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When is a “big tent” really useful ?

October 26, 2015

An important contribution to strategizing movement building! We’re talking more and more about creating a “big tent”, intersectional organizing or building a “movement of movements”. But how useful is it?

From the always excellent wagingnonviolence.org

Earlier this summer I helped to organize the March for Jobs, Justice & the Climate — an action that brought more than 10,000 people to the streets of Toronto in one of the largest and most diverse climate mobilizations in Canadian history. More than 100 organizations supported the march — from national environmental groups to labor unions to the indigenous rights’ movement Idle No More to Toronto-based groups tackling poverty, food justice and migration. It was, as Naomi Klein put it, the “first steps of a new kind of climate movement” that reached beyond the traditional boundaries of the environmental movement.

The march was a “big tent” approach to climate organizing being put to practice, the same approach that helped the People’s Climate March bring over 400,000 people to the streets of New York City last September. It’s also an approach that we’re seeing gain more momentum in the lead-up to the Paris climate talks this December. In fact, another round of People’s Climate actions are already being planned for later this year.

Whether it’s called a big tent, intersectional organizing or building a “movement of movements,” this approach is key to the kind of transformative change required for solving the climate crisis. It’s also clear that it’s not an approach that’s going away any time soon.

During the organizing of the March for Jobs, Justice & the Climate, I learned a lot of hard lessons about the strengths and limitations of the big tent. In so doing, it became clear to me that the climate movement is struggling with this style of organizing, and that if we hope to build transformative power across and beyond social movements it’s going to take a lot more than just one big tent.

Big tents get crowded, quickly

Organizing in a big tent is a lot like hanging out in a crowded bar. It’s packed with people, everyone is talking and it’s next to impossible to get from one side to the other — especially if you’re trying to move with a group.

When you’re throwing a big party, you want a crowded bar. When you’re organizing a big mobilization, a massive tent can bring in a lot of people, but it’s going to be crowded and loud. People will struggle to be heard and those people who prefer a quiet night in may just stay home. As with the problem of trying to cross a packed bar with your friends, moving people in a big tent is also an ordeal.

(Survival Media / Fatin Chowdury)

When we started organizing the Toronto march, a big tent approach helped to open a lot of doors. Instead of starting with the same climate groups we always turn to, we worked with partners to create a frame that other movement sectors could see their struggles reflected in. By inviting a wide range of partners into the organizing space with a big, broad framework, we were successful in shifting the discourse around climate in Canada and including more voices in the conversation. At the same time, however, the sheer scale and breadth of groups involved also limited the depth of conversation that could take place.

For a single march, and the first one of it’s kind, this crowded tent wasn’t an insurmountable issue. Yet, as a movement strategy, the big tent approach needs space for people to move around and to be moved in. There needs to be enough room to move that the tent itself can be relocated through conflict, disagreement, negotiation and shared strategizing. Without this, the big tent will stagnate rapidly, accepting the lowest common denominator of agreement among the groups in the tent rather than unifying around demands that are in line with the scale of change that we really need.

There are rooms inside the tent

A lot of the value ascribed to big tent climate organizing is the idea that it’s a more inclusive approach to tackling the climate crisis, and it’s true that this approach is miles ahead of the environmental movement of the past. Unfortunately, a lot of the time the big tent feels a little too much like it’s just throwing a big sheet over already existing divisions and inequality across and within movements.

During our organizing, we started to observe that our big tent had developed a series of rooms. In the middle was a big central room that was the “official” center of the tent. It was the main organizing listserv and the weekly meetings where formal decisions were made and where everyone was welcomed. As the organizing moved forward though, smaller rooms started to pop-up.

Some of these rooms played a pivotal role in the organizing. For example, a meeting of local Toronto-based environmental and social justice groups gathered to talk about the march and how or if they would engage with the march. This meeting and the room it built within the tent helped to build alignment among groups. It also helped to clarify what kind of resources groups required to participate in the march, and created alignment among enough groups to shift the political orientation of the march to give a voice to groups typically sidelined by the climate movement like migrant justice groups, anti-poverty organizations and groups working to end police violence. A similar space was created and held by faith groups that used it to successfully mobilize a large and broad interfaith contingent for the march. In these instances, when the room held the work of a kind of caucus, it created space that helped to improve the dynamics in the big tent.

At the same time, rooms also emerged that hampered the organizing effort and threatened to undermine the goal of the big tent approach. Rooms emerged as exclusive spaces where groups with certain relationships, budgets or approaches talked to each other and made decisions that would impact the entire big tent strategy.

Most of these rooms replicated the same movement divisions that the big tent was intended to dismantle. It makes sense that these rooms would emerge and that people and groups would find themselves working with natural allies, but for a big tent climate organizing strategy to really be transformational, it has to be more than just putting a big sheet over our movements.

A coalition is not the same as a base

We started organizing the March for Jobs, Justice & the Climate by bringing together representatives from a range of groups to form some kind of a coalition to make the march happen. We had an idea for the action, a rough vision of what it could achieve and a sense — from consulting with a wide range of groups — that a massive cross-movement project might be possible. Following this strategy, we build a coalition of over a hundred groups by the day of the march. Yet, while the coalition was big and broad, it was also weak and, as I’ve outlined above, most of the alignment was on a surface level.

We lost track of the fact that in a cross-movement organizing space there are two sets of people, those people in the meetings, and those people who the people in the meetings have to explain things to. For some people that meant a collective, for others a staff team or board of directors. For most people it also meant a base, the broader community or movement that group organizes with and within. Or, put another way, every person in the room had to not only come to agreement in the room, but figured out how to translate the decisions in the room into a language that their people could speak.

This challenge played out in countless ways during the organizing process. One example was during conversations about the intersection of climate and migration. As someone who has worked between climate and social justice spaces for a lot of my adult life, I feel like I understand the links between climate change and forced migration. It’s pretty easy for me to rationalize why creating more open and just immigration policies is a fundamental part of a justice-based adaptation policy in a warming world. The problem is that I’m not representative of most of the people who make up the base of the traditional climate movement. So, when it came to working with a migrant justice group to make the case for connecting the dots between a super-storm in the Philippines and Canada’s immigration policies, we were confronted with an environmental movement that, for decades, has been obsessed with polar bears and parts per million.

(Fatin Chowdhury / Survival Media)

In our big tent, it’s not just me and a migrant justice group. We also have a labor union that has a mandate to represent and be accountable to its members. Some of these members might hold views that stem from fears around migrant workers and job security. Others — and frankly some people in the climate movement at large — may even hold racist, anti-immigrant beliefs. At the same time, the migrant justice group may have its own well-placed concerns or ambivalence about this big tent, as a result of those racist views. With that, comes another series of challenges, and that’s with only three groups in the big tent. We haven’t even started to scratch the surface of the vast majority of people not already connected to the groups we invite into our coalitions.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that bringing diverse groups together is a key first step to building a movement for climate justice, and in organizing the March for Jobs, Justice & the Climate we managed to reach farther outside the box than any mobilization of it’s kind in Canada. Nevertheless, we fell into the same big tent trap of “uniting the left” on climate and believing that an intersectional approach to climate stops when we check enough movement diversity boxes in our coalition. We lost track of the fact that behind each group is a base of people with their own opinions, views and beliefs. Even if the groups in the room agree on something, the people we email, call and try to turn out in the streets might not.

The ground beneath our feet, not the tent above our heads

In the end, the biggest lesson I learned in this process was that it may actually be the term “big tent” that’s our biggest problem. A big tent invokes the idea of one big idea or issue that sits above the rest, leaving us to unify underneath it. While it’s true that climate change connects issues like few crises our society has ever faced, it’s problematic to view it as an issue “above” the rest. Instead of looking up to the tent, we need to start thinking about the ground beneath our feet – about how we can share fault lines that connect our movements.

In geology, a fault line is the space where tectonic plates meet. Movement fault lines could be defined by the points or issues where our struggles interact. The point where things actually meet is narrow compared to the size of the mass itself, but it’s also the place where the most dynamic changes occur.

If we think about the intersection of movements like this, we can see that the kind of power that has often been ascribed to a big tent is actually found in the narrow fault line where struggles intersect and where the friction between movements already exists. This means that in these places, like the intersection of migration and climate change, there is profound potential. It also means the points where our movements intersect are only a small piece of the work that movements and the people that make them up do. Movements are like massive tectonic plates that exist behind each fault line, their seemingly subtle movement the result of the constant day-to-day work of campaigning, educating and organizing. This work makes it possible for our movements to intersect along fault lines, and we need to consider the impact of the fault line on the movement as a whole. We also need to consider that sometimes the potential for intersectional organizing is not between everyone on everything — in other words, sometimes a specific fault line may only involve two movements interacting.

(Survival Media / Robert van Waarden)

If you think about the example of the intersection of migration and climate change as a fault line, it’s easier to understand how we could overcome the challenge I outlined. Rather than try to find a way to agree on a high-level demand that ties together migration and climate change, we can look at the challenge and realize that the first step to this is the need to educate the climate movement about migrant justice and to build a deeper sense of trust across movements. From here, we can develop a strategy that starts with the fault line between climate and migrant justice movements — for example, a series of webinars as part of a joint campaign with support from movement leaders. In executing it, we could bring the climate movement and migrant justice movement together along a shared fault-line, and as trust is built and understanding developed, be in a better place to engage the labor movement along a new fault line. Step by step, we could build across movements in a way that respects where different sectors are, meets them where they are at and grows in a way that builds power from the bottom-up.

In the end, if we are constantly building alignment along fault lines, any big tent will be stronger and more valuable in the long run. After all, fault lines are the points that have raised mountains, carved shorelines and shaken the earth with powerful quakes. If we can take the time to go beyond the big tent, our movements can too. In order for this to happen the goal cannot simply be to hold up the big tent, but rather to forge a commitment to build movements together between the big tent moments. As the Paris climate talks draw near, these lessons can help us deepen our work for the long haul ahead and to truly tackle the climate crisis.

The Democratic Debate Proved That on LGBT Equality — and All Issues — Pressure and Protest Works

October 26, 2015

From Huffington post

The first Democratic debate last night was, refreshingly, a spirited exchange of important ideas and policies, unlike the egomaniacal, mean-spirited, rhetoric-spewing GOP slugfests that have so far transpired. This, even despite CNN’s silly showcasing of the last night’s event as if it was a Vegas prizefight. 

The debate also highlighted just how important it is to pressure candidates, including via loud protest, to focus on the issues progressives care about. That was evident literally a few minutes into the debate when Hillary Clinton, in her opening remarks, was the only candidate to focus on the battles ahead over full equality for LGBT people:

..[T]his is about bringing our country together again. And I will do everything I can to heal the divides — the divides economically, because there’s too much inequality; the racial divides; the continuing discrimination against the LGBT community…

Those few words were impressive because Clinton has been criticized for being slow to embrace marriage equality in the past, and, more importantly, has been pressured in recent months to speak out more forcefully on LGBT discrimination. Responding to the pressure, Clinton recently discussed the importance of adding protections for LGBT people in housing, employment and public accommodations to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, something even President Obama appears to be reticent about doing at this point.

The issue didn’t come up for discussion in the debate last night, but that’s because it wasn’t raised by the moderator: For Hillary Clinton’s part, she laid it out as an agenda item in her opening remarks, the only one to do so. And she had to do that, considering those on the stage with whom she was debating. Sen. Bernie Sanders was one of only a handful of legislators who voted against the Defense of Marriage Act as a House member in 1996, a bill that President Clinton signed into law. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley pushed and signed a marriage equality bill in his state, as did former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee, and both of them touted these successes during the debate last night — another example of how pressure from LGBT activists has shown candidates that embracing equality, rather than ducking from the issue, can be a win for them.

From Black Lives Matter to the DREAMers, the debate underscored how vigorous protest is vital in making Democratic candidates talk about the issues, just as protest pushed President Obama to act on LGBT issues, as Kerry Eleveld lays out in her new book, Don’t Tell Me to Wait: How the Fight for Gay Rights Changed America and Transformed Obama’s Presidency. There was criticism from some progressives of the Black Lives Matter protest at the progressive gathering Netroots Nation last July in Phoenix, when activists interrupted the appearances of both Sanders and O’Malley. But last night both candidates, rather than offering the bungled and embarrassing responses they had at Netroots — when O’Malley actually said “all lives matter” — spoke in detail on the issue of police brutality against African-Americans, having done their homework. And Hillary Clinton, having been hounded by the DREAMers, the young immigration reform activists who challenged her even before she announced she was running for president and who are rightly continuing to do so, spoke to the issues and championed the DREAMers and their cause.

Surely some of this was pandering as well as campaign strategizing to make sure the candidates didn’t step on any land mines. And there were less than adequate responses at times on issues affecting all of these groups, or just vague responses. But the fact that the candidates are responding at all validates how important protest is — including protest against those considered our “friends” — and how only those who speak up, loudly, will be able to make change.

Upcoming Trends in Social Video Campaigning

October 22, 2015

Technology’s inflexion points are difficult to spot without the benefit of hindsight, even for technology as widely hyped as social media and mobile video.

Read about the 10 latest trends HERE

Strategizing social media

October 22, 2015

“New Tactics in Human Rights” bring together experts over “Online Discussions” on various topics.

In this online conversation, they explored:

  • How to define your social media goals and targets;
  • Strategizing about how to reach your stakeholders with social media;
  • Making decisions about the resources you should devote to building and maintaining a social media presence;
  • How to use social media without putting your staff and your constituents at risk;

This online conversation was an opportunity to exchange experiences, lessons-learned and best practices among practitioners using social media strategically in human rights work.

Tactic examples shared in the conversation:

Engage your audience

October 22, 2015

With hundreds of millions of people around the world participating in social networks, it’s become passé to try to “be the message”. If your campaign mainly aims at building your sense of community, it’s OK to generate expressions and send them to one another, which is typically what selfie-campaigns do. By if you’re trying to change anybody’s heart and mind, your campaign shouldn’t send a message, it shouldn’t even generate expressions. It should convene a conversation, as only conversations move positions.

One finding that stood out from a survey by the Case Foundation was that 74 percent of non-profits use social media as a megaphone to announce events and share what they’re up to, instead of seeking out conversations.

Online campaigning is to polarize a discussion effectively, and then curate the conversation to make your side more compelling. And to create the conversation, you have to engage your audience.

Here are some tips for achieving this

Find the right tactic to avoid a ghost town.

If there isn’t any engagement with your social media efforts, it generally keeps new visitors from engaging. How do you first encourage engagement? You can recruit a handful of very loyal supporters – staff and volunteers – and get them to commit to participating in your social media efforts.

If you have some clout, you should also recruit leaders. See for example how the “Internet for schools” campaign by Social Driver and The Alliance for Education Excellence started their mobilisation:

“In order to start the campaign off, Social Driver identified 20 key influencers in the education space that they knew could kick-start a conversation. Once they were onboard and excited, Social Driver had them each make a video explaining why internet access and WiFi is important for schools – and post it with a tag to the FCC. From there, the snowball started rolling. Other educators, parents and students started to make similar videos, and even more people started to call on the FCC to expand internet and wifi coverage. All those conversations, impressions, and direct calls on the FCC gave the campaign the voice and weight it needed to be heard.”

Get your people out there to create content !

People don’t want to just participate in a campaign, they want to be the message.

The pinnacle of this is citizen journalism.

For a compelling introduction to what that is, we highly recommend this interesting TedTalk about Storify.com

Ask questions

This gets high interaction rates. Posts on Facebook with a question mark generate twice as much engagement as other posts.

Include photos or graphics with posts

A tweet with visual gets on average 50% more engagement than others.

Every user matters

It’s not just to keep that one user engaged. It shows all users that THEY would matter too, which is the single strongest driver of engagement.

Negative comments are an opportunity ! there is nothing better to start a conversation and wake up sleepy troops than a good troll. Interact, don’t delete.

Make sub-communities

Being/becoming part of a group is one of the fundamental drivers of our engagements. The more this community is made visible, the more people will engage. Look at the #hometovote campaign in Ireland: one of the target groups of the campaigns to get people to support same-sex marriage in Ireland and vote in the referendum were Irish people from the diaspora. To get them to come back, which represents a very strong form of engagement, campaigners created this very specific community, formalised by a hashtag among other expressions, which gave people this additional sense of belonging that propelled them to act

Get out there

We spend most of our time preaching to the choir, when we should really spend at least 70% of our time reaching out to our target audience of the moveable middle: these people whose views, attitudes and actions can be shifted.

Are we all really investing the spaces that our target group is on, instead of talking to one another? We definitely need to assess where we spend our time, and adjust when needed.

Hugging homophobia away – An Indian campaign takes to the streets

October 7, 2015

From Times of India

Mayank Manohar| TNN | Oct 5, 2015, 12.11 AM IST

NEW DELHI: Supporters and members of the LGBT community took out a campaign, “Free Hug”, in Connaught Place on Sunday. They marched with placards that read, “I am gay, will you hug me” in a bid to spread the message of equality and acceptance.
14queer-hug7
Asserting that LGBT people should be seen as normal people, they chanted slogans like “I am gay, please hug me” and “Hugs are harmless”. Many onlookers came forward and hugged the participants as a sign of solidarity.Siddharth Singh, a Delhi University student who took part in the campaign, said the response from the public was encouraging. “I did not expect so many people would actually come forward and hug us. It is a great feeling to be seen as a normal people and not being discriminated just because I have a different sexual orientation. We have our own right to live the way we want,” Singh said.

The campaign that took off on a low note gained momentum later with many people expressing their support for the LGBT community. “It is perfectly normal to be gay and people should understand it. It is not something for which they should be discriminated against. They are taking a great step to make people aware about their sexuality. It is a good initiative to connect with the society, which is slowly responding to their attempt,” said Shadman Alvi, another college student.
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Many Sunday revellers were seen cheering to the crowd and acknowledged that there was so much honesty and openness in their discussion about sexuality. “It is good to see people are not shying away and supporting their cause. I would love to join their campaign as a sign of my support for their initiative,” said Ankur Khurana, an IT professional.

When the campaign picked up its pace, people started taking selfies with the participants.

“We never expected such a warm response. The last time we carried out this campaign, comments were hurled at us but this time people are more welcoming. They asked us to take selfies with them. We cannot ask for more. They have shown lots of respect to us,” said Priyansh Dubey, one of the participants in the campaign.

 14queer-hug9

Around 35 people from the LGBT community participated in Sunday’s campaign that was held under the banner, “Queer Hugs-II”.

To succeed, movements must overcome the tension between rationality and emotion

October 6, 2015

By Georges Lakey, on Wavingnonviolence.org

 

When it comes to action, we are pulled by two tendencies that seem compatible but in practice are often in tension. We want our movements to be rational – that is, to strategize well, use resources efficiently, and stay nimble. Yet, on the other hand, we may also want the products of emotion: to experience solidarity, to let empathy connect us with those who haven’t joined us, and to tap the righteous anger that goes with caring about injustice.

In my lifetime social movements have increasingly turned to trainers to increase their learning curve and make actions more effective. However, a movement’s wish to draw on the power of both rationality and emotion poses a challenge for trainers, who are influenced by middle-class bias and traditional education. Class and the academy push trainers to privilege rationality and ignore the wellspring of emotion.

Fortunately, action reasserts the need for both, and training is learning to respond. The movement story in the United States shows the tension, and begins with the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The civil rights movement didn’t solve this for everyone

The civil rights movement made more breakthroughs than today’s activists have yet caught up with, but that movement’s practice is not a complete answer for us today. I was a trainer in the civil rights movement and saw brilliant use of role play and other experiential tools for preparing to take on white segregationists and brutal police. The tools were helpful in bringing emotions like fear and anger to the surface and, by normalizing them, making them easier to manage.

The fullest positive use of emotion, however, was in the South where black church culture was strongest. Black preachers sought to be charismatic and many were expert in surfacing emotion, mobilizing what they called soul force for the nonviolent struggle. We see this in the film “Selma.”

Some civil rights activists at the time saw the charismatic leadership model as problematic, and in any case the black preacher tradition is not available for most of today’s movements. A practical organizational alternative for mobilizing emotion, however, was unclear. After the civil rights movement faded a few of its members joined others to form in 1971 the Movement for a New Society, or MNS.

In the early days we in MNS discovered “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” a breakthrough book by the best-known initiator of popular education, Brazilian educator Paolo Freire. Popular education takes sides in the class struggle and honors the wisdom of oppressed people, assisting them through dialogue to name their experience, connect the dots and encourage each other to take action. The tools reassure people who have been told they can’t think well, partly through the facilitator asking questions and showing respect, and partly through the experience of thinking out loud and noticing that others in the group are paying attention.

Our trainers enthusiastically used Freire’s approach, finding that it did elicit more fully the rationality of a group. When MNS combined popular education with the action training born in the civil rights movement, our trainers became in demand around the United States and elsewhere. MNS helped the nonviolent anti-nuclear power movement win its remarkable victory in the late 1970s.

However, a curious phenomenon began popping up in MNS workshops: emotional revolts of participants that most often were expressed at the facilitator team, but also at each other. The workshops’ empowerment tools focused on the rational dimension of the participants. In these mini-revolutions, the group’s emotional life was demanding more attention.

A group in Starhawk’s attic yearns for solidarity

The 1999 Battle of Seattle over corporate-led globalization led to a series of mass confrontations with power holders in the United States and elsewhere. Nonviolent trainers went from city to city, facilitating workshops at each convergence. After a few years, leading activist Starhawk and I called trainers together to take stock of how we were doing. We met in her attic in San Francisco.

Trainers reported multiple successes at working in the midst of chaos, as well as limitations. They also raised strategic questions about the value of mass confrontations that had no concrete or achievable goals.

We turned to skill-sharing, which was fun, and comparisons of analytical frameworks. Suddenly the amicable bunch of trainers turned crabby. We found fault with each others’ comments, but especially distrusted the person who happened, by rotation, to be occupying the facilitator’s chair at the time. Participants urged solutions to our unhappiness: “Let’s go into pairs.” “We need a break.” “We should never have left that earlier point of disagreement.” “Maybe a group song would help.”

Nothing worked. I was as lost as anyone while a storm raged within the group. The facilitator looked flattened. One of the participants lost it, dramatically. Then a respected group member expressed vulnerability. Suddenly, the sun came out, we hugged whoever was near us, we laughed and paused for tea.

Only then did I realize we’d experienced an emotional process that sometimes shows up in groups. We started with our “honeymoon” period when everyone was making nice, then began the raw conflict when people showed more of themselves while peacemakers tried the impossible: to find rational solutions to our pain. Finally, we experienced the breakthrough into community and became, to use organizational development jargon, a “high-performance team.”

I remembered that a group generates a storm when its members want to experience acceptance for the deeper layers of themselves, including differences that they have been, up until then, keeping under wraps. In short, they want closeness, because human beings happen to be social animals.

The rational model suggests that group members could state differences and negotiate common ground in order to gain the solidarity needed for action. True enough, for low-risk, low-stakes action. However, movements often have high stakes that require members to endure fatigue and high stress, execute detailed teamwork, take big risks and draw deep support from their comrades. Nearly everyone has seen this in movies, including sports and war movies, in which a team or platoon that includes members who could never get along back home have together gained a win.

Movements often state goals that require this level of struggle to achieve, and so attract participants who expect to find the support to “go there” — but do not find it. Middle-class control trumps effectiveness in those movements, having only its rationality to offer. In Starhawk’s attic those present would not have asked, in so many words, for that bonding — it would have seemed corny or naïve. Instead, we created it emotionally, by storming.

The good news is that facilitators can be trained to recognize the early signs of a storm brewing and techniques for supporting the storm when it comes. The bad news is that facilitators rarely seek that training, or the other techniques for assisting groups to access their unconscious resources. As with traditional education, popular education did not go there.

Trainers invent direct education to support solidarity-based action

The group of activists who founded Training for Change in the 1990s developed over time a training practice that could make the most of what happened in Starhawk’s attic, and harnessed other group dynamics that support empowered action. Training for Change trainers knew the tools of the civil rights movement and the popular education used by MNS, so we started there. However, we also turned to the resource of emotion, incorporating insights on group dynamics reflected in, among other places, Starhawk’s book “Dreaming the Dark” and psychologist Arnold Mindell’s book “Sitting in the Fire.” My book “Facilitating Group Learning” summarizes a decade of discoveries about both the rational and emotional life of the group, and shares methods that work best across many cultural boundaries. Significantly, this was the action training approach that attracted the widest range of groups, from religious organizations to anarchists to nonprofits to labor unions.

Direct education gets push-back from those who limit learning to the conscious, rational realm, including those who believe that social change happens through wielding abstract academic language like “code-switching” or “intersectionality.”

Our experience is that, when groups bring forth real-world conflicts in the training room, participants get the chance to go to a deeper place and experience the behaviors that abstract words were invented to represent. Supporting conflict in the moment even helps some participants to un-hook from the class-formed attachment to words and become more present to what’s really happening. Actions that flow from such a process are more likely to have an impact on the real world of injustice, because those actions come from experience rather than words.

But what about ‘triggers?’

Conflict-friendly pedagogy contradicts a current assumption in anti-oppression circles that the goal in, for example, achieving racial justice is protection. That assumption gives the facilitator the job of outlining rules to prevent conflict. In some classrooms professors are asked to give “trigger alerts” when material is coming that might in some way be experienced as oppressive.

I believe this trend is anti-liberation. It further empowers power holders, asking authorities (in this case, teachers) to take even more responsibility to monitor and control. It disempowers those who have suffered oppression, by assuming they can’t stand up for themselves when an insult appears. It excuses facilitators from the task of supporting participants to develop the muscles to fight for their own liberation.

The vision implicit in the current trend is to produce hot-house plants who can bloom only with shelter, called a “safe place.” That vision leaves me indignant: my gay and working-class self has grown in personal power in the real world where micro-aggressions abound. In fact, living in the real world helps motivate me to fight for broader change rather than retreat into yet another version of privilege where I will be insulated from the real world.

This well-meaning vision is, because of its classist roots, a version of the gated community.

Trauma survivors need and deserve support. Checking with the facilitator ahead of time might devise options that empower. Depending on the person’s own degree of healing, a particular workshop may or may not work for them. That may especially be true of train-the-trainer workshops, because new trainers need to unlearn reactivity and stay present with aggression that surfaces in a learning group.

The origin of direct education, with its roots in the civil rights movement and its use among oppressed groups that do stand up, insists on a distinction between safety and comfort. In a workshop the facilitator assists members of a group to be both safe and uncomfortable, because discomfort is where the greatest learning and growth are.

Needless to say, today’s movements need the steepest learning curve they can generate.

 

 

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