Give 'em Helen
Happy May Day! There's an exciting and confusing race for mayor happening in Philadelphia right now. I live there and so I'm obviously deep in the weeds on it, but I think the situation could have implications for other places around the country, particularly after former teacher Brandon Johnson won against Paul Vallas in Chicago's mayoral race.
I wanted to start with a weird ideological dissonance I experienced recently. When the Philly mayor's race was just getting going, we were at dinner with friends. The question of Helen Gym came up: would we support her? I said she's obviously the best left candidate, has been with the movements, but I found myself saying: she's all talk, but what has she gotten done? And why should we trust that she'd stick with the movements once in office?
One of the friends we were with had worked in city council for four years, on the staff of socialist and Working Families Party councilwoman Kendra Brooks. We'd done a lot of socialist organizing together. My friend raised her eyebrow at me: what the heck do you mean? she asked. Helen's gotten more done in council than most anyone would expect. If anything, my friend said, Gym is one of the more effective and 'pragmatic' politicians.
Then I started remembering all the things I'd actually seen and witnessed over the previous seven years of organizing in the city and she was right: Helen was there almost every time and had done a lot, specifically for schools. Where did I get this idea from?
Helen was there
We moved to the city in 2016. I got involved with the Democratic Socialists of America and was figuring out the terrain of Philly's educational organizing. I found myself in the ornate gallery of City Hall's city council chamber pretty often, holding signs for various issues relating to school: ending the 10-year tax abatement on new construction, the Working Educators' campaign against toxic schools, the fight of Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights, Fair Work Week legislation, recent efforts to get a wealth tax, and calling for water filters in Philly schools to combat lead poisoning. I also gave testimony in hearings related to school finance.
Every time I was in City Hall, around City Hall, or even at an event pushing for demands that the city government would have something to do with, I saw city councilwoman Helen Gym, like when we protested the sale of Hahnemann Hospital to private developers. Some of these issues I just mentioned actually passed: the domestic workers' bill, fair work week, and water filters to name a few. That's notable because it's been really hard to get much done in City Council over the last 15 years or so, due to the way that moderate Darrell Clarke, the President of Council, was running things.
Classroom to council
So I've known about Helen's work for awhile. Her story was just as notable for its education movement-oriented narrative. She was a classroom teacher and public school parent who started organizing around schools in the wake of the charter movement of the early 2000s. She was a classroom teacher and got into organizing when she saw that things were so bad for her students and parents that the classroom wasn't big enough to do what she wanted to do.
She started a group called Parents United for Public Education, helped start the nonprofit education newspaper The Notebook (now under the Chalkbeat umbrella), sat on the board of Rethinking Schools, organized on campaigns against bullying at South Philly High School, and bad grading practices at Jenks Elementary. Weirdly, she helped start a charter school -- one of the 'better' ones, at least curricularly speaking-- called FACTS, but quickly pivoted to opposing charter expansion and targeting the ways that charter policy became a vehicle for marketization and privatization.
She ran for council and won an at-large seat in 2016 against the odds, and shortly thereafter started working on removing the statue of infamous right wing mayor Frank Rizzo from outside city hall. The statue was indeed removed.
The unconscious smog against movements
So after all that, how did I end up with the idea that she didn't get anything done? I was literally in the city council chamber when Fair Work Week passed, cheering. I testified at a hearing she organized on transforming Philly's school facilities finance. I think there's an ideological fog out there, propagated by the Inquirer and other places, that Gym's movement-based approach is all talk and no action. That's what her opponents are saying anyway. They're obviously wrong. And I don't agree with what they're proposing policy-wise. Ideology is powerful and unconscious and this must've gotten to me somehow.
I'm wondering whether the dominant imagined relation to real conditions has, for so long, been a technocratic and insidery type of ideology, that movement candidates have to break through a sense of 'impracticality' around them. These movement candidates are relatively new on the scene in recent politics: from Kshama Sawant in Seattle to Bernie Sanders to AOC to Brandon Johnson. But in Philly, these candidates have been strong and productive, including the squad that Helen created space for on council: Jamie Gauthier and Kendra Brooks, not to mention Larry Krasner, Elizabeth Fiedler, Rick Krajewski, and Nikil Saval at other levels of local and state government.
(And in this election, the DSA is backing three movement candidates: Amanda McIllmurray, Andres Celin, and Seth Anderson-Oberman. I'll be canvassing and voting for them.)
Similar things have been said about all these politicians when they ran for office. And it was all bullshit. As movement candidates emerge from post-2016 shifts in American politics--I'm thinking particularly of the teacher strikes of the last five years--they'll probably face this smog of unconscious technocracy obfuscating their credibility. We have to push back against that.
Voting Helen
I've heard that Helen hasn't been everyone's favorite politician, and that's inevitable. But the choice is clear. If you're going to vote here, like Michael Cord says, Helen's the candidate. There's no guarantees for what she'll end up having to do once in office, and there's a chance she'll be like, I don't know, Barack Obama, who ran on an image of community organizing and progressive change, but then ended up ditching his base and platform and went full neoliberal. I really don't think that'd happen with Gym given her priors.
And it just so happens that some of my favorite people that I've organized with have worked for Helen, been close to Helen, strongly support her, or are currently working for her. My friend who raised her eyebrow at me at dinner--the one who called me on my characterization of Gym as all talk and no action--she's actually Helen's communications director now.
I don't have anything close to these connections to any other candidate. And when it comes to fixing Philly's school buildings and education justice in the city, and maybe justice generally, I'm a supporter. She's got a great Green New Deal for Philly Schools platform that I'm completely on board with. So: I'm voting Helen.
