A Solidarity of Strangers

“Hell, anyone can stick up for someone who thinks like themselves and looks like themselves. The real challenge is building a union or a movement alongside people who aren’t like you, who maybe make you uncomfortable and who maybe you don’t like. (And being a working-class kid who almost didn’t go to college and then wound up at Yale, there were plenty of people I didn’t like.)  At the same time, you have to ask these strangers to do something that probably scares them—and maybe they don’t like you all that much either.  Therein lies some of the most difficult—and some of the most important—work that unions do when they organize successfully.”

Politics of equivalency and coalitional politics…much easier to overcome in theory than in practice.

1 Notes/ Hide

  1. voguedissent posted this