From the refusal of representation to its incarnation

When former community organizers politicize their individual and collective identities

Abstract

The election of Barack Obama to the White House in 2008 was not just the election of the “first Black president”: it was also the first time a former community organizer became president. Until then, the category “community organizer” was relatively unknown; with Obama’s election, it was woven into the very fabric of a mythified individual political career. The politicization of the category highlights an often-overlooked phenomenon—the integration of community organizing to the recruitment channels of US professional politicians, at all institutional levels. But this phenomenon is actually paradoxical: not only was community organizing as a specific area of practice built against the political field as a “citizen power,” but, as professionals in people’s mobilization and representation, community organizers refuse to accomplish public political tasks, which are executed by the lay “leaders” they train and supervise. In order to make sense of this shift from refusing representation to embodying it, the article builds on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Chicago between 2015 and 2018.