Abstract
The core message of Saul Alinsky’s model of community organizing is that we must act in the world “as it is” He railed against privileged middle-class people who cling to impossible dreams of public “reason” and “collaboration” that have little relationship to the real workings of power in the lives of those who suffer in America. He had little use for middle-class progressives and their efforts to create a democratic society focused on the unique identities of individuals.
The very social scientists who are so anxious to offer our generation counsels of salvation and are so disappointed that an ignorant and slothful people are so slow to accept their wisdom, betray middle-class prejudices in almost everything they write.
—Reinhold Neibuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society
As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be—it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be.
—Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
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Notes
See Aaron Schutz, “Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing,” Open Left, http://www.educationaction.org/core-dilemmas-of-community-organizing.html (accessed May 28, 2010).
Aaron Schutz, “Home Is a Prison in the Global City: The Tragic Failure of School-Based Community-Engagement Strategies,” Review of Educational Research 76, no. 4 (2006): 699.
Quotation from Pedro Noguera, Racial Isolation, Poverty, and the Limits of Local Control as a Means for Holding Public Schools Accountable (Los Angeles: UCLA, Institute for Democracy, Education, & Access, 2002), 14, 341–50, http://repositories.cdlib.org/idea/wws/wws-rr011-1002 (accessed May 29, 2010).
See Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994).
Listen, Inc., From the Frontlines: Youth Organizers Speak (Los Angeles, CA: Privately printed, 2003).
Todd DeStigter, “Public Displays of Affection: Political Community through Critical Empathy,” Research in the Teaching of English 33, no. 3 (1999): 235–44;
David Stovall, “Forging Community in Race and Class: Critical Race Theory and the Quest for Social Justice in Education,” Race, Ethnicity, and Education 9, no. 3 (2006): 243–59;
Rahima C. Wade, “Service-Learning for Social Justice in the Elementary Classroom: Can We Get There from Here?” Equity and Excellence in Education 40, no. 2 (2007): 156–65;
Brian D. Schultz, Spectacular Things Happen Along the Way: Lessons from an Urban Classroom (New York: Teachers College Press, 2008).
Anne Showstack Sassoon, Gramsci’s Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 124.
Ibid., 141. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Allen and Unwin, 1990);
C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law, This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995);
Michelle M. Tokarczyk and Elizabeth A. Fay, Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993);
Alfred Lubrano, Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004).
Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Aaron Schutz, “Home Is a Prison in the Global City.”
Fred Rose, Coalitions across the Class Divide: Lessons from the Labor, Peace, and Environmental Movements (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 162.
Paul Lichterman, The Search for Political Community: American Activists Reinventing Commitment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
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© 2010 Aaron Schutz
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Schutz, A. (2010). Building Bridges?. In: Social Class, Social Action, and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113572_9
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