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The Bechdel-Wallace test is a similarly simple device, created by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel and her friend Liz Wallace, for evaluating whether movies and television shows perpetuate gender inequity. Does a film have at least two named women in it, talking to each other, about something other than a man? A depressingly large number of films and shows fail the test. But it does more than scold. It suggests an alternate reality--an achieva..
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Eric Liu |
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If you want to change the story that justifies current structures of power and privilege, you must have such a combination of bold goals and specific steps.
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Eric Liu |
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In our country, there is so much that's wrong with the way we deliver care to the aging, the very young, and the infirm. But you can't beat something with nothing. It is not enough to decry what's broken. You have to describe the alternative and make it possible for people to believe in it. To care.
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Eric Liu |
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uses a method for organizing that centers on three nested narratives: the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now. He teaches organizers entering into any setting to start not with policy proposals or high concepts like justice but with biographies--their own, and those of the people they hope to mobilize. What are the stories you tell about yourself? Why do you tell them that way? How can we find connections across our stories..
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Eric Liu |
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Power justifies itself, in countless small ways. But one of the big ways it does so is by creating an ideological narrative about how things got to be this way--and what must now change. These narratives are more than technical explanations. They are epic morality tales, and they typically follow this sequence: Paradise Paradise Lost Paradise Redeemed
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Eric Liu |
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Every person and institution with power in our society today has it because we give it to them.
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Eric Liu |
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First, power concentrates. That is, it feeds on itself and compounds (as does powerlessness). * Second, power justifies itself. People invent stories to legitimize the power they have (or lack). * Third, power is infinite. There is no inherent limit on the amount of power people can create.
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Eric Liu |
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In American politics, power is presumptively illegitimate. It's important to remember this. Our founding is premised on the notion that power is inherently hostile to freedom. The pamphlets of the Revolution are heavy with warnings that citizens must "jealously" guard their liberties against tyrannies of the state. The Constitution, even as it created a stronger national government, hobbled that government with checks and balances, separati..
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Eric Liu |
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To me, this passage is essentially the Chinese equivalent of the Socratic claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. It has exactly the same rhetorical assertiveness and moral severity: the unexamined life is not just less good; it's useless.
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Eric Liu |
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Meaning, though, changes with time; text with context. What am I to do? There was a time, as in the minutes after we learned of my father's death, when those words or words roughly like them, uttered in panic, escaped my mother's lips. Today, after so many years of lonely meditation, and so many conversations with me that describe but a fraction of those meditations, and so many outings and travels with her Bon Sisters and other friends to ..
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Eric Liu |
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In civically flourishing societies, the people remember that the system is healthiest and most robust when power emerges from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down. In such societies, the people recognize that it is not only fair that power be circulated widely; it is also wise.
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Eric Liu |
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Which is why, from the Inca Empire to the Soviet Union, extractive societies have been prone to collapse. Power naturally flows to the top. We've established that. But where power flows to the top and stays there, without correction or recirculation, a society is likely to die a catastrophic death.
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Eric Liu |
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They share a vision of a society where more people are able to claim and create more power--for themselves, by themselves--against the encroachments of others. And they now share an experience that teaches them that it is both possible and necessary to create power: to activate people who very reasonably could believe that the deck is so stacked against them that there's no point in getting involved.
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Eric Liu |
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By deliberately withholding power, you generate more. By choosing to redirect it, you remember that the choice is yours. Such acts remind us how much dormant civic power we actually have--and how infrequently we ever activate that potential in full.
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Eric Liu |
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We haven't truly enabled all the people of this society to participate in self-government to the fullest extent of their potential. We haven't come close, not in an age when our elected officials and their staffs are overwhelmingly white, male, and affluent. Nor have we truly enabled all the people of this society to participate fully in economic life as creators and contributors. Not when 48 percent of the new jobs in the country are low-w..
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Eric Liu |
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It was there, during the 1960s, that his evolution into a firebrand revolutionary began. He became a vocal leader in the emerging Chicano movement. He joined black student activist Larry Gossett, Native American leader Bernie Whitebear, and Asian American leader Bob Santos to create multiracial coalitions for justice in education, policing, immigration, and other issues. Together they became masters of organizing and direct action. The so-c..
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Eric Liu |
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The story of El Centro's creation and flourishing reminds us that civic power may not require a plan--but it does require a purpose.
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Eric Liu |
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Change the game: 1. Adjust the arena. 2. Re-rig the rules. 3. Attack the plan. Change the story: 1. Describe the alternative. 2. Organize in narratives. 3. Make your fight a fable. Change the equation: 1. Act exponentially. 2. Act reciprocally. 3. Perform your power.
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Eric Liu |