Until justice rolls down like dollars
The SPLC is back in the news, and not in a good way. Its president Richard Cohen resigned yesterday. The New Yorker has a bandaid-rippingoff article on the truth behind the myth by Bob Moser, who was a staffer there from 2001 to 2004.
In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used to tell to keep ourselves sane. Walking to lunch past the center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs, we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King, Jr., etched into the black marble—“Until justice rolls down like waters”—and intone, in our deepest voices, “Until justice rolls down like dollars.”
In short: the SPLC is extremely rich, and a lot of that wealth goes to the top staff, who are almost all white men.
Moser was surprised first of all by the headquarters, a new, vast, modernist glass-and-steel fortress.
The entrance was through an underground bunker, past multiple layers of human and electronic security. Cameras were everywhere in the open-plan office, which made me feel like a Pentagon staffer, both secure and insecure at once. But nothing was more uncomfortable than the racial dynamic that quickly became apparent: a fair number of what was then about a hundred employees were African-American, but almost all of them were administrative and support staff—“the help,” one of my black colleagues said pointedly. The “professional staff”—the lawyers, researchers, educators, public-relations officers, and fund-raisers—were almost exclusively white. Just two staffers, including me, were openly gay.
He forgot something. He forgot women. It’s strange how regularly people forget that. He gets to it later in the piece but it’s odd to leave it out at the beginning. The professional staff were almost exclusively white and male.
In the decade or so before I’d arrived, the center’s reputation as a beacon of justice had taken some hits from reporters who’d peered behind the façade. In 1995, the Montgomery Advertiser had been a Pulitzer finalist for a series that documented, among other things, staffers’ allegations of racial discrimination within the organization. In Harper’s, Ken Silverstein had revealed that the center had accumulated an endowment topping a hundred and twenty million dollars while paying lavish salaries to its highest-ranking staffers and spending far less than most nonprofit groups on the work that it claimed to do. The great Southern journalist John Egerton, writing for The Progressive, had painted a damning portrait of Dees, the center’s longtime mastermind, as a “super-salesman and master fundraiser” who viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals. “We just run our business like a business,” Dees told Egerton. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same.”
It’s not that they don’t do any good work, but it is that the people at the top got rich doing it, which donors probably don’t realize.
Co-workers stealthily passed along these articles to me—it was a rite of passage for new staffers, a cautionary heads-up about what we’d stepped into with our noble intentions. Incoming female staffers were additionally warned by their new colleagues about Dees’s reputation for hitting on young women. And the unchecked power of the lavishly compensated white men at the top of the organization—Dees and the center’s president, Richard Cohen—made staffers pessimistic that any of these issues would ever be addressed.
Now he’s remembered about the women; good.
“I expected there’d be a lot of creative bickering, a sort of democratic free-for-all,” my friend Brian, a journalist who came aboard a year after me, said one day. “But everybody is so deferential to Morris and Richard. It’s like a fucking monarchy around here.” The work could be meaningful and gratifying. But it was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.
Then Morris Dees was fired.
One day later, the Los Angeles Times and the Alabama Political Reporter reported that Dees’s ouster had come amid a staff revolt over the mistreatment of nonwhite and female staffers, which was sparked by the resignation of the senior attorney Meredith Horton, the highest-ranking African-American woman at the center. A number of staffers subsequently signed onto two letters of protest to the center’s leadership, alleging that multiple reports of sexual harassment by Dees through the years had been ignored or covered up, and sometimes resulted in retaliation against the women making the claims. (Dees denied the allegations, telling a reporter, “I don’t know who you’re talking to or talking about, but that is not right.”)
Emperors tend to expect access to the females of their choice, without any backtalk.
And these omissions are not a small thing. It’s the sort of thing that makes people assume somehow that white women have gotten to the top of the pile, and they deserve to be pulled down with the rest. Yes, it is easier being white, but no, white women are not in charge of much. And in some jobs, being a male of any skin tone is preferred over being a woman, so perhaps people need to continue including women in the mention of the ignored, at the beginning of the article before most people have checked out and gone on to the next article about something else.
Exactly. It’s the same old drip drip that conditions us the way all those shes and hers condition us to think of men as laydeez.
As the multiple references to past investigative reporting here show, the fundamental shadiness of the way the SPLC runs itself has been known for a long time. This has given opponents of the cause of equality a basis for contemptuously dismissing the SPLC’s work, and so harmed their cause — but the SPLC leadership had no real incentive to change because their detractors weren’t numerous enough and news of their misdeeds didn’t spread widely enough to keep the donation money from rolling in. And because the SPLC did vital work that no one else seemed willing to step up and do, it was easy for supporters of the cause to overlook or dismiss the reports of profiteering and worse from SPLC’s leadership. Frankly, I think the same dynamic has protected the ACLU from greater criticism for years.
I gave up on the SPLC when they decided that “the terfs” were a hate group long before any groups of real women opposed to trans nonsense had formed any type of formal organizations. It was just so stupid that I realized SLPC was probably sucking up Mister Jennifer Pritzker’s money pipe.
Hitchens was saying that the big human rights orgs are terrible in this way years ago – back in the 90s. I didn’t know what he meant and didn’t research it, but it stuck in my mind. (He talked about it at a reading of the Kissinger book at Elliott Bay Book Company, back before he was a celebrity and the crowd was in the 10s.)
Yeah, some of the environmental groups have problems, too, sucking up dollars from large polluters wanting to buy themselves some “sustainability” cred, then allowing the corp to select numerous seats on their board; which gives them huge say in what the group does.
This movie quote explains
And then there’s the smearing of Majid Nawaz and Hirsi Ali.