We Have To Stop Valorizing Black Cops

By Mary Retta

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

The purpose of policing—to jail and kill Black folks—remains the same regardless of the officers’ race. 

Policing in America is facing a PR crisis. Following the May 25th murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, the term “defund the police” has become a rallying cry for thousands across the country. Six months later, however, America has not defunded its police force––and in fact, has in some cases taken steps to give police departments even more money. Instead, police forces across America have taken an insidious approach: painting their departments in blackface.

After the January 6th Trump riot at the Capitol building , Yoganda Pittman, a Black woman, was named the new Chief of Capitol Police. Her appointment followed the resignation of former Chief Steven Sund and the arrest and firing of several white police officers who were found to be in attendance at the MAGA riot. Pittman’s appointment appeased many liberals who falsely believe that allowing Black folks to infiltrate or run law enforcement agencies will lead to higher levels of safety for Black Americans. The termination of several officers  who took part in the riot has convinced many that we are one step closer to “reforming” the police by weeding out the racist, bad apples within the department. 

This is a nice narrative, but a false one; in order to understand why, we must look at the history of policing in this country. Modern policing in America was originally created as a replacement for America’s slave patrol system wherein squadrons made up of white volunteers were empowered to use vigilante tactics to enforce laws related to slavery. These “enforcers” were in charge of locating and returning enslaved people who had escaped, crushing uprisings led by enslaved people, and punishing enslaved workers who were found or believed to have violated plantation rules. After slavery was legally abolished in 1865, America created its modern police force to do the exact thing under a different name: maintain the white supremacist hierarchy that is necessary under racial capitalism. The purpose of policing––to jail and kill Black folks––remains the same regardless of the officers’ race. 

Liberal media has also contributed to the recent valorization of Black cops. In the days after the January 6th riot, many news outlets aggressively pushed a story about Eugene Goodman, a Black capitol police officer who led several rioters away from the Congress people’s hiding places while being chased by a white supremacist mob. Several news outlets published testimonials of Black police officers disclosing instances of racism within the department. A January 14th article in ProPublica  notes that over 250 Black cops have sued the department for racism since 2001: some Black cops have alleged that white officers used racial slurs or hung nooses in Black officer’s lockers, and one Black cop even claimed he heard a white officer say, “Obama monkey, go back to Africa.” 

These white officers’ racism is unsurprising, and I am not denying any of these claims. But focusing on these singular, isolated moments of racism wherein white cops are painted as cruel and Black cops are the sympathetic victims grossly oversimplifies the narrative of structural racism that modern American policing was built upon. After hearing these slurs that they were allegedly so disgusted by, these Black cops still intentionally chose to put on their badge, don their guns, and work alongside these white police officers who insulted and demeaned them, laboring under a violent system with the sole purpose of harming and terrorizing Black and low-income communities. Similarly, while Goodman’s actions most likely saved many lives during the riot, we cannot allow one moment of decency to erase centuries of racist violence. 

The great Zora Neale Hurston once said: “All my skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.” Her words ring ever true today, and these Black police officers are an excellent example of why. It’s tempting to believe that putting Black folks on the force will solve racial violence, but this is a liberal myth we must break free of. Allowing Black people into inherently racist systems does not make those systems better, safer, or more equitable: a quick look at many Black folks in power today, such as Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Lori Lightfoot, and Keisha Lance Bottoms immediately prove this to be the case. Everyone supporting racial capitalism must be scrutinized and held accountable, regardless of their identity. We cannot on the one hand say that ‘all cops are bastards’ and then suddenly feel sympathy when those cops are not white. If we want to defund and abolish the police, we must resist the narrative that Black cops have anything to offer us.

On the Anti-Racist Economy

By Joshua Briond

In the aftermath of the state-sanctioned executions of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, we have witnessed arguably the largest and most sustained mobilization of protests and political demonstrations across the country in the movement for Black lives. In the midst of an era of drastically increased performative and opportunistic "activism," where "spreading awareness" is prioritized over human lives and dignity—which was helped ushered in by the Shaun King’s of the world—where capital(ism) does what it has done to everything: commodify, celebritize, and corporatize any and everything, by any means necessary. Such has been done for “social justice" rhetoric and activism. We have seen, in real time, Black Lives Matter be co-opted, commodified, watered down, and flat-out defanged in the face of capital, as the simple passivity of the hashtag and movement demands—if you can call it such—has become socially acceptable in the mainstream arena, specifically so in the post-Kaepernick era.

With increasing pressure for bourgeois public figures to “speak out” and “spread awareness” from fans, the sociopolitical moment has forced historically apolitical figures and brands alike to momentarily step outside their bubble of privilege, power, and wealth to release uninspired and bland political statements vaguely condemning violence and pledging their rhetorical support for the Black lives matter movement. Such acts are met with comment sections filled with bleak and dystopian undue and unjust adulation for bare minimum performances of intellectually insulting public political theater—that is yet typical for the celebrity worship present here in the US. As the limits of neoliberal political imagination have once again depicted, in this crucial sociopolitical climate, the best the professional liberal class could offer as a solution to the prevalence of racialized state violence—was not the political interrogation of the white power structure we live under and its constant terror and antagonization to non-white life—but to vote for uninspired Democratic candidates, donate to NGOs and non-profits with zero ties to communities most largely affected by said violence, and read “ally” self-help books, written largely but not exclusively by and for white people.

One of the books in question is Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Published the summer of 2018, it went viral during the rise of the protests (stated to have sold at least a million copies in the matter of a few months). Others have grappled with the glaring contradictions and violence inherent to the act of a white person raking in millions under the guise of “anti-racism” and “anti-bias training”—that has been largely proven ineffective; while also charging anywhere from $30,000 to $45,000 on public speaking gigs for corporate conglomerates like Bill Gates and Amazon. So I’m not here to speak on that. Yet, DiAngelo’s public persona and prominence is arguably the perfect depiction of the co-optation of the politics of “anti-racism” into its own industry for corporate diversity initiatives without addressing structural root causes. The issue with books, panels, infographics, and the discourse surrounding race that centers and targets “allies” is that so many of them still fundamentally misunderstand rac[e/ism], whiteness, and anti-Blackness as just a matter of individual feelings, ignorance, and morality—instead of what it is: a structural organizing tool that the US political economy—built on and inseparable from slavery and genocide—necessitates.

“We who were not black before we got here, who were defined as black by the slave trade—have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a long time & have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about our­selves, survived & triumphed over it."

—James Baldwin

How can one be an anti-racist if the historical precedence of race and racialization as a colonial society organizing device and regime isn’t widely understood amongst those who proclaimed to identify or align with anti-racist values? And when the vast majority of this country’s population—including self-proclaimed anti-racists’ understanding of race is wrongly and harmfully understood as that of a biological marking, rather than a sociopolitical tool meticulously and conveniently constructed and manipulated through legislation? As W.E.B. Du Bois, amongst other historians and critical race thinkers have noted: Whiteness, as stated since its historicized legislation, marks power and dominance. Blackness marks the powerless, slave, and dispossessed.

The United States of America, as we know of it, cannot function or exist without the racial regime: whiteness and anti-blackness. The entire economy, politically and otherwise—going all the way back to the cotton industry; which introduced the world to the US as a global imperial-capitalist project—is predicated & sustained through racial violence. The subjugation of imperialized nations and peoples, the dispossessed, and the enslaved, is how America and therefore the American knows that they are free. The coloniality of American freedom and the subjugation of those racialized and colonized nations and peoples cannot be divorced from one another. The entire concept of freedom and democracy—as espoused as principle by the American project—is predicated on the denial of such, of the Other(s).

“Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed & powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.”

—Toni Morrison

I want to say that when I speak of the “America(n),” I am referring to that of the white. America(n) means white. I would like to also infer that the American, and white identity, ideology, and structure, is founded upon not just the systemic exploitation of the Other, namely the Black or otherwise the slave, the native, the dispossessed, and the colonized—and the moral and political justification of it—but also defined entirely by said positionality of the subjugated. As Toni Morrison has written, “Black slavery enriched the country’s [creative] possibilities. for in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not—me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize extemal exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American."

The liberal anti-racist economy is fundamentally unwilling and ill-equipped to grapple with this and racial[ized] contradictions of capital(ism)—the likes of which Black radicals of the Black radical tradition have theorized and highlighted on for decades now. Racism is not just a matter of individual ignorance or feelings that can be changed or eradicated via “understanding,” “diversity and anti-bias training,” “tough conversations,” or a quick fix in morality and finally seeing subjects of its violence as human; as so many prominent “anti-racists” would like to have us believe. The ‘antiracist’ economy, lucrative as may be, is incapable of birthing white ‘anti-racists’ because it refuses to grapple with the inherent racism of the project, or rather regime of race, racialization, capital(ism), and whiteness-as-power, in and of itself. You cannot manufacture solidarity—which a radical anti-racist movement necessitates—on the simple passivity of moral posturing. Solidarity must be built on, not just through shared struggle or basic figurations of empathy, but also on recognizing the humanity of those in which it has been historically denied to and ultimately coming to an understanding and agreement that we are worth fighting for.

“As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you.” —James Baldwin

To teach white people to be ‘antiracist’ is to teach white people to betray everything that they have ever known about their very existence, the world order, and life itself; it is to quite literally antagonize everything that they are and sense empowerment from. Therefore, you cannot ‘teach’ white people to be ‘antiracist’ through moral and virtue signaling—especially when whiteness itself, as politically constructed, is, has always been, and will always be, immoral. It is why becoming an anti-racist is, or at least should be, a choice one makes through rigorous study of the history of race, racialization, whiteness, and liberation movements, etc. White people cannot be guilted into antiracism—this is why the “spreading awareness” tactic—deployed by Shaun King and his ilk—that bombards people with pornographic visualizations of black terror and death have been largely ineffective but on the contrary quite in fact, historically libidinal—a source of entertainment and collective joy. The politics of moralism has proven futile. You cannot moralize oppression—especially when the source and basis of said oppression is that of capital and whiteness—both of which are categorically immoral.

In a sociopolitical moment where we have seen Donald Trump’s violence exceptionalized; making it out to be unlike anything we have ever seen before—despite his political crimes largely (and simply) being an extension of the order and requirements of the US presidency—by the liberal media apparatus; terroristic political legacies resuscitated, war criminals, regime changers, and COINTELPRO state agents become faces of resistance. All of which depict a moment in which the standard for “good doers,” “morality,” and human rights and social justice advocate is deeper in the gutter than ever before. I’m afraid that the anti-racist economy, the ally industrial complex—as a result of commodification of social justice has ushered in an “anti-racism” and a human right advocacy that is inseparable from the social, political, and economic capital that it often leads to.

I’m afraid the anti-racist economy has, ironically enough, failed to create any substantial “allies” or “anti-racists.” But instead created a culture of unadulterated and uncontested political performativity, groomed more benevolent self-aggrandizing white people—who are smarter, more clever than their forebears at disguising such racism; to avoid backlash, consequences, or even the mildest forms of confrontation; just enough to navigate situations with and around subjects of racial oppression without exposing the psychopathy and immorality of structural and ideological whiteness—but not enough to materially and substantially dedicate themselves to and sacrifice their own power and capital towards an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist struggle.

I’m afraid that there has been little to no progress, remorse or lessons learned—on the part of individual whites or the white power structure at-large as evidenced by the continuation of the legacy of colonialism, slavery and historicized violence—as the tactics and acts wielded against the initial racially marked and subjugated would serve as a template of what would occur in the centuries to follow—being exported to other racialized and colonized people domestically and across the globe; while still being enacted on the initially marked, i.e., African, Black, and Indigenous subjects.

I’m afraid with the consequences of slavery, which is that of whiteness-as-power, the racial regime and racism that is inherent to it depict white remorselessness on the part of the perpetuators and continued beneficiaries of the historicized economic industry; to paraphrase one of my favorite James Baldwin quotes from 1970: the very sight of black people in white chains and cages—both proverbial or otherwise—houseless, neglected, and structurally subjugated, and terrorized; would struck such anger, such intolerable rage, in the eyes, minds, and bodies of the American people, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But instead, as we know of it all too well, the existence of said chains, cages, and racial subjugation, is how the American measures their own safety and sense of comfort. It is how they know they are free.

Don’t Tell Me Anything About Diversity When All Of Your Leadership Looks the Same

By Cherise Charleswell

As one of the founding Chairs of the Hampton Institute, a working-class think tank , I can say that one of the things that excited me about launching this project - a project that has grown into a respected resource and is accessed from those in Academia, filmmakers, and a wide variety of media sources - is that we were truly a diverse group, in every sense of the word, from day one.

Although a majority of us are based in the United States, we are a collective that includes men, women, various races/ethnicities, and religious views. We even have diversity in terms of age. Younger people have never been told that they could not voice their concerns or share their insights. Our collective includes immigrants/first generation immigrants, those who identify as LGBTQ, and all recognizing that we are equal members of the working class, and thus should all have a "seat at the table."

Now, contrast all of this to what is often seen in other organizations, particularly those in the public and non-profit sectors that flaunt their commitment to diversity, inclusion, and progressive missions. Those organizations are essentially only diverse in name, or only at the entry-perhaps-mid-level of staff, but rarely when it comes to those in position of leadership. And this is unfortunately also true for women's or feminist organizations. And, yes, this means that more often than not those who lead these organizations are White, middle-class, cis, heterosexual women. Basically the face of white feminism, and everything that makes it so problematic.

I was reminded of this when I heard the initial excitement about comments made by Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood, during her participation in the Women's March #PowerToThePolls rally in Las Vegas. During the event she called on white women to do more to "save this country from itself." She went on to state that it is not up to women of color to "save the country from itself" (BTW: You're welcome!) And her comments come on the heels of much of the accolades, thank-yous, etc. being thrown at Black women for attempting to save the United States from Trump, while 53% of white women voted for him; and for saving Alabama (and again the US) from pedophile and racist, Roy Moore, while 63% of white women voted for him. More about all that saving here , here , and here .

Cecile Richards actually announced her plans to resign from her role as President of Parenthood on January 26th, and after thinking about her statements for "white women to do better, because clearly they have been failing," and all of these statements of gratitude being directed at Black women and other women of color for their efforts, I can't help but ask whether we will actually see a Black woman or other women of color step into this soon-to-be-vacant position?

One has to ask this, when considering once again what leadership in public and non-profit organizations currently look like, even those that claim to have missions and areas of focus that directly impact communities of color. For instance, consider the leadership of other well-established women's organizations. The Feminist Majority Foundation (Eleanor Smeal), National Organization of Women (Terry O' Neil), and other organizations such as the Women's Foundation of California (Judy Patrick), are all lead by white women. My knowledge of these realities helped to ensure that I was not surprised by finding out that the Los Angele's County's Women & Girls Initiative's Executive Director is a white woman. I expected it. I recently attended their kick-off discussion meetings with community thought leaders, whose feedback is supposed to help drive the initiative, and as they shared statistics that I was familiar with, such as the fact that since 2015 there has been a 51% increase of homeless women in Los Angeles County and one-quarter of Latinas and African American women in the county live below the poverty line, my mind couldn't help drift to the fact that I was again in a position where I was witnessing another gatekeeper share narratives about people who look like me, and communities that I come from, instead of having a representative from those very communities be the person sharing this information and driving the initiative.

If the goal was truly to make a change (and as great as it is having members of the community provide their input), the person delivering the message and pushing the initiative should have an intimate understanding, including personal lived experiences, of the issues that have caused the disparities that were being discussed.

And no, having a diverse staff is not enough, and the reason why is Power Dynamics, but I will get more into that later.

Again, feminist organizations are not the only ones who have this problem. Diversity is a buzzword to many, but it is truly a falsehood when you begin to look at leadership. For example, simply attend a conference or professional networking event and you will find the same dynamic. The vast majority of people being introduced to you as Directors, Department heads, Senior Researchers, tenured professors, etc. are not women or people of color, or other marginalized groups. These people are often excited to share information about a diversity program, community outreach, or participatory research project that they are leading, and they want to share their best practices of reaching out to a specific community, you know "those people," and all of this can be really astonishing. Including the fact that they themselves do not see the irony or the problem. Literally blinded by privilege.

They view themselves as allies, as social justice warriors, as good Samaritans committed to change, but they are unwilling to take a look around, and look at who is in the room, and how much space they are able to take up, and how much authority and prestige (decision-making power) they possess. They do not take enough time to reflect on the fact that the chosen leaders who work primarily within marginalized communities and groups do not look like them. In short, not much has really changed, and there are statistics to prove that.

Consider this:

• A 2014 study found that women of color only occupied 3% of all board seats among Fortune 500 companies.

• Women are overrepresented in the public and nonprofit sectors, and this overrepresentation is linked to (1) greater offerings of family-friendly practices, (2) the higher wage advantage obtained by women compared with men working in the public sector rather that in the for-profit sector, (3) greater access to part time jobs and shorter workweeks (which again ties into women's traditional care-giver role or burden of non-paid work). (Lanfranchi & Narcy, 2013). Thus, 69% of nonprofit executive leadership are women ((Bell, Moyers, and Wolfred, 2006).

• Women are CEOs of only 21% of large non-profits, and they only make 66% of what their white counterparts make (Dubose, 2014).

• While women in academia (including public institutions) win roughly 56% of academia's most prestigious awards, only 29% of women have tenure. (Foxworth, 2016)

• 94 percent of foundation presidents are white (Thurman, 2007)

• Only 7% of non-profit chief executives are people of color (Dubose, 2014)

• Only 8% of non-profit Board Members are people of color (Dubose, 2014)

• 18% of non-profit employees are people of color (Dubose, 2014).

But What about Affirmative Action?

The group that has been the biggest beneficiary of Affirmative Action has been white women, and this has been no secret. More about how White women have been benefitted disproportionately can be read here .

How this disproportional benefit happened is easy to follow. White women are simply in closest proximity to white men, who have always held positions of prestige and leadership. They have been their fathers, uncles, cousins, and husbands - and their resources (especially financial) and connections (the "good old boys network") has benefitted them. All of this has bolstered their educational and professional pursuits. In fact, allowing white women to actively enter the workplace, assume positions of leadership, and earn higher wages, helps contribute to the fact that the median wealth of white households continues to be 20 times that of black households.

What is ironic about this is that the category "women" wasn't originally included in the first affirmative-action measure, which was an executive order signed by President Kennedy in 1961. It required federal contractors to "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin." In 1967, President Johnson amended this, and a subsequent measure included sex, recognizing that women also faced many discriminatory barriers and hurdles to equal opportunity. Thus, this minor modification helped to ensure that Affirmative Action will continue a racial hierarchy - where white women remain at the pinnacle.

Yet, blinded to this reality (and privilege), many white women may not recognize just how much more they have benefited from Affirmative Action, which would explain the results of a 2014 study , where 70% of White women (ironically) "somewhat" or "strongly" opposed Affirmative Action.

According to a 2016 report from the American Enterprise Institute, "In surveys that ask about affirmative action for different groups, support is consistently higher for affirmative action programs for women than for affirmative action programs for minorities." The willingness to pay for only women, and not minorities, completely erases women of color; and makes it clear that these programs will not include intersectional frameworks that will address the multitude of issues that impact the lives of women of color.

This is why it is truly time to be intentional when it comes to Affirmative Action, and this is particularly true for women's groups, giving circles, feminist organizations, etc. Be intentional. Instead of creating agendas about women's empowerment, focus those agendas on the group of women who remain marginalized, create funding and garner resources that will help to empower women of color who have been left behind, and yes-let them Lead!

What is So Problematic about All-White-Women Leadership?

The following excerpt from the article, Don't Just Thank Black Women. Follow Us , does a great job of explaining why this current structure of white-women leadership is problematic and ineffective. It simply helps to show why real diversity is so critical:

"When I joined the 470,000 other women who walked down Constitution Avenue toward the National Mall on Jan. 21, the day after Donald Trump's inauguration, I carried a sign saying, "Don't Forget, White Women Voted for Trump."

My messages stood in stark contrast to the theme of togetherness that dominated the Women's March - the pink "pussy hats" and "girl power" placards, the chants about how women would lead the resistance. This was exactly the point. I made the sign to communicate that in a world where 53 percent of white women voters chose a racist, elitist sexual predator for president, the idea that we all want the same things is a myth .

The point wasn't to antagonize the Women's March participants, who were mostly white. Rather, I wanted to highlight that on a national level, white women are not unified in opposition to Trumpism and can't be counted on to fight it ."(Peoples, 2017).

When one considers "closed-door decision-making," there is no greater example of this than the voting booth. When one casts their votes, it is a reflection of their values, of the issues that they think are important, and it is an exercise in judgment. The fact that so many white women could vote in-line with Trumpism, choosing to ignore or were unable to recognize his racism, xenophobia, sexism, and so on, is evidence enough that they are not exactly the best at having good judgment, and at worse, it means that they, too, hold Trump's views.

Connecting those dots should help you understand why having white-women-led organizations, particularly those that should focus on intersectional issues (the one's they deny or ignore) that primarily impact communities of color and other marginalized communities, is not only flawed, but dangerous.

Again, not much has changed.

Working Toward Diversity

Your organization, collective, collaborative, agency, or group should not even dare to call itself diverse if it is not ready to ensure that those in leadership, strategic planning, and decision-making are a diverse group, in terms of race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, sex/gender, and so on. In other words - prove it!

Here are some ways that you can work toward diversity:

· Track and be mindful of the changes in racial demographics in the country, state, city, and assess your organization to see if it has kept pace with these changes. Determine whether the leadership of your organization reflects these varying demographics.

· Create opportunities for entry and mid-level staff to provide input that reflect perspectives from their various communities, and reward them for this sharing of expertise, particularly during considerations employee reviews, and salary negotiations/ re-negotiations. They should be considered subject matter experts.

· Ensure that you take the time to educate funders - whether they are foundations or politicians, who have to approve legislation for discretionary spending. This education should include discussions on systematic racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, and how they impact the communities that they serve, particularly in terms of intersectionality. Take the time to go over the social determinants of health and how they have negatively impacted the wellbeing and many marginalized groups; and use these examples to justify the need for more intentional and directed funding mechanisms, and opportunities that are specific to these groups. Do not speak about programs for women's empowerment; instead begin conversations about the fact that Hispanic/Latina are paid only 59 cents on the white male dollar. So, this is why it is imperative to focus on programs for economic empowerment and development for Hispanic/Latina women.

· If your organization doesn't have an internal Affirmative Action program, implement one.

· Make cultural humility training a requirement for staff and Board members, and realize that the basis of cultural humility, which differs from cultural competency, means that there is no "end point" when it comes to learning, and that one will never be an "expert" about any group of people. Cultural humility is a process that involves ongoing self reflection, where one has to actively address Isms, work to end power balances, and be willing to take a step back to allow those from the impacted communities to serve as the "experts" on how best to move forward.

· Form Advisory Boards made up of members from the community, and do not make academic achievement the main criteria for joining the boards. Other factors should be considered.

· Be intentional when recruiting candidates. Make an effort to reach out to minority candidates, whether through head-hunters, job fairs, and working with workforce development organizations. Select executive search firms that have a proven track record of delivering a diverse pool of candidates. Dismantle the recruitment model that involves only referring from the personal circle of leadership, because everyone in those circles "look alike."

· Make diversity a central part of your organization's succession planning and managing executive transitions.

· Ensure that your human resources department and other members of leadership maintain an open door policy for complaints related to bias and workplace racism, as well as micro-aggressions.

· Look at your marketing materials and ensure that your staff and LEADERSHIP reflect the people in those images. Do not put out false images of diversity without working to maintain a diverse organization.

· When looking at candidates, consider privilege. Candidates from minority communities and marginalized groups may not have had the access (financially or through the established good boy network) to have attended an Ivy league university, or taken on many non-paid internships (because they had to work and earn an income, while pursuing their education), and realize that they may have far more to offer in terms of skills, perspective, or work ethic than someone who simply has credential degrees and no actual experience. Selecting these inexperienced, privileged, un-connected candidates only helps to continue the problem of having non-diverse leadership.

· Invest in diverse candidates upstream, by championing, funding, and/or creating programs for children, youth, and others from underrepresented groups, to ensure that they have the necessary skillets to compete. The United States Office of Minority Health actually hosts webinars for funding agencies, to teach them how to build health equity and diversity into their funding models.

For the Public:

· Demand that nonprofit agencies that you support be transparent when it comes to their leadership. Ask them about their commitment to diversity before you choose to support them.

· Be bold when visiting a public agency (that is supported by your tax dollars) and speak candidly about the issues that you see to all levels of staff. Ask to speak with a member of the leadership team, about the lack of diversity that you see. Be willing to make people uncomfortable.

· Consider volunteering your time and serving on a Foundation Board or Nonprofit Board. Many have a need for Board Members, but do a poor job of outreach to various communities and groups. As a member of these Boards you will help decide the direction of programming, messaging, which communities and topics to engage in, and you can help to facilitate the hiring of more diverse members of leadership and staff. Your vote can greatly help shift the dynamics of underrepresentation.

The for-profit, non-profit, and public sectors all equally have a diversity problem, particularly when it comes to leadership; but this issue is even more problematic in the public/non-profit sector, due to their missions, which are often one of service and addressing social inequities and health disparities. They will continue to fail in carrying out their missions, due to their failure in promoting leaders who are of diverse backgrounds, and have an intimate understanding of the various communities that are often negatively impacted and marginalized. Having board members, executive leadership, and staff from a wide array of backgrounds are truly a benefit to the organization, in that they bring unique perspectives that may be overlooked by "all white traditional leadership", and these differences in perspectives will help foster more meaningful relationships, and more importantly more effective solutions.

This includes feminist/women's organizations who claim to have a progressive agenda. There is nothing progressive about upholding the status quo of white supremacy. Organizations that claim to be committed to social justice need to have leaders that look like the members of those movements, and the communities served.

Ultimately, if you are committed to social transformation, restorative justice, resisting Trumpism, and truly serving the public in a manner that addresses social inequities, then you cannot continue to simply surround yourself with white people. Truly think about the hypocrisy of your actions.

Works Cited

Angela Peoples. Don't just thank Black women. Follow Us. New York Times. December 16, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/opinion/sunday/black-women-leadership.html

Bell, J., Moyers, R., and Wolfred, T. Daring to Lead 2006: A National Study of Nonprofit Executive Leadership. 2006. Retrieved Sept. 15, 2008, from http://www.compasspoint.org/assets/194_daringtolead06final.pdf .

Derwin Dubose. The nonprofit sector has a Ferguson problem. Nonprofit Quarterly. December 5, 2014. http://nonprofitquarterly.org/2014/12/05/the-nonprofit-sector-has-a-ferguson-problem/

Joseph Lanfranchi and Mathieu Narcy. Female Overrepresentation in Public and Nonprofit Sector Jobs: Evidence From a French National Survey. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. 2013; 44(1):47-74. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764013502579

Raymond Foxworth. Native American Women, Leadership and the Native Nonprofit Sector. First Nations Development Institute. 2016. https://firstnations.org/sites/default/files/%2A/Native_American_Women_in_Nonprofit_Leadership_FINAL2.pdf

Rosetta Thurman. Philanthropy Doesn't Care About Black People.

Standford Social Innovation Review

. October 2007.

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/philanthropy_doesnt_care_about_black_people

Women Workers Versus Intersectional Exploitation: Striving for Working-Class Feminism

By Tatiana Cozzarelli

This article originally appeared at Left Voice .

Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi, an Indian American, is the CEO of PepsiCo, the second largest food and beverage business in the world. It produces products such as Pepsi, Lay's, Quaker, Dorito, Starbuck's Ready-to-Drink, 7UP, Cheetos, Aquafina, Mountain Dew, Gatorade and Tropicana. In 2016, it made $62.8 billion in sales, had a market value of $159.4 billion, and employed an estimated 264,000 workers. It is no wonder that as CEO of such an important global corporation, Nooyi was ranked among the world's most powerful women more than once.

Not only has Nooyi been able to achieve the highest levels of business success as an individual, but she opens doors to people of color and women within the corporation. Currently, 27 percent of senior executives at PepsiCo are women and 36 percent are people of color- more diverse than the average corporation without a doubt. In the UK, PepsiCo has been ranked one of the top 50 companies for women to work over six times. The Times and Opportunity Now say that PepsiCo "is leading the way in gender equality in the workplace," in part due to a Strategies for Success program that helps female middle managers reach senior management positions.

For some, Nooyi is a model of female empowerment, evidence that women, and even women of color, can knock down the barriers of racism and sexism to achieve anything they set their minds to. Some may go further to argue that her empowerment is not just an individual achievement because she opens the doors for other women as well, a model feminist.

Some would argue that Nooyi's life demonstrates that the barriers of the past that limited our grandmothers from the highest positions are long gone and that we have entered a new era of equality. Based on this logic, there are still difficulties women face, but women like Nooyi are shining examples that women can overcome these difficulties.

This kind of feminism is a meaningless dead end. While Nooyi stands as a beacon of progress, women all over the world suffer from illiteracy, violence, low wages, horrible working conditions. For every Nooyi, there are thousands of women whose bodies and spirits are crushed by the literal and symbolic weight of heavy machinery used to produce the products that make Nooyi a billionaire.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of PepsiCo in Argentina, a factory where a majority female staff are currently organizing a struggle against layoffs. This struggle highlights the faults of lean-in feminism and exemplifies a different kind of feminism - one that points to a real way forward for women around the world.

The Women of PepsiCo

For years, PepsiCo hyper exploited workers in the factory, hiring an overwhelmingly subcontracted female workforce that worked 12 hour days. Catalina Balaguer, a 10 year veteran of the factory and militant of the Partido de Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS) says, "A lot of us women didn't say that we had kids, because we thought they would fire us. In time, we learned that having kids, being single mothers was in some cases a guarantee that we would be even more exploited. They knew we needed the money." She describes the horrible working conditions - 12 hour days, working over the weekend, short breaks, low wages, and dangerous conditions. "If you got pregnant, you had to work just like any other worker to make sure you kept your job. We spent years doing the same monotonous motions; years of our bodies bent in the same position. We are an extension of the machines. The machines spit bags of chips at us that we pack into boxes over and over again until we die. Every day, the same work that ruins our bodies."

In 2001, Katy, along with several other co-workers, was fired for organizing in the factory. For a year and a half, Katy fought for her job with the help of a fellow PTS militant who is a lawyer. They took the fight outside the courtroom, seeking solidarity from universities and other sectors of workers. Katy says, "We did an investigation with people at the university, psychologists, and sociologists, where we talked about what it was like to be a woman worker. We were able to put out good material about the complexity of being a woman worker - how much you spend and how much you make, how much time we work at the factory, how much time we work at home, and it was a good way to talk to other women workers… It made other women workers de-naturalize the work conditions we had."

Katy not only won her job back, but forced PepsiCo to take measures to save face. They stopped super exploiting subcontracted workers and began to make special donations to charities and to hire people with disabilities etc. Yet the real victories were in the understanding of workers at PepsiCo. "The struggle cost us suspensions, firings and threats, but we would do it again a million times if it changes the consciousness of tons of women who are not willing to resign themselves to the misery of this system," said Katy.

"The abuse, the anger, and the pain taught us to fight and to organize" said Katy. She and other workers, some of whom are members of the Trotskyist Party PTS organized and won leadership of the shop floor committee. As shop floor leaders, they won several concessions: leave for pregnant co-workers, better and safer work conditions and the end of subcontracting. The shop floor committee organizes regular assemblies to vote and decide on actions, promoting internal democracy and participation in the factory.

PepsiCo Workers for Women's Rights

PepsiCo particularly fought for the rights of women workers at PepsiCo and at other factories. For example, in 2010, along with the women's commission at Kraft Foods, they organized a road blockage, holding a sign that said "Subcontracting and Precarious Work are Violence." The workers also organized a work stoppage on March 8 for the International Women's Strike, as well as every June 3 for the Ni Una Menos march. At Tuesday's massive march for PepsiCo workers, Katy wore a sweater that said "Ni Una Menos Sin Trabajo" - Not one more without work.

She says, "We working women know that violence doesn't just happen in the domestic sphere. It also happens at workplaces and at the hands of people who are supposed to represent us in the government. The government just defends their own interests and submits families to the worst humiliation and the worst living conditions."

In the workplace, men and women organize together for women's rights, as well as for their rights as workers. "We have advanced with unity between male and female workers because we understand that our enemy is the boss who has demonstrated, with a sign on the door, that gender doesn't matter when it is time to fire us. We decide, we organize ourselves, we have assemblies, we vote (in the assemblies) and fight alongside our male co-workers: not ahead of them, not behind them. At their side, standing firm for our rights." Male co-workers who regularly witness the discrimination, humiliation, and violence suffered by women struggle side by side their co-workers against the managers and the bosses.

The Battle at PepsiCo

In the midst of an economic crisis, government austerity measures, and a constant increase in layoffs, PepsiCo decided to close the factory in Buenos Aires. The 600 workers arrived at work to find a sign that fired them from the job that they had worked and organized in for years, the factory that many had given their body to, leaving them with aches, pains, and injuries that will never go away. These workers decided to do what they have always done in the factory: fight back.

Despite the lack of support from the union bureaucrats, PepsiCo employees voted to occupy the factory, defying the American multinational led by Nooyi. They won over support from the community, engaging in pickets, roadblocks, interviews, solidarity concerts and more, with hundreds of workers, academics, and students expressing solidarity within Argentina and around the world. They organized a high profile boycott campaign and movement of international solidarity (including a petition in support that you can sign here). Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, figures from the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the massive Ni Una Menos movement, and thousands of activists from human rights, student, and worker organizations have come out in support of PepsiCo workers.

In mid July, the PepsiCo workers were violently evicted from their occupation. Armed with tear gas, rubber bullets, and batons, the cops attacked the workers and their supporters. The police attacks on workers and students was broadcast live on TV. A private consulting firm has estimated that the eviction of PepsiCo was livestreamed, tweeted, and read about by upwards of 20 million people - nearly half the total population of Argentina.

Two hours after the eviction and with media attention and public pressure mounting, a Labor Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the workers and ordered the company to reinstate them. However, PepsiCo has yet to comply with the court's decision.

The workers continue their struggle, even without the factory occupation. On July 18, 30,000 people marched to the National Congress representing combative union locals, student organizations, human rights activists, and the globally known #NiUnaMenos feminist collective. The hashtag #TodosConPepsicoEnLucha (Everyone With Pepsico in Struggle) was a trending topic for six hours. The workers set up a tent to coordinate the struggle against PepsiCo, as well as against austerity and layoffs.

Working Class Women on the Front Lines

The women of Pepsico demonstrates that women in the highest positions of society, whether they be in the government or in corporations, do not mean the liberation of working women; Nooyi of PepsiCo may be a woman of color, but that didn't make the conditions at PepsiCo any less exploitative. Changing the gender of those in power is merely a symbolic gesture, with no material consequences for the vast majority of women.

Nooyi's position as the CEO of PepsiCo, her super salary of $25,168,597, and the super salaries of all the women and people of color she seeks to put in management positions are built on the broken backs of Katy and workers like her around the world. Nooyi is wealthy because Katy is overworked and underpaid; Nooyi keeps her position as CEO by guaranteeing profits for shareholders, profits made by the labor of Katy and her co-workers. The longer Katy works, the lower her wages, the more precarious her job, the more PepsiCo makes a profit and the more Nooyi is a "good" CEO.

When Forbes ranked PepsiCo one of the best places for women employees, did they take into account the hundreds of thousands of women around the world like Katy who break their backs and spend their lives as the human extensions of machines?

Just last year, Hillary Clinton tried to convince American women that she was a symbol of female empowerment and that a Clinton Presidency was a victory for all women. It's the empowerment represented by the CEO of PepsiCo and the governor of Buenos Aires. It's empowerment that means nothing to the women workers of PepsiCo, to the partners of male workers, and to the women all over the world who are oppressed and exploited by "empowered women".

Yet, the PepsiCo struggle also highlights a different kind of feminism, a feminism rooted in the working class, in combativeness, and in refusing to accept symbolic gestures of equality. It is a feminism that understands that working women's enemies are the bosses, whether male or female, and their allies are their male co-workers who labor in the same working conditions as women PepsiCo workers. Today, there are more women than ever in history in the labor market. This can be a source of tremendous strength, as working class women organize themselves against labor abuses and sexism.

PepsiCo workers show a different kind of feminism, a feminism rooted in working class solidarity. A feminism that defends the working class and women against all violence by individual men, the capitalists, and the government. A feminism that does not seek individual empowerment but the empowerment of the working class as a class in defense of their rights and the rights of all oppressed people in society. A kind of feminism that understands that an injury to one is an injury to all; while one of us is oppressed and exploited, all of us are in chains. The kind of feminism that organizes in shop floor committees along with male co-workers for the rights of pregnant workers and for safer conditions for everyone.

While some argue that this kind of feminism is marginal, idealistic, impossible to take hold, I argue that this is the only kind of feminism that can realistically win rights for women - all women. This is the kind of feminism that wants actual victories, not symbolic ones; a feminism that wants to win the world for the working class and oppressed, not just crumbs for a lucky few.

Academia's Other Diversity Problem: Class in the Ivory Tower

By Allison L. Hurst and Alfred Vitale

"How can you know anything about the working class?" asks Ernest Everhard, the protagonist of Jack London's 1908 dystopian novel, The Iron Heel as he addresses a group of liberal do-gooders and college administrators. They can't possibly know the working class, he argues, because they don't live where the working-class live. Instead, they are paid, fed, and clothed by "the capitalist class." In return, they are expected to preach what is acceptable to that class, and to do work that will not "menace the established order of society". While this was written over 100 years ago, for many working-class academics (those of us who grew up poor or working class and climbed into academia), this conversation rings true. Many of us have presented some variation of it at one time or another to our more privileged academic colleagues.

Watching this past election cycle has been difficult for us. It has reminded us of the gap between the places we currently inhabit (the so-called Ivory Tower) and the places we originally came from, which we still visit from time to time. We cheered Bernie when he came on the scene, because he appeared to understand this gap and promised to make things better for the people we loved. When Trump began overtaking other candidates, we were not as surprised as the people around us seemed to be, because we understood that his message, cloaked as it was in misogyny, nativism, and racism, was directed at real issues long overlooked by the Democratic Party. We held our breaths, hopeful that Sanders would take down Trump, that his message was the message of change and kindness rather than change and hate. After the primaries, we crossed our fingers but felt the DNC had made a major blunder in nominating a candidate who stood for everything that people seemed to be fighting against - business as usual, neoliberalism, paternalism.

Both academia and the DNC have a class problem. They don't know anything about the working class because they have isolated themselves from working-class people. We have been struggling for years to change this within academia. In 2008, after a few years of discussion among comrades, a group of us formed the Association of Working-Class Academics (AWCA), a group for people like us with lives that straddled the working class and middle class. We wanted to bring class into the academy, to get people talking about it, aware of it, doing something about what we saw as an unsustainable growth of economic inequality. We had parents without retirement income, brothers with back-breaking jobs, sisters without the ability to pay for childcare, generations who faced joblessness or an attempt at a local college, with accompanying debt. We knew firsthand that things had shifted somewhere in the promise of the American Dream, that good jobs were harder to come by, that many people didn't have the luxury to plan and save and think about retirement. We thought that having more faculty with backgrounds like ours would provide natural checks-and-balances on academic discourses that tend to move far away from the reality of class as lived by the overwhelming majority of the population.

It hasn't exactly worked out that way. Discussion of social class has always been relegated to the margins of academia. In turn, public discourse about class is muted. By denying the opportunity for social class to be a valid academic subject in itself, or to be considered an authentic form of social identity, educated folks (academics, pundits, campaign managers, and journalists) didn't just silence the voices of the poor and working-class, they also denied the possibility of critically engaging the problem of affluence. How to critique Trump without this? His status as a member of the billionaire class was not seen as problematic, despite all we know about the power and impact that class has on the very real experiences of the vast majority of Americans. He was lampooned as a buffoon, then excoriated for his bad manners, and finally deplored for his many bad acts, all of which left the essential issue of a billionaire running on a platform of economic populism relatively unquestioned. When we saw the picture of the Trumps and the Clintons hobnobbing in evening wear, we thought, "This will nail him!" But that picture was never used by the DNC, because it would target their candidate as well. Plus, it wouldn't have been polite.

A society more sensitive to the complicity of the ruling classes, more willing to eschew the sycophancy and reverence given to the already overwhelmingly privileged, more capable of resisting the urge to lionize the affluent, and more attentive to the ubiquitous power handed over to the 1%, would have appropriately vilified Trump and dismissed him well before his name went on the ballot. We can spend time looking at any number of reasons for his victory, but we must ask the bigger question of why an unabashedly greedy billionaire glided through the primaries and general election without any real resistance. Could it be the case that we have consistently neglected to blame, unequivocally, the economic elites for inequality, and to hold them accountable for it? Where was the critical intellectual attack on the damages reaped by the excesses of the 1%? This takes us back to Jack London's protagonist Mr. Everhard, and his suggestion that such critique would "menace the established order of society." It may be true that many university researchers have studied poverty and made it their social justice duty to try to understand and ameliorate it. But the lens is most often focused downward, to poverty, and there has been virtually no research directed upward at the practices and mechanisms by which the affluent cause, exacerbate, benefit from, and rely on the steady continuation of inequality. And the occasional whispered squeaks of condemnation for the wealthy fade quickly, subsumed by the jingoistic, pragmatic liberalism of the well-educated in an academic world increasingly shaped by the whims of the donor class.

This form of economic censorship, justified by the neoliberal fabric of institutions of higher education, ensures that no acceptable critique of affluence will become sewn into the fabric of pedagogy. It is our contention that if academia was proportionately represented by faculty and students from the poor and working-classes, the influence of the donor class on the institutional structure could be counteracted at the immediate level of teaching and research as a matter of course, rather than as an occasional garnish on the obligatory "race, class, gender" courses offered in many college departments. Discourse would create a resistance to the universalizing narratives compressing "poverty" and equalize it through a reciprocal comingling with intersectional narratives condemning the oppressive presence of affluence. If social class is duly acknowledged as salient, we will have to problematize and identify the systemic sources that shape the dominant narrative. Such a critique will require an indictment of capitalism as it stands, and therein lies the problem: how can we expect a real, class-sensitive critique of affluence in a milieu that tacitly condones its pursuit and happily reaps its benefits?

But, you may be asking, is there some problem here? We all know that academia can seem far removed from the day-to-day social worlds of most people, so what does it matter if academia doesn't want to indict affluence? Let's consider this question in light of the recent failures of the Democratic Party, and its slow slide away from economic populism and into neoliberalism since the days of Bill Clinton. Let's acknowledge that the increased dismissal of social class discourse in academia coincides with the current chasm in understanding between those who run the Democratic Party and those whom it purports to represent.

In many ways, the Democratic Party is like the Ivory Tower. They have both distanced themselves from a class awareness that they profess to have-so much so that they have forgotten and refused to acknowledge what social class means to actual people in the world. They have nominally acknowledged oppression, but have not really invited the oppressed into their circles; consequently, they assume they will have the support of the oppressed when it's needed. Diversity (or, rather, the lack thereof) remains a major problem in both academia and the Democratic Party. Both the party and academia have come to rely on a cadre of affluent donors, thereby shifting their priorities to fund-raising, advancement efforts, and the doling out of reciprocal favoritism, influence and rewards to the philanthropist class.

This diminishing attention to social class, both culturally and academically, paralleled the decline of unions in the United States, the crumbling of rust belt cities, and a sweeping upswing in inequality. The poor and working-classes ceased to have even a small amount of power, and were picked clean by things like predatory lending, healthcare costs, student-loan debt and skyrocketing college costs, jobs moving overseas, and major cutbacks in the social safety net. Relatedly, while scholarly attention to other factors in human experience such as race or gender grew exponentially - and it is true that there are deliberate efforts at most universities to invite more faculty from diverse race and gender backgrounds - there remains a relative and concerning scarcity of minorities as faculty members or students, and in particular, of working class and poor faculty and students. It may be the case that the very structural class dynamics most liberal professionals have neglected could help explain why they're having such a hard time ensuring equitable racial and gendered distributions in the University and the meritocratic beyond.

Although access to higher education has helped some members of the poor and working-classes "move up" in the world (we are witnesses to that), the numbers remain stubbornly small. Our colleges continue to serve children of the elite, or at least children of the highly educated. Proportionately speaking, faculty in universities do not reflect the existing social class strata that exists outside the walls of the Ivory Tower. This is not likely to change. Many academics from poor and working-class backgrounds are in disproportionate amounts of debt because they had to pay for the academic entry-fee themselves, and the tuition prices went up as the lines got longer. As it becomes more expensive to fund a graduate education, we will continue to find a smaller percentage of employed academics that come from poor or working-class backgrounds. The academic system keeps out the rabble, as it always has. This, in turn, comforts the donor class, who are assured that their role as instrumental philanthropists (i.e., manipulative tax-avoiders) will continue to garner them the reverence that their economic power naturally deserves - all without any means for resistance by the masses.

Thus it stands that the absence of real class awareness and the glacial pace of diversity efforts plague both the Democratic Party and institutions of higher education. Perhaps both the ivory tower and the DNC shouldn't be publicly trying to recruit the poor and working-class to become members of the liberal elite, and privately insulting them if they aren't. Instead, maybe we should ask ourselves what we can do to make academia privilege the voices of disenfranchised people, rather than the elite group speaking on behalf of them. Perhaps then, maybe in 2020, our collective voices will shout to the elites the same words spoken by Jack London's Ernest Everhard:

"We know, and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you. Your hearts are hard as your heels with which you tread upon the faces of the poor. So we have preached power. By the power of our ballots on election day will we take your government away from you."

Alfred Vitale, Ph.D. and Allison L. Hurst, Ph.D. are two co-founders of the Association of Working-Class Academics, a non-profit that was recently absorbed into Working Class Studies Association.