A Day Without Organizers

Mark Winston Griffith

A Day Without Organizers

One of the most interesting developments to come out of the past few weeks of immigrant activism is the extent to which many of the actions across the country were spontaneous and truly grassroots-led. Several of my colleagues in the immigrant rights movement have commented to me about how organizers were profoundly humbled by how low-wage earning immigrants were themselves determining the strategies, form and tone of the protests they engaged in, rather than taking their lead from professional organizers. (The title of this blog was lifted from the title of an opinion piece written by Raj Jayadev for New America Media which made the same point.)

While this is no time for self immolation, it is perhaps a good moment for non profit executive directors, organizers and advocates to be more conscious of the water in which we swim.

It's hard to imagine what America would look like without the fight that progressive non profits have waged against social and economic injustice over the past forty years. I'd like to think that professional leaders of social change work have kept America from slipping into a right wing, reactionary abyss.

But have we also been complicit in creating a glass ceiling for progressive action?

It's hard to deny that we have on some level become "kept" men and women of what some refer to as the non-profit industrial complex. Michael Shuman and Merriam Fuller, in an article in The Nation called Profits for Justice, put into stark relief the social cost of non profit domestication:

"If Mohandas Gandhi were a typical leader organizing in a nonprofit environment like ours, he would probably be wearing a three-piece suit and working in a plush office with his law degree prominently displayed. He would have little time to lead protests, since every other week would be spent meeting with donors--and those power lunches would hardly go well with fasting. He would be careful to avoid initiatives like salt marches or cotton boycotts, so as not to offend key donors. To sharpen his annual pitch to foundations, he would be constantly dreaming up new one-year projects on narrowly focused topics, perhaps a one-time conference on English human-rights abuses, or a PBS documentary on anti-colonial activities in New Delhi. To insure that various allies didn't steal away core funders, he would keep his distance and be inclined to trash talk behind their backs. In short, there's little doubt that the British would still be running India."

Even the most supposedly militant forms of "membership led" direct action organizing and "taking it to the man" have become formulaic campaigns in which the measure of victory is wringing concessions from corporate marauders. Our punches are packaged and telegraphed in advance. We labor under the illusion that we are disrupting business when, at least most of the time, it's business as usual. Community Reinvestment Act challenges, Community Benefit Agreements and the perennial knee jerk opposition to box store or mega-development deals have in many instances protected the interests of low-income neighborhoods in the short term, but are ultimately stripped of creativity, spontaneity and the imagination to bring about real structural change. At the point, as has been reported, developers project concessions to protestors within their cost of doing business, you know we have lost our edge, to say the least.

I think the first step to overcoming our limitations is to admit they exist and begin a dialogue around them. (Some already have begun this dialogue. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence organized a conference entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond The Non-Profit Industrial Complex, in May 2004).

It's no wonder that this past week many immigrants decided to step off the reservation and show us all how it's done. Maybe there is something for us organizers and advocates to learn in the process.