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Episode 60: Political Organizing with Gratitude & Humility Rather than Guilt and Shame

Episode 60: Political Organizing with Gratitude & Humility Rather than Guilt and Shame

FromSpeak Out with Tim Wise


Episode 60: Political Organizing with Gratitude & Humility Rather than Guilt and Shame

FromSpeak Out with Tim Wise

ratings:
Length:
64 minutes
Released:
Apr 16, 2020
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

In this episode, I explore the importance of gratitude and humility, in terms of how we think of our own place and the place of others in the economy (especially in this moment of quarantine), and also as political organizing tools. As we enter the home stretch for the 2020 election, activists in both the Biden camp and Sanders camp have been quick to deploy guilt and shame to motivate those in the opposite camp. For Biden supporters, it's shaming those Bernie die-hards who say they will refuse to vote for Biden in November, by insisting they will be responsible if Trump wins a second term. For the Berners its shaming supporters of literally any other Democrat for "not caring if people die because they can't afford insulin," or not caring about the climate crisis or student debt. In neither case is this approach intellectually honest, strategically wise, or ethical.Instead, as I explain in this episode, we should utilize gratitude for those who could be our allies in the struggle for a more just society. And we should deploy humility when it comes to our own awareness--since, after all, whatever we know (or think we know) is the result of what we've been taught and the insights to which we've been exposed. We haven't the right, ethically, to be smug about how woke we are, when our own awareness may be fairly recent and is largely the result of others helping us come to whatever insights we've managed to stitch together.
Released:
Apr 16, 2020
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (61)

Speak Out with Tim Wise is an informative and entertaining podcast aimed at promoting multiracial democracy and justice in dangerous times. The show features the biting, factual, and humorous commentary of its host, alongside dialogue with some of the nation's leading scholars, artists and activists, as well as grassroots community leaders whose voices are often ignored in the dominant media.