2024-09-23 21:29:45
by Nicole Brown*
Dovie Coleman, considered one of the “founding mothers” of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), was affectionately known as the “human tornado”. Her boldness and highly effective organizing strategies demonstrated her strategic acumen and leadership centered on the issues affecting those impacted by the system of poverty in Chicago neighborhoods. Coleman was symbolic of the women leading and serving Chicago welfare rights organizations as the social and political landscape of poverty policy was shifting.
During the 1960s, at the same time the US public discourse moved toward a hostile feminization and ‘blackening’ of poverty narratives, the country also saw new financial and technological advancements in the form of massive revolving consumer credit rollout. This consumer credit technology and the consumerism it perpetuated became tied to US citizenship and denied poor Black women of the Welfare Rights Movement the benefit of financial tools that allowed for more budgetary flexibility and autonomy. But, the women of the movement would not accept this denial quietly.
Convergence of Welfare, Civil and Consumer Rights Movements
We Are Each Other’s Business (Columbia University Press, 2024) speaks directly to the convergence of the Welfare Rights, Civil Rights and Consumer Rights movements and how this environment impacted the ways Black women were seen and/or ignored in their movement work. The book interrogates the welfare rights movement (spanning 1965-1975) and activists’ use of various capitalist strategies as tools of liberation as both complicated and flawed. The book also considers how political consumerism has taken many forms besides boycotts. For example, Chicago welfare organizations such as the Lawndale Tenant’s Union and the Near North welfare rights organization utilized rent strikes to fight for public housing rights. Communities impacted by poverty and disenfranchisement organized cooperatives and food buying clubs. The women of the movement recognized the connections of consumer and civil rights and creatively navigated these spaces through their movement work.
Intersectional Political Consumerism
Core to the book’s argument is the necessity for an intersectional analysis of the Welfare Rights movement that takes into account the unique challenges faced by poor Black women given their racial, gendered and classed status. The book defines ‘intersectional political consumerism’ as consumer activities motivated by ones intersecting social locations (in this case race, class, and gender) and utilizes comparisons to illustrate how complex political strategies of consumerism emerged from specific social locations. For intersectional political consumerism to occur, there must be a desire to influence some political condition and evidence that marketplace sites of consumerism are used or targeted for some political purpose designed to influence how resources are allocated.
In the Woodlawn neighborhood of Southside Chicago, The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) deployed commercially-centered intersectional political consumerism to get large chain supermarkets in their community, with hopes of also securing local jobs for residents. This form of intersectional political consumerism looked to conventional consumer corporations as potential partners, viewing capitalist structures with the potential for mutual benefit. While men comprised the formal leadership of TWO, the rank-and-file organizational members were women. These women recruited, agitated, and walked picket lines, in order to apply pressure in the hopes of securing local jobs and better goods and services for communities. In other Chicago communities a different type of intersectional political consumerism emerged. Community-centered consumerism, such as the type deployed by the Jobs or Income Now (JOIN) organization, focused on communal rather than corporate solutions to economic issues. JOIN had socialist origins and was formally led by a multi-racial group of women. Rather than aspiring to reach white middle-class status, JOIN saw itself as an organization of resistance and revolution and not a resolution community organization aimed at compliance and reform. The book highlights both TWO and JOIN as exemplars of the types of consumer movement work engaged by Chicago welfare organizations during the 1960s and 1970s.
Reframing Advocacy as Black Feminist Technology
We Are Each Other’s Business also offers unique theoretical contributions with its reimagining of Black women’s sophisticated strategies as forms of Black feminist technologies. The book utilizes technological analogies to differently understand welfare policies and complex interplays between social, economic and political conditions that posed very particular threats and opportunities for Black women’s organizing. Reframing welfare policies as ‘analog algorithms of poverty’ serves to differently consider how these rigid policies produced rigid outcomes unable to account for dynamic, changing circumstances. Focusing specifically on the Nixon administration’s poverty policies and their punitive effects, the book interrogates those biases embedded within that served to reify constructions of deserving and undeserving poor and ultimately reproduced inequities through the promotion of capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. In turn, the bias of equating quantification with universality perpetuated false objectivity which then produced false generalities resulting in the hindrance of access to financial tools and resources. This served to influence how our society constructed ‘the poor’. Concerns related to social safety nets such as welfare contributing to ‘laziness’ and ‘loafing’ rather than empowerment and uplift, feed into an ideology of the poor as undeserving and wholly responsible for their condition. In the book I argue that the collapse of welfare organizing began with the aggressive assault of these ‘analog algorithms of poverty’ of the Nixon Administration and that this rigidity and perpetuation of inequities against those living under conditions of poverty persists today.
A Way Forward
The book is also timely as we see national rollouts of guaranteed income pilot programs, drawing attention to many of the same issues of affordability and equity that were goals of the welfare movement nearly sixty years ago. Many local and national welfare organizations demanded some form of guaranteed income and the major disconnect between the state and the welfare organizations in their fight for a guaranteed income was a difference in beliefs around whether poverty was something to be individually exorcized or structurally overcome.
Today, with the increasing stratification of US society following the pandemic, there are renewed calls for structural solutions to lack of affordability in housing, healthcare, childcare and food insecurity. The ‘face’ of poverty is shifting yet again, as those with college degrees are finding themselves priced out of the ‘American Dream’ and mired down in debt. Cities in over half of the US are testing universal basic income programs. Preliminary findings from these experiments show measurable improvements in health, employment and financial stability in program participants. The programs suggest that, contrary to the narratives about the poor, people have the ability to govern themselves and make sound choices for themselves and their families. We have yet another opportunity to reimagine our relationship to consumer choice and poverty policy and we owe a debt of gratitude to the Black women of the welfare rights movement for their advocacy efforts instrumental in helping to critique and reframe political consumerism.
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* Nicole Brown is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Saint Mary’s College of California
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