Let's Move Our Feet Together
By: Lauren Robel
Next Steps: “Pray, but move your feet”
Let me begin with gratitude for the mission of Women for Change. Founded as an urgent call to action, animated by a spirit of equity and impatience with indifference, Women for Change calls us to listen in the best way: Hard. This conference has given us deep insights into many of the issues that make the path harder and steeper for the least-resourced and least-powerful in our state. We have heard about the narrowing path to the ballot box, and the tyranny of powerful algorithms to divide us politically. And we are meeting in a week in which our ability to control our reproductive destiny, and therefore the course of our lives, is in peril in several states and, astonishingly, a live issue at the United States Supreme Court.
But the theme of this conference is resilience, and I, therefore, take my cue from the late Congressman and civil rights icon, John Lewis, who often quoted an African proverb: Pray, but move your feet.
In one of the last things he wrote, the afterword of Jon Meachem’s incredible biography of his life published just last year, John Lewis surveyed a grim landscape he described as “forces that are still preaching hate and division,” forces that he had spent his life standing up to at profound cost. But he refused to take his eyes from the prize, which to him was easily stated: “. . . to go forward and create one community----one America.” For Lewis, as for the organizers and presenters at this conference, that “journey begins with faith---faith in the dignity and worth of every human being . . .an idea with roots in Genisis and the Declaration of Independence. The journey is sustained by persistence---persistence in the pressing of the justice of the cause. And the journey is informed by hope---hope that . . . . adversity can breed unity and hatred can give way to love.”
So, in the spirit of John Lewis, how do we pray, but move our feet? I offer three thoughts and a caveat:
Invest in organizations actively working to reap the “solidarity dividend.”
Invest in local politics
Stand for equity in all our actions, and especially in voting.
And the caveat: Be kind to yourself. It has been a hard couple of years, especially for parents, and particularly for mothers if you have no time to give, you give what else you can, including your financial and moral support.
So in order:
Let’s pray and move our feet for organizations that believe in and foster what author Heather McGee calls the “solidarity dividend.” In her terrific book recent book, McGhee describes the zero-sum thinking that dominates so many policy debates about race, at a steep cost to our communities. But McGhee finds hope in the small town of Lewiston, Maine. Such small towns in rural America are often challenged, but Lewiston’s city government courted an influx of African refugees to attack its chronic labor shortages. To do this, Lewiston relied on local multiracial coalitions that listened to the concerns of the current residents and fostered activities to bring them together with the new ones. That work paid a dividend in inclusion: a bipartisan think tank calculated that Maine’s African immigrant households contributed $194 million in state and local taxes in 2018.
But you don’t have to go to Lewiston, Maine or Utica, New York to find such stories. Look closer to home at the work the Indiana University Center for Rural Engagement has been doing with Indiana’s Huntingburg, a Southern Indiana town with a LatinX population of close to 20%. The Center worked closely with the mayor, local citizens, and the immigrant community to bring IU’s resources to the community. That in turn led to Spanish-speaking internships for School of Education students; a legal clinic on immigration issues run by a law school faculty member, and most powerfully perhaps, working with IU’s Arts & Humanities Council to set up a regular First Fridays festival where LatinX culture is a regular feature. As a result of this work, Huntingburg was able to give life to its new park, and tie together its housing and workforce development efforts, leading to new funding for the community.
Of every organization we might give our time, treasure, or talent to, we can ask, “How are you working to reap the solidarity dividend?”
We can pray and move our feet to invest in state and local politics. In a beautiful farewell to his readers this past weekend, New York Times Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Nicholas Kristof said goodbye to journalism to run for governor of Oregon. Kristof had written for nearly 30 years from every place on earth where genocide occurred, often at great personal cost. His witness was always mixed with the deepest compassion and respect for the local heroes of every kind he met in that work.
But as Kristof wrote last week, “While I’m proud of the attention I gave to global atrocities, it sickened me to return from humanitarian crises abroad and find one at home.” Kristoff grew up in the rural town of Yamhill, Oregon, and he watched in horror as the kids he grew up with----indeed, a quarter of the kids he rode with on his school bus---succumbed to the diseases of despair: Suicide, addiction, and imprisonment. After writing about these profoundly personal stories of his friends in a recent book with his partner and spouse, Kristof decided he could no longer simply watch and bear witness. He needed to try to enact policies that could save our children---and the remaining families in Yamhill----from the despair that was killing them. He left the pinnacle of his profession this week to run for governor in Oregon.
Kristof and WuDunn’s book ends with “Ten Steps you can Take in the Next Ten Minutes to Make A Difference,” and every idea there is terrific, including their suggestions that we break taboos and talk about mental health, domestic violence, and substance abuse. While we can’t all run for governor, we can all pay attention to local politics, and support---or be!--- candidates that care. On this score, I will particularly commend attention to the school boards----nonpartisan elected fellow citizens who give their time to our local public schools---that are under sustained assault right now. At the end of September, the National School Boards Association asked for federal assistance to stop threats and acts of violence against public schoolchildren, public school board members, and other public school district officials and educators. We obviously should not compete with the FBI for countering threats of violence against school board members, but we can be involved closely in school board elections to ensure that our local school boards are not captured by extremists. And we can offer our thanks and support to the teachers, public school administrators, and school board members who are currently serving, and a show of solidarity with these public servants. And perhaps, the next school board election, you will be moved to run.
And we can pray and move our feet for that foundational principle of our democracy, the right to vote. As you have heard in this conference, that right is being challenged in sophisticated and effective ways----through gerrymandering, through restrictive voting practices, and through the corrosive effects of cynicism. We need all eyes on our representatives now to ensure that the brutal vote suppression that John Lewis, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and so many others fought against in their generation is not simply replaced with the bloodless but equally brutal suppression of algorithms that slice our communities apart with deadly accuracy. This gerrymandering affects both Republican and Democratic voters by ensuring that the center is replaced by the fringe. Stay engaged, stay engaged, stay engaged.
This conference has done what Women4Change does best. It has allowed us a door into the gift of each other’s humanity and the moral imperative of staying awake to each other’s needs. In “At Blackwater Pond,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote of the power of sustained attention:
At Blackwater Pond, she wrote:
the tossed waters have settled after a night of rain.
I dip my cupped hands. I drink a long time.
It tastes like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
Into my body, waking the bones. I hear them deep inside me, whispering
Oh what is that beautiful thing that just happened?
Thank you to Women4Change for waking our bones. Let’s use this conference as the springboard---for that is what resilience is, a bouncing back---to make the most beautiful of things, community, happen.
Thank you.
Lauren Robel
Val Nolan Professor of Law
Maurer School of Law
Indiana University