BOOKS REVIEW: Reclaiming Humanity: Revolutionary Pathways to Beloved Community by Beth Roy
Written by SP Editor
What Is the Path to Change? A review of Reclaiming Humanity by Beth Roy.
Introduction
In this rapid-fire discussion of gender, status and class; psychiatry and conflict resolution; identity, compromise and radical change, Beth Roy addresses the major issues and problems of our time. A professional mediator, she knows conflict in the intimacy of resolving it between individuals and within organizations.
As a Marxist, she centers her analysis in class. But this is no simple economic determinism. She places patriarchy as its carrier in practice. She gives careful attention to race and gender.
Roy deals with the threat of climate change, and still believes in the possibility of a better future. She offers thoughtful ideas to those who struggle with damaging internal conflict in organizations that seek to change the world. She has specific ideas on how to deal with them, and practices that can implement those ideas.
At the end, I came away with important reservations about her outlook, one having to do with power and organization, the other with an analysis that makes class and patriarchy the central concepts to understand where we are and guide us forward.
I enjoyed and learned from the reading. You can’t ask for much more in 200 pages.
The Book’s Purpose
“We live in a shared house with hard but crumbling walls, faulty plumbing, and unending rain soaking through the roof. My ultimate aim in writing this book is to engage in dialogue, learning ways to imagine and construct a new house, a sturdy and beautiful structure built on truth and equality. If that project has reality, it must challenge not only the ways we think about each other and the ways we treat each other—as essential as both those things are—but also the material realities that limit our access to the resources needed for shared well-being. We need not only to reclaim our humanity but also to rebuild society to enable and encourage reconnection.”
She thinks big. I like that. But you need the worm’s view as well as the eagle’s to build people power that can overcome the country’s present mess. Despite its grounding in practice and careful observation, that’s the major weakness of this book. To paraphrase Wade Rathke, we need to keep our feet planted firmly on the ground, and our eyes on the stars.
The Key Question
“The three pillars of modern life as lived in industrialized western societies are capitalism, psychiatry (both as it is practiced and as it embodies an ideology) and individualism…How do [they] come together to both create what we know as the benefits of normal life and also lock us into serious issues of inequality, personal unhappiness, and isolation?”
Roy weaves together her experience as a mediator, practitioner of Radical Therapy (which goes against the mainstream of psychiatric practice), and a careful observer of social and economic conflict in the U.S, and in India where she lived for 20 years. She draws on many aspects of her life: mother, wife, partner in a lesbian relationship, professor, careful participant observer in a community of Muslims and Buddhists that erupted in violence (and became her book Some Trouble with Cows: Making Sense of Social Conflict).
Cultural Hegemony
Drawing from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, Roy finds us in a system of cultural hegemony, “…ideas that surround us with such uniformity that they are accepted without question by others and are so rarely questioned or contested that we come to assume they are facts of life, not human constructs with histories.” I question Gramsci and Roy on this hegemony: many openings exist in religious teachings on justice and democratic ideology to challenge it.
The oppressions of racism, sexism and class are deep within anyone raised in this country. But so is an alternative set of ideas like fairness, the right to my opinion, democracy and “love thy neighbor as thyself”.
In Roy’s telling, the origin of “ism” ideas seems mysterious, at times even genetic: “Meanwhile, as we lose access to our authentic truth, we also lose access to that primitive cry, ‘it’s not fair’.”
During the Nazi occupation, “ordinary Polish men performing genocide stood close before the women, children, and elders they shot casting their still-warm bodies into pits…How do our eyes stop seeing our own limbs and faces and hearts in those we harm?” I’m confident it is apparent to Roy that to refuse to shoot would lead to murder by the Nazis. In a dehumanizing situation, should a Pole sacrifice his own life even knowing that one of his country-mates would have done the killing? Why is she so confident that some of the murderers didn’t have nightmares?
The George Floyd Murder
In her chapter on identities, she asks about the cops who witnessed George Floyd’s murder by one of their fellow officers: “Did the police officers who stood by as their partner slowly choked the life from George Floyd see their victim’s identity as anything other than Black? Did they equate that label with “not human” or “criminal” and so assume George Floyd did not need or deserve their protection?” Implicit is a view of power and its abuse that runs through the book. It minimizes ambiguity. Though power and powerlessness are central concepts for her, she fails to apply them in situations I will soon discuss.
But first this: One of the stand-by cops is a Hmong-American with a history of police abuse. Another is Black, was supervised by Chauvin (who killed Floyd) and was abusive, A third had a history of violence. These suggest a predisposition to support Chauvin that is fairly important to the story. Might there be cops with other histories and predispositions? Might they have acted differently? We don’t know, but we won’t find out without asking questions more specific than hers—other questions that have to do with the “thin Blue Line”—cops covering for each other when one violates police codes because that cop might be the one who “covers your back” in dangerous circumstances? If your fellow officer can save your life in a situation of violence, then you’re not likely to “rat” on him (or her). These questions of context are central to understanding race and racism in our police departments.
Complexity
Here’s a situation where “racism” isn’t sufficient to explain behavior, though it surely establishes a context for it. The 1930s Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago was home to white ethnic Eastern Europeans, Irish and a small enclave of Mexicans all of whom worked in the Chicago stockyards. Most attended homogeneous Catholic parishes where the mass was said in their native language. There were bitter antagonisms among them. No Blacks lived there.
The Packinghouse Workers Union in the person of Herb March, an open member of the Communist Party, organized all of them into the union. Blacks too. How did he do that? In their Catholic parishes these men were warned not to join “the Communist union.”
March knew the work and was good at it. He developed relationships that may have led co-workers to think of him as a “different kind of Communist,” though I don’t know that having never spoken with any of them. When presenting the union, he appealed to self-interest to engage workers, as do all organizers I know who ever built anything that exercised people power as distinct from moral righteousness (they appeal to that as well). Roy respects “liberation theology,” a radical Catholic biblical interpretation. But not many priests preach that, and fewer of them are parish priests. The Catholics that March worked with had theologically and politically conservative priests, but they were moved to join with Herb March in this new organization.
Community organizer Saul Alinsky entered the scene with the idea of bringing them all together in a “broadly-based, multi-ethnic/racial, multi-issue” community organization, and included March in his plans. Thus was born an alliance that spanned the politics of conservative Catholic priests to a Communist who was a key figure in the organizing.
March was initially skeptical. “I know you’re a clever guy, Saul, but how are you going to get me in the same room with those priests?” With their self-interest, Alinsky replied. That idea is the one that builds people power whether in communities or workplaces.
Once engaged in common struggle against a common adversary, opportunities to challenge old stereotypes arise. March and Alinsky understood that.
Roots of Racism
Soon after the end of World War II, a few Blacks sought to move into Back of the Yards. They were threatened with violence. Black realtors who used “panic peddling” to get “white ethnics” to sell were nonviolently escorted out of the neighborhood and told if they showed up again, the escort might not be so generous. Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council organized the neighborhood to keep Blacks out. Critics wondered at how an organization that had passed resolutions for equal rights immediately after World War II could so quickly become racist. Some on the Left attributed it to Alinsky’s lack of ideology. When I asked March and his wife Jane whether Alinsky could have done anything differently, they concluded “no.”
Analysis is central to understanding. Red-lining, the practice of lenders, public agencies and realtors drawing a red-line on a map to delineate a “deteriorating” neighborhood was lurking behind the initial forays by Black realtors to get homes in the neighborhood sold to Black buyers. Residents were told, “sell now (at a loss) but avoid a steep decline in the value of your home when the Blacks move in.” (Blacks paid above what had been market price because discriminatory practices limited their access to housing.)
For white ethnic working-class households, their home was by far their greatest equity—the basis for sending kids to college, borrowing to buy a boat and for otherwise joining the American middle class.
The detail is necessary to understand why “racism” runs deeply in this country. It is countered by examples of “Black and White Unite and Fight.” Herb March led one of them. While class was his central category for analysis, he had a deeply nuanced understanding of the interplay of class and race (and Jane added gender).
Back of the Yards neighborhood, by the way, slowly integrated. It is now predominantly Latino, about 10% Black, and the rest older white ethnics who were its earlier residents.
Class, Status and Power
The people power necessary to challenge the money power that now dominates American political, economic, social and cultural life will not be built by excluding people who our analysis might consider “racist.” Nor will it be built by arguing whether class or status is the more important variable in understanding who rules. People believing one, the other or having “no opinion” need to be assembled in “majority constituency” organizations built on the core values of the American democratic tradition, values embedded in the Declaration of Independence, the writing of Tom Paine and many others who preceded and followed them.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” can be the object of criticism as sexist, just as the authors of the Declaration can be identified as racist. That is a useful thing to do in a class on American history. It isn’t useful in the context of enlisting people to build people power. That class can take place in an organization that brings Blacks and Whites (and immigrants and Latinos and et al) together if its organizers do their educational work in the context of building people power. Everyday people working in the context of people power organizations quickly see for themselves the application of divide and conquer used by the powerful.
When asked by critics, “What is your ideology?” I respond, “radical democracy,” and distinguish it from “elite democracy” which fears the participation of regular people in the political process. As John Dewey put it, “The cure for the problems of democracy is more democracy.” In an active democracy, diverse people necessarily come together to formulate policies, elect leaders and determine strategy and tactics. Cognitive dissonance arises when racial, gender and other stereotypes don’t fit their experience of “The Other.” These are teachable moments when past “isms” can be challenged—as indeed I have seen them successfully challenged. Radical democracy is best created in mass-based, multi-issue, highly participatory organizations. They are what’s missing in today’s anti-Trump/MAGA politics.
Prejudiced retired white Eddie came to a Black tenant union’s demonstration. I asked him why: “They showed up for me on my issue, and now I’ve gotten to know them. There are some really nice people...”
Successes?
Roy cites the demonstrations of Arab Spring and Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven’s Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail” as practical examples of her views. Except for Tunisia, Arab Spring mass demonstrations didn’t lead to democratic governments; some didn’t topple the authoritarians they were protesting.
Piven and Cloward argue that organization is what undermined the welfare rights movement, but it is organization that sustains the otherwise ephemeral power of social movements. Movements may win concessions from the powerful when hundreds of thousands are in the streets, but they can’t enforce them when everyday people get on with their lives.
There is no dispute that many people power organizations have pathologies that small “d” democrats struggle to overcome. “Freedom is a constant struggle” we used to say when I was a field secretary in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And, in fact, there are both more-and-less small “d” democratic organizations.
Conclusion
Reading Roy is an antidote to the worm’s eye view that is essential to building people power. I highly recommend it even though I disagree with some of its arguments.
It concerns me that people on my side of the political fence are not deeply rooting themselves in the practicalities of building local power, which is now more than mobilizing people on this-or-that issue or for this-or-that election. All people power begins locally. No union was ever built and sustained without “locals.” The Deep South civil rights movement wasn’t built without local units—clergy-led affiliates of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and everyday local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, day laborers, domestic workers and small business people in the case of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee formed groups.
Minneapolis ICE resistance is encouraging: ISAIAH, an immigrant rights organization, unions and a multiplicity of block, parent and other very local organizing pushed ICE out of town there. Without these formations across the country, we will continue to be on the defensive against the endlessly malicious and clever divide-and-conquer Donald Trump. Without them we will not have an alternative to appeal to MAGA-oriented whites who are looking for solutions to real problems in their lives and now believe “The Other” is their cause.
To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, “I have a dream that one day all people will rise up and come to see that they are made to live together as sisters and brothers.”
Mike Miller was an SNCC “field secretary” from late 1962 to the end of 1966 and worked in the Mississippi Delta during the Summer of 1963; directed a Saul Alinsky community organizing project in Kansas City, MO; and spent the rest of his life engaged with community organizing. He directs ORGANIZE Training Center.
