WRITE TEAM: Real leadership is willing to be held accountable, accepting criticism, and changing direction when necessary

Lately I keep coming back to something I read in an interview with an anonymous cybersecurity engineer at Amazon Web Services. Asked if there might be any hope for union organizing within Amazon, he said “the people who are going to organize are the people who need to organize because they are fighting for their lives and their subsistence.” It won’t be the white-collar folks writing code or meeting in corporate board rooms. It will be the folks working in factories in East Asia and North American distribution centers and barely surviving.

It surprises me sometimes that the people leading society forward are from marginalized communities – the hungry, the downtrodden, those struggling for freedom because they are not yet free. In the U.S., we often seem to forget that what makes a leader is followers. And despite what the cynics might say, we are not a country of sheep. Real leadership means being willing to be held accountable, accepting criticism, responding to it and being willing to change direction when necessary.

Both former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan and current U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi came from the immigrant communities that formed the backbone of Democratic machine politics in the mid-20th century. Pelosi’s father, Tommy D’Alesandro, was the Italian American political boss of Baltimore; Madigan is the son of a Southside Irish ward captain. Former President Barack Obama, from his humble beginnings as a community organizer, built his political career on the foundation forged by Harold Washington’s alliance of the Black and Latino communities with liberal white voters.

There will be rejoicing in the Illinois Valley as Madigan retires from the speakership, I suppose, although I will take no part in it. It does make me glad that what finally brought his tenure to an end was a coalition within his own party between the Illinois Black Caucus and women legislators. People fighting for something, not just railing against government.

On Monday, we celebrated the greatest American political organizer of the 20th century: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, who devoted his life to the struggle for civil rights and economic justice. It is fitting that two weeks ago, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta where King was once pastor himself, was elected to be the first Black Democratic senator from the state of Georgia, alongside Jon Ossoff, who will be the first Jewish senator from Georgia. And it is still more fitting that the historic campaign that elected Warnock and Ossoff was lead by Black women, including Stacey Abrams.

On Wednesday, Kamala Harris will become the first woman, the first Black person and the first Asian American to hold the office of vice president of the United States. She and President-elect Joe Biden arrive in Washington, D.C., at the head of perhaps the most diverse political coalition ever assembled in the U.S. – and not a moment too soon! As for those claiming to represent the “forgotten man,” perhaps they were forgotten because they did nothing worth remembering.

SAMUEL BARBOUR lives in Ottawa and teaches economics to community college students.