Guest Post: Hakim Bellamy

November 6, 2008

Hakim Bellamy: “He Absolutely Had to Be a Community-Organizer”

Hakim Bellamy is a two-time National Champion in the Poetry Slam scene, as well as a freelance journalist, community organizer and social justice advocate. He is currently working for the New Mexico Office of African American Affairs and is a board member for Poetic Justice Institute and Black Cowgirl Productions as well. He is most proud of being the Poetry Club coach at South Valley Academy.

In talking about the work that SWOP does in the community, my good friend Tomás Garduño said, “groups like SWOP have been doing the work in the community long before Senator Obama made it popular to be a ‘community organizer.’”  In other words, WE, the community organizers, should stand and be recognized for the work we did to make this historic candidacy possible and the work we’ll continue to do long after Senator Obama is president-elect.

The Obama Campaign was brilliantly strategized. Their brilliance lies in the fact that they did not try to reinvent the wheel or “parachute campaign” (as the Republicans have been very effective at doing in elections past). In other words, the Obama Campaign didn’t just drop into our town to stump issues and plant seeds of fear, desperation or misplaced nationalism only to ransom our vote and then leave right after they’d won the race, never to be heard from again until the next election cycle. Instead, the Obama camp realized that they needed to use people already on the ground in “real American” communities all across the nation—people who were already in the trenches fighting wars AT HOME.  People who aren’t easily swayed by perfect smiles, shiny shoes and fancy-shmancy check-signing pens. We have a certain disdain for authority and politicians.  We have already enacted change in our local communities and we have a history of holding public officials accountable. On a local level, we have already experienced change we can believe in, because we are the agents of change in our communities. We have been waiting for such change to occur on a national level.

In order to succeed, Obama had to be one of us. He needed us to buy in order to give his campaign legs in local communities. He needed us to believe. And his story was one that folks in groups like SWOP, Common Cause, New Mexico Youth Organized, NM Hip Hop Congress, Young Women United and many others could believe in primarily because we lived it too.  We can smell when someone is falsely-depicting. It’s like when you’re from the streets and you hear someone talking about said “streets” and three sentences in, you know for sure that they have never spent a day on the streets in their life. That’s not gangsta at all.

The Obama Campaign worked because we already had networks established. We had our own grassroots ground games. We had already cultivated an organized, informed, and active base of citizens who got up out their homes and did what it takes to carry their neighborhoods, communities, families and schools forward. We were the ones out registering record numbers of voters, convincing our gang-banging cousins to register, walking our neighbors with felonies down the path of re-enfranchisement. We are the opinion leaders in our social circles and personal relationships talking out the issues with those we care about because their future is important to us. And that carries more weight than billions of dollars in TV commercials. It means more when it comes from someone you have suffered side-by-side with in the same economically depressed neighborhood for the past 8 years than from someone flown in from Boston to canvass your block for 8 weeks.

So stand up and take your bow, community organizers. No matter what race, sex or nationality you are, one of ours has made it to the presidency because of you. Because of us. We have been the change we wanted to see in the world for some time and now, and finally, the world is starting to look like us. Our work is not in vain and, as President-Elect Obama has now realized, neither was his. And maybe, just maybe, community organizers like us will have to get bodyguards and paparazzi-protection because from now on it will be DAMN sexy to be a “community organizer.”

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Posted in burque, obama, politics