Dallas Activists One Step Closer to Confederate Memorial Removal!

Last night, the Dallas City Council voted 4-11 to take down the Confederate War Memorial in Pioneer Park. Dallas anti-racist activists deserve tremendous credit for making this vote happen. For years now, they’ve been unstinting in their calls for the monument’s removal—employing methods of protest from the traditional to the wildly creative. Thank you for all your hard work and tireless effort.

This isn’t the end, of course. The Dallas Landmark Commission will now take up the issue, and that decision may be “appealed to the Dallas Plan Commission since the monument and the location in the Pioneer Cemetery are both historic,” according to a local NBC affiliate. “The issue would then once again return to the City Council for a final decision, but Wednesday’s vote is a very strong indication of what that final decision will be.”

The monument, which has stood since 1896, features a Confederate soldier atop a lofty 60-foot pedestal and ringed by statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Albert Johnston, and Jefferson Davis. Erected by the Dallas chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, it’s located in downtown Dallas, just across the street from City Hall. The statue is one of the Make It Right Project’s 10 Most Unwanted statues.

Congratulations, again, to Dallas’s activists, whose sustained outcry over the last three years has led to the removal in September 2017 of the statue of Robert E. Lee at Lee Park, the renaming of the park to Oak Lawn Park, and the 2018 changing of multiple school names that formerly honored Confederates.

Texans: Call Your Reps to Stop These Bills!

Dear Texans,

Right now, there are three bills moving through the Texas General Assembly that are designed to override community consensus, disenfranchise local citizens and rewrite history:

    • SB226 is a “Heritage Law,” like the Virginia legislation that continues to protect Charlottesville’s Confederate statues even after a rash of racist violence. Sen. Pat Fallon’s (R-30) bill would prohibit colleges from removing monuments or renaming facilities, public school districts from changing their name, and every county and municipality from removing any monument older than a few decades. The bill comes after the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, and the recent renaming of several schools named for Confederates, in Dallas.
    • HB583: Section 3C of Rep. James White’s (R-19) bill would prevent the removal or alteration of all Confederate monuments and memorials—including street and building names, portraits, statues, etc. Anyone charged with removing a monument would face a fine of up to $1,000 and “confinement in jail for a term of not less than three days and not more than one year.”
    • SJR2 would amend the Texas state constitution so that the legislature would have to approve all interpretive content at the Alamo and any state-owned history museum. While this isn’t technically a matter of removing Confederate monuments, it’s disturbing and outrageous that Sen. Bob Hall (R-2) is attempting to hand museum curatorial duties to a bunch of politicians, an idea radically incompatible with accuracy about our racial history.

If these proposed laws pass, efforts to remove monuments to the Confederacy and white supremacy will be halted—which, of course, is the entire point. They are intended to take away the power of local voters and jurisdictions to decide for themselves whether they want to pay homage to those who fought to defend black slavery, oppression and servitude. For all those reasons, a similar law in Alabama was recently ruled unconstitutional by a judge.

Please call your legislators and ask them to oppose SB226, HB583 (at least as long as it has section 3C in it) and SJR2.

For more information on these bills, visit the Texas Legislature website, which allows visitors to review all pending state legislation and its exact status in the legislative process. To find your local legislator and relevant contact information, visit fyi.capitol.texas.gov.

AND WHILE WE HAVE YOU HERE…On January 25, the State Preservation Board held a hearing that allowed 90 days of public comment on where the Confederate plaque removed from the Capitol rotunda should go. Please reach out to the board and tell them 1) not to reinstall the plaque, 2) not to install the plaque somewhere else where someone might think that it’s historically accurate and 3) to use this occasion to hold educational events about slavery, secession, and the “Lost Cause” myth. Email [email protected] OR send snail mail to P.O. Box 13286, Austin, Texas 78711.

Don’t forget to join De-Confederate Austin on Facebook and follow the group on Twitter at @DeConfederate.

Attend the Take ’Em Down Everywhere Conference!

As part of the international movement to remove symbols of, and tangible tributes to, white supremacy, you are officially invited to the Second Annual International Take ’Em Down Organizer’s conference the weekend of March 22-24 in Jacksonville, Florida. Over the last six months, the Make It Right Project has had the honor of working with folks across the country and world who are dedicated to dismantling white supremacy and reckoning with its ongoing legacy in every form, including its most visible manifestation—monuments glorifying systems of racist oppression and their defenders. We hope that all of you can join us in Jacksonville at this critical convening.

This year’s Take ’Em Down Everywhere conference “will be the second of its kind designed to commemorate, celebrate and strategically align Take ’Em Down efforts.” Last year’s conference took place in New Orleans and was an outgrowth of the tremendous work done by Take ’Em Down NOLA, who were key in spearheading this incarnation of the movement. “The conference will be targeted toward organizers from around the country and world who have been engaged in Take ’Em Down movements in their respective communities.” Please also note that Saturday will be open to the public, with a 3:00 p.m. protest action in Confederate Park to promote Take ’Em Down’s effort to remove all symbols to white supremacy.

Register for the conference here. (Please RSVP as soon as possible, whether you’d like to present or just attend. Please note there is a registration fee of $35.)

And if you are part of a network of folks who are dedicated to fighting white supremacy and removing symbols of white power, PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD. The conference will ideally include attendees from “every city or community with a monument or symbol movement afoot (and even those just getting started or planning on it).”

If you have questions or need to discuss anything, please reach out to organizers at (904) 524-1669.

For more information, including Take ’Em Down Everywhere’s mission and goals, visit TakeEmDownEverywhere.org.

Online Voting Revolution Coming to 2020 for Dems—Starting in Iowa, Biggest Changes to Nomination Process in 50 Years

Special Note:

This January, Voting Booth produced a highly important series of reported articles by Steven Rosenfeld about the possibility of the biggest changes in half a century to the Democratic presidential nomination process, starting in Iowa. Given where our country is at, and the huge stakes of the 2020 election, I cannot more strongly recommend you read this work and think about the implications for who the next presidential nominee will be.

—Jan Frel, Executive Director of the Independent Media Institute

Online Voting Revolution Coming to 2020 for Democrats—Starting in Iowa, Biggest Changes to Nomination Process in 50 Years

by Steven Rosenfeld

Iowa’s Democratic Party is leaning toward offering party members the option of participating in their 2020 presidential caucuses via internet and telephone balloting. However, recent experiences of Republican state parties elsewhere with online voting suggest that Iowa faces formidable challenges to make this work in 2020.

I’ve reported on these developments in a series of articles for the Independent Media Institute’s Voting Booth project, underscoring the uphill effort that must be mounted by Iowa’s Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee if 2020’s opening presidential nominating contest is not to be marred by frustrated participants.

By mid-February, the Iowa party is expected to issue its blueprint to allow registered Democrats who are not physically present at the state’s 1,679 caucus sites to remotely participate. That plan, which will be used to seek bids from voting technology firms to create and implement, comes in response to the Democratic National Committee’s 2020 Delegate Selection Rules. (Unlike primaries, which are run by the government, party caucuses are privately managed affairs—hence the reliance on contractors.)

Iowa’s party has been looking at three broad options: using a mix of online- and telephone-based voting; mail-in ballots; and a proxy system where a person who is physically present can take pledges from others and caucus on their behalf. The party’s executive director, Kevin Geiken, has that said he favors the first approach, what he’s loosely called “tele-caucusing.” However, the party’s executives have yet to formally decide what path to pursue. Still, online and telephone voting has the inside track for one reason: it offers the closest approximation to in-person caucusing.

Against this backdrop, the Independent Media Institute has examined the experiences in other states where parties have used online voting for caucuses. In many instances, a mix of differing human and technical factors has made the process more challenging than not, and, in some cases, prevented any online voting from occurring. The situations that did not work out generally were larger-scale events—statewide or presidential contests—not smaller events or pilot projects that were more easily managed.

Some of the human factors that undermined online caucusing include: a lack of familiarity among the voters using it; some participants or managers not following training protocols such as downloading apps in advance; and suspicious or paranoid reactions when snafus surfaced, given participants’ emotional ties to candidates.

Some of the technical factors that impeded online caucusing included: participants who didn’t download apps triggering eleventh-hour traffic jams at app stores; participants not being able to sign onto apps due to bandwidth issues; or, once signed in, participants not being able to finish user authentication in time for caucusing; and having one contractor’s system fail due to conflict with some aspect of another contractor’s technology.

These factors could be seen in Utah’s GOP caucuses in 2016 and 2018.

In 2016, the state GOP switched from primaries to caucuses—and introduced online voting. The party worked with an internationally respected voting technology firm to handle the balloting. But following the Republican National Committee, it used Eventbrite, an event-planning app, to handle voter registration. That app could not handle all of the real-time demands, including non-party members who wanted to participate. A high-ranking state election official, who watched from the sidelines, estimated that 10,000 people were kept from caucusing online. Meanwhile, his office and county election officers were deluged with phone calls for help. The party and its app did not plan for customer-service needs.

In 2018, the Utah GOP tried a different vendor, one using smartphones as ballot-marking devices. When party members arrived at caucus sites, many had not downloaded the app. When many tried to do so, they couldn’t get it from the app stores—which were not set up for the surge. Those who did get the app faced identity authentication delays, which often could not be resolved before the caucus began. The GOP’s caucuses then used backup paper ballots, some unimpressed reviews noted at the Apple store.

Outside of the U.S. in the province of Ontario, Canada, municipalities use a mix of online and telephone voting for local elections. This past October, one voting technology firm managing online voting in 50 municipalities discovered its underlying telecom service was not providing enough bandwidth to handle the voting data. The municipalities were forced to extend their 2018 election by a day, Toronto newspapers reported.

Most Democrats interviewed were not aware of these examples from Utah and Ontario.

To be fair, there have been successful recent online caucuses—such as in Arizona in 2016. But importantly, these caucuses took place in a handful of locations and did not involve large numbers of participants. For example, the state Republican convention that sent delegates to the Republican National Convention was held in a locale where 1,200 party members attended. The online system, developed by a Canadian firm, was web-based—not an app. It could be accessed via participants’ own phones and kiosks in the room. Throughout the hall, teams helped anybody struggling with the process.

What Iowa may do in 2020 is of a different scale and process. The state has 1,679 precincts that hold caucuses. The event is a series of successive votes as less popular candidates are disqualified. The party envisions people who are not physically present sending in their choices for each round of voting via digital devices or older push-button telephones. That voting data has to be tabulated and combined with the room’s results. There must be an evidence trail to accommodate ties, disputes and recounts.

To build this system and have it seamlessly work is akin to conducting a symphony where all the musicians are in sync and the audience follows every note. However, elections, especially high-stakes contests, are rarely that tidy. That’s why the Canadian firm that helped Arizona conducts its GOP caucus—and last fall saw a competitor (an American company!) fail by not ensuring there was sufficient bandwidth for its online system—told the Canadian government that it would not yet recommend online voting for high-stakes elections. Even if the technology exists, which they say is the case, the public needs to get familiar and comfortable with voting online. Typically, that is more easily done in an ongoing series of lower-profile and lower-stakes elections. Local elections also have lessened cybersecurity risks than federal races, they said.

Where does this leave Iowa’s Democratic Party as it looks toward 2020? There may be a handful of vendors willing to customize and deploy the online technical infrastructure. But it must set up this system, test it, and train its precinct captains over a period of months, not years. It must anticipate the public’s quirks and unfamiliarity with a new voting process and have a major customer operation ready to help. (The party also is seeking to offer same-day registration to any eligible voter at caucus sites, another innovation to be implemented in 2020.)

All of these elements, as complex as they are, set the table for the event. They come before the caucus voting commences, where, doubtless, due to the size of the presidential field and passion of campaigners, there will be contested votes and recounts.

Can all this and more be done between now and February 3, 2020? Theoretically, yes, voting technologists reply. Should it be done, or at least introduced, at one of America’s most high-profile and high-stakes political events? That’s a different question.

Currently, the party in Iowa and DNC in Washington are looking to offer online options for 2020’s caucuses. In the coming weeks and months, both Iowa and the DNC will decide how to proceed. Curiously, both have had mixed past experiences with online voting tools.

In 2016 in Iowa, despite training, some precincts’ captains did not prepare for the caucus by downloading a Microsoft app intended to help the party compile statewide results. That caused a scramble. Later that night, some fingertips entered the wrong vote totals—for example, a 66 instead of a 6. On the other hand, the Iowa party has used an online voting option to help a small number of overseas military members participate.

At the DNC’s February 2017 meeting to elect the national party chairman, the national party set up an online voting system that had to be abandoned—even though there had been practice runs. Nearly two years later in December 2018, the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee issued its 2020 rules, telling caucus states to provide a remote participation option. Now it’s up to Iowa’s party to design how it can be done.

Make It Right Project Supports Jacksonville Activists Marching Against Confederate Monuments

This past weekend, for the third consecutive year, hundreds of protesters gathered in Jacksonville, Florida, as part of Women’s March: 2019. The event route took demonstrators from Hemming Park to the Supervisor of Elections Office. Among those organizations offering information and resources to the folks who came out were members of the Jacksonville Progressive Coalition (JPC) and Take ’Em Down Jacksonville (aka Take ’Em Down Jax)—established to “remove monuments, symbols, and names that honor Confederate leaders, white supremacists, and slave owners from all public spaces in Jacksonville, Florida.”

The Make It Right Project collaborated with JPC and Take ’Em Down Jax to produce a pamphlet that offers historical truth in response to frequently repeated neo-Confederate lies. That brochure was particularly relevant since the march kicked off from Hemming Park, home to the most prominent Confederate monument in the city. (It can be seen in the background of the first photo, below.) Currently, the Make It Right Project is working in collaboration with JPC, Take ’Em Down Jax and other progressive local groups on a campaign that will target for removal Jacksonville’s Monument to the Women of the Confederacy, which was erected in 1915.

Below are some of the awesome photos of activists, organizers and other protesters who took part in Jacksonville’s Women’s March this year. As you can see, the Make It Right Project’s pamphlets also made cameo appearances.

UNC Wasting Unnecessary Millions on Racist Monument

For months now, UNC leaders have publicly wrung their hands over next steps for the Confederate monument known as “Silent Sam,” and suggested that only costly remedies will serve. But new correspondence suggests administrators have been sitting on a solution—one that’s both time- and cost-efficient—since the days just after the Confederate statue came down. I wrote about the scandal in an article for the Daily Beast, which you can also read below. Big thanks to Heather Redding, and happy holidays.

—Kali Holloway, director of the Make It Right Project

Why Is UNC-Chapel Hill Spending $5 Million to Protect a Racist Statue?

By Kali Holloway

On the night of Monday, August 20, anti-racist protesters toppled the monument to the Confederacy known as “Silent Sam” on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). A week and a half later, school officials announced they planned to resurrect the racist marker.

Finally, earlier this month, the university’s board and Chancellor Carol Folt outlined their vision for relocating the statue. “Silent Sam” would be housed in a brand-new building that would cost the university $5.3 million to build and require $800,000 annually in upkeep.

But the university’s Board of Governors rejected that proposal, citing the steep price tag. They directed administrators to come up with a less expensive strategy. UNC officials reportedly have until March 15 to develop a new proposal for Silent Sam’s placement.

As it turns out, UNC administrators have been ignoring an option that wouldn’t cost the school a single penny: returning the statue to the group that erected it originally—and requested its return months ago.

An email reviewed by the Daily Beast and reported on there for the first time shows that two days after the August toppling of “Silent Sam,” the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC)—the group that put up the marker back in 1913—asked that the felled Confederate monument be returned to them. The letter has come to light as a result of a FOIA request filed by anti-racist activist and Hillsborough Progressives Taking Action organizer Heather Redding.

“I, as a representative of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, request that the Boy Soldier, referred to as Silent Sam, be returned to the United Daughters of the Confederacy,” wrote Peggy Johnson, then-president of the UDC’s North Carolina Division, to UNC Board of Trustees Chair Haywood D. Cochrane Jr. “We are willing to take possession of both the base and sculpture…He no longer belongs on the campus of UNC Chapel Hill.”

Johnson’s exact plans for the statue were not disclosed. FOIA documents show no indication that Cochrane responded to her email.

Despite the UDC’s offer, officials at UNC-Chapel Hill have insisted the monument must be re-erected on campus to comply with a North Carolina law that protects markers that glorify the Confederate army. That legislation was passed by state GOP lawmakers in 2015 as a bulwark against attempts to remove Confederate iconography following the massacre of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, and a successful effort to remove the name of a Confederate soldier and KKK member from a UNC dormitory.

At the 1913 dedication ceremony for “Silent Sam,” UNC honorary degree holder and invited speaker Julian Carr explicitly praised the UDC’s newly erected monument for its celebration of racist terror and white supremacy. In addition to thanking the Confederate soldiers who formed the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction, “sav[ing] the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South,” Carr also bragged about having “horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds” near the site of the statue.

The UDC’s offer to take Silent Sam back is a rare example of the group’s willingness to have its racist monuments be removed. (Curiously, correspondence sent a day later to the UNC Board of Governors by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, another neo-Confederate heritage group, demands the statue be returned to its pedestal on behalf of both groups.) In numerous cases, as jurisdictions have announced plans to remove or relocate Confederate markers, the UDC has filed lawsuits to ensure that those monuments remain standing.

A UDC suit against San Antonio lawmakers who in 2017 removed a Texas Confederate statue is still winding its way through the courts; in Franklin, Tennessee, a local UDC chapter threatened to sue town officials who plan to erect black historical markers near a UDC Confederate statue. The group, which in 1926 erected a North Carolina monument to honor the Ku Klux Klan, is responsible for the majority of Confederate markers across the country and far beyond the boundaries of the former Confederacy, including in sites such as Seattle, Washington and Brooklyn, New York.

The Durham-based Herald-Sun notes that UNC’s insistence on reinstalling the “Silent Sam” Confederate monument is likely less about following the letter of the law than it is intended to keep Republican legislators, who wield power over school administrators, happy. “They appoint UNC’s governing bodies,” the paper points out in an opinion piece, “and have championed voter suppression, racially based gerrymandering of political districts, and the privatization of public education, going so far as to legally create all white charter school districts for wealthy white communities, in addition to maintaining the ‘Silent Sam’ statue.”

That probably also accounts for UNC leaders’ longstanding inaction related to Silent Sam, which has been a target of protest for more than half a century. A 1965 student letter to the campus newspaper noted Silent Sam was erected “to associate a fictitious ‘honor’ with the darkest blot on American history—the fight of southern racists to keep the Negro peoples in a position of debased subservience.”

Days after the 1968 murder of Martin Luther King Jr., black UNC students protested Silent Sam by defacing the statue with paint. In recent years, faculty from UNC’s Departments of Art, Geography, and Communications and School of Law have written open letters asking that the statue be removed, students have held numerous peaceful demonstrations at the statue, and local anti-racist activists have filed petitions and made various other legal efforts to bring the statue down.

The university responded by assigning plainclothes police officers to infiltrate student activist circles and spy on their actions, and leaked emails revealed a UNC Board of Trustees member had described protesting students as “entitled wimps.” As UNC investigated its own students and generally did little else to address the Silent Sam issue, neo-Confederates and other white supremacists rallied at the site and issued racist online threats against student activists. Those groups have been a consistent presence on campus since the statue was taken down, proving Silent Sam is a threat to public safety, particularly for black and other students of color.

In response to the university’s promise to re-erect the racist symbol, teaching assistants had threatened a grade strike, but have relented for the time being, promising to revisit the issue in the spring semester. Other critics of the plan pointed out that the funds for the new Silent Sam building could be used to update buildings that have seen better days, to improve student services, or to help with financial aid packages.

An op-ed in UNC’s student newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, noted that Latinx student organizations had been repeatedly told over years that UNC school couldn’t provide meeting space, yet the university seemed to have no problem coming up with millions to construct a building for Silent Sam. “It seems UNC is more willing to spend money on a racist relic of the past than students who attend this school,” wrote the paper’s Editorial Board.

What’s more, eight historically black fraternities and sororities are housed near the proposed Silent Sam space. UNC, which spent nearly $400,000 last year on security for Silent Sam, shells out staggering amounts of money to keep a racist monument safe, but can’t be bothered to ensure its POC students aren’t traumatized by an ode to white power and anti-black racist violence.

This article was originally published on the Daily Beast.

Kali Holloway is the director of Make It Right, a new national campaign to take down Confederate monuments and tell the truth about history. Her writing has appeared in Salon, The Guardian, TIME, AlterNet, Truthdig, Huffington Post, The National Memo, Jezebel, Raw Story and numerous other outlets.

 

Article Image: “Silent” by Don McCullough, CC BY 2.0, Flickr

Voting Booth Special Report: The Future of Vote Count-Verifying Technologies

Voting Booth senior writing fellow Steven Rosenfeld’s latest article looks at election protection technology.

Why Election Officials Are Pinning Their Hopes on Different Vote Count-Verifying Technologies

But will states and counties check results based on estimates or accounting?

By Steven Rosenfeld

December 17, 2018

In early December, the county officials running Florida’s elections unanimously endorsed a new way to recount ballots and more precisely verify votes before winners are certified.

The Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections wanted to avoid complications seen in November’s multiple statewide recounts. They are urging their legislature to sanction a process pioneered in a half-dozen of its 67 counties. That auditing technique involves using a second independent system to rescan all of the paper ballots to double-check the initial count using powerful software that analyzes all of the ink marks. That accounting-based process also creates a library of ballots with digital images of every ballot card and vote, should manual examination of problematic ballots be needed.

Yet a few days later at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Audit Summit, this emerging approach in the specialized world of making vote counting more accurate and trustable was not part of any presentation. Instead, state election directors, county officials and technicians, top academics in election science and law, technologists and activists were shown a competing approach with differing goals and procedures.

…

Read More

Make It Right Supports Anti-Racist Protesters in Raleigh, North Carolina

Late last week, Smash Racism Raleigh held a rally to call for the removal of Confederate monuments currently on the grounds of the North Carolina state house. The Make It Right (MIR) Project supported the coalition—which includes members of North Carolina State University’s chapter of Young Democratic Socialists of America and other local anti-racist groups—with design help and protest signage. The group was also prepared for a handful of white nationalist counterprotesters who showed up, at least one of whom tried to make trouble, but whom the coalition refused to engage.

In 2017, on the heels of the violence in Charlottesville, North Carolina’s Democratic Governor Roy Cooper filed an official request with the state historical commission to move the Confederate monuments to the Bentonville Battlefield State Historic Site. One year later, the body voted 10-1 to not to relocate the statues, but to instead add historical context about slavery. At the time, MIR Director Kali Holloway criticized the committee for choosing “moral ambivalence” over reckoning with historical truths.

Photos from last week’s protest in Raleigh, the first of many to come, are included below.

Victory in Charles Town

The Make It Right (MIR) Project congratulates the anti-racist West Virginia activists whose tireless and dedicated protest brought down a Confederate plaque from the Jefferson County Courthouse. MIR has been honored to support and highlight their activism in recent months, and today we’re ecstatic to applaud their success.

The campaign to take down the Charles Town Confederate plaque began a little over a year ago, when six women—Linda Ballard, Janet Baylor, Sylvia Gregory, Gloria Lindsey, Verdeana Lindsey and Brenda McCray—penned a letter to local Commissioners asking that the marker be removed “without fanfare.” That missive was met with unexpectedly aggressive pushback by defenders of the plaque and other neo-Confederates, who went so far as to accuse the women of representing a “radical minority… creating harmful division and discord among our people and threatening to destroy our country.” Not long after they launched the fight to take down the plaque, members of West Virginia’s Women’s March, including captains Susan Pipes and Sara Thomsen, joined the effort.

Among the most notable facts about the Jefferson County Confederate plaque is the date of its placement—the local chapter of United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) put up the marker in 1986. Ironically, the current courthouse building was constructed to replace the original edifice, which was badly damaged by Confederate soldiers during the Civil War.

In October, the Make It Right Project began working in collaboration with and support of the Charles Town activists to remove the plaque, providing signage and other resources. The Heyward Shepherd marker, an overtly pro-slavery monument put up by the UDC in 1931 in Harpers Ferry, is located just a few miles from the courthouse.

On December 6, the Jefferson County Commission voted 3-2 to remove the Confederate plaque from the courthouse. The marker was then quietly removed overnight. The pictures below are celebratory shots featuring WV Women’s March activists Sherri Harris, Susan Pipes and Sammi Brown, who was recently sworn in as a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates.

Below, you can check out video of the City Council vote that yielded this fantastic and much-deserved triumph. We congratulate the hard-working team that made this happen. It’s all the more proof that the fight must continue!

Announcing the Launch of the Face to Face Project

Simon Greer and I are excited to share the news that we are partnering on a new editorial project called Face to Face—an ongoing series of essays and articles that explore the spiritual, religious and moral dimensions of social change and the progressive movement. Simon is joining the Independent Media Institute as a writing fellow this fall, bringing a wealth of experience to the table.

Simon is a longtime labor and community organizer and social change leader. He has headed several social justice nonprofits and, for the past four years, has been working closely and intensively with white, working-class Americans to bridge the gap between this constituency and progressive movements. You will find Simon’s work indexed here on IMI’s Face to Face page.

Simon and I recently spoke about the project and thought sharing our conversation would be a great way for readers to get introduced to the topics and approaches he will focus on.

Jan Frel: The concept that we’ve arrived at, which we both see the need for, combines a few missing dimensions that we see in the progressive movement: patience and the understanding that social change requires inclusion and that everybody must a part of it.

Simon Greer: It feels to me at least like the lines are being drawn, either on this side or that side, and I feel that inside of me, as well. There’s a curiosity and a humility required to get past those lines, without which I’m not sure how you actually make the kind of change that progressives talk about wanting to make. So it feels like it’s convenient, if you will. They’re the bad guys, we’re the good guys. They need to change, be more like us, and then we’ll win, right? Does the world really work that way?

We know from our most personal relationships that whenever we approach a disagreement with ‘you’re wrong, I’m right, and if you were more like me, we’d all be happier,’ we don’t get a lot of movement. We actually generate more resistance, and it feels as though progressive movements are losing sight of the curiosity and the humility that could actually serve us better.

Frel: And so the work that you are going to do with us is going to look at the key issues of our times and try to understand them through this framework?

Greer: Exactly. I’ve certainly felt over the last 10 years, and more intensively over the past two, that I’ve started to feel more like I’m a political orphan on some level.

Not that my values have changed, but my sense that, in the way we approach the issues of today, we’ve lost sight of the rest of our fellow Americans and the possibility of what we might do together. We need to bring that perspective back.

Frel: Do you feel that there is also a legacy issue the progressive movement is dealing with in a habit of ignoring the efforts that the religious and spiritual movements of our times have made for social change? And the flip side of the question, are we ruling out the people on the basis that they could go under the label “religious right”?

Greer: Certainly back to the Gore election defeat, there’s been talk among progressives about values voters and so I feel like there’s been an awareness of it. But I have spent the last few years immersed in conservative, white working-class America, and God, family and country are the things that matter to most people. Not just conservatives, but most people. Those are the things they care about, and progressives, in a way, have given up or lost that territory.

So we tend not to speak in faith language, or about strong families, or about being patriotic and loving our country, and if those are the things that most people care about, you start a deficit. Without speaking to these issues, you can’t communicate credibly and inspire people to develop the conviction to take some risks and do things differently as a country; to extend themselves to others with whom they might not have much experience.

I’m just going to add one thing to that: in fairness to progressives in America, this is a global phenomenon. So in England, Germany, Scandinavia, Israel, Australia—in developed market economies across the globe—the left, liberal, labor, social democratic, progressive parties have lost faith with a lot of people.

You would think that, out of global financial collapse, the rising tide would be the progressive one. You would think that’s who would capture the political imagination of working-class people.

But in all those countries, those progressive movements and parties have lost the connection to what you would have thought its base should or could be, especially in the face of the banks fleecing the country. So, wouldn’t the people be with the progressive alternative to that? They aren’t, to put it plainly.

And so it led me to think not just that we’re inadequate as progressives here, but that there’s something missing in the ethos of progressive politics across the planet.

Frel: I observe a prevailing habit of imagining or pretending that there is no spiritual dimension to life when it comes to social change.

Greer: Certainly you see it play out. The advice to progressives is: if you’re going to talk to conservatives or to moderates, people who are likely more religious or have a theology or a moral code, don’t talk about morality. Talk about bread-and-butter issues. That’s the safe territory.

But this approach misunderstands that, for people who live by a moral code, you don’t have bread-and-butter issues and moral issues. You have a moral code through which you understand all the issues. And so if I come to you as a religious person and say, “I want you to put those moral issues aside and let’s talk about bread and butter,” they think, “Well, either your bread-and-butter stuff must not matter because it doesn’t relate to my morality, or you don’t have a moral code. You think that’s an optional thing. For me, it’s the whole thing.”

In essence, we’ve said, “You shouldn’t trust me, because I think morality is flexible and now I want to tell you why you should ignore your moral code to vote on the issues I’m telling you about.” It doesn’t make any sense. You need to operate within the code by which people think they live. Otherwise, they’re not going to take a leap with you.

Visit IMI’s Face to Face project page.

Jan Frel
Executive Director
Independent Media Institute

 

 

Simon Greer
Writing Fellow
Face to Face Project