The May 4 blog suggested that criminal justice system reform to create greater racial justice will be useful and necessary; but it will not be sufficient. On the other hand, ‘reinventing social institutions’ through a new type of community organizing may sound overly challenging or contentious to consider. For example, working with an ordinary understanding of ‘institutions’ usually means long meetings discussing difficult policy change, right? Certainly, If you begin reading some of the books that are out there on social justice theory or poverty eradication, this could be a plausible conclusion.
Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, we need to remember that the institutions of which we’re speaking are not the ordinary working institutions such as educational, justice, or religious institutions. Instead, societal institutions create ‘the rules of the game’, and are different from ‘working institutions’. One way to understand these more amorphous underlying societal institutions is to think of them as ‘thought worlds’ which shape our basic ideas about daily life and activity.
At this more profound ‘thought world’ level, it is necessary to use a new type of social participation—now defined as deep participation—to effect change. Deep participation is a social and connecting, intellectually challenging process. It creates a group coalescing social energy that is durable, longstanding, and oriented to altruistic acts. All of this is necessary for social integrative power to emerge. This emergence, as I have stated elsewhere establishes, over time, a critically examined, emotionally resonating collective recognition of the significance and rightness of a reinvented institution which imbues it with social legitimacy.
This deep participation process is certainly not overwhelming or contentious, but it does involve effort and commitment. On the other hand, it can’t work within a competitive economic or political atmosphere utilizing exclusion and manipulation to achieve agendas. Instead, it requires social organizations where trust can evolve, along with inclusion and iterative critical thought, to reinvent those particular thought worlds or undergirding societal institutions that are now often out-of-sync with our fast changing world.
This new type of social participation and community organizing opens up new perspectives and original ways for problem-solving which are of particular importance to racial injustice. For example, there are individuals and organizations that are decided racists, but in this 21st century most people would like to believe that they, as individuals, are not. Still, one group of people will wholeheartedly support the police, while others line up with their sisters and brothers of color. And those that try and point out the complexity of the situation are looked upon with suspicion by both sides. As a result, when new policies are established out of old-school politically polemic processes, the resulting agreements often do not have the social legitimacy they need to withstand the divisiveness and push back involved in their implementation.
Instead, deep participation, allows us to look below the surface of our fast-paced lives and explore together where our immediate beliefs which shape conscious choice and preference actually come from. Once identified and shared, it is easier than we ordinarily believe to choose a more idealistic value from which to begin. For instance, Norman Uphoff, of Cornell University, in studies of economic free riding and generosity, suggests that the issue is not, as many contend, the differing values we as individuals may hold. Instead Uphoff tells us: “What matters is not which values one has—we all have many—but which values are activated and applied in a given situation”. To look beneath the surface we must have the good fortune to hear multiple experiences—differing police activities, teacher insights, young black men and women with their parents, neighborhood activists, friends, emergency room actors—the list goes on. And as we begin to dig down into those unacknowledged ‘rules of the game’ that shape our collective societal institutions we will sometimes have to acknowledge their racist roots. But we cannot let that deter us. We also have to keep in mind what I suggested in an earlier blog: that a societal group’s institutional apparatus too often runs on past history and values, not present ones. Each person’s contribution has merit. Maybe an 80 year old black man will remind everyone that in 1933, the year he was born, there were 26 documented lynchings in the U.S.[2] Maybe a white middle-aged woman will say that she has spent her whole life in comfortable surroundings and never suspected anything like we see in the news today; and she’s not yet sure that it really does exist. Maybe a student will bring up the disparity of resources among his schools and others. Maybe a black activist will make some white folks feel uncomfortable with his impassioned observation that poor black neighborhoods too closely resemble the segregated colonial townships across Africa that everyone would like to believe are part of distant history. But just a few exchanges will not do it. There must be a social commitment to the group’s longevity, and it must be a group composed of ‘insiders’ however that may be defined by the group itself. So yes, reform initiatives are needed, but both simple reform and calls for a ‘national conversation about race’ remain insufficient. In addition, it is imperative to reflect upon—and change when needed—those ‘thought worlds’ or underlying societal institutions that create and sustain our country and its diverse cultures. The first step is a social exchange of views and experiences by multiple groups near and far to the involved cities. This new process of social participation which has now morphed into deep participation will require a very different type of community organizing. It has to be insider-initiated social groups which over time can horizontally link with others to create an enduring ‘new social movement’. In this situation the often didactic definitions of social justice theory start to become a mutual exploration of this profound concept. We will talk about how to move forward from this initial effort the next time. [1] Norman Uphoff ( 1992) Learning from Gal Oya, Ithaca, N.Y. Cornell University Press, p.337. [2] PBS, Documentary of The Roosevelts, Part 5.
Thanks for this insightful post. Yes, it is true that an exchange of views from different social groups is a first step. I cannot help but wonder if Roof belonged to any community. The mainstream press wants us to believe that he’s a lone actor although he has received a significant number of congratulatory messages from across the nation. Are they to be engaged in this necessary dialogue?
Good question. We do need an exchange of views from different social groups. However, an essential requirement for a group conversation to have any possibility of reaching the more profound and useful level of deep participation, requires that each individual be ready to practice basic inclusion. They don’t have to agree with each other, but they do have to be willing to become a part of an inclusive social group in search of greater social justice, and listen with that perspective in mind . Murder is, of course, the most violent act of exclusion, and people that congratulate the murderer are supporting that type of violent exclusion. But new groups needs to be aware that any type of conscious exclusion begins to negate the possibility of accessing deep participation which is where we can actually begin to change things. Creating socially just and inclusive actions will also, over time, attract many that are presently promote acts of exclusion