ap•a•thy
1. absence or suppression of passion, emotion, or excitement.
2. lack of interest in or concern for things that others find moving or exciting. (dictionary.com)
Privileged people that aren't from a particular marginalized community, and even active people who are from that community often complain that most people are "apathetic." They just don't care. You can't "get" them to do anything.
I happen to know a lot about the research on schools, and the school context seems to provide a useful example of how this "apathy" thinking emerges.
If you wander around an inner-city school and ask teachers and staff why children aren't doing well, they will often tell you that "these parents just don't care." Parents don't come to parent-teacher meetings, they don't read enough to their kids, they don't help enough with homework, etc., etc. Rarely will you hear anyone able to explain why this might be the case. Rarely will anyone tell you about parents whose experience in schools themselves was horrible, for whom school is not a welcoming place. Rarely will they tell you that the only contact these parents generally get from the school is when their kid is "bad." Rarely will they explain that a lot of these parents are facing enormous barriers themselves, from multiple jobs, to long bus commutes, to a lack of sick days, to (less often than they think) substance abuse issues. Most of them don't know about the extensive research that shows that poor parents care more about the education of their children than privileged parents. And they don't realize how little real control these parents feel they have in a world controlled by middle-class professionals who they hope will help their kids on issues and challenges that they feel like they can't do much about themselves.
Judgments about the failure of poor communities to engage in collective action can arise in similar ways (although as I've pointed out in earlier posts, most people don't even notice that collective action is lacking in the first place). It's easier to blame people for not acting to change their circumstances in the way you would like them to than to understand why they choose, often for quite good reasons, not to act in this way.
Just as in schools, I am convinced that the main problem isn't apathy. The problem isn't that enough people don't care about their futures or the future of their community. The problem is that oppressed people often feel hopeless. The options for individual volunteering or service that seem available don't seem likely to "do" very much. They don't really know much about alternatives. And most wouldn't know how to get collective efforts started even if they thought much about it.
Obama has been hammered for his comments about people's turn to religion because they are bitter. Bitter is the wrong word, as he has acknowledged (although, as he has also stressed, people are bitter). Instead, for many people, religion offers hope in a world that often seems hopeless. The problem, from my limited perspective (as I noted here ), is that the hope and, yes, joy of the religion of impoverished people so often entails a withdrawal from the seemingly irremediable brokenness of the secular world.
Saul Alinsky and the Idea of "Apathy"
Let me first admit that Alinsky did, in fact, talk a lot about apathy, and about how people were apathetic, etc. But I think one of the best things he said about why people don't act is this:
The issue that is not clear to organizers, missionaries, educators, or any outsider, is simply that if people feel they don't have the power to change a bad situation, then they do not think about it. Why start figuring out how you are going to spend a million dollars-unless you want to engage in fantasy.
Once people are organized so that they have the power to make changes, then, when confronted with questions of change, they begin to think and ask questions. . . . It is when people have a genuine opportunity to act and to change conditions that they begin to think their problems through--then they show their competence, raise the right questions, seek professional counsel and look for the answers. Then you begin to realize that believing in people is not just a romantic myth. (Rules for Radicals, pp. 105-6)
In other words, you don't get people thinking about change by asking them to think or by urging them to act. You get them to think about change by showing them a concrete way that they can actually make change happen.
A sense of power precedes real thought and engagement.
We generally reverse this process. Privileged or engaged people like us ask unengaged people to think seriously about stuff that seems like a fantasy to them, and then we are surprised when they've got better stuff to do. And then they seem apathetic to us-they seem like they don't care. (This tendency to promote extended analytical thought prior to action as opposed to a more organic and embodied process of engagement, experimentation, and evaluation, by the way, is a core characteristic of middle-class vs. more working-class ways of being, as I started to discuss here.)
They care. They just don't see any point about talking about how shitty things are when there isn't anything much they can do about it. And they have got a lot of other stuff on their minds, things they need to do, etc. . . .
Of course, some people may be apathetic. But you don't need everybody. You don't even need most people.
An organizer once said to me that if you could effectively organize 1% of the people in a city, you could basically make anything you wanted happen there. That makes sense to me. There are about 500,000 people in Milwaukee. If you could get 5,000 of them seriously engaged in a focused and long-term way about a specific challenge, it's hard to see how local politicians and others could stand against them.
An Example: Engaging High School Students in Social Action
I learned this lesson about power preceding action to my own chagrin when I started working with a local inner-city charter high school. They were trying to engage their students in community change projects, and I offered to help as part of a research effort. I got a bunch of graduate students together to act as "coaches" to small groups of youth. The idea was that the youth would choose their own topic areas, and we would try to engage them in a process to focus down on a specific social change project. This would involve a lot of research and thinking about how the world worked, how different problems and issues were related to each other, etc. We basically used the model that most "youth organizers" use, which is adapted from the model adult organizers use that I've discussed earlier.
It was largely a disaster. Nearly all the groups sat around for week after week going around and around about the (too) general topic (teen pregnancy, drug abuse, foster care, etc.) that they had started with and increasingly felt disempowered about the whole thing. The youth could often present quite sophisticated analyses of their communities and of the challenges they faced, but these dialogues never seemed to really "go" anywhere concrete. Early on, for example, coaches engaged students in an activity where the cause and effect relationships between different aspects of their topic area were laid out on a big piece of paper. After which we (the coaches and the kids) all stood back and felt totally overwhelmed by the complexity and immensity of the whole thing.
Why didn't this process work? A key issue was that, unlike most youth organizing where a core group of interested and already engaged students self-select participation, these groups were required by the school curriculum. All students had to participate. And these students didn't necessarily arrive in these groups feeling particularly empowered. (See this powerpoint for a more complete early draft analysis of this effort)
The next year we took an entirely different approach, informed by the Alinsky quote, above. In the first year we hadn't wanted to tell students what to do-that seemed like it would defeat the whole purpose. The second year we started every group with a "doable" project. It wasn't necessarily earth shaking, but it was something that the youth could actually work on from the first moment at the same time. Our hope was that they would get engaged in the activity and that this would get them excited about thinking more broadly about the challenges of social change, imagining other things they could do and taking ownership.
Year two wasn't perfect either, by any means, but the general approach seemed right.
The year one kids weren't apathetic. They did care, and often got engaged for a little while, at least, in discussions about their communities. But the fact was that during the first year they (and, after a while, we) felt hopeless. The point wasn't that we couldn't do anything, but that the way we framed the "problems," it didn't seem like we could do anything that would really matter. The whole activity often seemed like an exercise in futility. So why bother?
Education, Active Recruitment, and Lower Barriers to Entry
I've talked before about changing the ecology of organizing in a city. One of key ways to increase collective action would be to stop waiting for organizing groups to appear by themselves and actively seek out people and groups to create new organizations. (The national multi-issue umbrella groups do this--I'll talk about them later--but only to create a single organization in each city.) Doing this would require a range of intertwined efforts. We'd need a broad education plan to go out into the community so that more people know what organizing is and how it can work. We'd need spaces where people could gather. We'd need easily accessible funding for start-up and some sense of where more long-term funding would come from. We'd need local trainers available to help groups develop over time. And we'd need more visible examples of effective organizing that they could model themselves after. Overall we need to lower the barriers to the creation of new organizing groups.
In other words, one way or another, people need to see that it is actually possible to achieve meaningful change before we can expect them to even start thinking seriously about actually acting themselves.
(Note: I want to thank my colleague Larry Marx for the "ecology" metaphor). |
