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From The Desk of Lace on Race

The New Yorker article (embedded in comments) about Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center is shocking, though perhaps it shouldn’t be.

It is also tragic, and infuriating.

Candor.

The undoing of the SPLC, and the expose of its co founder and face of the org, Morris Dees, highlights some of the dangers of white people purporting to ‘speak for’ or ‘stand in the gap’ with people of color.

It also brings to sharp relief the danger of doing new things in old ways, using old social contracts, and old systems of hierarchy.

To hear former staffers tell it, ‘the work’ was a smokescreen, a way to sell a product–which in this case, was racism, and, by extension, selling brown and black bodies for both social capital and for profit.

Yes, infuriating. But maybe it shouldn’t be as surprising. Doing the work without love–love for the mission; love for the people you serve; love for your colleagues– almost always leads to excesses.

But, as in most things in life, the SPLC is complicated. It did score some big wins, and I still feel that it moved the needle towards justice.

But it also underscores something we have been asserting since LoR launched–that the work–however well done, however superficially ‘effective’, is never as important as the people doing it; how they prosecute the mission; their internal lives as they do it; why they felt the passion to act in the first place.

I can make an argument for the opposite–it doesn’t matter where their hearts are so long as the work is solid, right?

Welp.

Let’s look at the fallout.

Putting aside the fact that monies were garnered hand over fist by peddling brown and black bodies for white gain, the work, at least in the short term, is incalculably compromised. And not just for SPLC.

There are other, smaller groups doing civil rights law and advocacy, doing it well, doing it with integrity and intention, with black and brown people at the helm and directing policy and priorities which will also be negatively affected.

I hope that those who were giving SPLC funds (I was one of them) will not just walk away, but pivot and actively find other groups doing similar work with less residue and disingeniousness; hope that people will do the mental and moral exercise to thread the needle and tease out the difference, and it is a real one, between censure for Morris Dees and his poverty porn palace, and animus and side eye of the actual work itself, which continues to be done doggedly with care by those who never saw the work as just another mail order con.

Those firms and orgs are not sitting on multi million endowments; they are doing what SPLC purported to do, even as they made money hand over fist: working hard, for little or no pay on scarred desks in gritty offices, often pro bono, often with real risk, beating the bushes for scarce dollars, because the SPLC hoovered up funds as the 800 pound malevolent gorilla in the room.

Let’s pivot. Again, candor.

This could not have happened if Morris Dees had been black. Period. Full stop.

There would have been scrutiny of the books; of mission; of the character of the person themselves. How a man who once worked for George Wallace (!) became the face of racial justice law is boggling. A black man would not have been able to hide or minimize that level of historical context.

This, this, is why it is important to look beyond the main players, the ‘go-to’s’ in racial justice spaces who have the largest profiles, can command the largest fees and donations, and who are, almost to a person, white.

That Dees sat atop a 9 figure endowment when almost all of the innovators in this corner of the work are tentmakers, sweating out poverty, beating the bushes for reluctant white people’s latte money, doing the real work of pulling the work forward is maddening.

That the work of civil rights law will be tarnished by what is beginning to sound like a long con is a tragedy,

But the real tragedy are those who bought into the myth of White Benevolence; who never dreamed of looking under the hood and seeing what really seemed to drive the work, who allowed Dee’s whiteness to cover, like pasty country gravy hides tainted salisbury steak, the real motivations and mission drift of its founder and of the firm for whom he was the standard bearer.

Who, in short, made a farce of racial justice. Who in fact, made it into yet another vehicle for white supremacy.

That the work of racial justice is still needed and urgent is unquestionable. The conversation needs to happen about power and privilege in racial justice spaces, and the danger in allowing the fetid racial soup to infect and render impotent good work.

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