In a recent New York Times opinion piece, “Women the Game is Rigged. It’s Time we Stopped Playing by the Rules,” author Lux Alptraum calls for the feminist movement to move away from “empowerment feminism” and embrace what she calls “disempowerment feminism.” Her interpretation of the prevailing feminist approach comes very close to making the movement and the leaders of that movement the feminist equivalent of Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise. “Cast your bucket down where you are” may find equivalence in Alptraum’s criticism of the underlying assumptions of empowerment feminism, which (like racial accommodation) “requires a system that’s operating in good faith, one that rewards our hustle, respects our confidence and values honesty and truth.”
Alptraum further elaborates: “Rather than seeking the approval and validation of an unjust system, what if we rejected the system’s legitimacy and worked from there?” Fair enough, but the author seems to stop short of seeking to transform an unjust system when she states that “Perhaps the fault isn’t in ourselves but in our strategy,” citing numerous examples of organized agitation that succeeded at getting marginalized and oppressed groups a seat at the table. But isn’t that the core issue for any empowerment strategy? Are we seeking to change injustice or simply bend an unjust system to accommodate our issues, concerns, and needs?
Given my nearly half-century of experience as an organizer, activist and executive of several community development organizations in New York City, I believe the lessons are fairly clear. Power is dynamic and defensive. To repeat the famous quote from Frederick Douglas, “power concedes nothing without a demand.” But how does an “out group” become and “in group?”
In writing and talks, I have often cited the success of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. But how successful would this group have become without the work of Act Up, an in-your-face, AIDS activist group that split from the GMHC over charges that it was right on policy but impotent in matters of political relevance. When I ran a New York City foundation in the 1980s, I worked with several so-called “community-building” initiatives. The initiatives were short-lived, mostly due to a combination of faulty assumptions (that community was a given and there was no need to define it), market forces and government assistance (which started to make “inner city” development not only possible, but profitable). During this time, a big (unsurprising) focus of some of the foundations was to fund “consensus organizing” efforts. The theory was that “confrontational organizing” was for the impractical, immature among us. Consensus organizing, where all the institutional “stakeholders” were brought together to work collectively and cooperatively on solving problems plaguing low and moderate income neighborhoods, was the responsible alternative. Beyond the problem with some of the underlying assumptions (the presence of community and local institutions as truly representing those presumed communities), there were convenient omissions permitted so as not to undermine the paradigm. I was at one meeting where the conveners spoke about “consensus-building” efforts somewhere in Pennsylvania. The results were impressive, but what the conveners failed to mention was that ACORN was organizing in the area, but in a confrontational mode. No one could say what the result would have been were it not for ACORN’s presence and actions.
In my direct experience, I had the opportunity to be the “adult in the room” or opt for potential continued confrontation. Sometime in the mid-1980s, I received a phone call from a Deputy Commissioner at the city’s housing department, HPD (Department of Housing Preservation and Development). My organization had been active providing financial, technical and legal assistance to groups of tenants seeking to take over their buildings from bad owners and turn them into cooperatives. On that call, I was asked if I would be willing to extend our program of multi-family homesteading to small homes. The city was then faced with increasing numbers of these small homes acquired through tax foreclosure, had little interest in, or capacity for, managing them, and wanted to dispose of them to responsible owners. And, by the way, the city had already appropriated $1 million dollars that we would receive to start the program. I told the Deputy Commissioner that we were interested in discussing this and that it was acceptable to represent that we were in discussions. Of course, early the next week the city publicly announced that our organization (then called the Consumer-Farmer Foundation) would be running a “low-income auction program” in the East New York section of Brooklyn.
What I did not know at the time was that, fresh from a successful squatter campaign in Philadelphia, ACORN was organizing residents to take over city owned, small homes in East New York, Brooklyn. After a rather animated call with a lead organizer from ACORN (Fran Streich), I agreed that my response to the city would be to propose a mutual housing association that included ACORN. Having undermined the subterfuge, the city agreed to the terms with one proviso – we could not explicitly state that ACORN was a partner in this. We could only refer to the newly-created MHANY (Mutual Housing Association of New York), which ACORN controlled, as a partner in this effort. Today, ACORN is out of business but MHANY is one of the premier housing organizations in the city and ACORN, locally, has been competently replaced with New York Communities for Change.
The question remains for any organizing effort seeking to address systems of oppression: is the goal to force a seat at the table, or is the goal to transform an unjust system or some component of an unjust system? Notwithstanding the author’s repeated reference to the problems with the “system,” I believe Ms. Alptraum’s opinion piece fails to do more than suggest ways for women to enhance their roles within the existing system, a system that the author seems to conclude is unjust. Even if successful, this is a problem to which anyone with a history in the labor movement can attest.