Streetwise for Book Smarts: Grassroots Organizing and Education Reform in the Bronx

Chapter Seven. Favorite Hits

Chapter Seven Favorite Hits Embedded Preferences for Confrontation or Collaboration Tool kits do more than help social change organizations (SCOs) in deciding on their approaches to issues of race and their capacities to influence different stages of the policy-making process. Their significance is clearest in the SCOs’ embedded preferences for collaboration or confrontation, since the organizations tend to stick to their respective repertoires of political strategies, even after campaign “failures” as well as “successes.” Here, confrontational strategies are those that chiefly pit the SCO in opposition to policy makers and the state, usually represented by a public official or the Department of Education. As in a court case in the American adversarial judicial system, there are clear losers and winners, and SCOs attempt to “win” in an argument, whether by outshouting the targets, outwitting them, or winning them over. Collaborative strategies are those that generally ally the SCO with policy makers and the state, as if they were members of the same (sometimes amorphous) team. Collaboration and confrontation do not have to be dichotomous.Indeed, just as SCOs aim to develop the capacity to influence politicians at different stages of the policy-making cycle, SCOs would also become more efficient if they nimbly combined or alternated between political strategies. Why, then, do SCOs rarely change course when a political strategy falls flat? By that time, leaders and organizers in the SCOs have formed habits Embedded Preferences for Confrontation or Collaboration 157 that cannot be easily broken. Further, the strategies that they do pursue yield a sense of satisfaction that mitigates the disappointment of a campaign setback . Via a dialectic of self-selection and personal transformation, leaders either choose to opt out or become ever more invested in the tool kits and respective political strategies in which they participate.This chapter emphasizes the nonmaterial rewards of leader participation in SCOs.1 It examines the ways in which the Alinskyite and Freirean tool kits lead to political and emotional commitment to certain political strategies, and how each SCO attempts to strike a balance between confrontation and collaboration. A brief analogy might be helpful here. If the SCOs’ organizers and leaders are like musicians, then we can imagine the Alinskyite SCO leaders playing music like a big, well-disciplined orchestra, working under the direction of an organizer-conductor. Their rehearsals are heavily structured. By contrast , Freirean SCO leaders are more used to working with each other and feeling out each member’s style and strengths along the way. As musicians, they might often riff off each other, one picking up on a harmonic theme where another left off. Their practice meetings are less like rehearsals per se, and more like jam sessions. It makes sense that with different styles of training from different tool kits, these leaders also end up developing embedded preferences for different musical styles. Whereas the Alinskyite leaders might prefer to astound and maybe even intimidate audiences with their virtuosity, playing classical symphonies as if with one booming voice, the Freirean ones might feel like they are most in their element while playing improvisational jazz. They might take turns playing solos rather than follow a conductor’s directions or stick to a musical score, and they might even ask for audience participation along the way. In the end, a pianist might aspire to play a wide variety of styles, and a skilled one can probably adapt to playing Frédéric Chopin’s concertos as well as Thelonius Monk’s jazz pieces, but it is quite difficult to switch back and forth, and to skillfully launch into whatever style the occasion requires. This is especially true because eventually the pianist might be more emotionally moved by some pieces than others. Depending on how the pianist has been empowered, she will also have different dreams of grandeur. As with these hypothetical musicians, the internal tool kits of the different case study organizations helped to determine the leaders’ embedded preferences for the SCOs’ external political strategies. The largely organizer-coordinated activities of the Alinskyite tool kit, which help to build strong organizational identities and a sense of mission and unity, encouraged leaders to revel in more confrontational political strategies. The teamwork-oriented activities of the Freirean tool kit—which emphasize 158 Chapter Seven individual development and, in turn, multiple perspectives on the same issue and the creation of alternative institutions and lifestyles...