should not allow.
There is nothing enviable about this position in body politic. And it's not enough. Still, voices that speak fundamental truths, that hold up indelible principles, that insist upon equality and dignity for all are absolutely essential. Someone has to set the bar high in a nation that has been built upon countless indignities and injustices.
Someone has to remind us that ideals animate this country, not interests, convenience, or pragmatism.
Someone has to do that. Black women took up that mantle in the earliest days of this republic and they continue to bear that burden even today, in the 21st century.
interviews
How Change Happens
by Duncan Green
September 25, 2018
Duncan Green is Senior Strategic Adviser at Oxfam GB and author of How Change Happens and From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States can Change the World. He also authors the From Poverty to Power blog.
frank: I want to talk to you about what you've written about a lot, which is how to be an effective activist.
Duncan: Malcolm Gladwell wrote some really interesting stuff off the back of the Arab Spring a few years ago. He was saying, look, the people who really bring about change have deep bonds of trust. They go into scary situations together and face them. Those bonds tend to be built face-to-face, having gone to school with people or having been in organizations with people. More than the quite thin bond you create on Instagram. One thing is that you need to build up that personal network of people you trust, and who you're willing to work with and occasionally take risks with. And that means getting out of the house.
frank: Once you establish that sort of personal connection, how do you scale from there?
Duncan: The book talks a lot about the idea of power. How do you understand power? I find it really helpful when I look at that sort of process that you just described to think, "well, there's a process of power within." People feeling effective, thinking that they have rights, a light bulb moment's come on in the heads of people who are often quite downtrodden, when they suddenly stand up and say,
Where they're going to scale is to unify, to find people who have similar views to yours, or are in similar situations to yours, and learn to work with them, which is not easy. But what you get by working together is irreplaceable.
frank: Do you think there's a way to cross over from NGO work to policy and government?
Duncan: A couple of points on that. The book argues that activism is not just about being a protestor on the streets. It includes that, but it's actually anybody who's trying to bring about change in their context, in the institution they work in, in the situation they find themselves in. That's because I started to find repeat patterns in terms of how people bring about change.
If you're trying to change the world through a private company, through an NGO, through a mass organization, you're actually looking at similar rhythms, similar tactics, you're asking yourself the same questions about, "Who are my allies? Who are my opponents? What tactics might help strengthen the allies, weaken the opponents?" It's the same.
frank: You mention activists need to become reflectivists. Can you explain that term?
Duncan: This is part autobiography [laughter]. I started off as an angry activist. Lots of things to be angry about. When I was starting, it was what was going on in Central America, it was the U.S. funding a really nasty war in Nicaragua. A lot of the activism was about protest! It was about saying, "this is wrong." And, in a way, that's cathartic, and it might make a difference, but I never really thought about how this protest was likely or unlikely to bring about any kind of change. It was much more of an expression of outrage. Over time, I got more impatient.
When you're trying to do more insider influencing, you tend to work in different ways. It's not all about numbers on the street. It's about contacts, and language, and ways of doing things. People try and change the system from the inside, and from the outside.
Outsiders will be numbers on the street. Protest movements in civil society is a big part of the work I've looked at. I've worked with a lot of those organizations, I've been in those organizations. Then there's an insider track of people who are trying to get meetings with ministers, or trying to get meetings with officials, trying to come up with the kind of evidence that might persuade them doing pieces of research. There's an uneasy relationship between the insiders and the outsiders. If you're an insider, if you're trying to get a company to worry more about the labor standards in its supply chain, in the factories that produce its goods, it's great to have protests. It's great to have outsiders putting pressure on the company, so the company talks to you.
My rule of thumb is that insiders, if they're sensible, love outsiders. Outsiders have a much more ambivalent attitude to insiders, because if you're an outsider, and you're doing a protest, and you want to keep things clear, you don't want to have all these people messing up, coming up with compromises, making things halfway okay. That really messes with your campaign. The outsiders are sometimes more hostile to insiders. Insiders are usually quite happy about the outsiders. It's kind of asymmetric.
frank: Do you think it's a mistake for outsiders to be hostile towards insiders?
Duncan: It depends what your purpose is. If your purpose is to bring about change, I would say yes it is a mistake, because that combination of insider and outsider is ultimately very effective. If your actual purpose is to mobilize as many people, and make them really angry and get them to join your party, or whatever it is you're trying to do, then it does mess things up. So it's a sign, really, of what's actually motivating people.
There is also a political difference, sometimes, which is that the outsiders are kind of maximalists. They want really transformational, big change. They want to get rid of capitalism. If you've got an insider who is making capitalism a bit nicer, that actually makes it harder to get a big change. So, there are political reasons for the differences, as well as motivational ones.
frank: Are there any movements at the moment that you think are really successful, that are doing a good job at not only provoking more thought, but also enacting real change?
Duncan: There's loads. But, I'll talk about one which is really close to home, which is an organization in London, in the U.K. called Citizen's U.K. I love it because it's really different from Oxfam, and the kind of NGOs that were. It is a community-based organization based on the same principles that Obama applied when he was learning his trade in Chicago all those years ago. It's got the same kind of intellectual gurus. And, they work. They basically go around to poor communities working in particular with faith institutions (mosques, churches, synagogues), and with schools. And, they ask people what their problems are. You know, "What's pissing you off?"
But, the reason I know about this is partly because my son works for them, so...
frank: Amazing!
Duncan: Just full disclosure there. He's set up something in one part of London, and they were working with local groups to clean up parks, and to get changes in planning, and to get social housing, and all sorts of things. I love that approach because it's so different from online activism, and it respects the institutions that poor people trust, which is faith organizations and things that matter to them as families, like schools, and starts from there, and I think that's really interesting.
frank: Community based that goes macro from the micro, it seems.
Would you expand more on the kinds of power you define in your work?
Duncan: When people talk about power, they often mean the formal political power who is actually in the government, or who has got the guns and runs the army. That leads you to think that power is a bad thing. I think far too many people go with that line that power corrupts...Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
In order to actually change anything, you need power. That's why the book argues that we need to be a bit more nuanced and thoughtful about power. One way of thinking about it is there is formal power. The people who are sitting in the government making decisions. Then, there's hidden power, which is old boy networks, the backrooms, the lobbyists, the people you don't see who sort of seem to influence events. Then there's invisible power, which is actually the power in people's heads, it's close to that "power within" idea. Why do some people think that they're entitled to run the country, and, loads of us, think, "Oh, no, what do we know?" And that kind of thing.
You need to confront those less obvious forms of power if you're actually going to create change. There's lots of different ways of looking at power, but overall I've found, say to people, "Look, power is like this force field, which permeates society. And, most processes of change involve a change in that force field whereby some people get more power, some people get less." The nature of power shifts, so if you're going to become serious about change, you have to make power visible and then try and act upon it.
I think there's lots of different tools for making power visible, and that invisible-hidden-visible is one way.
frank: We're at a particular moment now where more and more people feel an urge towards activism. How do you push people who have no history of activism to participate beyond a march, beyond a like...?
Duncan: There's really interesting studies over centuries about social movements. How do these movements come? They suddenly spike, and then they disappear again. We've got one of those at the moment. We've got the #MeToo, Black Lives Matter. There's a lot of these big, upsurging movements. All of them, when you look at them, they're made up of little grains. They're not amorphous blobs, they've got structure.
Those grains are actually more long-lasting groups of people. It's faith groups, churches, mosques. It's trade unions, it's sports clubs, all sorts of things! Suddenly, they all come together and they make a big noise, and you think, "Oh where did that come from?" When it settles down again, they go back to their grains.
I think one answer to your question is...I am getting to an answer to your question...one answer to your question is, look at your own life and see where are you in a grain? Where are you in a sports club, or a cultural group? Where have you got social capital? Because that might be a place where you should become active.
If you're a parent to your kids at school, and if you're in a faith organization, if you're a believer in some religion, whatever it is, any of those could become big, whereby you're not alone. I'd say my advice would be think about doing that, not just doing the online petition.
frank: Is there anything at the moment you feel really urgent about? Anything you think people need to be taking into consideration but aren't?
Duncan: It comes back to that point you picked up earlier, we need to be activists and reflectivists. I think one of the aspects of reflection, which I think we need to get much better at, is spotting where things are working in our environment.
If you're concerned about the environment, getting better at seeing where people are doing the right thing for the environment, and then trying to ask, "Why?" There's a whole field of work called positive deviance, which looks at where things are unexpectedly good. I think especially now, we should be consciously looking for these positive outliers, these unexpectedly good results on any given issue, and seeing what we can learn from those.
The reason I like that is because it shows some respect for the people and systems who generate solutions. They're not always waiting for the great, white savior to come in and solve it. It might well be my next book, this positive deviance aspect, because I think it's got fantastic potential as a way of reading about change.