Going Public Book Club – Chapter 4: Introducing Your Larger Self

Civic Reflections

In Chapter 4, Gecan explores the idea of attention versus recognition.

“Intelligent action, even public confrontation, is at bottom an attempt to engage and relate,” he writes, for the larger, fundamental purpose of recognition. He notes that most activists fail to appreciate this. He is pointing to an important distinction that serves what activists presumably want, but do not get, because they are not perhaps aware of the tools and discipline of organizing: Recognition, he explains, is “the most basic sign of respect, the start of reciprocity, and the precondition for a working public relationship.”

Recognition is about power. And Gecan writes, as a warning: “Bureaucrats seek to stifle it…Celebrity self-promoters try to monopolize it…Our leaders study and practice it.”

If you can gain recognition - a tall order on issues like education or affordable housing - then you are, in effect, exerting power. 

Gecan takes us through a few really good examples. One of them was about a public pool that had, for years, been closed despite funds being allocated for repairs due to municipal inaction. He details how Alice McCollum, a leader in her Baptist church and single mother of 10 children who lived across the street from the closed pool, led the kind of “intelligent action” that leads to recognition, to exercising the power of organized people, and to results. Gecan describes the meeting that Ms. McCollum led with a city director who had the authority to make the needed repairs to the swimming pool. The scene Gecan shares is of a woman who knew the role she had to play: she was not just a mother or congregant…she was part of a larger, public group that had researched, organized, and planned for public action, and had the discipline to carry it out. 

The scene in the book is striking; Gecan describes how the city director transformed from a patronizing city official to a bureaucrat who “exploded” on the group, screaming “‘You people! You people! How dare you?’”. Throughout the meeting, McCollum and her team remained calm and stood their ground on their simple question about repairs to the swimming pool, and within months the pool was opened. Importantly, Gecan shares the follow-up; the city director thereafter understood who McCollum was; not just a mom, but part of a larger public organizing apparatus that was about doing public business in public. Recognition. 

The theme of the chapter is recognition, and the stories that Gecan shares indicate the ways that organized people in power organizations such as East Brooklyn Congregations and Jersey City Together can gain recognition through doing their research, organizing their communities, and having the discipline to carry out their work. Many of the stories indicate ways that organized people can turn the tables on public officials who have in the past been unresponsive to their communities, through the discipline of organizing.

Brigid: I experienced this as an outsider looking in from the choir loft of Old Bergen Church in 2016. I attended the action because I was interested in one of the topics - the Reval - which I had been writing about on Civic Parent. I understood the issue inside and out and knew it was complex, confusing, and fear-inducing for many valid reasons.

That evening, I watched Jersey City Together exert real power. I recognized it immediately and respected the group. I did not know how; I just saw it and understood the raw power for what it was. 

I watched Rev Alonzo Perry of New Hope Missionary Baptist Church lead a community of over 900 through a distilled, 10-minute teaching about property tax injustice that the mayor at the time was effectively sanctioning through blatant inaction. 

The newspaper headline the next day was “In Jersey City, Poor Blacks Subsidize Rich Whites” by Star Ledger op-ed writer Tom Moran.  The headline was true. What Jersey City had done - over successive administrations starting in 1988 - was keep the tax assessed values frozen in time. In 1988, the downtown waterfront was some of the lowest-priced property, so the tax assessed values were also the lowest. But between 1988 and 2016 the city then - through public tax abatement subsidies - drove up the market values of downtown properties. The abatements and skyscrapers rose but the taxes did not adjust as they should have, and it created a hard-to-see tax discount for downtown homeowners that would be subsidized, as Moran rightly pointed out, by taxpayers in areas like Greenville. Families in areas like Greenville could no longer afford their own property tax and were forced to move; their stories were never headline-worthy…until Jersey City Together decided to tell it. In public. Within days, the mayor greenlit the Reval.

The long-stalled Reval was like the unfixed pool in Gecan’s story. Inaction causes pain. Unless someone has the courage to name it, it blends in with the landscape. As that inaction persists, it becomes harder to fix, which makes it a harder sell for bureaucrats in power. It's a vicious cycle. 

But inaction does not have to persist. When civic actors make a conscious choice to introduce their larger selves, change is possible. 

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