Farewell to a Working-Class Hero

Pat Carta, an extraordinary organizer with Local 34 and one of the great leaders of the unions at Yale, has died.

I worked closely with Pat between 1993 and 1996. She trained me as an organizer, and though I don’t think she ever realized this, she felt like family to me. In fact, she reminded me a great deal of my family, particularly my mom. She was tough, warm, smart, loving, difficult, charismatic, powerful, relentless, demanding, honest, and fearless. I always wished I could tell her what she meant to me, but she wasn’t someone who invited that kind of disclosure. Unless you said it from afar. As I’m doing now.

Though it’s been nearly thirty years now, two things about Pat stand out across the decades.

First, she understood fear like no one I’ve ever met. Every organizer knows about fear — the fear of the boss, the fear of retaliation, the fear of vulnerability. Pat understood something else, something deeper, about fear: the fear we have of our own power, particularly when we’re using it against people who have authority over us or people we respect.

Underneath every one of our fears of someone with power, Pat thought, is our fear of defeating or overcoming that power. Pat understood that because all of us grow up with fear, we learn to live with our fear. We adapt to it, our limbs and organs grow around it, we internalize it, it becomes a part of us. When it comes time to let go of it, we can be suddenly and surprisingly reluctant to do so. We’ve gotten too attached.

Psychoanalysts and political theorists — Plato and Jean-Jacques Rousseau come to mind — know all about this kind of thing. Pat did, too. And gave me a classroom experience in overcoming it, the likes of which I never learned from anyone else.

Second, I’ve never met anyone with a stronger sense of working-class consciousness.

A lot of people, particularly in academia and journalism, have a lot of opinions and ideas about working-class people in…