| Here's an example of what I believe works best in promoting change and building diverse coalitions:
Jane and I put together a panel on organizing the roots using technology. Our composition:
Jane (WF, moderator)
Me (GHM)
Randall Winston of Project Agape (BM)
Justin Krebs of Living Liberally (WM)
James Rucker of Color of Change (BM)
Christy Hardin Smith (WF).
I also presented supplemental material on using text messaging to organize latino youth to vote, from Maria Teresa Peterson of VotoLatino. She unfortunately could not make it, but I interviewed her in advance and she gave me permission to share some of her lessons learned from her organization's efforts.
The funny thing is, we had only spoken with Randall on the phone before meeting him on the day of the panel, and we had no idea he was African American.
So, we took a panel that looked at different models of organizing that involve various technologies, from blogs and social networking to traditional email outreach to text messaging to creating offline social communities through an online enabled movement, all targeting different progressive communities (netroots, African Americans, latinos).
But our focus was on creating power through technology and organizing, across different constituencies, and it included diversity in both the communities addressed and in panel composition, though "diversity" itself was not the primary focus.
To me, this is how best to incorporate diversity, not as some meta-discussion about "why aren't we more diverse?," but in terms of using the expertise of people creating power in different ways to compare best practices and seek to discover ways to collaborate more, building coalitions.
In my experience, extended meta-discussions about "why aren't we more diverse?" always, without exception, devolve into cycles of recrimination, blame, victimhood, forced, unspontaneous efforts by those cast in the role of the majority to demonstrate their ritual sensitivity. . . eventually making it impossible to have an authentic conversation in that context. This tends then to detract from movement building, rather than support it. The process sucks all the life from momentum and action.
The people I've heard talking most about diversity lately have nothing but the best intentions, but most the discussion seems to regard diversity as the goal, rather than as a means through which to achieve progressive change for all. Furthermore, I agree with Jane that much of the discussion about diversity in the blogosphere presumes some kind of networked, exclusionary coordination that fundamentally ignores the way the blogosphere works and how traffic and influence online actually grow. I believe these are all big mistakes.
If you coordinate for progressive change and ideology, and organize accordingly, with various communities focused on action, then minority empowerment and economic justice have to result.
On the other hand, if you focus on "diversity" as a goal, it does not magically happen that change in societal power structures follows. You still have to organize and strategize to make that happen. So by getting coordinated on action first, with progressive ideology primary, thereby leading you to include various constituencies to combine power, you're far more effective.
The primary counterargument, I think, to my argument comes in the case of people who are inexperienced with people outside of their own micro-cultures of origin.
For those people, more exposure to other cultures is most helpful, but then again, while we never stop learning about other cultures, we do learn at some point how to learn about other cultures, and this meta-learning process is tranferrable. All of the well known progressive bloggers I know are in this latter condition, rather than the former.
So, what do people think? |
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