Many of you who are social scientists have read John Gaventa's *Power and Powerlessness*, which tries to show how long and often invisible histories of organizing shape whether a community rebels against or acquiesces to a powerful and oppressive institution or set of elites. 1/n
This inspiring NYT article is the second big media piece this year about the amazing pro-immigrant activism in Morristown, Tennessee (the other one was in The New Yorker in April) that, for the most part, completely ignores these effects of history. nytimes.com/interactive/20… 2/n
Morristown has a history of activism, going back to early 90s, around the closing of a GE plant. That activism—helped by Highlander Center, which has a history of organizing around labor, civil rights, and the Communist Party, going back to the 40s—didn't stop the closing. 3/n
But that long history of activism did produce amazing organizers, who wound up doing work around NAFTA, the maquiladoras, immigrant rights, and other workplace struggles. Eve Weinbaum's To Move A Mountain is a great book about that activism. amazon.com/Move-Mountain-… 4/n
The point of that organizing was to get affected and afflicted men and women to see their struggles as part of an ever widening circle of political economy, up to the highest reaches of the global economy, and not to scapegoat immigrants or other vulnerable populations. 5/n
And now we see the invisible effects of that organizing, that history of activism, in the amazing pro-immigrant response of this town to a recent ICE raid. newyorker.com/news/dispatch/… 5/n
Had the Times bothered to look at its own archive for reporting about Morristown, it would have seen several articles over the years about all this labor activism in the area. nytimes.com/2005/09/06/us/… nytimes.com/2009/03/22/us/…
But this is the land where every day, good or bad, is a new day, every moment a winter or springtime. In this telling, Trump bursts out of nowhere; so do dedicated opponents of Trump like these people in Morristown.
The story of Morristown is not a story of goodness out of nowhere. It's about the effort of leftists over decades to build a better world. 8/n (Sorry, I forgot to number the two previous tweets.)
Sometimes it takes that long for that world to come into being; sometimes, it never comes into being at all. But always there is unheralded and invisible work of the militant minority. 9/n
And here are some reports on that invisible work. appalshop.org/store/appalsho… southernspaces.org/2011/going-sou… 10/n
My point is not to celebrate the uncelebrated, though that needs to be done, too: It's that organizing—politics, the stuff of history—makes all the difference in which direction a town goes. This isn't about culture, neuro-psychology, deep authoritarian complexes. The people 11/n
of Morristown who stood up to ICE don't have different wiring in their brains, don't have different cultures, from the people outside Morristown who stood with ICE. They have the benefit of years of political leadership and experience. They stand on the shoulders of others. 12/n
This is why history, politics, matters. 13/13
