I was reading Marian Wright Edelman’s elegant piece, Remembering Howard Zinn and I was struck by this part:
Howie taught me to question and ponder what I read and heard and to examine and apply the lessons of history in the context of the daily political, social, and moral challenges all around us in the South like racial discrimination and income inequality. He combined book learning with experiential opportunities to engage in interracial discussions; partnered with community groups challenging legal segregation; and engaged students as participants, observers, data collectors, and witnesses in pending legal cases.
Marian’s words made me think about my own teachers. Looking back, I realize that the most valuable lesson they taught me was to question. To think critically about everything. Everything. From my college professors who taught me feminist theory and religious studies and philosophy and Black history. Oh, and poetry. The ultimate truth. My professors pushed me to investigate what was true for myself. They taught me to even question them and the PhD certificates framed on their office walls.
When I got to grad school, it seemed like the total opposite. In my nonprofit management program, I was taught to obey all the “best practices” of the nonprofit world. “This,” my professors told me, “is how you do social change.” I read all the books and learned all the theories. I even went out to the Midwest to learn how to raise money at The Fundraising School, where they taught me everything I needed to know about fundraising.
When I first started out in my nonprofit career, I was constantly praised for implementing all the neat stuff I’d learned in grad school. “This is how you write a grant proposal,” I would say to organizations that needed help building their capacity. Not once did I broach a conversation with them about why they were using problematic language. Not once did I question the status quo.
In the “real” world of nonprofit management, I had lost a bit of my idealistic college fire. I had forgotten that I’d come to the sector not just to build better organizations, but to build a better world. I had forgotten that I’d come here in pursuit of truth with a capital “T.”
But after a while, I did begin to ask questions. Why do we do what we do the way we do it? Why do we say one thing in the staff meeting and another in the fundraising meeting? Why do we have to kiss so and so politico’s ass when they clearly don’t give a damn about the people we serve? Why aren’t we using our power to compel the community to action? Why are there so many white people in nonprofit leadership positions when so much of our work is serving communities of color?
I learned the answers to these questions and more very quickly. The easy answer? Because that’s just the way it is and always will be. The more nuanced one? Because no one wants to rock the boat with their boards, with their “friends” inside the City Council or the White House, with their funders. Especially with their funders. It’s much easier to obey.
Just ask DC Central Kitchen president Robert Egger, who has been trying to mobilize his colleagues around the country to change the way we do the work of social change for many years now. He even wrote a book about it. He even started the V3 Campaign to help them do it. Yet many people in the sector consider him a “rebel.” I’ve heard people whisper in the conference hallways that they wish he would get off his soapbox.
I want to ask them why they don’t have a soapbox. Why are they not asking the questions? Isn’t that what being an “independent sector” is all about?
I suspect that the reason that Marian treasured her time with Howard Zinn so much is because very few people do what he did. Very few people are in the business of questioning. The ones that do? Well, we call them rebels. We don’t let them sit at the big kid’s table. We kick them out of the White House.
You will say that I’m naive. I am not. I get the whole money, politics, power thing, I do. I see how it affects nonprofit organizations. It’s a hard line. Sometimes we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. But I want to see us lead from that hard place.
Because unless we do, we become merely keepers of the status quo. We become cogs in a broken wheel. And yes, we know that it’s broken. We see it coming off its hinges before our very eyes. We just don’t want to ask the hard questions that could lead us to fixing it.
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