At Sarasota event next week, Harvard historian will urge activists to beat divide-and-conquer strategies.
Johannes Werner
Original Air Date: Jan. 17, 2024
Host: Everybody praises the achievements of the U.S. civil rights movement. But what did it take to get there? Joint action, which in turn took a lot of organizing, and—most importantly—coalition building that involved moving outside comfort zones. We talked to Tim McCarthy, a Harvard historian who will be moderating an event in Sarasota next week that brings together leaders of three regional grassroots movements.
Tim McCarthy.
Johannes Werner: Tim McCarthy was the first openly gay faculty member at Harvard Kennedy School. This is where he teaches history—specifically of the Civil Rights movement and LGBTQ movements. Being a founding member of Barack Obama’s National LGBT Leadership Council aside, he spent 15 years organizing hundreds of students to help rebuild Black churches destroyed in arson attacks throughout the United States, and he chairs the board of Free the Slaves, a global NGO in the fight against modern slavery.
So McCarthy does have weight when he talks about coalitions and the challenges of coalition building. Here’s what he said in a phone interview when asked about how to overcome isolation and the divisions created by the culture wars in Florida:
Tim McCarthy: Coalition building is hard. It’s always hard. Part of the challenge on the so-called left, or among progressive folks, and among different kinds of groups, is that people don’t always see common ground in their different struggles, and that’s the reality of things. People who are immigrants are in a different position right now in terms of what they’re up against than trans people, maybe. Women who have just lost the right to determine what they do with their own body and reproductive choices may have different experiences from people who are workers and wage-laborers—people who are unionized or not unionized. All of those different groups have different lived experiences and realities and may have different priorities for what they think is important in one given moment, and all of that gets in the way of organizing or poses challenges. The other thing, too, that I think is important for us to remember—and this is where history, I think, can be very helpful, because history is basically a whole set of case studies that can help us understand how things in the past have succeeded and how things in the past have failed and why they’ve failed. One common root of failure for social movements is the submission to the divide-and-conquer playbook—the authoritarian playbook. When we submit to the impulse to fight one another as opposed to fighting the injustices that we’re all experiencing in different ways, we participate in the divide-and-conquer strategy of the other side.
Flyer for Power & the People, Jan. 23 from 6–7:30 at Unitarian Universalists of Sarasota.
JW: McCarthy will moderate a three-member panel. It’s made up of CJ Czaia, founder of UnidosNow, a Sarasota-based advocacy group for immigrants; Kehsi Iman Wilson, co-founder of Atlanta-based New Disabled South; and Zander Moricz, founder of Sarasota-based SEE Alliance, a youth-led advocacy group.
Here’s how McCarthy describes what the organizers are trying to achieve with the event, titled “Power & the People.”
TM: One of the things that we are trying to do in this conversation with the four of us coming together, from very different places and identities and movements and lived experiences, is to have a conversation precisely about the challenges of coalition building and the possibilities of what we could do if we were working more closely together. We have people on this panel—CJ and Zander and Kehsi and myself—who come from LGBTQ movements and racial justice movements and immigration rights movements and educational equity movements and disability rights movements and all of these different movements—women’s movement, feminism—so we all represent, together, our own kind of coalition—our own very diverse kind of community, and we’re hoping to have a really honest conversation precisely about the issues that you’re asking about, and precisely within the context of the current political climate in Florida.
JW: “Power & the People” will begin 6 p.m. next Thursday, Jan. 23. Put together by the Boxser Diversity Initiative, it will be hosted by the Unitarian Universalists of Sarasota at their sanctuary at 3975 Fruitville Road. The event is free, but seating is limited, and registration is required. To do so, go to boxserdiversityinitiative.org. That’s “Boxser” with “XS,” boxserdiversityinitiative.org.
Reporting for WSLR News, this has been Johannes Werner.
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