Nonviolence Day Minnesota October 7
I was honored to receive the ‘Spirit of Gandhi’ Award at Nonviolence Day in Minnesota on October 7, 2017 at the State Capitol. As the Chai News reported, “Nonviolence Day is observed globally on the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. The India Association of Minnesota, the Dash Foundation, and partners which include Senator Foung Hawj and the Hindu Society of Minnesota joined forces to emphasize the importance of nonviolence in a polarized world and country.”
Here is an edited version of my remarks.
Marie Ström, a South African democracy educator and my wife, and I travelled through India in December with our daughter Jae. Both Marie and I were active in nonviolent movements. I worked for Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement. She was active in nonviolent strands of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, where modern nonviolence was born. In India we were struck by the renewed relevance of the nonviolent philosophy.
Nonviolent movements speak to the crisis of their times. The civil rights movement challenged the “color line,” which as W.E.B. Du Bois had observed was a crucible of the 20th century.
I believe that the primary crisis today is an unravelling of the social fabric linked to devaluation of the talents, intelligence and productive energies of everyday citizens of all races and backgrounds. We need nonviolence as a transformative philosophy, a way of life, that can be woven into the fabric of everyday life and work through what we call public work. This is the “New Nonviolence.”
The transformative power of nonviolence
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world,” said Mahatma Gandhi. His word for nonviolence was satyagraha, “soul force.” It inspired Martin Luther King and others in the American civil rights movement. King also stressed nonviolence’s transformative power. “The nonviolent approach…first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it,” he said. “It gives them new self-respect. It calls up resources of strength and courage they did not know they had.”
King argued for seeking to understand opponents, not to defeat or humiliate them and to separate the sin from the sinner. He also insisted that nonviolence is a kind of love aiming at “a neighborly concern for others,” whether friend or enemy, recognizing their aspiration “for belonging to the best in the human family.” Such love can be described as public love, respect for others’ potential to contribute to our common world. Others have also contributed.
One was Jane Addams, a leader of the settlement house movement to help new immigrants coming to America. Like King and Gandhi, Addams challenged sentimental concepts of peace-making. Nonresistance “is much too feeble and inadequate,” she said. proposed as an alternative “forming new centers of spiritual energy.” She saw in these centers stirrings of “strenuous forces at work,” especially among “the huge mass” of people marginalized and invisible like immigrants flooding into Chicago. “If they have opportunity for connection to others,” she said, “they develop the power of association which comes from daily contact with those who are unlike each other. It is possible that we shall be saved from warfare by the ‘quarrelsome mob’ turned into kindly citizens.”
A second figure in co-creative nonviolence is Lewis Mumford, a philosopher and educator who argued that “transformation in society…must first take place in the heart and minds” in his book, The Conduct of Life, published in 1951. Mumford said, “our present civilization is efficient in giving orders and compelling obedience and providing one way communications but is inept in everything that involves reciprocity, mutual aid, two way communication, give and take.”
Public work was the way to respond. Mumford proposed that young people spend time in a public work corps, “doing a thousand things that need to be done, from planting forests and road side strips, supervision of school children in nurseries and playgrounds to active companionship of the aged, the blind, the crippled, from auxiliary work in harvesting to fire fighting.” Our own efforts through the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, now the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship, has built on these ideas.
A third voice is a group of Mexican American leaders in the religiously based community organization Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio, Texas, in the 1970s, which became a global model for broad-based community organizing. By the late 1970s, the group faced the challenge of how to make change outside the neighborhoods, impacting economic development and other city-wide issues. This required developing what they called “public relationships” with Anglo (European-American) business leaders on the North Side of town, whom Mexican Americans hated for what they saw as their institutionalized racism. COPS pioneered the concept of “public life” in which the point of action is not to seek care and intimacy or even friendship. Rather, public life is an arena of building productive working relationships across radical differences even among those who may intensely dislike each other, for the sake of larger public work. The COPS view of “public” has proven to be a way to operationalize public love for many powerless and disadvantaged groups around the world.
What is public work?
The concept of public work was further developed by the Center for Democracy and Citizenship (now the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg University) and its partners. Its roots are in the grassroots practices and nonviolent philosophy of the American civil rights movement, which aimed at “broadening the scope of democracy to include everyone and deepening the concept to include every relationship,” in the words of Septima Clark, architect of the movement’s grassroots citizenship schools.
Through experimentation, public work emerged as an approach to citizenship and democracy which highlights citizens as co-creators, not simply voters and volunteers. Public work emphasizes the civic possibilities of work and workplaces. It involves efforts by citizens working across sometimes sharp differences to solve common problems and to create community wealth, from schools, gardens, libraries and local businesses to art, music and healthy lifestyles – a commonwealth of things of public usefulness and beauty.
We discovered that public work projects need to be grounded in the places and local cultures where they operate. The more rooted the more powerful. The question of how to root efforts like Public Achievement, our youth civic education initiative generated the idea of “citizen professionals,” teachers and other educators who keep open free spaces for young people to have power-building experiences and connect their schools or other institutions to local cultures.
The forthcoming book, Pedagogy of the Empowered (Vanderbilt University Press), shows how such nonviolent public work is emerging as a nonviolent philosophy of living. One vivid example is transformation of special education.
Transforming special education
In Public Achievement, teams of young people from elementary through high school work on issues of their choice in real world settings. All work is nonviolent and makes a public contribution. Teams are coached by adults, often young adults, who help them develop achievable goals, learn to navigate the local environment, develop political skills, and treat others with respect.
Dennis Donovan, organizer for Public Achievement, worked with the Special Education pre-service program at Augsburg to experiment with Public Achievement as an answer to the critique of special education emerging from within the field. Susan O’Connor, director of special education, wanted to try something different. “Special Education generally still uses a medical model, based on how to fix kids,” she said. Instead the special education program partnered with teachers Michael Ricci and Alissa Blood to design an alternative class in the Fridley Middle School using a Public Achievement approach. Over three years the results were dramatic. ”Problem” students, mostly low-income and minority, became “problem solvers” on issues like school bullying, health lifestyles, animal cruelty, and creating a support network for terminally ill children. They were recognized in the school, in the larger Fridley community, and across the state.
In her master’s thesis Alyssa Blood explored young participants perceptions of change. She found participants “began to express their feelings of power beyond the realm of Public Achievement.” Allen (a pseudonym) commented, “if you set your mind to it you can do it.” Spud described feeling “we can change a lot of things in the world [like] Martin Luther King did.” He said, “I didn’t care about nobody but me. But now it makes me open and I care about other people.”
Public Achievement also transformed the work of Ricci and Blood into “citizen teachers.” “My role is not to fix things for the kids but to say, ‘this is your class, your mission,” explained Ricci. “How are you going to do the work?’” The teachers were co-creators with students. Since Fridley, all special education preservice students are involved in Public Achievement. Interviews with teachers involved show striking increase in their understanding of special education students’ intelligence and talent, changes in their teaching to give students far more room for co-creative activity, and dramatically more hopefulness about their careers.
An everyday practice Nonviolent movements are symbolized by everyday practices. “If you want to work through nonviolence you have to proceed with small things,” said Gandhi. In our polarized, inflamed public culture when the social fabric itself is fraying, where do we start?
Have a meeting with someone you disagree with. Refrain from judging what is wrong with their views. Think about the meeting as the beginning of a “public relationship,” a chance to practice “public love.” What’s their story? Are there things you can learn? Is there common ground?