Organizing Across Boundaries: Beyond Identity Politics

...How may we speak of transcending identity politics—not in the sense of obliterating differences, but in the sense of tempering them with action in behalf of the common good...

...If they were to insist on expressing bigoted attitudes, they would have to forgo working in the organization...

...Hoboken, New Jersey...

...Meanwhile, labor should be pressed to support the just demands of identity groups, to put the spirit of movement back in the labor movement, to renew labor's claim to bearing the people's whole interest in mind...

...The struggle against the Klanridden, fire-bombing, cross-burning, murderous white South was formative to our sense of ourselves...

...The JOIN organizers had frequent contacts with Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff who had been sent to Chicago as an advance party preparatory to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s open housing campaign...

...The second approach required racial integration from the start, in the heart of the organization...

...Arguably they were better...

...American history is replete with times when minorities have submerged their particular claims in broader coalitions, only to be forgotten—and this is always a risk...

...A few steadfastly antiracist organizers countered conventional wisdom...

...The Uptown JOIN organizers, most of whom had experience in the civil rights movement, constantly worried about how to respond to white racism and insularity...

...By 1963, it was clear that civil rights activists were in the process of winning their original demand to abolish legalized 38 • DISSENT Organising Across Boundaries segregation...

...In both cases, the concrete results were subject to all the limits of sixties organizing in general...

...The point is that, in both cases, the whites who were organized into coalitions with blacks were not supposed to be interested in or capable of doing that at all...

...Many were racist and not shy about saying so...

...We took two approaches...

...In SDS, we were not naive about the racism of poor whites...

...At JOIN's inception in 1964, the plan was to link our office on the (largely white) north side with a unit on the (largely black) south side, funded by the United Packinghouse Workers and with a black union staffer...

...Still, even its defenders concede that there have been costs as well—that an imbalance has developed between the politics of group assertion and the politics of commonality...

...They were pretty tough, these "young guys," as we called them—hard drinkers, few with regular jobs, the toughest of them (and the one with the biggest following, it seemed) in and out of jail...

...Louisville and Hazard, Kentucky...

...One of the first, if not the first, New Left activists to propose organizing the white poor into alliance with the black poor was Stokely Carmichael, a rising star in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC...

...Oppressed and disadvantaged minorities win victories when they persuade majorities...

...But the sweet politics of commonality—what might it look like...

...One was to bring Uptown whites and blacks from outside the neighborhood into contact at the earliest stages of organizing, so that the notion of a common struggle might take form...

...Twice we brought together white and black community people at national meetings, in order to conduct common discussions across race lines...

...But is there any reason to think that this ground might exist...

...Many of us had worked for civil rights in the heart of the South, and organized support campaigns for the courageous SNCC workers...

...and Oakland, California...

...This dynamic developed with welfare organizing...

...this implies that multiracial organizing is more likely to succeed on the job than elsewhere...

...My appeal to those who have turned to identity as the core of their practical politics is twofold: first, to consider whether diminishing returns have set in, and second, to consider whether their projects presuppose the existence of broad-gauged coalitions that are in fact vulnerable and in need of tending...

...ERAP sprang from a perception of the black movement's dilemma...

...But the engine of the necessary coalition would have to be the poor themselves—and since a majority of the poor, then as now, were white, the white poor would have to join with the black poor around common concerns...

...In one case, cross-racial coalition from without...

...But by working in an active, sensible, productive interracial group, they felt momentum—the sense that they were on the move, that cooperation and the direct expression of solidarity had serious prospects...

...During the summer of 1966, some of our staff, led by Rennie Davis and Bob Lawson, were trying to organize young white men...

...in the other, cross-racial coalition from within...

...The great August 1963 march was, after all, called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom—the word "jobs" came first...

...In the course of this campaign, the organizers took the Uptown street leaders to meetings with their black equivalents...

...Some of the more committed Uptown community people, along with organizers from black community organizations elsewhere in the city, came along to these gatherings...

...In 1966, I was working as a community organizer in the Uptown area of Chicago, an impoverished neighborhood on the north side where unemployment and crime were high, housing decrepit, and many people on welfare...

...We knew that the Populist alliances of the 1890s had been wrecked because, when push came to shove, whites had turned on blacks...

...These were tiny experiments by a handful of organizers...

...In truth, we know very little about what might be achieved by moving beyond the politics of identity...

...It has to be created by organizers who are aware of the urgency of forging cross-identity links, committed to the difficult work of overcoming group rancor and forming alliances, flexible in their methods, mutually supportive and willing to learn from mistakes...

...So, after a full generation, it has become a sort of tradition...

...There are precedents...

...Workplaces today are racially more diverse than neighborhoods...

...What kind of action follows from the desire to overcome the limits of the politics of difference...

...The question is how to knit majorities into alliances where people know that they need each other—even when their interests are different, even at times antagonistic...

...Even where a work force (and therefore a union local) is relatively homogeneous, union representatives from various locals have to work out forms of cooperation in order to win beyond the local level...

...By the same token, when the campaign against police brutality produced no results, and it looked as though there was no payoff for keeping the coalition together, race-baiting returned, along with other varieties of grumbling, bitterness, and gloom...

...But equally, it is much too easy to lose sight of the opposite risk of narrowness, and of the gains that minorities have won when broad-based movements—in particular, labor— have been strongest...

...Women in Uptown, like others around the city, began to organize for increased allotments (in 1966, Illinois allotted twenty-two cents per child per meal) and against punitive rules...

...We discovered something simple: When the Uptown whites felt they were making progress, they stopped race-baiting black allies...

...Not to try creating the ground for progressive policies is to be doomed to marginality...

...What more might be possible with a coherent application of energy and care by a new generation of union and community organizers...

...At the same time, similar campaigns were being mounted in other parts of the city—on the part of organizations that were almost exclusively FALL • 1997 • 39 Organizing Across Boundaries African American...

...Race relations were reasonably cooperative...

...Their centrality to the welfare rights group threw white women into a quandary...

...In the motto of the time: what good was the right to sit at a lunch counter if you couldn't afford the price of the hamburger...

...It was too soon for them to see material rewards—that would take time...

...In the JOIN welfare group, two of the most active and talented women were black...

...From then on, the central social problems affecting African-Americans were going to be economic...

...The story may offer a clue—not a formula for surmounting present-day dilemmas, but a way to think about how to proceed...

...Copying a tactic that had been used in Watts, we organized a community patrol, driving around behind police cars around on weekend nights, with cameras and notepads at the ready...

...Labor has the difficult but not impossible task of siding with the excluded while it is also the voice of the half-included...

...but labor needs to campaign for affordable housing, health care, and child care as well...

...40 • DISSENT...

...Under what circumstances...

...The governing assumption was that the needs of blacks required radical changes in the economy, but where was the political support for such changes to come from...

...Cairo, Illinois...

...They were suddenly willing to enter into coalitions...

...There were about a dozen more or less full-time organizers in Uptown, in loose association with another dozen each in both white and black neighborhoods in Cleveland, Newark, Baltimore, Boston, and at various times, smaller numbers in Philadelphia and Chester, Pennsylvania...

...There were, of course, liberals who (so we thought) could be counted on—in the churches, unions, and liberal city and state Democratic organizations...

...Hayden and others went on to do just that in the heart of the Newark ghetto...

...Perhaps I can best approach the question of how to transcend the divisiveness of identity politics with a recollection of some modest successes of the past...

...these were inspirational, though occasional...

...The second lasted longer, though there was more than one reason for that—the welfare mothers were a steadier, more stable group than men in their teens and early twenties...

...Since their most deeply felt grievance was police brutality, that was the issue on which the organizers worked...

...At a 1963 meeting with SDS leader Tom Hayden, Carmichael proposed the formula "Whites should organize whites"—which begged the difficult question, Organize around what...

...On the issues of police brutality and welfare reform, the concrete results were certainly no worse for crossrace coalitions than for all-black organizations...

...So did equivalent groups in Cleveland, ERAP's other main attempt at organizing poor whites...

...There is no magic bullet...

...The movement was going to suffer from success...

...The vast majority of the residents were white, many of them recent arrivals from the Appalachian South, some from elsewhere in the South...

...Campaigns to raise the minimum wage, and to require localities to pay living wages, set a good precedent...

...In the meantime, before the enunciation of Black Power (by the same Stokely Carmichael) in 1966, it was still possible for white organizers to live and organize in black communities...

...The community organization, JOIN ("Jobs or Income Now"), had been started by Students for a Democratic Society through its Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), a national attempt to organize what we immodestly hoped might turn out to be "an interracial movement of the poor...

...What are the implications for today...

...q The author thanks Steve Fraser, Michael Kazin, and Alan Sokal for their comments on an earlier draft...

...But surely common ground can be found across race lines on class issues—or better, common ground can be made...

...What we do know, after a generation of experience on the left, are the self-limitations of identity politics, and the existence of untested possibilities...

...That office, however, got nowhere...

...Eventually, we decided to organize a march on the local police station calling for an end to police brutality and demanding the punishment of one particularly menacing cop...

...We knew something of the history of Bourbon Southern elites tossing poor whites a subordinate caste to despise—"You've got more than the blacks, don't complain," in the words of Bob Dylan, who caught this mentality well in his song "Only a Pawn in Their Game...

...This coalition held together for years...

...And then what...

...If, on the other hand, they worked with these black women, they might see some results...

...In this sense, labor is probably the most fruitful area in which to test the potential of a politics beyond segmented identity...

...If anything, the lessons of cross-racial organizing might apply better to labor today than in the sixties...