dominic moulden is a beltway legend. Hailing from Baltimore, I first encountered “DTM” through a mutual friend working with the community organization ONE DC. This stands for Organizing Neighborhood Equity in Washington, DC, and, as our talk clarifies, is among the most impactful groups in the country. In this brief response, I focus on what it means to create space for organic intellectuals and how this can impact pedagogy within and beyond academic spaces.In 2005, Barbara Ransby published Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Through this text, I learned the language of “organic intellectuals,” an idea she uses to describe Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer. Originating in Gramsci's writings, the organic intellectual is often distinguished from the academic intellectual and describes people whose “primary base of knowledge came from grassroots communities and lived experience, not from formal study” (Ransby 103). There is no prerequisite, no educational ceiling, no standard or requirement for capturing such a title. Hamer famously held a third-grade education, and Baker was college-educated.1 Applying the concept amidst Black freedom struggles captures a sense of consciousness that organizers like DTM are creating space to cultivate. I use this response to unpack this organizing, cultivation of organic intellectuals and the potential for readers to adopt these pedagogical models.As organic intellectuals, Baker, Hamer, and Moulden all embrace visions of democracy unrealized. These are radical visions in the sense of getting to the root of, as DTM said, what the capitalists want. But the visions of organic intellectuals are also radical in the sense that they diverge from the malaise and complacency of an anti-democratic status quo. We might begin to wonder how much of our own work has contributed to empowering others with the consciousness we need to act in favor of our own collective well-being. To these ends, I focus on Dominic's work with ONE DC and his profound storytelling as key to his work, creating space for the worldmaking genius of organic intellectuals. The guiding force of this work comes from a simple philosophical question: Who is human?During the Coss Dialogue, Dominic took care to highlight multiple sites of programming that ONE DC is spearheading. These included the Right to Wellness campaign, Healthy Workers campaign, Serve Your City/Ward 6 Mutual Aid, and Leadership Education for Action and Power (LEAP). These programs stem from the original vision of ONE DC's founders, two elderly Black women who, according to DTM, “grew up in DC, lived here all their life, and understand the politics and the conditions under which they live.”2 He adds that these foundations “will help you in the long run to get more victories, because they understand that their consciousness has been raised and they look at things very differently.”3 What is that difference? In Moulden's words, it stems from a question about who has a right to the city and then, as a response, “Who is human?”In this connection between rights to a city and full humanity, ONE DC is capturing a distinguishing Black intellectual preoccupation about the nature of people.4 Specifically, it is widely believed that the most fundamental source of suffering and harm is not some original sin nor an inevitability of human decadence, but rather systems of power organized in a way that diminishes the life chances and life experiences of Black people in particular and members of the diaspora more generally. As such, a central preoccupation with Black organic intellectuals (at least over the past two centuries) has been grounded in establishing a right to exist as full human beings in all spaces.5 Thus, in this most basic kernel of facing the question of one's own humanity, organizations like ONE DC are insisting on the responsibilities and rights of one to another. This insistence is what makes community a verb, that which connects people to one another in a shared commitment to recognizing collective humanity and acting forcefully on behalf of that humanity. And here we find a crisis for pedagogy, which may be interested in recognizing shared humanity but is seldom a means of creating and sustaining communities. Therefore, I use our brief conversation with DTM as a bridge between pedagogy and community building.Our audience of philosophers are without doubt true believers in the purity of their work. Nonetheless, this is the first year that the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy has ventured into the HBCU space for this conference themed “American Philosophy: Lacunas, Derelictions, and Evasions.” And yet, DTM spoke not of such deficits but rather of opportunities to shift our gaze, re-evaluate foundations, and engage in teaching and learning that make us aware of our own power. Perhaps here is the greatest difference between academic and organic intellectuals: the former rely on a deficit model and the latter on mastery, but both reflect on the self and humanity. I thus return to the question and remind us of this former deficit reading to shift to mastery—that is, to include ourselves as needing to understand the answer as much as the dispossessed: Who is human? The question now liberated from the confines of haves and have nots arrests our considerable intellectual abilities to escape preconceived notions of guilt, survivors remorse, or apathy. A useful paradox. From here, the question of humanity is about how we make space for ourselves and others to act in favor of our own collective well-being.Recognizing this long-standing organizing work in DC, DTM invokes Nannie Helen Burroughs’ efforts in Ward 7. Burroughs committed to self-help and liberation work, training hundreds in “reading, writing, making clothes, laundry” through what functioned as a working co-op. Moulden adds, “We teach about Burroughs during Juneteenth.”6 In the sense that programming wraps around the intergenerational community as a form of wealth building, we might similarly think about pedagogy through this sort of community-materialist lens. In DTM's words, he wants people to have “the ability to interact and liberate yourself—and you can do all that and yet still lose your community.” Unlike “school,” learning is rewarded in carrying inalienable tools that you need to move through the world entitled to the space you occupy. But what some of us are granted by privilege, hard work, or short memories, consider how Moulden engages people who say their neighborhoods are “bad.”Moulden asks, “Why do you think your neighborhood is bad?” And answers, “Because somebody taught you that you're bad people.”7 He acknowledges what we all know: some neighborhoods are bad and rough and undesirable and difficult to live in and resourceless and unkept and more. And yet, he says “where you live is very important and valuable, given the capitalists want to take it.”8 That a reader might be carrying hard-to-reach bias that could make them defensive is irrelevant. This is not about you. This is about considering the life of someone whose reality has been fundamentally altered by being dispossessed of their own good self-image. What chance can any people deprived of their imagination—perhaps the only thing we truly possess—have of overcoming what they see inside themselves, in others, and in their neighborhoods? This concept is articulated especially well by the godfather of Black history, Dr. Carter G. Woodson in The Miseducation of the Negro in 1933. There, he says: When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary. (xiii)In sum, “community” is a verb that is creating a space for us to be powerful in recognizing our humanity and the humanity of others. Our pedagogy can live and evolve in such spaces—not necessarily by bucking the grading or exam expectations of our employers, but rather by reconnecting our work environments to the communities we have displaced and are yet still surrounded by. We cannot re-create the world that has been undone by the society we intellectually lord over. But the brilliance of organic intellectuals is recognizing that unringing a bell is much less important than carrying a torch. That is the work Moulden does and will continue for as long as he can. In his words, “I used to think years ago that this was a little bit of . . . the work. Now I think this is the work. And surviving the work, and that's why I'm still here.”9 Take the opportunity to join him, thank him, and most importantly, light your own torch and find others seeking the same.
Marcus Board (Thu,) studied this question.