People-Oriented Engagement
In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the word “civic” is defined as follows:
civic (adjective):
of or relating to a citizen, a city, citizenship, or community affairs
In our own time and place, as in many others, there is a profound contradiction at the heart of this definition, for the city is not reducible to its citizens alone. This is especially true here in Worcester, a city that has frequently been galvanized by the contributions of those coming from beneath or beyond the parameters of citizenship. Written out the very definition of citizenship, they have continued to bring themselves and their surroundings into being.
At the program that Elizabeth Bacon and I run, the local branch of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, we educate adults in the city of Worcester in subject areas including art history, critical thinking and writing, literature, philosophy, and U.S. history, providing them with the books, childcare, transportation, and tuition to engage in an eight-month college-level course of study. The founder of the Clemente Course, a Chicago born-and-raised scholar and social critic named Earl Shorris, viewed the enterprise as a mode of education toward more engaged citizenship. But as our students and graduates demonstrate year in and year out, one need not be a citizen in order to engage in the life of the city or to take a leading role in community affairs.
Shorris also aimed to engage Clemente students with what he called “the moral life of downtown.” This happens at arts and culture institutions providing venues for various kinds of human expression: places like galleries, libraries, museums, radio and television stations, and theaters. But it is not enough for our students to merely attend such venues. They must also aim to remake them by taking co-ownership of them and exercising co-responsibility for them. This is as imperative as it is natural, for I want to assert in no uncertain terms that Clemente students, together with their family, friends, and neighbors, and alongside the other college and university students across the city, are the moral life of downtown.
Engagement is a two-way street, and together with Clemente alumni like Kenza Dekar and Monica Salazar we are bringing our initiatives and our stories to the Worcester Women’s History Project and the Worcester Public Library, across the airwaves of WCCA and WICN. Together with Clemente faculty members like Barbara Beall-Fofana, Lucia Knoles, and Ousmane Power-Greene we are bringing students from the neighborhoods in and around Main South into the archives and exhibitions along Salisbury Street. In the process of such engagement, we learn time and again what it means for Worcester to be in Massachusetts, in New England, and in the United States. We also learn, time and again, what it means for North and West Africa and Central and South America and East and Southeast Asia to be in Worcester.
Shorris believed that the best education for engaged citizenship came through sustained contact with the Western canon, and while we do not shy away from that powerful legacy, we also engage with a more diverse and inclusive set of contemporary texts as well. Thus, in art history, we look not only to the buildings of the ancient Greeks, but also to those of the ancient Inca and Shona, studying the work of Leonardo da Vinci alongside the work of Judy Chicago. In U.S. history, we examine not only the legacies of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, but also the legacies of Abby Kelley Foster and Fannie Lou Hamer. In literature, we read not only William Shakespeare, and William Blake, and John Keats, but also Gloria Anzaldúa, and Etheridge Knight, and John Yau. And in philosophy, we contend not only with the dialogues of Plato and the essays of John Locke, but also with the letters and speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today marks the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination. Today also marks the 51st anniversary of one of his most important speeches, delivered at Riverside Church in New York City. King knew what it meant to struggle on behalf of those that had been denied the rights of citizenship. As such, his civics lessons were simultaneously oriented toward citizens and toward those that had been excluded from the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. By the time he engaged the faith community in Morningside Heights, on April 4, 1967, a year before his untimely death, his antiracism campaign had expanded to include antipoverty and antiwar principles as well. On that day, King asserted:
I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
Fifty-one years later, we are a more thing-oriented society than ever before. And yet, even in the midst of racism, materialism, and militarism, when we work together we can turn from things back toward people.
A citizen owes certain obligations to the city and the state. What do we as people owe to one another? It’s a complicated question, but in our Tuesday and Thursday evening sessions at the Clemente Course some answers begin to emerge around a series of readings and a set of tables and chairs. Citizens or not—always, long since, or not quite yet—we engage one another on a regular basis with ideas and perspectives from multiple generations, national origins, religious traditions, and various other standpoints. The scale of our dialogue attends to matters of city and state, but also hones in on matters of neighborhood and household concern even while widening out to questions of regional and planetary importance. It’s a community affair, happening right here in Worcester—and in Chicago, and Dallas, and Los Angeles, and New York, and Salt Lake City, and many other places around the country and beyond.
The civitas and the community are abstractions on some level, but the people standing and breathing before you should never be reduced to abstractions. Reflecting on four years of work with the Clemente Course, I can say that I have taken part in few other efforts as centered upon what we might call people-oriented engagement. Come talk with us and learn more about our work. We’d liketo engage with you too.
To learn more about the Worcester branch of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, please visit http://www.clementeworcester.com/. For more details on the Clemente Course at the commonwealth and national levels, please visit http://masshumanities.org/programs/clemente-course/ and https://clementecourse.org/.