Title: Bayard Rustin and the Responsibilities of Political Organizing
Abstract:
When building democratic political movements to address problems such as climate change, immigration, discrimination, gun violence, and war, we cannot ignore intra-and-intergroup identity differences. As a skilled political organizer, Bayard Rustin also learned that when our collective identities are scripted too tightly, which can happen by specifying their meaning in overly restrictive ways, we can become boxed in. In this talk, Professor Darby (author of Boxed In: Making Identities Safe for Democracy with Eduardo J. Martinez, Oxford University Press, 2024) examines how being boxed in can undermine the cooperation needed to address intractable social problems. It draws lessons from Rustin’s approach to political organizing to argue for a civic responsibility to search for heterogeneity among potential coalition partners as a component of breaking free.
