Oxfam provides some excellent resources for civic education. Among its products is a guide for schools on “global citizenship” (pdf). This document says:

Oxfam sees the Global Citizen as someone who:

• is aware of the wider world and has a sense of their own role as a world citizen
• respects and values diversity
• has an understanding of how the world works
• is outraged by social injustice
• participates in the community at a range of levels, from the local to
  the global
• is willing to act to make the world a more equitable and sustainable
  place
• takes responsibility for their actions.

By the way, a Global Citizen (so defined) can also be a good national citizen. But what interests me is the mix of principles on this list, many of which are logically separable. You could value diversity, be outraged by injustice, and take responsibility for your actions, but not think of yourself as a “world citizen” or operate at the global level. Or, if you run a multinational oil company, you could very much take a global perspective, understand how the world works–and even value diversity–but not care a fig for injustice.

In the 1800s, progressive nationalists, like Abraham Lincoln and Charles Dickens, were concerned with profound injustices–slavery and urban poverty–and saw advantages to a strong national consciousness. As I argue here, Dickens thought that British nationalism was a means of enlarging human sympathies, and Lincoln argued that preserving the Union as a democracy would serve human-kind. But other nationalists of the 1800s tried to develop nation-states as a means to wipe out hated minorities and dominate their regions.

Nationalism was a means, not an end. I am inclined to think the same of globalism today.

In the 1800s and early 1900s, political thinkers often romanticized “the people” as a homogeneous and progressive force. Marxists assumed that working people were beginning to share class-consciousness that would prevail in a revolution. Democratic populists assumed that the people would vote for justice if they achieved genuinely equal political power. In fact, the working people of Europe supported slaughtering other working people on the battlefields of World War I and then splintered into left and right.

I fear we risk romanticizing the people of the world in the early 2000s. If they all saw themselves as global citizens and wielded equal power in global forums, that does not mean that they would unite. In Canada, for example, climate change may mean an improved standard of living as the extent of arable land expands and oil and gas reserves become even more valuable. If Canadians (who are already quite cosmopolitan) become more active and influential at the global level, that’s not necessarily good news for Bangladeshis.

All of which is to say that fighting injustice is the important part. Being a global citizen is only desirable to the extent that it promotes justice.

(Washington, DC) I have long known that Rosa Parks was not a tired secretary who just decided one day to sit in the front section of the bus because there were no open seats in the back. I knew that the Montgomery bus boycott was a planned and laboriously organized social action; Rosa Parks was a highly trained and experienced activist. Telling the false story has long seemed to me a form of “civic education malpractice”: we are teaching students that reform happens automatically and randomly, when the real story is about skillful, courageous, long-term organizing.

But I didn’t really know the most important story about Rosa Parks until I heard a brilliant presentation in Detroit by Professor Danielle McGuire, author of At The Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. McGuire shows that Parks was already one of the most effective and respected civil rights leaders in the whole South by the 1950s. Specifically, she had focused for almost two decades on white men’s sexual aggression and violence against black women. One of her great battles was the Recy Taylor case. In 1944, a gang of racists had raped Taylor and dropped her in the middle of town; Parks investigated the case on behalf of the NAACP and organized a national publicity effort to get the rapists prosecuted.

Parks’ background is directly relevant to the Montgomery Bus Boycott because the most salient injustice on the buses was not the segregated seating pattern. Most of the black riders were female domestic servants traveling to White neighborhoods to work in private homes where sexual harassment was routine. The drivers, who were white men, armed and deputized as police officers, routinely sexually harassed and sometimes sexually assaulted these African American women on their way to and from work. That injustice was the impetus for the boycott, conducted and organized by female domestic workers.

Making all black people sit in the back of the bus was profoundly unjust, but it’s part of a story that now feels comfortable, which may explain why Rosa Park has become an uncontroversial national icon, featured on stamps, awarded a state funeral, used as the name of avenues and boulevards.

Imagine how difficult it would be to digest and discuss this story: White men rape or sexually humiliate black women. Rosa Parks fights that violence, drawing on militant theories about race and sex (e.g., Marcus Garvey’s black nationalism) to develop her own views. The Montgomery buses are particular sites of sexual violence. Women organize to withdraw their business from the bus system and create their own alternative transportation network. Their boycott is taken over by black male leaders who choose to downplay the sexual aspect of white supremacy so that they can attract wider support for their main agenda, which is to end de jure racial segregation.

Here are some of the uncomfortable aspects of that–real–story: Rosa Parks was angry and radical. Unjust policies changed only because she and others were organized and politically effective. Certain injustices did yield to pressure; we no longer have white sections of public buses. But other injustices remain unacknowledged and have diminished only slightly (if at all): rape is an example. The reform movement began with women working on an explicitly sexual issue. They yielded the stage to men because a different issue (racial segregation in public services) was easier to deal with. Finally, integration, or the mixing of people, is not necessarily beneficial, because the original problem was not separation but the direct exposure of black women to white men. A separate transportation system run by black women for black women–which began during the boycott–may actually have been more just than an integrated public system.