There’s a great recent piece in The Intercept about how internal struggles in progressive non-profits are becoming a serious problem for the organizations, hampering their ability to advocate by keeping energy directed inward. I should have finished and published a draft I wrote in November 2020, but since I neglected to do so I will first quote from the article about how this recent trend may self-correct:

Executive directors across the space said they too have tried to organize their hiring process to filter out the most disruptive potential staff. “I’m now at a point where the first thing I wonder about a job applicant is, ‘How likely is this person to blow up my organization from the inside?’” said one, echoing a refrain heard repeatedly during interviews for this story. (One executive director noted that their group’s high-profile association with a figure considered in social justice spaces to be problematic had gone from a burden to a boon, as the man now serves as an accidental screen, filtering out activists who’d be most likely to focus their energy on internal fights rather than the organization’s mission.)

I had been thinking about this in terms of private businesses. This was in 2020, when we were all reading about the internal reckoning large, visible employers were doing, or at least talking about doing for the previous six months. At the time, progressive non-profits were riding high, and I suppose the internal struggles the article focuses on were still in infancy.

My draft:

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Every society needs troublemakers, but like anything else, there is an optimal amount of troublemaking. For all of the salutary consequences of the recent protest movements, and indeed in the broader social movement they extend, there is always the risk of excess. And in certain smaller level contexts, the optimal amount of troublemaking might be zero.

Suppose you run a small-to-medium-sized business. You focus on making money by moving units. You comply with workplace laws and try to keep a respectful workplace environment. You know there’s a greater emphasis lately on examining our assumptions about behavior and interaction, but you don’t always see how it relates to your workplace.

You begin to see more news stories about workplace unrest. So far it hasn’t reached your firm, but the stories keep coming up. When it comes time to hire people, you know have to think: is my company in danger of having these kinds of problems flare up? Employers already consider how a person will fit into a firm’s workforce in some measure; at the very least, they just don’t want applicants to be weird, but often there’s more consideration. This is one more factor to consider.

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If I could conceive of this potential liability for private employers, surely they could as well. (Netflix recently made headlines for telling employees to focus on the mission or consider alternative employment.) My guess is that on the margin it pushed some of the employees they passed on towards the non-profits that are now feeling the heat. The Intercept piece notes how Bernie Sanders instructed his campaign staff to stop hiring activists in 2020 as he also noticed how the internal focus was playing out, but of course a presidential campaign is more goal-oriented than the larger ecosystem of progressive organizations. Now, if non-profits are increasingly wary of these potential employees, what will they do?

The tendency to call out excessively is not constant, even assuming that injustice or the perception of injustice is. A hungry person has a more immediate problem than fixing defects, real or imagined, in some institutional culture. The old wave of ’60s radicals shrank during the ’70s as many of them got on with the regular problems of life like keeping steady jobs to support families. And really, if even progressive non-profits compare your internal struggles to a right-wing op, society could probably benefit from you moderating a little. The pendulum may have swung too far.

It is not just within progressive organizations that the problems occur. As the piece mentions, the same dynamic plays out at the top of the food chain, where leaders at wealthy foundations who fund non-profits are, in effect, held hostage by their younger, more radical staffers. Because the foundations have few, if any, objective metrics of success, they do not stop writing checks when the orgs are paralyzed by internal dissent. But they surely have similar concerns about their own workplaces as the leaders of the orgs they fund.

The Intercept piece concludes by discussing the backlash within that world, but admits it is embryonic. Social movements are cyclical, and based on that alone we could expect some of this recent excess to slow. Add to it the micro-level adjustments individual people will have to make, and the diminishing ability to present personal grievances and power plays as social justice essentials as people eventually learn not to touch the hot stove, and a lot of the excess should be curtailed. Because of how cultural influence radiates outward from these organizations, that will be most welcome.

The Atlantic had an interesting piece recently about how gentrifying neighborhoods attract more police resources, due to calls from the newer residents, and how this disproportionately affects racial/ethnic minorities. I think it reads more productively as a criticism of policing rather than of gentrification per se, though the author doesn’t seem to, but more interestingly it evokes a widespread social issue. To begin my explanation, let me highlight these passages:

When low-income neighborhoods see an influx of higher-income residents, social dynamics and expectations change. One of those expectations has to do with the perception of safety and public order, and the role of the state in providing it. The theory goes that as demographics shift, activity that was previously considered normal becomes suspicious, and newcomers—many of whom are white—are more inclined to get law enforcement involved. Loitering, people hanging out in the street, and noise violations often get reported, especially in racially diverse neighborhoods.

In 2013, the city of San Francisco launched Open311, a mobile app that allows residents to easily report public disorder like loitering, dirty sidewalks, or vandalism by snapping a photo and sending their location. The app can feel altruistic; residents, for example, are able to report the whereabouts of homeless people who seem to be in need of assistance. But some worry that the dispatches can result in unnecessary citations or harassment. And while broken-windows policing remains controversial, a 2015 poll suggested that it’s still largely accepted by the general public, so when people see something, they’re likely to say something. After the app launched, 311 calls increased throughout the city, and one study showed that gentrifying neighborhoods saw a disproportionate spike.

Butler, who recently wrote the book Chokehold: Policing Black Men, believes that this is a result of newcomers refusing to assimilate to longstanding neighborhood norms. [emphasis added] “Culturally, I think the way that a lot of African American and Latino people experience gentrification is as a form of colonization,” he said. “The gentrifiers are not wanting to share—they’re wanting to take over.” One of the tools they can use to take over public spaces, he argues, is law enforcement.

This is interesting, and it reminds me of the neighborhood where I lived in Alexandria, Virginia, only in reverse. There was a lot of very recent immigration, largely Salvadoran, as there has been all over the DC metro area. Granted, I was a newcomer to the neighborhood, but of similar SES and background to the longer-term residents. Being from the US-Mexico border, this immigration doesn’t bother me, but I noticed it bothered a lot of other people because the Salvadorans, to use the language of the article, ‘refused to assimilate to longstanding neighborhood norms’ regarding noise, cleanliness of public spaces, junk cars parked on the street, etc. Indeed, this is a common occurrence all across the country, and for the last decade or more has been a simmering issue. This cultural friction is one of the reasons for the surprising result of the 2016 presidential election. The Atlantic’s political wing tends to regard people who are upset by immigration as, well, deplorable. No doubt some are motivated by racism, which is indeed deplorable, but cultural frictions exist that aren’t motivated by racism. (For the record, in my ideal world immigration rules will be greatly liberalized relative to current rules.)

So which is it? Are newcomers wrong for “refusing” to assimilate to longstanding area norms, or are older residents wrong for not accepting the changes? There’s no simple answer, and I don’t mean to suggest the writer of the article or anybody else thinks there is. I don’t think we’ve had much public dialogue on the issue, and I’d like to, especially as so much governance happens outside of formal systems, and better public understanding of good rules and norms would help us resolve more social issues with nuance and wisdom before they became political issues resolved with neither.