Deep Canvassing: A Strategy for Building Coalitions Amidst Political Polarization
Deep canvassing is a method being employed across the country to inspire people to shed bias and join with others across lines of difference within solidarity-based organizing campaigns for social change. Before we dive into the technique in detail, we need to understand its importance in our current political landscape.
Today, we are actively being peddled a bias-filled, polarizing politics meant to divide us across lines of race and class, and weaken our collective power to create the world that all of us need.
One the one hand you have media outlets like Fox News putting out what policy advocate Heather McGhee described as, “Racial resentment for breakfast, group status threat for lunch, fear the Muslim terrorists as a cocktail hour, and for dinner take it home with rioters in the streets and hordes of undocumented immigrants.”
On the other hand, there are messages like those that were once sent by the Daily Show's Jordan Klepper as he attended Trump rallies, asked the most extreme people there a series of “gotcha” questions, and through this, created a caricature of rural, white working class people as inherently backward, anti-intellectual, and bigoted. These images were then regularly projected into the living rooms of millions of liberal viewers as comedy to laugh at.
Together, these two examples represent a broader dynamic in our political culture. Business-backed Democratic politicians and liberal corporate media outlets have a tendency to label the root of society’s problems as “deplorable,” rural, working class white people—and spew those stereotypes into the minds of their constituencies. At the same time, the Republican party and conservative corporate media companies blame society’s problems on people of color, especially poor and working class people of color, and spew those stereotypes into the minds of their constituencies.
While in recent decades the scapegoating of people of color has led to distinctly and especially violent institutions like mass incarceration and mass deportation, both of these media narratives pit these two very marginalized groups against each other while keeping all of us from seeing the central role of the ruling class in driving injustice, suffering, and social manipulation in our society. These narratives also create major forms of bias and mistrust that we have to move through as we do our political work.
One tool that can help us challenge this propaganda is deep canvassing. If you are unfamiliar with this method I recommend listening to this episode of the podcast, To See Each Other. In it, an organizer from rural Michigan named Caitlin Homrich-Kneilen describes how this practice helped her show her white neighbors what they had in common with immigrant workers, repaired her relationship with her mother that had been fractured by political division, and renewed her own faith in humanity. This 2017 podcast is from a wonderful organization called People’s Action that hosts regular virtual and in-person deep canvassing trainings and action events (which I have attended in the past). Check out deepcanvass.org to sign up for a training with them.
Deep canvassing involves relational, lengthy conversations to inspire people to shed bias, grow their support for specific forms of policy change, join voting coalitions, or become members of political, community or labor organizations. These conversations are structured slightly differently depending on the context (those I’ve learned the most about and been part of have had to do with rural organizing of predominately white demographics) but they always contain the following elements:
They begin by asking about the issues and struggles that have deeply impacted the life of the person you’re talking with and listening with radical empathy and respect. Even though this may seem awkward, oftentimes people have never been asked about these things before and so it's common that they will really open up.
The second element of these conversations involves sharing your own story with a lot of vulnerability—about your struggles, your family’s struggles, your passions and deep concerns; and then sharing the political solution you see for these issues that you and the person you're speaking with have brought forth. You don’t try to persuade the person in an explicit way—you just share yourself, your story, and your conviction. And because of the investment in relationship building, listening, and care that you have already put in, a lot of times a natural political shift will start to happen.
One final important part of this involves letting go of the bias we may have been taught to hold about the person we’re talking with and to understand that this person has a lot to teach us about their own lived experience. We must realize that if we want to shift people away from the distorted politics they have been peddled, we also have to identify and let go of the distorted politics we have been peddled.
No matter who we are, and whether we know it or not, we have been demographically identified and targeted by a particular form of business-backed political propaganda that works in concert with other forms to divide the 99% and weaken our collective power to challenge the corporate domination of all of our lives. If anything can save us, all of us, it is solidarity. Solidarity can be hard. It requires learning and unlearning. But it is liberatory. It is the very thing that we’ve been so aggressively dissuaded from by the powerful because it is the only thing strong enough to create the life-affirming world we so desperately need. I believe that deep canvassing is one important tool that can expand our capacity to bring this world to be.
An additional note on building restorative organizational cultures: The skill of deep canvassing is also relevant within diverse political organizations in general — more than the persuasion elements, I mean the relationship building elements. In diverse, coalition-based political organizations, conflict, hurt, and expressions of bias are inevitable (especially if you’re trying to bring in a truly broad constituency and build the collective power we need to actually win things). We have been strategically divided for centuries and the powers that be didn’t make it easy to bring people back together. One way to create a container for conflict when it does happen is to forefront relationship building. Hold community building circles where members go around and share with each other what they’ve been through and who they are as people. Build those relationships through shared vulnerability, so people can see each other, and so that they can stay together and work through things together even when it’s hard.
Photo credit: SEIU