For the unity and healing of the nation

When we fight together - we win

“The Women’s Strike of August 1970 used bipartisan collective activism and shared goals to prompt the passage of Title IX in 1972, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in educational institutions. (Warren K. Leffler / Courtesy of the Library of Congress)”

I suspect that we will be hearing a lot more about unity and healing in next four years of the Trump administration. In May, the Festival of Homiletics is themed on “Preaching to Heal the Divide.” After the Trump assassination attempts, I saw a raft of services and prayers directed at healing our divided nation. The same directive followed the election in November. Democratic and Republican politicians alike implore our country towards unity and healing.

I also know that unity and healing are not neutral terms. When we see attempts to heal divides a few questions follow. Which divides? Towards what end? Who benefits from this healing? Who loses out?

I had this on my mind a couple weeks ago when our church hosted the first of four skill-building workshops to prepare for the Trump administration. The first was titled “how to talk to people you might disagree with.” The training also assumes a deep divide in our nation, and that there’s something we can do about it.

The difference is found in the subtitle of the training: “…because we’ll need to build a bigger and broader base to defeat authoritarianism.”

Talking to people with whom we disagree is a strategy for building a better world. We know this because movements by ordinary people have successfully faced down authoritarian regimes repeatedly by utilizing a multiplicity of non-violent, coordinated tactics. To be successful, we need to be invitational, especially to people who experience buyer’s remorse about the vote they cast in November.

In other words, talking to people with whom you disagree is a movement strategy.

One of the tactics we learned was shifting our language towards opening conversations around self-interest. We talked about what we notice in statements like, “We just really need to educate them. They keep voting against their own interests!” This way of communicating our outrage infantilizes people and further marginalizes them from getting involved in progressive grassroots movements.

Next, we looked at the strategies used by deep canvassing, a form of public engagement that seeks to sway people’s opinions, a different kind of canvassing than the kind that bolsters the base. In this kind of engagement, we learned to connect with people around our shared values, to utilize personal storytelling (“can I tell you why this issue matters to me?”), to non-judgmentally solicit the views of the other person, and to use follow up questions to explore differences and commonalities.

Instead of seeing the election of Donald Trump as a net negative, we discussed the opportunities that will come with disillusionment. We have the opportunity to organize around Trump’s failure to fulfill campaign promises, and the realities of policies that seemed good on paper but inevitably lead towards trauma and pain in our local communities.

We then moved on to reframing the structures of our difference. Rather than “left/right” we learned to shift towards “up/down.” A small number of people in our country control and harness the vast majority of wealth and opportunity. When those economic divides are racialized, those in power divide and disrupt our ability to amass a movement. We learned Race-Class Narrative Architecture. We watched a clip of deep canvassing by the Los Angeles LGBT Center as they attempted to shift anti-gay prejudice after California banned same-sex marriage.

This training was designed to help our congregation work towards unity and healing. We want to be a part of the unity of our nation – unified in having affordable food, clean water and air, good education, fair waged-work, and access to affordable health care. We want healing – healing of the divides between laborers, between social classes, between people who have been racialized and set against one another.

While this training focused externally, on bringing people in, I’m also aware of the dangers of division within our movements. We know this will be strategy that the Right employs over the next four years – the Christian Zionist/White Nationalist Esther Project wrote that one of their goals is to “exploit fissures” in anti-genocide movements for Palestine. Dividing movements is a well-worn technique of authoritarians throughout history.

Those of us on the left have been more than willing to oblige. One of the books I’ve returned to in preparation for the new administration is adrienne maree brown’s “We Will Not Cancel Us.” It’s an intervention for transformative justice in the ways we approach one another when we don’t live up to the hopes we have for the world around us. I am holding fast to her invitation:

· Can we hold each other, as the systems that weaken and distort our humanity crumble?

· Can we release our binary ways of thinking of good and bad in order to collectively grow from our mistakes?

· Can we be abolitionists with each other?

· Can we be principled and discerning in movement conflict? (pg 15)

brown initially published the essay as a blog on her website. She was working through the questions of accountability and growth from mistakes among people in her movement circles. She noticed how COVID-19, our separation during a fearful time, increased call-outs with little room for growth and change.

I especially like this book because it’s a kind of show-and-tell. She writes about the initial wave of feedback after publishing her thoughts, about the encouragement and thanks she received from others who felt seen in this piece about the quickness by which we turn on one another.

But the second round of feedback was different. This time she was hearing critique. She describes her feelings: defensive, hurt, misunderstood. “And finally, curious: what am I not seeing? Not hearing? What do I not know? What can I learn?”

In the print version, brown goes on to describe what she was learning and how she incorporated that learning into her writing. Some of the language she used, particular and exact to her experience, had been weaponized against others in her community. She would be aware of that and align her metaphors accordingly. She learned and was held accountable in public, and she allowed readers to participate.

A few years ago, I realized that I was finding myself in organizing spaces whose primary form of working through the trauma of racism and capitalism was to punish those inside the organization. These committees and orgs couldn’t come to what brown calls “collective clarity on what we mean by conflict, what we mean by harm, and what we mean by abuse.” It was easier to hurt internal allies than to develop strategies to confront the structures of power around us. I stopped participating in this kind of work because I realized that when we fight each other – they win.

When we fight together – we win.

I’m praying – and working, organizing, protesting, canvassing – for the unity of our race and class disparities. I’m committing myself to movements that are moving us towards the healing of our broken systems and the failed promises of this nation. We’re going to need each other more than ever in the next four years. Will you join us?

Onward!