FORTITUDE 101
Image Credit: Robin Holland
People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values.
Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015) was a Chinese American philosopher, writer, and activist in Detroit with a thick FBI file and a surprising vision of what an American revolution can be. She studied at Barnard College and Bryn Mawr, receiving her Ph.D. in 1940. Her studies in philosophy and the writings of Marx, Hegel, and Margaret Mead led not to a life in academia, but rather to a lifetime of social activism. Rooted for 75 years in the labor, civil rights, and Black Power movements, she challenged a new generation to throw off old assumptions, think creatively and redefine revolution for our times. Boggs doesn’t just explode the docile-Asian-female stereotypes; she made an inspiring case for self-determination and intellectual fortitude regardless of background.
Boggs has rejected the stereotypical radical idea that capitalist society is just something to be done away with, believing more that "you cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it." She promoted social change through working together in small groups, not in large revolutions where one group of power simply changes position with another.
Boggs continually challenged herself and others to think differently, to personally redefine the very idea of revolution — something that must start, she insists, at the level of individual transformation. She herself underwent such a change over the course of the civil-rights era: Supplying an abundance of archival footage from marches, rallies and the horrific 1967 Detroit race riot, the docu details how her close identification with her associate Malcolm X eventually developed into a greater appreciation for Martin Luther King Jr.’s emphasis on nonviolent resistance.
Bill sits down with philosopher activist Grace Lee Boggs.
FORTITUDE 101
Fortitude is a strength of mind and emotional strength that enables courage in the face of adversity.
Fortitude is always reasoned and reasonable. It involves practicing what is good and just when it is difficult or even dangerous. A person of fortitude practices patience when meeting obstacles. They do what is right, even when others criticize them. It is a skill, allowing people to push through difficult circumstances without losing confidence and the ability to perform at peak levels during crunch-time.
When people begin to seek solutions by doing things for themselves, the new proximity they bring helps inform their perspective and makes them a more creative problem-solver.
Fortitude, mental toughness, courage, and grit—all tend to be used synonymously but they have subtle differences and are not strictly interchangeable. The definitions are fought over in academia; here is my take on these definitions for our purposes.
Fortitude starts with a focus on the self, which enables self-evaluation. Our interest in how we perform to standards lets us honestly assess our strengths and areas we need to improve. We then can participate more constructively in the evaluation meeting with our supervisor. Self-evaluation also serves to increase commitment to goal setting/achievement, competency development, and career planning in the context of the larger group.
Fortitude is the life-long journey of self-efficacy, the ability to evaluate one’s awareness of the:
self: We have honest knowledge of our strengths and limitations.
family environment: We understand that certain traumas and privileges result in certain levels of conflict, cohesiveness, and values. We know where we come from and how we are wired.
support from others. We know how systems around us work, and how to leverage them toward an end goal. We understand how the world works, our place in it, and what we are likely to achieve, given perceived and actual levels of support.
How do we learn to gain fortitude? Wrong question. To have fortitude, we need to develop greater self-efficacy and use that knowledge to level internal and external resources of support in the face of challenges and adversity.
PRACTICE
Know Yourself.
Think 1-2 moves ahead: what kind of work would you like to be doing? What key experiences do you need to get there?
Take an honest inventory of your strengths and weaknesses. Engage a coach, or speak with your manager.
Take action: based on this knowledge, what actions will you take?
Learn With/Through Peers
Learn on the job: What will you do? When will you do it? How will you measure your success?
Learn with/through others (in a class, program, or structured reflective practice): Describe each activity & be specific: What will you do? When will you do it? How will you measure your success?
Cultivate Community
Choose your Guides (wisely). Who needs to know about your aspirations and development priorities? Who do you need support from to achieve/review progress against development activities?
Develop Your Perspective. Who can help you to grow through their perspectives? How will you maintain connection?
Nurture Sponsors. What advocates do you need, and who will represent you in discussions, groups, or communities as it pertains to your career development?
COMMIT
[ ] I commit myself to actively cultivating my awareness across multiple areas of my life—both internal and external. (And, I know I am not alone—that I am creative, resourceful, and whole—that I have inner resources to start with.)
FURTHER READING/ WATCHING
American Revolutionary (PBS): Right at the start of American Revolutionary, director Grace Lee makes clear that she isn't related to Grace Lee Boggs. She met the older woman through her earlier documentary, The Grace Lee Project, about the shared name of many Asian American women and the stereotypes associated with it. Philosopher, activist and author Grace Lee Boggs, then in her vigorous 80s and very much a part of Detroit's social fabric, began applying a spirited analysis to the film project itself. She habitually turned the tables on the filmmaker with a grandmotherly smile that belied her firm resolve, probing the younger woman's ideas and suggesting she consider things more deeply. Thus began a series of conversations over the next decade and beyond. (Article)
The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century: Grace Lee Boggs, a legendary figure in the struggle for justice in America, shrewdly assesses the current crisis—political, economical, and environmental—and shows how to create the radical social change we need to confront new realities. She has participated in all of the twentieth century’s major social movements—for civil rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, and more. Drawing from seven decades of activist experience, and a rigorous commitment to critical thinking, she redefines “revolution” for our times.
Living for Change: An Autobiography: An account of Grace’s life as an untraditional radical from the end of the thirties, through the cold war, the civil rights era, and the rise of Black Power, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panthers to the present efforts to rebuild our crumbling urban communities. She transcended class and racial boundaries to pursue her passionate belief in a better society. Her life was bold and her experiences deep.
In her words…
“Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after” ― The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
“History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.” ― The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
“Our challenge, as we enter the new millennium, is to deepen the commonalities and the bonds between these tens of millions, while at the same time continuing to address the issues within our local communities by two-sided struggles that not only say "No" to the existing power structure but also empower our constituencies to embrace the power within each of us to create the world anew.”
― The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
“As Jimmy Boggs used to remind us, revolutions are made out of love for people and for place. He often talked about loving America enough to change it. 'I love this country,' he used to say, 'not only because my ancestors' blood is in the soil but because of what I believe it can become.' Love isn't just something you feel. It's something you do every day when you go out and pick the paper and bottles scattered the night before on the corner, when you stop and talk to a neighbor, when you argue passionately for what you believe in with whoever will listen, when you call a friend to see how they're doing, when you write a letter to the newspaper, when you give a speech and give 'em hell, when you never stop believing that we can all be more than what we are. In other words, Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after.”― The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
“We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We urgently need to bring the neighbor back into our hoods, not only in our inner cities but also in our suburbs, our gated communities, on Main Street and Wall Street, and on Ivy League campuses.”
― The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
“Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers to relate to other human beings.” ― The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
“Movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.”― The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
“activism can be the journey rather than the arrival;” ― The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
“At the core of the problem is an obsolete factory model of schooling that sorts, tracks, tests, and rejects or certifies working-class children as if they were products on an assembly line. The purpose of education, I said, cannot be only to increase the earning power of the individual or to supply workers for the ever-changing slots of the corporate machine. Children need to be given a sense of the 'unique capacity of human beings to shape and create reality in accordance with conscious purposes and plans.”
― The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
“We are beginning to understand that the world is always being made fresh and never finished; that activism can be the journey rather than the arrival; that's struggle doesn't always have to be confrontational but can take the form of reaching out to find common ground with the many others in our society who are also seeking ways out from alienation, isolation, privatization, and dehumanization by corporate globalization.” ―The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
“I am often asked what keeps me going after all these years. I think it is the realization that there is no final struggle. Whether you win or lose, each struggle brings forth new contradictions, new and more challenging questions. As Alice Walker put it in one of my favorite poems: I must love the questions themselves as Rilke said like locked rooms full of treasures to which my blind and groping key does not yet fit.” ― Living for Change: An Autobiography
“The main reason why Western civilization lacks Spirituality, or an awareness of our interconnectedness with one another and the universe, according to Gandhi, is that it has given priority to economic and technological development over human and community development.” ― The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
“Every crisis, actual or impending, needs to be viewed as an opportunity to bring about profound changes in our society. Going beyond protest organizing, visionary organizing begins by creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing system.”
― The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
“The physical threat posed by climate change represents a crisis that is not only material but also profoundly spiritual at its core because it challenges us to think seriously about the future of the human race and what it means to be a human being.” ― The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
“Through this tradition of face-to-face oral communication, now in danger of disappearing, black folks maintained the conviction of their own worth and saved their own souls by refusing to fall victim to fear or the hatred of their oppressors, which they recognized would have been more destructive to themselves than to their enemies. As the poet Lucille Clifton put it, “Ultimately if you fill yourself with venom you will be poisoned.” There were incidents of individual violence, usually crimes of passion committed by someone under the influence of alcohol and over a man or a woman. But despite the unimaginable cruelty that they suffered, blacks kept their sense of humor and created the art form of the blues as a way to work through and transcend the harshness of their lives. Living under the American equivalent of Nazism, they developed an oasis of civility in the spiritual desert of “me-firstism” that characterized the rest of the country.”― Living for Change: An Autobiography
“We need to understand that the “command and control” model has become obsolete in the wake of the information revolution, as Alvin Toffler wrote convincingly in his widely discussed 1980 book, The Third Wave.2 The industrial culture of Standardization, Specialization, Centralization, Concentration, and Maximization, Toffler said, has exhausted itself. Therefore, in every area of our lives we now have the opportunity and necessity to create new decentralized institutions based on the possibilities opened up by the information revolution, for smaller work units, closer ties between producers and consumers, and greater participation in community life. These conditions of postindustrial.” ― The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
“Still, it becomes clearer every day that organizing or joining massive protests and demanding new policies fail to sufficiently address the crisis we face. They may demonstrate that we are on the right side politically, but they are not transformative enough. They do not change the cultural images or the symbols that play such a pivotal role in molding us into who we are.” ― The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
“If we want to see a change in our lives, we have to change things ourselves.” ― The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
What we don’t see on the resumes we review or the job descriptions we want is the litany of emotional entanglements we bring to our roles, uninvited, to the team and organizations we work in. Alongside technical skills, people who can master a range of subjective skills are better able to influence, deal with ambiguity, bounce back from setbacks, think creatively, and manage themselves in the presence of setbacks. In short, those who learn lead.
Observing subjective qualities in others past and present gives us a mental picture for the behaviors we want to practice. Each figure illustrates a quality researched from The Look to Craftsmen Project. When practiced as part of our day-to-day, these qualities will help us develop our mastery in our lives and work.