A ‘Community Activist’ Who Listened to CommunitiesA ‘Community Activist’ Who Listened to Communities
“The victimizer might have knocked you down, but it is the victim that has to get up.”
That’s a quote from Robert L. Woodson Sr., the veteran community activist who died last week at 89. On the political right, “community activism” is often viewed with suspicion or disdain, associated with progressive liberals who sow racial division, express contempt for the rights of others, and have an abiding faith in government solutions for problems that hamstring the black underclass. Woodson’s style of self-help advocacy cautions against painting with too broad a brush.
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“These researchers take their notebooks into low-income communities and tally how many people are on drugs and in prison, how many young girls are pregnant, and how many youths have dropped out of school,” Woodson wrote. “They do not look for models of success—families that, in spite of similar circumstances, have raised children who have refused the lures of drugs and gangs, who have stayed in school, who have not had babies out of wedlock.”
Woodson advocated more-direct engagement. “Scholars on both the left and right make comfortable livings detailing the pathologies of the poor without ever talking with a single poor person,” he wrote. After stints at the liberal National Urban League and the conservative American Enterprise Institute, he founded his own organization in 1981 to do the kind of work he believed would make a bigger difference in facilitating upward mobility. His legacy is the Woodson Center, whose mission is to seek out those “models of success” and replicate them.
Makes sense. A lot of what's lacking in modern discourse is peoples' agency to better their lives, despite difficult external circumstances.
This 💯
There is a lot more of... I want to feel like I am doing something than doing something to help those that need help.
We have isolated ourselves from poverty and those that need help so it is easy to do. But it is getting harder and harder to avoid the poverty around us.
Bottom line, our society is what has produced it. There is some truth in the left's critique of capitalism. Yeah, it's hedonist and selfish materialism. But socialism is every bit as materialist.
Neither system is a moral system. We have stripped that out of society. No institution has the authority to speak to us on moral matters. Most of society is completely obsessed with gratifying their wants. Most of the people asking the state to fix this are no different.
Truth is, they are not helping. And most people aren't either. We are so lost morally.
I think it's a function of the scientific / mechanistic view of the world. It reduces us all to just particles bouncing around according to physical rules. It causes you to view the world through the action of external forces rather than the individual decision-making of rational and moral beings.