When I’m at a Standstill

• ILI Director, Lucinda J. Garthwaite

I had a crisis of faith this week. 
 
It happens sometimes; I lose my bearings. I see no path ahead, no stones on which to place my foot. Renewed faith in myself as an agent of change is the stone I need. If I could find that stone and set it down, I could take a first step and keep going.
 
I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think many people who want to make change come up against crises of faith sometimes. My faith in particular gets shaken when I compare myself to others whose lived experiences have been much more constrained by systemic injustice than mine, when I compare the work I do with boots-on-ground organizing. 
 
Then I begin to believe there’s no place for me, as I am, with the life experience I’ve got, in the work of liberatory change. That brings me to a standstill, despairing, frantically looking around for a path.
 
I was in that despairing standstill this week when a good friend texted, “Try not to think too far ahead. Do what’s right in front of you until things get better, which they will.” I took her advice, sat down at my desk, and opened my list of things to read. 
 
First on that list was  “Building Resilient Organizations: Toward Joy and Durable Power in a Time of Crisis” by Maurice Mitchell. As I read, my crisis of faith began to loosen. Mitchell was handing me a stone.
 
Maurice Mitchell is the national director of the Working Families political party (WFP). Before that, he was a community organizer, working on issues like police brutality, divestment from private prisons, and civic engagement. When Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, Mitchell left his job to support that community. He was a key organizer of the 2015 Movement for Black Lives Convention, and founded an organization called Blackbird to support that movement.
 
Eventually, Mitchell left that work, which he calls his home, because he “felt like there needed to be venues where we could build a multiracial, united front.” His leadership of the WFP has been challenging; he describes more than a few crises of faith. In all of that, he’s come to believe that the most important part of work for liberatory change is to bring more and more people into it.
 
Mitchell believes one of the things that stops that from happening is what he calls maximalism, which he defines as “considering anything less than the most idealistic position as a betrayal of core values and evidence of corruption, cowardice, lack of commitment, or vision” and “a righteous refusal to engage with people who do not already share our views and values.”
 
I was considering myself as less this week, questioning the worth of what I have to offer, suspicious of my insistence that the ILI not only engage with, but meet with compassion, people who may be averse to equity, justice and even peace.
 
Then I heard Mitchell say, in an interview with journalist Lulu Navarro-Garcia, “We must assess the power we actually have at all times and in every circumstance so that we don’t leave power on the table.” And I thought, Oh! I have the power that I have, from the lived experience that I have, and I mustn’t dismiss that. 
 
I read, “The basic work of organizing: talking to lots of different kinds of people on their doorways, in their homes, and in their workplaces.”  And I thought, Oh! We’re organizing.   
 
I read, “There is a cost to hewing to the tactics that make us, maybe, feel the most correct, but don’t present a more correct and accurate picture of the terrain.” And I thought, Ah, it’s alright that our approach goes against the grain of so many approaches to change.
 
It’s exactly my lived experience that helps me to accurately see the terrain of fear and resistance to a pluralist world in which everyone has a chance to thrive in peace. It’s exactly my lived experience that requires me to stay in the work. 
 
In the interview with Navarro-Garcia, Mitchell says, “The most uncomfortable thing to do, if I was a white person in a debate around racial justice, is to stay in the debate and run the risk of being wrong.”
 
I can do that. I can risk being wrong. I can certainly live with discomfort. I can even live with occasional crises of faith. They go like this:  No bearings. No path. No stones to make one with. Stay steady. Pay attention. Something or someone will come along and hand me a stone.