part one: Confronting Conflict Within Movement Work

photo source: mic.com

I am a community organizer and storyteller with a globally-minded yet hyper-local focus on Indianapolis and Central Indiana. I have lived in the city for four years, serving several different nonprofits, and leading and working alongside community organizations as a teaching artist, engagement specialist, and program coordinator. In what seems like relatively short time, I have learned about building relationships with neighbors and leaders alike, creating and growing grassroots spaces, navigating layers of personality and politic, bridging art-making and political education, all while leveraging few resources. I have since taken a step back from community organizing this summer.
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Scaling back gives me space to observe and self-reflect, and relieves the unsustainable pressure to do everything and be everywhere ascribed to active participation. It is easier for me to think about our work and my role with one foot now placed firmly outside of my network of fellow organizers. The break has provided needed perspective on a variety of aspects of local movement work, helping me theorize and practice better ways of approaching frequent points of contention between groups and individual people, points that more often than not impede collaboration and solidarity usually at the direct expense of already marginalized people. We are a relatively small but mighty contingent, and we are our work — many of the most visible organizers are also members of the communities and identity groups we serve and advocate for.

okay, but why write about conflict
For the last year or so, I have been wrestling with the concept of accountability, conflict resolution, and their impact on relationships between people both contributing to and leading movement work in Indianapolis. I am not the first or last person to feel, think, write, fail, flourish, share my way through difficulties concerning conflict and accountability, specifically among community organizers. We can and should draw from the lived experience and expended emotional labor of organizers creating and building on models to confront and work through conflict rather than over, around, or ignored altogether. A single gold standard how-to manual does not exist for us to reference, to revere as the answer. We can and should study and incorporate historical examples gifted to us by past and present movement workers and storytellers, elders and ancestors. We can and should allow hard lessons to transform our selves and our work, and share and adapt best practices from one another in real time. We are making up whatever this is as we go, and mountains and molehills abound. Traversing the unknown and uncertain space of conflict requires radical, decolonized, collective imagination. Otherwise we risk remaking conflict resolution or glaring lack thereof in the image of systemic oppression we seek to deconstruct.

wtflols of red state organizing, an indianer tale
Contrary to inter/national belief, “progressive” ideology and initiatives can and do thrive Indiana, from labor protections and fair wage campaigns to reproductive health clinic escort programs to growing rural Pride celebrations to Black Lives Matter statehouse demonstrations and more. Indianapolis is a peculiar city, a blue blip of a county swallowed by deep red statewide save for few exceptions like Bloomington, South Bend, and Northwest Indiana, the Region of my upbringing.

The city-county, primarily governed by establishment Democrats, is home to people upholding municipal policy producing systemic harm neatly swept beneath a facade of hospitable and sensible, moderate Hoosier politics. I am hard-pressed to distinguish between Democrats and the GOP when Indianapolis Metro Police Department tactical operations touted by our new mayor target predominately black and brown neighborhoods and an ultra-conservative campaign to defund the state’s Planned Parenthood facilities results in the worst HIV outbreak in Indiana history. These policies and practices are fruit of the same systemic oppression.

Movement workers in this area are often disregarded by national, mainstream organizations advancing progressive efforts. Funds, resources, and people power tend to better saturate larger metro areas like New York City or Chicago while community organizers in Indianapolis and similar cities generally have to fight for disappearing grants, rub crowdfunded pennies together to somehow manifest miracles.

The months prior to the election of our current president injected an influx of newly excited and politicized people into various local movements. A noted lack of regard for and partnership with existing community organizations caused ongoing conflict and unrequited hope to stretch political understanding and action sparked by anti-Trump sentiment. Affluent white women crowded out the substantial boom in influential demographic blocs, flocking to establish women’s groups, pussy hat marches, and bipartisan political action committees to fund women candidates for local and state offices boasting thousands of dollars in disposable revenue.

These circumstances force familiar compromises, sometimes affectionately called infighting, between ideologically related yet juxtaposed groups primarily representing radical leftists, liberal centrists, center left folks as a whole: police and prison reform and abolition, pro-choice feminism and reproductive justice advocacy, Medicare expansion and the Fight for $15, to connect and name a few. This political and material reality leaves little room for cooperative trial by fire among Indianapolis organizers. Perhaps we should and must join forces to accomplish our political goals because hands, hearts, heads, and hard cash are seemingly and actually geographically limited. How we navigate and overcome these conditions affecting our work here in Indianapolis influences and exacerbates conflict between us.

and ya cousins too, or, catching these communal hands
Conflict is a natural part of relationship between two or more. The potential for trouble rears up when we submit to the idea that conflict is inherently devastating and we repeatedly employ dysfunctional tactics expecting positive results, or worse, avoid addressing conflict to the point of uninhibited replication. Creativity, collaboration, sociopolitical solidarity beyond lip service cannot come to fruition without conflict. Conflict challenges our comfort and sharpens our critical thinking and emotional intelligence, and pushes us to communicate honestly and clearly with our selves and others. Further, conflict should expose, heal, reduce, and prevent exploitation, violation, and abuses of power we wield on one another without question or consequence.

Conflict between two or more organizers can affect capacity for teamwork and interrupt partnerships of respective groups and/or create friction within organizations. The blurred line between personal and professional and few degrees of separation among Indianapolis organizers affords the benefits of close proximity and varied levels of comradery. However, the same dynamic also fosters an environment when conflict remains unresolved and festers, spilling over into organizational operations and causing what begins as an individual dispute to become a communal impasse.

The impact of abuse at the heart of conflict is egregious as violent acts employed by an individual are extensions of systemic domination that do not exist in a vacuum. This week’s #metoo campaign is yet another indication of a sobering reality. Sexual violation by one organizer against another, for example, not only directly harms the survivor/victim, but damages the working relationship and necessarily calls organizational integrity and values into question.

A community organization operating under the banner of social justice cannot approach abuse as an isolated problem between two parties in good faith. Rather, we have to consistently handle singular violations connected at the roots and address gendered norms abetting domination. We repeatedly neglect addressing micro and macro in tandem, relegating victimized organizers into silence, exile, and further harm for the “greater good” of political progress. We are aiding oppression we claim to labor against.

binaries got us fucked up, an interlude
At the core of relational and communal conflict is a fundamentally flawed belief that power is innately evil, and causing us to forgo critical analyses of power and disavow its uses and imaginative possibilities. We yield collective power to the binary of oppressor and oppressed, stopping short of accounting for the ways we cause and endure harm on all sides of oppression, directly and indirectly. Evil latitude of power is not the sole territory of people holding ideologically opposed positions. What we are trying to dismantle is not simply the other side. It is also inside of us and our communities. It is all parts rather than either/or, because sometimes, there is no other side. When we fail to understand systemic power structures and the power we hold as individuals, the power we are granted by virtue of identity and perceived position, the power reclaimed through solidarity, we will continue to misuse and abuse ourselves and others.