When i finish "November Rain," I'm thinking about moving on to "Wild Side" (Hey babe, take a walk on the strike line,) and, even better, reworking the Tribe Called Quest song which sampled it as "Can I Picket." I like Kweli's shout out to Octavia Butler on the (somewhat odd, but endearing) song about Lauryn Hill.
I'm feeling like I'm being totally ineffective as an organizer, if I can even call myself that right now. Whenever anyone hands me a list to phonebank i get seized by this irrational terror of the phone, and the conversations i have are all tentative and badly organized and generally not productive. Maybe i need to keep practicing. Maybe i need to find someonbe to do some roleplays with me - the problem is, we don't necessarily talk to the same people all the time in our organizing, so roleplaying might wind up being imprecise and less helpful than it is for folks who are talking to the same six people every day or every week. It's possibile that i just generally suck at this, but there have been enough moments in my life where i've felt competent enough at this to be of enough use to somebody's organizing to continue to do it. Part of me would like to see us do more face to face stuff rather than phone-based conversations, as a potential means of countering some of the atomizing aspects of the experience of being a graduate student in New York City. But i'm not sure the same shit wouldn't be holding me back if we did that. Plus, sometimes it's hard to grab a cup of coffee with someone when you're on strike. And we'd still have to phonebank anyway. Anyone have any ideas?
I mean, you could ask folks to meet you on the line, maybe? Unless you're all assigned places in advance. And everyboyd's gotta eat at some point: I think grabbing meals or coffee is a great idea. I know I'm terrified as I contemplate moving to D.C., New York, or Los Angeles this summer, and the idea of someone who wanted to meet with me regularly in one of those big scary cities would be amazing. Also, I think I'm joining the National Writers' Union. I'm pretty damn excited.
ReplyDeleteA few thoughts:
ReplyDelete1) More GSOC-wide mtgs. More face-to-face interaction b/n union members and organizers. And at the very least, more interdepartmental mtgs for striking grads to informally socialize and brainstorm tactics.
2) The distress you feel about talking on the phone is one symptom of a much larger affliction called "social anxiety." It's something that every academic must endure, because hey, if you were 100% socially functional, you wouldn't be getting your PhD. (Ha, made you smile!)
3) Keep up the good work--you're doing a terrific job.
SofM
First off, I'm guessing that you're a better organizer than you give yourself credit for. Alyssa's advice seems solid for a couple of reasons. For one thing, face to face organizing is more effective. Maybe more important, though, is that someone who agrees to meet with you has -- probably without realizing it -- taken an action for the union. That's not nothing, so setting that as the goal of your phone conversation gives you an objective that's both achievable and worthwhile.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing I'll say is that lots of people (maybe you, but maybe not) make the mistake of thinking that organizing is about talking, about figuring out the right thing to say, but it's really not. The trick is to listen to what the other person is saying in a way that makes space for them to convince themselves.
Read:
ReplyDelete1) Charles Payne's "I've Got the Light of Freedom"
2) "Sisters in the Struggle" edited by Bettye Collier-Thomas and VP Franklin
and
3) Barbara Ransby's "Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement"
Full of good stuff