interviews
Where Will We Go From Here?
by Lauren Schandevel
April 6, 2020
This interview with Lauren Schandevel, the Macomb County Organizer for We the People - Michigan, a non- profit started in 2017 with the mission to build multiracial working class alliances across the state through community organizing, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Lauren | I came on last year in June. [Organizing] is an interesting thing to try to grapple with and understand and explain to people. So I think it's taken me some time to figure out what exactly my role is in my community. It is also due to the fact that I went back to the community, I grew up in.
frank | What does your community look like?
Macomb County is an area just North of Detroit.
It's pretty blue collar. It's sort of famous for being an Obama to Trump district. It is where the term Reagan Democrats was coined. It’s very reliant on the auto industry.
I grew up in Warren, which is the biggest city in Macomb county. Warren is in the Southern part of Macomb County, it tends to be a little poorer and a little more diverse than the rest of the County. I try to focus most of my work on that part of the County, because that is where the most people are and also where people are poorer and it's easier to organize people with their material interests in mind.
How would you explain the work of an organizer, and the outcomes you’re after?
The goals vary by region [for We The People - Michigan]. We have organizers in different parts of the state. Our West Michigan organizer is focused on a campaign to allow undocumented immigrants to have driver's licenses. While our Northern Michigan organizers are working on a lot of energy, environmental, and indigenous rights work up there.
The direction I'm moving in is to build a more cohesive sense of community here in Macomb County. It's a suburb, and it has all of the trappings of a suburb, which includes isolation – people are not trusting or talking to their neighbors. But there's that added layer of people also being poor and needing help.
I am focused on community building and political education to create a stronger sense of community and belonging. From there people can advocate for their own needs.
Mechanically that looks like having one on one meetings, determining what people are working on, connecting them to people who are doing similar work, and supporting community groups as they arise. [Also] looking for opportunities to work around issues in the community.
For example, there was a spill a few months back that was like a cocktail of hexavalent chromium, cyanide, and PFAS, it spilled onto one of our nearby highways and ended up in some of the waterways. Identifying opportunities like that to pull people in to advocacy work or organizing.
Right. It's one thing in normal circumstances, but what does it look like now? How do you organize in isolation?
Yeah, I mean that's the question.
Have you figured it out in the last 10 days or what?!
[Laughing] Yeah, I've been at it for a couple of weeks. We started working remotely a little over two weeks ago.
In Macomb County specifically, I've been pulling together contacts that I already have here. We have a call every week with someone in our Congressman’s office, one person from the county health department, and a bunch of community members. People talk about projects they're thinking about launching. There are a couple of folks who want to do a seedlings project where they're planting seeds, growing them, and giving them out to people in the community when the supply chain is disrupted, if people don't have food or can’t afford food. People will talk about what they're thinking about, what they’re working on, and solicit advice. People who are interested in doing that work with them can be connected to them.
In addition to that, We The People - Michigan, is a part of a coalition of organizations called MI COVID Community. They are making policy demands to elected officials and thinking through what advocacy looks like during this. How do we get these demands met? Those are the big things for now. I like to think about the work as separate buckets: an advocacy bucket and a mutual aid bucket.
Can you talk about those two buckets?
Mutual aid is a term that's been thrown around a lot the last couple of weeks, but I think it originated in anarchist circles. It basically is the idea of communities taking care of each other and leveraging resources within the community to help each other – but it started explicitly as an alternative to capitalism. The way that people are using it right now is neighbors helping each other, which is fine and also builds power and alternative structures. If it's something that becomes a little bit more mainstream, I think that's a good thing. But I'm not an anarchist so I wouldn't know.
For me, doing mutual aid here has been figuring out what the needs are, identifying gaps in services, and then figuring out ways to meet those needs. It's really hard to develop a volunteer network where people are going out and doing things, when people can't go out and do things.
For now, that has looked like emulating some of the things that are happening in other parts of the state. For example, people are putting out newsletters to community members, talking about what resources are available in the community, what volunteer opportunities exist, figuring out ways to build community through that first correspondence.
Other communities have set up Google Voice Numbers for people to call if they need help. And so I think more creative digital strategies will emerge and people will start really getting the hang of doing this work remotely. But it's very beginning stages.
I'm working right now to pull together a newsletter with a couple of County residents just to keep everyone informed and aware of what resources are available and volunteer opportunities. That's the mutual aid bucket, which is focused on meeting people's immediate needs.
Then there's the advocacy bucket. Focusing on how this moment is, in a way, a window of opportunity to advocate for some of the things that we've wanted for a really long time, including paid sick leave and Medicare For All. Being strategic in how we do that advocacy and tie it to this current moment is really important.
I know there's a group in Michigan called Mothering Justice, which had paid sick leave on the ballot in the last election we had, it passed, and then it was repealed during our lame duck session in the legislature. They're looking to mount that campaign again and bring that back.
Apart from the actual advocating for issues – it’s, what does this political moment mean? I think at any point in history where you have massive economic devastation, there's always a choice made between two visions of the future. Either you're going to choose potential fascism, or a more progressive left-wing vision for what our country could look like.
I think when America emerges from the pandemic, and people are in really dire economic conditions, there's going to be a lot of competing rhetoric. We are going to hear a lot of scapegoating of China and of immigrants and of Asian Americans and of whoever else. People are going to be susceptible to that. Which is why it's so important on the left, to build a proactive counter argument to that, and make the case for inclusive economic justice that points the finger at the real enemies, which are corporations and rich people and shitty politicians.
There will be a rhetorical battle when this is over, which will really determine what direction the nation swings.
It's important to be proactive about what narratives we're putting out. Because if we don't put anything out, people are going to subscribe to the thing that they hear repeatedly, which is this right wing narrative, present before COVID, that says your economic conditions are so dire because of the immigrants taking your job and the people of color who are on welfare and the countries like China who are like stealing our jobs. That sort of stuff. We are going to see a lot more scapegoating, and we have to be really mindful of that and be really aggressive and combative.
Have your goals as an organizer shifted in terms of national electoral politics?
My job has never been organizing around electoral campaigns, so my work really hasn't changed in that way. The approach I like is thinking globally and acting locally.
I do organizing here and try to build community here and build trust and build power for people to fight for the things that they need and want with the knowledge that this strategy can be applied more broadly.
It's really a case study in human behavior doing this sort of work. As I learn more and more about how, particularly working class people, who I grew up with and consider myself a part of, how we think and how we respond to certain strategies organizers use, how we respond to political education and community building activities, is important and applicable for building a larger working class movement that cuts across race and ethnicity and geographic location, and can actually build meaningful power in this country.
How can people get involved?
There's that mutual aid route people have been taking. You're seeing networks arise all over the place. Even in places where mutual aid networks didn't exist before. A lot of these groups are pretty public on social media. There have been Facebook groups that have emerged in Michigan that are specific to a region. And a lot of it is just like resource exchange. If people are thinking through more robust volunteer opportunities, like delivering food and supplies to people and figuring out how to grow food for folks you could also probably find those people through those social media platforms.
Then there's the advocacy side of things. There are a lot of campaigns mounting from this, including campaigns for rent strike, and campaigns that have doubled down on the need for universal healthcare. Because we're all working remotely, those have been pretty accessible. And a lot of folks have switched over to virtual meetings.
I know groups like Sunrise have had a series of webinars that folks can sign up for. Every night they have training online you can attend to get a better sense of how climate activism and COVID fit into each other. I know there are lots of national and local groups that have done similar things where they've been hosting public meetings and webinars and trainings for people virtually.
What is the most urgent advocacy work? Specifically in an area like yours.
The rent strike, in the way that I've heard it used, is basically advocating for a rent freeze. A lot of folks can't afford their rent anymore. I think that's probably necessary work that needs to happen here. In Macomb County, especially because the Southern part has a lot of rental properties, and a lot of evictions, and a lot of foreclosures. A lot of that could be mitigated, hopefully through a rent strike if we're very thoughtful about it, although that's not something that I'm really planning for right now.
In Macomb County in particular, we have an older population. A lot of them live alone. A lot of them aren't on social media. One thing we've been thinking through that's pretty specific to this community is how we get the word out to those people and disseminate information to them, if we can't do it virtually, and we also can’t interact with them in person. Thinking through what flyering could look like, or what safe door to door delivery could look like, and it’s something we're still grappling with. Some of the most vulnerable folks are people who aren't very well connected as it is to their neighbors.
Have any of the tactics you've been deploying right now worked better than others?
I put together a Facebook page called Metro Detroit COVID 19 Support which has probably been the most useful and popular tactic I've tried. It’s basically a place for people in Metro Detroit to offer and ask for resources. Leveraging existing relationships, and pulling people into virtual meetings together so they can cross pollinate ideas has also been really useful. The last couple of weeks have been the strategizing phase of things. And I've just now started to try things with people in my community who are also starting to try things. I don't think we'll know what is really effective for a few more weeks, until after we actually try it and evaluate it.
What’s underreported right now?
It's really important, if we're talking about what work looks like in Michigan, to also connect with some of the organizers in Detroit, which was hit really, really hard by Coronavirus, because of all of the health issues and environmental issues that existed before the virus. There are a lot of people who have been doing work around those issues for a really long time who can speak to that. Particularly folks who are doing advocacy around the water shutoffs.
In 2014, 2015 Detroit started shutting off the water of people who couldn't pay their water bills.
That was also happening in Macomb County, but nationally it was talked about in terms of it happening in Detroit because that was where it was most prevalent. At the beginning of the crisis, in early March, our governor announced a moratorium on water shutoff which was great, but it also meant that people who had had their water turned off already still needed to get it back on.
There was quite a backlog because the city had three plumbers on staff who were turning people's water back on and they just weren't moving fast enough. So folks in Detroit, like Monica Lewis Patrick from We The People of Detroit (which is different from my organization and I know it’s confusing), folks from The People's Water Board, Nayyirah Shariff from Flint Rising were basically tirelessly both pestering the governor to mandate that water be turned back on and do a statewide moratorium, and also delivering water to residents who didn't have water through their taps. That is one snapshot of myriad issues that Detroit has faced and has contributed to the influx of COVID cases there. A lot of those are environmental and public health related. I think if I were to point you in a direction of where to get a better sense of what's going on, it would be with some of those organizers and activists.
Have you found yourself asking any new questions – questions you weren’t asking 6 weeks ago?
I also have all of the very nit-pinky questions about the virus itself and how scared I should be of it and how I protect myself. I totally get that.
From the standpoint of an organizer, a couple of questions I've had and haven't really had answered because there is no answer right now is, what does this mean for my community and the nation and the world? How do we use this moment to turn things around and fight for more equitable and just policies and to fight for a better world, a world that's more prepared to deal with something like this, but also can deal with it more equitably? How do we develop a robust social safety net for our most vulnerable? How do we see the humanity in people who are poor or incarcerated or undocumented and instill that in people so that this doesn't happen? Those are all questions that are emerging for me.
Where are we going and how do we ensure it’s better than this?
It's a huge moment for compassion and empathy. But it’s also a blatant example of systemic and institutional failures. Will those two overlap politically?
Oh my God, that's a great and important question. And I hope I can do it justice in my answer. I think that people are starting to make the connection in more subtle ways, right? I am also checking Twitter and seeing people say, “we are housing folks who are homeless now, we could have done that this entire time.” Or you know, “we're providing free public transportation. We could have done that this whole time.” Realizing that a lot of these problems existed because people didn't have the political will to make solutions happen. I do think, though, that we need to be really adamant and proactive and strategic about how we're making those connections for people.
That's why I say that this is an opportunity to really start fighting for the things that we've always wanted and needed because there's clearly a story here about how our institutions failed everyone because they're stacked against poor folks and in favor of wealthy folks. But if we're not telling that story, someone else will tell a different story. Being really intentional about crafting a narrative about what went wrong during this crisis, why it went wrong, who is responsible and then applying it to some of our other fights like universal healthcare and paid sick leave. But I think especially this ties in well to something like climate change where it does impact everyone, but it impacts them unequally. Because people have access to resources that mitigate some of the effects of it.
I read something the other day saying this will be the death of celebrities. Detachment from the real world has never been so apparent.
Yes – most obvious to people is the testing disparities. People are seeing celebrities with no symptoms getting tested and then they're seeing their loved ones dying and not being able to get tests or treatments. That is a very staunch example of what that inequality looks like. And it's really affirming for me, because I was already railing against these things before this happened. And now it feels like more people are sort of flocking to my corner and I welcome it.
That's nice. It's nice to feel welcome. There is sometimes a fear of when something clicks and you're like, shit, somebody has been telling me about this for 10 years and I haven't really realized until now.
It feels less good to be right than you would think, doesn’t it?
It reminds me a lot of the 2016 election when folks were like, Oh my God, this is so fucked up. We need to do something. I think a lot of people think that Trump is like the worst thing to ever happen to America, when there were all of these issues that existed before, and precipitated the rise of Trump – he wasn't just an anomaly. I think about this moment like that. Like there are things that people have been talking about for a really long time, like the importance of a universal healthcare system, and how unequally resources are allocated in this country. And this is a very stark example of that. And it's a very dramatic, awful thing that had to happen for people to see that. It's very similar to how I think a lot of people thought about Trump's election.
interviews
An Interview with Dr. Patricia Parker
by Dr. Patricia Parker
September 27, 2018
This interview with Dr. Patricia Parker, Chair at the Department of Communication, Associate Professor of Organizational Communication Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, and founder of the Ella Baker Women's Center, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
frank: Can you give us a bit of background on yourself. How you ended up where you are now?
Dr. Parker: There are many entry points to that story, but the one I think is most relevant to the work I'm doing now is my family history. I was born in rural Arkansas into a family of 13 children. I'm the youngest of the 13. I was exposed to an older generation that was very much involved in activism. One of my oldest sisters was the first African American students to enter the local liberal arts college that was just a few miles from the segregated town in which my parents and their parents were born and raised.
By the time it was my turn to go to college, that would have been in the late '70's, my sister and seven siblings had forged that path. My oldest sister, Jurlene, and her peers and the civil rights activists at that time had forged that path. That is something that stayed with me. When I went on to get my master's and PhD degrees in communication, I was introduced to some theories including Black feminist theory and other theories about power and anti-racist work.
I was always interested in organizing processes (perhaps because I was literally born into an in-progress organization that was my family!) and that brought me to critical organizational communication as a field of study within the larger discipline of communication. That solidified my interest in thinking about organizing processes and leadership.
At the time I was getting my PhD, there was a focus in the literature on women in leadership and it was very clear that the women they were talking about were particular women—White, middle class women. My dissertation research was focused on African American women executives who had made it to the top.
I did a study with 15 women across the country who were representative of the women who had made it to the top ranks including the women in the President's Cabinet. They connected their own success, as I did, with the communities they were born into and the influence of the Civil Rights movement and the role models there. That influenced the book that I wrote about African American women executives and thinking about re-envisioning organizational leadership from the perspectives of African American women.
It was a bold thesis, but my thinking was influenced by people like Peter Senge at MIT, and others who were thinking about organizing as a process that takes complexity into account. One argument was that leaders who are able to lead complex systems themselves need to to have the capacity to “see” complexity; they need to have engaged with complexity as a frame of reference.
That set me on this course of thinking about leaders and leadership and social justice activism as intersecting with that process.
Do you feel that the personal is political?
Dr. Parker: Absolutely. That is a foundation of feminism in general, but in particular after I finished my first book and I had done that historical study of thinking about the traditions of Black women's activism throughout history, I was thinking about precisely what you're asking. How are young women - how are contemporary girls able to make those connections in terms of looking at their personal context and being able to connect that to the larger structural conditions that might be shaping their lives. That's what my current work is and I think that it's absolutely crucial.
Doing that historical analysis was when I got introduced to Ella Baker, the human rights and civil rights activist whose work spanned 50 years starting in the 1930's. She's most well-known for being the advisor and really the catalyst that made SNCC happen, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee that's iconic from the '60's in terms of youth activism.
That is, we need to find ways to connect with the knowledge of people who are already living with and through particular articulations of oppressive conditions. Interventions become possible where there is an analysis of how capitalism and racism, and white supremacy, and so forth, are intersecting through people's bodies, in their everyday lives. Ms. Baker said, "If you give people light they will find a way." She also said that, "Strong people don't need strong leaders." Her meaning there was, people are already living through the impacts of capitalism and some of these other oppressions and that as experts, people who are doing scholar activism who have a particular analysis, our job is to work alongside the people who are already fighting it because they have a particular angle or vision. They have a particular knowledge that can be brought to bear in terms of social change initiatives.
My work with girls of color right now is founded on Ms. Baker's principles of what I call “catalytic leadership,” the topic of my next book due out in 2020 by University of California Press. Her approach is often referred to as group-centered leadership that is highly participative, but it is also grounded in a tenacious belief in community power. In Ms. Baker’s philosophy, organizing for social justice means catalyzing community power. My current work is founded on the staunch belief that girls are in the know. They know what's happening in their schools. They see the disparities in school suspensions and access to opportunities. They know what's happening in their communities because they're living it. Through the Ella Baker Women’s Center for Leadership and Community Activism, my students and I work with girls and their allies in communities to create space for girls to see their own power and to do some of the amazing things that they're already doing, but also support them with resources and mentoring.
The current cohort of leaders developed a project to focus on intergenerational storytelling. They planned and organized a “Girl Power Summit.” They decided that they wanted to have an all- women space for their mothers, their aunts, their grandmothers, their sisters, anybody who's interested in girl power, to come together to talk about their expereinces. To prepare for the summit, we did some of our critical pedagogy work, and the girls worked with arts activist Kayhan Irani to facilitate the gathering of about 30 girls and women in thinking about and telling our stories. They were amazing. These beautiful women, these grandmothers and aunts who talked about when they were teenagers and young women and going through their careers and some of the things that they faced, and this resonated with the stories that the girls were telling in terms of what they face in their classrooms, and some of the sexism that they face, or not being seen. It was just a really powerful convening of intergenerational storytelling. The girls decided that they wanted to expand on the project, so they are preparing to collect stories from women and girls in their neighborhood to do a more extensive action research project.
The personal does matter and it provides a route toward this kind of contextual understanding. This is actually one of the main themes of the book I'm working on right now — mapping these personal routes toward collective consciousness about social justice activism.
I think it's really astute to recognize that the people who you are trying to help are probably capable of helping themselves given resources — especially if you believe in this idea of power within ones own body and mind.
What do you think the younger generation should be focusing on? How can they take the lessons of somebody like Ella Baker and use them in 2018?
Dr. Parker: You know, it's a great question. It's the question of the day, right, because we have such courageous activism happening right now. The Black Lives Matter movement. I was just in conversation with the southern regional director for Black Lives Matter, a young Black woman. I don't know how many people know the three Black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, who created #BlackLivesMatter as a response to anti-Black racism. DeRay McKesson is sort of the face of Black Lives Matter right now, which is another story we can talk about that sort of harkens back to Ms. Baker and Dr. King. By many historical accounts, Ms. Baker was just as influential on the Civil Rights movement as Dr. King. She worked more with the grassroots, he more so at the grass tops. That's an oversimplification and I recognize the great work that Dr. King did, but it sort of gets to this idea of the context of social movements and the erasure of Black women’s labor. There are some things that don't seem to change.
Have you heard of misogynoir?
No.
Dr. Parker: When Leslie Jones, the wonderful comedienne from Saturday Night Live, was viciously attacked on social media in 2016 a lot of celebrities came out to support her and among them was Katy Perry, who used the term misogynoir to explain what was happening. It's misogyny but against black women's bodies in particular. The woman who originally coined the term back in 2008, Moya Bailey, is a queer Black feminist scholar who wanted to describe the particular form of racialized sexism that Black women experience, especially in online media platforms, but also in everyday life. Katy Perry’s reference sort of took it to this other level of visibility. All that to say, there are some things, like misogynoir, that seem to get reinvented in different contexts across space and time.
Black women figure prominently in keeping that narrative alive because it started in the time of enslavement in terms of having to have this violence against black women's bodies in order to justify chattel slavery.
With the advent of social media, there is more access... tools for people to connect.
I think that there are some foundational activist strategies that are grounded in anti-racist work that has happened, that are always emerging from indigenous communities. I'm thinking about the history of black women's activism. And indigenous women all over the world. These movements all over the world, really I think connect on a certain level to a fundamental strategy which is to have an analysis of structural power.
We have to start with analysis of how power is inserting itself into our everyday lives. For me, that has to do with these different dominating structures of power. But having that analysis, then we have to have the tactics of educating people about how that's happening in their communities.
When a girl starts to wonder, just asking a question, "Why is it in my school, Black kids are being sent to detention more than White kids?" I mean, it's just a simple question. When she is able to do that kind of research and then starts to ask those questions, that's a structural analysis. So having that structural analysis is important. And then it's a matter of asking what is the point of change? I think this is where we get some sort of divergence because I know that in the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been so much emphasis on direct action which is bold and courageous and in your face. I'm gonna shut it down, right? How does that strategy work over time in terms of change? It takes such an emotional toll to continue to confront these persistent restructuring of state violence.
On one level this gets to the importance of self care in activist work; but it is also about how are the tactics of direct action fitting in with the larger strategy for change? To me, that's the question that all of us have to engage.
This is where I think we have to come to bear, in terms of trying to determine what are the strategies. Where's the point of change? Is it in these direct action tactics, sort of the social media campaigns and so forth, or is there a larger political strategy? I think it's a complex combination of all of these, starting with a structural analysis and then educating people to empower people to be able to see that analysis and then mobilizing people according to particular strategies, whether it's campaigns, voting, direct action. So that's my take.
How do you sustain engagement and energy over time?
Dr. Parker: Well, that's a great question because it speaks to what I was just talking about in terms of what is the overall strategy. I am very clear about what my intervention is in the general project of social justice and social movements.
I think it's the foundation of our democracy — and I'm telling you that I have never in the ten years that I've been doing this work, I have never encountered a girl who wasn't excited about this project. Who wasn't excited about wow, I have a space where someone is going to see me. Someone is going to listen to what I think and what I think is connected to something bigger in the world. But that's the project. That is so important because so much has happened on a structural level that gives the opposite message.
Nothing against Anthony Robbins, but this is not about finding the giant within. This is about understanding your place in history and in a democracy. It's personal routes toward collective consciousness. I can't repeat that too many times because it is really recognizing how we're connected in this project of social justice and equity.
That to me is how we keep it alive. In that regard, it keeps hope alive. So that's part one. Part two is that it's highly contextual. Part of the project is to reclaim a set of commitments to our democracy. This is where my communication background fuels my work. I understand communication as helping us to really facilitate those conversations about, what are our agreements in this moment, and maybe in this moment in history, but just in terms of thinking about who we are as a country, for example.
As people say, "Let's stay woke." Let's understand what's going on. That's the structural analysis. Then I will fight to stay connected to you in this conversation—especially if we disagree. That's what's in it for me is to know what our commitments are and if I know that you're committed to the same thing that I'm committed to ... and to me those commitments have to do with our values as a democracy. What do we stand for as a free republic? I think we go to that level of commitment. It's also about decolonizing. There are commitments related to dismantling the structures of white supremacy embedded in our institutions, our laws, our policies. So it's a particular kind of commitment. Being tenacious about staying connected with all the people who are in that conversation. People who disagree, who might be radically opposed to each other but find productive ways to keep the conversation going forward.
Do you think there’s a danger now of people feeling like they're participating because it's so easy to like something or share something or post about something? The illusion of activism.
Dr. Parker: Again, I think it has to be highly contextual. With any social action, it's going to be within a particular context. I think people have to be aware of, what is a social media campaign doing in that moment?
You should do the work of making yourself aware of all the complexities that are creating a particular moment. I think education is the key. Having that education about a particular issue. For Ms. Baker, it was always about tilting the power toward the people who are most vulnerable. Not acting unless you are able to get the context from the people who are being impacted by that particular moment.
Her approach to social change was about teaching and learning. So in other words, people should be able to educate themselves and others in terms of how social media might be moving something forward. They should also be teaching and learning about traditional grassroots organizing. There is so much more to learn in terms of actually engaging with people on issues. Being on the ground with people and learning some of the approaches to social movements in terms of doing a direct action but understanding what you're learning about, how that is teaching you to build a particular muscle in social change.