What if you were running a major fast-food chain that had to get its tomatoes from somewhere, and you came across a program that had ended sexual harassment and violence among 90 percent of Florida-based tomato growers? What if participating in this program cost you only one penny per pound of tomatoes you bought? And what if 60 percent of your competitors, including McDonald’s, Chipotle Grill, Subway, Taco Bell, and Burger King, had long since joined up? Why would you avoid such a program, even going so far as to change your source for tomatoes from Florida, where this innovation was born, to Mexico, where human-rights abuses in agriculture abound?

That’s what the members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) are asking Nelson Peltz, the chair of Wendy’s board of directors. Demanding an answer, these farmworkers, mostly but not exclusively women, are conducting a group fast this week on the sidewalk outside Peltz’s office in New York. They want Wendy’s to join the Fair Food Program (FFP), a breakthrough solution that has made work safer and fairer for thousands of the farmworkers who make it possible for Americans to eat fresh vegetables. The farmworkers have declared #TimesUpWendy’s, confident that the CIW model, which places sexual abuse squarely in the context of all labor rights and has a host of legally binding accountability mechanisms, is the key to ending sexual violence not just in their own but in all industries.

The fast began Sunday with a small rally in front of 280 Park Avenue, a low-pressure dress rehearsal for the rest of the week, when foot traffic would grow exponentially as the city’s professionals went to work. About 40 people, most wearing sky blue beanies bearing the CIW logo and nearly a quarter of them children, sat in camp chairs or stood facing the campaign’s banner and speakers. A line of adults moved slowly across the sidewalk as each received a yellow armband from the women who had traveled from Florida to stop eating for a week. Speaker Antonia Martinez said, “Although it is a sacrifice, it is nothing compared to the thousands of farmworkers whose voices aren’t heard, whose kids go to bed hungry.” Musicians set an upbeat tone, and medical professionals arrived to check on the fasters as they prepared for an early evening vigil in front of Wendy’s in Union Square.

The CIW has been working for 25 years to improve conditions in Florida’s fields. It was founded in the 1990s, first organizing work stoppages and other actions to force growers to the table. But a crucial component of its approach has been the awareness that buyers, not growers, held the real power and money in the industry. In 2001, the coalition initiated a campaign to force Taco Bell to take responsibility for human-rights abuses in the supply chain, to add a penny to the price of each pound of tomatoes, and to buy only from growers who pledged to pass that penny on to workers. Four years later, it won, proving the power of a model it has used ever since.

The coalition has adopted a two-pronged strategy—organize a powerful base of educated workers, and remove a grower’s financial incentive to cheat them by driving buyers away when they do. Over time, the CIW has expanded this model into the Fair Food Program, which was launched in 2011 after a two-year pilot based on earlier agreements with growers and buyers. In farm work overall, 75 percent of women laborers report sexual abuse, but since the launch of the Fair Food Program, sexual harassment and assault of farmworker women has become virtually obsolete at participating farms. The FFP has also ended other abuses—wage theft has disappeared, and workers no longer experience modern-day slavery.

The FFP has six components: worker-to-worker education, the Code of Conduct, the premium-bonus scheme to improve compensation, the complaint line, and audits of farm conditions and immediate consequences for violating the standards. The coalition convinces buyers to add the Code of Conduct, which essentially repeats existing labor laws, as a standard for choosing suppliers. The particular solutions are designed for a seasonal industry, to support growers in doing the right thing and to provide a path to redemption when they don’t. The system maximizes the monitoring power of the farmworkers themselves with a robust but simple reporting mechanism and by making the agreement legally binding.

The specifics of each component make this genius package of solutions functional. The premium, for example, is a creative way of lifting workers’ quality of life without further stressing the growers whose own earnings are often meager. Essentially, partners agree to extra to the price of the unit, say 1 cent more per pound of tomatoes. That money goes to the workers in the form of a bonus in every paycheck. The coalition and the partners negotiate that addition each year. Since the program started, $15 million in bonuses have moved from buyers to workers, alleviating at least a little of the intense poverty that otherwise marks farmwork.

Worker education begins at the point of hire with an in-person training, run by the CIW and with the growers present. The complaint line is operated 24 hours by a human being who is also an expert in farm-labor conditions and legal compliance. When a supervisor violates the Code of Conduct, not only might they be turned over to the law, but the grower will be suspended from the program and not allowed to sell to partner buyers.

Ideally, unions would be doing this work through collective-bargaining agreements. But farmworkers have faced intense barriers to unionization since the end of slavery. Farmworkers and domestic workers were left out of the National Labor Relations Act in the 1930s, blocking them from accessing benefits like overtime pay. Although farmworkers legally can unionize (albeit without the protections of the NLRA), the realities of a highly mobile, seasonal workforce make it challenging. Unsurprisingly, then, there are very few farmworker unions. The United Farm Workers and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) have won collective-bargaining agreements after long consumer boycott campaigns. But the UFW’s contracts give growers increasing flexibility, and the North Carolina Farm Act threatens FLOC’s survival in North Carolina, where they have some 10,000 members (about 10 percent of the state’s farmworker workforce) by making it illegal to collect dues automatically from members’ paychecks. Dues comprise 50–60 percent of FLOC’s annual budget.

As unions face the possibility of a sector-wide gutting of their budgets through the Janus Supreme Court case, community-based workers organizations like Pineros y Campesinos Unidos de Noroeste in Oregon and the Coalition in Florida constitute important alternatives. “FFPs have offered a whole new model of labor organizing and workers rights,” says Susan Marquis, Dean and Distinguished Chair of Policy Analysis at the Pardee Rand Graduate School and the author of I Am Not a Tractor!: How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won. “They’re taking an industry-level approach as opposed to a workplace-oriented approach, and they’re organizing the community whether or not one is a formal member of the coalition or working at an FFP farm.”

endy’s used to buy from Florida growers, even after the Tomato Growers Exchange signed a historic industry-wide agreement with FFP in 2010, but never actually signed on as a company. They got all the benefits that FFP-compliant growers do without paying any of the costs, including the Premium. As the coalition and its allies started to pressure Wendy’s in 2014 and ’15, the company made the mystifying decision to move its supply contracts to Mexico rather than signing on to the FFP. Not only does the FFP not exist in Mexico, but human-rights organizations have documented extreme violence, including rampant sexual assault.

Nely Rodriguez, a former farmworker who now organizes with the CIW, said that the members have taken heart from the #metoo and #TimesUp momentum. After seven years of intensive worker education on sexual harassment, addressing not only harmful employer behavior but also that of other workers, Rodriguez is seeing more male farmworkers support this part of the platform. She says that’s partly because their own humanity is reinforced at work and partly because of the broader public attention to sexual abuse issues. “In years past the working environment that we were in was very uncomfortable because it was majority men and fewer of us women,” said Rodriguez. “Now we see the men are supporting us as women and I think that’s also because they see the effect [the FFP] is having on them. They say we’re being treated like the workers that we are, like human beings and not as tools or machines.”

In the 2015 FFP Annual Report, an auditor from the Fair Food Council, the independent entity that monitors participating farms, told the story of a male worker who observed that women were often fired if they complain about sexual harassment. This worker noticed the difference on FFP-participating farms, and he too was relieved not to work under conditions that weaken women’s power in the fields. CIW member Oscar Otzoy, one of the men who came up from Florida, said that was excited to work alongside women to change the conditions he’s experienced in the decade he worked in the fields. “My personal motivation for working alongside women in the fields to end sexual violence…really comes from having seen these things happen around me and feeling like I needed to do something myself to put an end to them,” he said. “Also just recognizing that as men who live in this society who all have mothers or who were born of women, we really have an important role to play.”

aving gained control of the tomato industry all the way up and down the East Coast, the coalition is looking to expand its reach by moving into strawberry fields and taking the FFP to growers in Texas. Rodriguez also wants to see the model spread to other industries. The CIW has already supported textile and dairy workers, and its strategy could apply to entertainment too. “At the base of the FFP is education and women knowing their rights,” she said. “Once you know your rights and also there’s a consequence for this kind of behavior, that’s when real change comes.”

In Vermont, the community-based workers organization Migrant Justice has adapted the model to the state’s dairy industry in the Milk with Dignity program, the first full translation to a differently structured industry. There, farms are much smaller, and milk goes from farmer to cooperative to retailer, so some of the solutions are different. For example, a portion of the premium bonus goes to farmers as well as farmworkers. Still, these mechanisms came from the input of workers as well as farmers, as the principles of real worker engagement and true market consequences are fully present. Migrant Justice recently signed its first agreement with Ben and Jerry’s.

There are numerous lessons to be learned from the FFP. Two key components top Marquis’s list: standards developed by worker themselves, and a swift process when complaints come in. “They developed a ground breaking sexual-harassment education program,” she said. “They know where this kind of harassment happens, in packing houses late at night. In the rows when people are moving quickly and no one has time to deal.” Once the standards are set and workers are educated, “then you’ve got 30,000 farmworkers monitoring every row for problems. If you have someone create standards who isn’t a worker, they’re not going to think of the right things.”

When complaints come in, they are resolved quickly and with immediate sanctions, if necessary. An investigation usually takes place within days, and the resolution is made public. If a grower is suspended, they receive a correction plan, and they can be reinstated as soon as the plan is executed. A long process might take up to two weeks. Because workers can see their complaints dealt with immediately and without retaliation, their motivation to organize and monitor grows.

he conditions that enable sexual harassment exist in every industry. The key is to recognize the situations in which abuse most often occurs and change those conditions. “Janitors working in isolation late at night are vulnerable to abuse by supervisors. In Hollywood, you could no longer be allowed to work for a particular production company if you’ve made a complaint. In the restaurant industry, a lot can happen after hours,” said Marquis.

The CIW’s model does have vulnerabilities. The coalition is aware of the potential for conflicts of interest; to prevent this, none of its operations, education, or monitoring is funded by buyers or growers. Instead, support for those activities comes entirely from foundation funding. That is robust now, but private philanthropic support can disappear with little notice as foundations spend down or shift priorities.

For now, though, this powerful organization is focused on bringing Wendy’s back into the fold. Consumers are responding—the petition to get Wendy’s to sign on to the FFP now has more than 101,000 signatures. The fast will culminate in a march on Thursday, March 15, with celebrity allies like soccer star Abby Wambach and writer Glennon Doyle. At a time when public attention to sexual-violence issues are at a rare high point, joining a program that has ended sexual harassment and other abuses is a no-brainer.

History suggests that Wendy’s will eventually cave as the pressure grows. Today’s consumers are too savvy to let retailers get away with the old excuse that what happens in the supply chain isn’t their fault. In an age of increasing political polarization, a program built on partnership as well as accountability among all the players that put food on our tables has the potential to change everything, one vegetable at a time. Wendy’s wouldn’t be doing anyone a favor in protecting themselves from inevitable abuse scandals. As member Julia de la Cruz said on Park Avenue, “We do not want charity. We just want dignity and respect.” Turns out, dignity and respect are good for business too.

This year’s Golden Globes were the best kind of anomaly, as women artists and activists took it over with #TimesUp, signaling an end to silence and inaction on sexual harassment and abuse. All the women wore black; men sported #TimesUp pins. Seven celebrity actors took women activists of color as their dates to raise the visibility of particular industries and communities. The campaign has raised more than $16 million for a legal defense fund. Several winners spoke to the issue (though none of them were men), and the night ended with Oprah Winfrey’s focused and moving acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award.

The next morning, I was disappointed to find the specious critiques I’ve come to expect from progressives whenever we manage to pull off something big. These revolved around familiar themes:

• This is not real action because it involves fancy clothes and a party.
• Celebrities are not really committed to ending patriarchy/racism/violence/poverty.
• This changes no policies or conditions on the ground.
• These women couldn’t possibly be connected to suffering women in actual communities.
• Why these women? Why do they get all the money/attention/kudos?

Trapped in binaries, we get confusing messages about how social change happens, both from the larger culture and from our own lefty culture. It only takes a few vs. it takes millions. It’s all about policy or it’s all about culture shift. We only need civil disobedience or we only need to win elections. No one knows exactly what formula will ward off the authoritarianism looming over our country and the world, but that formula probably doesn’t include the word “only.” There should and will be many tactical experiments in this period of political, cultural, and spiritual churn. Critique is easy. Actually running such an experiment is hard.

On Sunday night, Alicia Garza asked on her Facebook timeline what we think is required to build a movement in the millions. In my humble 33-year view of social change, I believe that it takes everything. Everything we’ve got. Every member, every leader, every ally, every platform, every tactic and every dime—all directed toward specific goals at specific moments. The moments when your big ideas have the potential to become reality don’t come around that often. When they do, we have to move. We can’t predict what will come out of each tactic, but we move fast and big and on faith.

#TimesUp is grounded in a progressive movement where racial justice, feminism, and workers’ rights meet. For years, organizations have worked to change the national narrative around work, violence, immigration, policing, and many other issues. Understanding that policy and politics were inadequate to the transformational task at hand, they added cultural change to their toolkit. Through praxis, they’ve developed a theory of how to create cultural flash points and forged strong relationships with artists. The National Domestic Workers Alliance, for example, has been doing Golden Globes watch parties for several years and has made a big investment in giving women entertainers like Amy Poehler a chance to support domestic workers. The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United has connected with foodies and celebrity chefs. Tarana Burke, who created the #MeToo hashtag a decade ago, took advantage of the current moment, to historic effect.

After the Weinstein news broke, Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, which represents 700,000 women farmworkers, wrote an open letter to the women of Hollywood, expressing their sorrow and outrage over the horror stories, and sharing a few of their own from the fields. On New Year’s Day, the women of Hollywood wrote back, launching #TimesUp and vowing to make change not just in their industry, but everywhere, and launching a new legal defense fund. Various networks came together for this campaign, some of them pretty informal, but a good portion of the work happened through Harness, a community of artists and activists gathered by colleagues, including America Ferrera and Paola Mendoza.

In my 33 years of social-justice work, this was one of the most effective actions I’ve seen, crafted by some of the best organizers I’ve ever known, and I’ve known many. One pitfall of celebrity actions is that they raise awareness but no actual action, a pattern that depresses engagement rather than fuels it. #TimesUp had a clear starting call—give money—and the campaign has added some $700,000 and counting in the last 36 hours.

The message discipline was also impressive. I watched a great number of interviews Sunday night before the show on E, Facebook, and NBC, and the vast majority of them included questions about sexual violence and harassment. While not every actor and activist got to all of the messages, they had clearly coordinated to repeat a few crucial themes. “Not just in this industry but every industry.” “This is not a moment, it’s a movement.” “Give to the #TimesUp fund.” I don’t know any details of how Oprah’s speech got written, but it’s obvious that she, too, had been organized.

After these big cultural moments, I always hear two refrains: “That’s just symbolic, not real change,” and “This is nice, but the question is, what actions are they really going to take?” Hell, I’ve said these things myself before I knew better. But symbols matter, and there are better questions to ask. Our affinity for symbols is the main thing that makes us human. If the left can’t deal symbolically, we are truly sunk. And of course “What actions are they going to take?” is the next question after an NFL protest/women’s march/Golden Globes moment. Duh. I’ve pledged to work harder, bypass that obvious question, and go straight to this one: How are we going to make the next thing happen?

I keep hearing that celebrities are too shallow to do much beyond sartorial protest, and to that I say, so what? Most people are too shallow to do more than the bare minimum on anything. I’ll take that shallow action over nothing any day. In fact, let’s go even further and lower our bars for participation on everything, so people can do something shallow and then do the next thing.

Some activists don’t want any of our campaigns to reach millions because that would mean they had gone mainstream and been stripped of radical heft. Well, I’m grateful for many results of campaigns that went mainstream in the past: the weekend, clean water, the right to vote. We’d have none of these if someone’s organizing and art hadn’t reached millions of people. The notion that we should keep our ideas out of the mainstream so they don’t get corrupted reflects self-protective fear, not the basis for a strategy for social change.

Finally, we get to shade directed at the activists who went to the show—Saru Jayaraman, Ai-jen Poo, Tarana Burke, Rosa Clemente, Monica Ramirez, Marai Larasi, and Calina Lawrence. These are women who have given their lives to social justice, to the fullest form of feminism, women with their eyes always turned to the “next.” Burke has been organizing with tiny, tiny resources for years at Girls for Gender Equity. The success of #MeToo aside, I suspect those resources are still pretty slim. Are we really going to drag her for organizing celebs and going to the Golden Globes? Come on, people. I understand envy—I feel its twinges too, because I am human and a Scorpio to boot. But I release the feelings to my mother or bestie or therapist—and then I get on the bus. Because everything is required now. Not tomorrow, after I’ve read the critiques and decided whether or not I can support, but right now.

I was so lucky last week. Two days after the election, 2,300 hundred racial justice activists of all colors arrived in Atlanta at the Facing Race conference, which my organization Race Forward hosts. They were shaken, grieving, and scared. We held each other through the immediate aftermath of an election that most of us didn’t think could turn out as it did. That holding made it possible for us to see through our panic to the opportunities and the work ahead.

This election cycle revealed the depth of the backlash against the progress of all our social justice movements. I know that it feels shocking to many people, so soon after electing our first black president. It’s quite easy to rest complacently on the things we’ve already won. But social change isn’t a linear process in which the trajectory goes consistently up. There are sideways moves, and there are dips.

This is the lowest dip I’ve experienced in my 30 years of movement work. A huge portion of the nation elected to the White House a capitalist con man, an authoritarian white supremacist, and an accused sex offender, and he has begun to appoint a cabinet of people we have good reason to fear. There are real dangers ahead; some are already manifesting, as stories of kids being told by teachers and classmates that their families are going to all be jailed or deported break my heart.

Trump has vowed to deport two to three million undocumented people, to begin a registry for Muslims, to tear up the Paris Climate Accords in the first 100 days. We need to be ready for the immediate worst—a shock-and-awe style repression for which the necessary infrastructure already exists—as well as for the degradation of civil and economic rights through legislation and the courts over the coming months and years. Many people will need protection from both the state apparatus and from vigilante violence. That includes women needing abortions or escaping sexual violence, undocumented people trying to stay with their families, Muslims, protestors and leaders of all stripes.

But we can also stay on the offensive, even as many of us shift to defense.

Our communities bring considerable maturity, creativity, organizational strength, courage, and intelligence to the grand project of achieving racial and social justice. I take so much heart, for example, from my Native American family right now. Consider what they’ve done. They had to recover from a genocide that wiped out 90 percent of their population. They have faced down centuries of isolation and exclusion, betrayal of treaties, and the notion that there weren’t any of them left. They had to rebuild their nations and hold onto their languages and culture in the face of unspeakable violence and repression. Yet they took down the Keystone Pipeline and have prevented the Dakota Access Pipeline from progressing. Their visibility and infrastructure for organizing, media, and fundraising is stronger than it was even five years ago, including the formation of the Native Organizers Alliance. If they can do all this, so can we all. So must we all. We have assets, money, relationships, experience that we didn’t have 30, 60, 90 years ago, and we need to use them now.

As I get back on social media after checking out for Facing Race, I see progressives berating each other a lot. I see so much stop—stop saying the problem was this, and not that; stop acting as if safety pins are the answer; stop refusing to acknowledge that Bernie should have been the Democratic candidate.

We cannot berate each other into better strategy. If we have better strategy, people will come. The most important word for us right now is “go.” We need to put that word in all of our social media posts, our headlines, our speeches, in our newsletters and in our art, as we direct to action the many people who are still with us, and the many more who are ripe for joining us.

Backlash only exists when we are making progress—there is no need for backlash when we aren’t. We’ve made enormous progress in small and large chunks over hundreds of years, and we have not come anywhere close to the end of that progress. In truth, we are just at the beginning. In the course of human history, a country the age of the United States is a baby. It’s a giant, angry, selfish baby, to be sure, but a baby that can grow into responsible adulthood with the pushing and pulling of our village.

I can’t lie: It was hard to leave the warmth, beauty, and love I felt at Facing Race to travel alone to Washington, DC, this week. I carry with me, though, every hug, every cute kid, every laugh (yes, we can still laugh), every piece of art, every poem, every insight. These are the things we can rely on to meet the challenges of this time, and those still ahead. Let’s go.

Donald Trump’s latest attack on US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is presiding over the suit brought against Trump University by its former students, led Paul Ryan to distance himself from the candidate he’s endorsed. He called Trump’s statement “textbook” racism, wishing aloud that Trump would stick to the GOP’s focus on revitalizing the economy. Ryan didn’t go so far as to withdraw his support from a Trump nomination, noting that the GOP policy agenda has a far greater chance of succeeding with Trump in the White House than with Hillary Clinton. But it is that policy agenda itself that advances racism, even if it stops short of racial slurs about the people who will suffer the most from its implementation.

Ryan’s clumsy attempts to navigate around Trump only throw into relief the GOP’s broader refusal to acknowledge that racism takes many, many forms—most of them unconscious, hidden, and systemic. Trump’s overt racism actually obscures the party’s covert racism. In some cases, that covert racism may even come with good, if paternalistic, intentions of saving communities of color from the “evils” of dependence. But for the GOP—and too many Democrats, for that matter—if racist intention isn’t obvious (and sometimes, even if it is), there is no need to bring up race at all. Indeed, doing so points to the moral weakness of racial justice advocates.

New York Representative Lee Zeldin, for instance, is particularly opposed to the notion that we might develop a policy agenda that actually directs resources to the racial groups with highest need. “So being a little racist or very racist is not OK,” he said on CNN in countering attacks on Trump, “but, quite frankly, the agenda that I see and all the microtargeting to blacks and Hispanics from a policy standpoint, you know, that’s more offensive to me.” Trump surrogates like Zeldin don’t want us to consider the possibility that a supposedly universal agenda might have different impacts on different racial and ethnic groups. Rather, they want us to believe proponents of “identity politics,” as another Trump surrogate argued, are the real racists, pushing “political correctness” down the collective American throat.

This isn’t new. Resistance to the idea that “textbook” racism can be found in our political and economic systems as much as in our individual hearts and minds was also fully present in the policy debates of the 1960s. And that resistance deeply shaped the Civil Rights Act. For example, in the employment section, employers were vulnerable under the law only if a complainant could prove a “pattern or practice of resistance” to civil-rights measures—or, if you can establish a racist intent. That was written to punish only the most explicit kind of Southern racism, while leaving the subtler Northern version intact. While updates to the act gave lip service to the notion that racist impact constitutes discrimination, even if intention is not obvious, civil-rights plaintiffs still bear the burden of establishing intention if they want any recourse.

Or take voting today. Perhaps GOP leaders are sincere when they say their ongoing attack on (nonexistent) voter fraud with new voter-ID laws are not designed to suppress the votes of people of color. But they will not acknowledge evidence that the law’s impact is nonetheless voter suppression. Or take the question of equal opportunity for children. A bill adopted by the House Education and Workforce Committee this year, which Ryan has endorsed, forces 11,000 high-poverty schools out of eligibility for free-lunch programs, lowers nutritional standards, and makes it much tougher for schools to enroll kids who need help. The children who are adversely affected will be far disproportionately of color. But they aren’t named as targets, so we cannot pin down racist intention; Ryan and many others denouncing Trump this week would strongly object if someone called the bill “textbook” racism. As long as lawmakers and politicians don’t say “black” or “Mexican” or “Arab,” they are cleared of racist intention, as though the impacts of their actions don’t matter.

But they do matter, to a growing electorate of color.

The GOP (and, again, lots of Democrats, too) willfully ignore the fact that all politics are identity based. White men are simply not required to own their identities in politics because they constitute the default universal. When Zeldin calls out “microtargeting” as racist, he attempts to shut down any discussion of the racialized effects of supposedly race-neutral policies. The result is a debate in which only the most obvious, intentional brand of racism is to be condemned.

In the first campaign I ran as a young organizer, I worked with fifty homeless families, the vast majority of them African-American, who were trying to escape a slumlike welfare hotel in San Francisco for subsidized permanent housing. Several weeks in, I was scoping out the hotel owner’s neighborhood for an action with a 19-year-old campaign member named Aaron, which meant long hours sitting in my car. After we exchanged life stories, Aaron asked me, “What are you doing here with us? You’re supposed to be with them.”

By “them,” he meant his Indian immigrant landlords, who had a lucrative deal housing families in vermin-infested rooms with broken toilets and no refrigerators for months at a time. I finally said something about how angry injustice made me. And I thought about the difference between Aaron and me for the next twenty years.

For much of that time, I helped build multiracial community organizations across the country. At the beginning of my career, I’d often tell diverse groups of people, “We’re all in the same boat”—that is, we’re all hated by the same people, and our fortunes will rise or fall together. This rhetoric resonated, at first. For a couple of years, members would focus on their commonalities rather than their differences. But eventually, fissures would emerge, usually over the benefits of our organizing. Whose demands got priority? Whose social networks got the most attention? Who got the few organizing jobs that our groups generated?

I came to realize that the “same boat” argument didn’t hold up. Racial hierarchy is not a binary in which all whites occupy the lead boat and all people of color occupy the one left behind. Instead, it’s a ladder, with groups occupying different rungs of political, economic and cultural power. The gaps between rungs can seem minor—a few cents on the dollar at work, a few blocks’ difference in where you’re able to live—but to those who are affected by them, they don’t feel like being in the same boat. And blacks often find themselves on the bottom rung.

This is not to say that there isn’t plenty of discrimination directed against Asians, Arabs, Latinos and Native people. But studies revealing the depth of anti-black bias abound—basically, people would prefer almost anyone other than blacks as neighbors and employees.

Racist ideology relies on maintaining hierarchies, and these hierarchies play out in our own political spaces, too—even when we intend the opposite; even when we think we’ll be immune because we’re people of color ourselves. Groups that can deal with the notion of racial hierarchy, even as it applies among and between people of color, are most likely to have significant black participation too.

Groups that are multiracial except for black people have the ability to self-correct. Both the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and the National Domestic Workers Alliance had few African-American members in their early years (although the NDWA always had lots of black immigrants). In the restaurant industry, blacks were relegated to fast food, not the high-end restaurants on which ROC United focused; in domestic work, immigrants dominated the workforce. But both groups made significant changes to bring blacks in. ROC United focused on discrimination, deprioritizing several potential campaigns that didn’t address discrimination against black workers, until it found a pattern of anti-black hiring combined with wage theft at Darden Restaurants, which owned Red Lobster, Olive Garden and the high-end Capital Grille. The NDWA, meanwhile, started an Atlanta chapter, whose membership is entirely black.

Yet involving African-Americans in progressive movements isn’t always about their joining something multiracial. Organized black communities are critical to multiracial power-building; they deserve much more support from the progressive infrastructure. An exciting development in the workers’ center movement is the growth of workers’ centers and campaigns that centralize the leadership of native-born blacks. Groups like the Los Angeles Black Worker Center, the Workers Center for Racial Justice in Chicago and One Voice in Mississippi organize black communities to win access to construction jobs as well as policies that prevent employers from asking about convictions in the application process.

After the 1970s, much black organizing energy was redirected into administering the victories of the civil-rights and Black Power movements. While vital, this meant a focus on protecting wins, not maintaining a movement. That’s why the organizing by black millennials that Mychal Denzel Smith explores is so important: it changes the equation of power.

There is no contradiction between the desire to build a multiracial movement and the desire to organize black folk specifically. We are all one race or another, and we must be explicit about each community we include. Differences are going to emerge. Knowledge of those differences can be a source of clarity and strategy, if we are brave enough to see them as such.

Read more from our special issue on racial justice

Mychal Denzel Smith: “How Trayvon Martin’s Death Launched a New Generation of Black Activism”

The Editors: “Renewing the Struggle for Racial Justice, Post-Ferguson”

Paula J. Giddings: “It’s Time for a 21st-Century Anti-Lynching Movement”

Dani McClain: “Obama’s Racial Justice Initiative—for Boys Only”

Frank Barat: “A Q&A With Angela Davis on Black Power, Feminism and the Prison-Industrial Complex”

Melissa Harris-Perry: “Obama Is Responsible for the Protests in Ferguson—but Not in the Way You Think ”

As we saw in this election, people of color are no longer “minorities.” Progressive alliances proved their power as a new majority, striking down the “three strikes” rule, protecting women’s rights and re-electing Barack Obama. But as Nation contributor and Colorlines.com publisher Rinku Sen said at this weekend’s “Facing Race” conference, the fight for racial justice is not yet finished. When protectors of the status quo ask, “what more do you want?”, we must demand the end of institutionalized segregation and inequality.

—Christie Thompson

The next battle in the fight for racial justice is ending the War on Drugs. Check out director Eugene Jarecki on “Voting Out the Drug War.”

People hold signs as they protest against Senate Bill 1070 outside the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix, Arizona April 25, 2010. REUTERS/Joshua Lott
 
Following a lecture I gave once, a student with a vaguely libertarian perspective asked, Is it possible to end discrimination without building up government? She didn’t like discrimination, but she also disliked interference in people’s lives. Ingrained in an organizing tradition that relies on government as the main locus of change, I actually had to think. Could we win racial justice without much government?

Fighting discrimination requires setting standards for both individual and collective behavior, educating everyone about those standards and ultimately creating some consequence for violating them. This young woman’s question implied that a society can generate compliance with such standards through volunteerism, an individual embrace of colorblind or gender-neutral ways of dealing with neighbors, students and employees.

But government provides critical pathways to participation in setting such standards, as well as to recourses when they are not met. Those pathways allow us to bring equity efforts to scale through specific policies. Without that system, we would have to rely on the good intentions of people within the private sector who are largely unaware of their biases and who would have neither the incentive nor the capacity to set or enforce high standards. Influencing intention doesn’t give us enough leverage over how institutions run. What’s more, white supremacy and patriarchy go back a long way. The human brain has, over many generations, wired itself to accept a certain amount of subjugation. This is why, many years after the end of slavery and the enfranchisement of women, Americans taking the Project Implicit test, which was designed to reveal our biases, will find their reactions to images of black people and women far less favorable than they expect. It is entirely possible to disadvantage particular groups of people without explicit animus.

Government represents a huge number of institutions and sets the rules for a huge number more. These institutions are key to closing discrimination gaps based on race, gender, sexuality, national status, disability and age. Such institutions reflect the power relations of a society, but they also provide important leverage points for changing those relations. The change process is iterative. The dominant trends of a society change as a result of organized pressure. When government changes some, it fuels more change in society, and the government then changes a bit more. This is why, throughout our nation’s history, fighters for equity have worked to gain access to and influence all forms of local, state and federal government.

One such fight led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII of the act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, sex, color or religion. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was established in this clause, but initially it had only education, outreach, technical assistance and mediation to work with. In 1972 Congress granted the EEOC the power to sue discriminatory employers. Over subsequent decades, disability and age were added to the list of causes. Today, the EEOC handles some 100,000 complaints per year. No employer welcomes its attention—nor do local governments. In Minneapolis, an alliance called the Educational Equity Opportunity Coalition convinced its school board to conduct a racial economic and cultural assessment of a decision to close two schools that served Somali children. The schools were consolidated and as a result one kept open.

Some argue that government is so corrupt that it will always betray us, citing the fact that we are forced to defend “things we won forty years ago” like abortion, affirmative action and voting rights. But what makes us think that the beneficiaries of privilege will live happily with its loss? We have to play defense and offense at the same time. Whether we win a change in the rules at City Hall or in the boardroom, we will always have to defend it. At least in the realm of government, we have victories to defend.

Consider the example of domestic workers. Before the Civil War, chattel slavery allowed white “property” owners to steal the labor and sexuality of black women. Emancipation ended that ownership on paper, and during Reconstruction black Americans gained political office and economic grounding; over those eleven years, sixteen African-Americans served in Congress, and more than 600 were elected to state legislatures. For a time, black domestic workers could sell their labor like anyone else, exercise options against an abusive employer and move into other livelihoods. But Jim Crow segregation, and its softer Northern versions, pushed them back into subservient positions. As he set up the key policies of the New Deal, FDR crafted compromises to get Southern support, which left these women out of Social Security and labor protections. The rules on Social Security were reversed in the 1950s, but the overtime regulation is only now on the table for change.

Today’s domestic workers could not hope to expand their rights without strong government. The Domestic Workers Bill of Rights is a core element of their policy platform; it clarifies that domestic workers are in an employment relationship with families, and that labor law applies in all such situations. Domestic Workers United won the first bill in New York two years ago, and the California alliance is close to winning a similar policy in California. Without government, domestic workers would have to go one by one to get employers to do the right thing by acting against their own self-interest. They would have to rely on Hollywood movies like The Help to raise awareness and on civic organizations to change behavior. No one in that list actually enforces correct action, nor does any institution systemically address the collective caregiving needs of families.

There are 2.5 million domestic workers in this country. Significant progress cannot be made employer by employer. Domestic workers and their supporters have more options for shaping private behavior using democratically influenced institutions through which the word goes out, and the consequences of noncompliance are made real.

Alternatives exist. Some corporations have adopted practices that shrink racial and gender gaps. Some religious institutions and nonprofits provide shelter, food, healthcare and education to people in need. Some media outlets have worked to raise awareness and encourage action. But for all these examples, there are many more companies that cheat workers and consumers; hospitals that deny critical care; and the most ubiquitous media outlets are still selling images of the dark criminal, the tragic slut and the heroic vigilante. As broken as our democracy is, none of these other options provide a way for the public to participate in its decisions.

Government can either reinforce an every-man-for-himself ethic or the idea that we are all in it together. There is nothing inherently corrupt about government, and the best way to shape it for collective good is to treat it as the critical site of struggle and change that it is.

The incident is well-known now. When civil rights hero Representative John Lewis asked to address Occupy Atlanta, the activists’ consensus process produced a decision not to let him speak. For many, the denial was a damning answer to a question that had arisen since the earliest, overwhelmingly white occupiers first took over Zuccotti Park: Is Occupy Wall Street diverse enough?

“Diverse enough for what?” is the query that leaps to mind. Diversity alone will not ensure that OWS advances an economic change agenda that is racially equitable.

The notion of taking over Wall Street clearly resonates with communities of color. Malik Rhassan and Ife Johari Uhuru, black activists from Queens, New York, and Detroit, respectively, started Occupy the Hood to encourage and make space for people of color to join the movement. On October 19, a different group, Occupy Harlem, put out “a call to Blacks, Latinos, and immigrants to occupy their communities against predatory investors, displacement, privatization and state repression.”

Such interventions have been necessary. The original OWS organizers didn’t consciously reach out to communities of color at the beginning; as a result, many people of color felt alienated. But local movements seem able to self-correct—and some newer occupations have been racially conscious from the start.

In Atlanta, the Lewis decision was followed by renaming Woodruff Park, the local occupation site, Troy Davis Park. In Albuquerque, the General Assembly, after a long and difficult discussion, renamed its movement (Un)Occupy Albuquerque in recognition of the history of indigenous lands. In San Diego, where October 10 was named Indigenous People’s Day, speakers have come from members of the Islamic Labor Caucus as well as immigrant and Native American communities.

These are all great symbols of racial solidarity. We must now move from questions of representation to ask, How can a racial analysis, and its consequent agenda, be woven into the fabric of the movement? We need to interrogate not just the symptoms of inequality—the disproportionate loss of jobs, housing, healthcare and more—but, more fundamentally, the systems of inequality, considering how and why corporations create and exploit hierarchies of race, gender and national status to enrich themselves and consolidate their power. As the New Bottom Line campaign has pointed out through a series of actions across the nation launched the same week as OWS, the subprime lending practices of Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo have devastated communities of color. A 2009 study found that 85 percent of those hardest hit by foreclosures have been African-American and Latino homeowners.

If racial exclusion and inequity are at the root of the problem, then inclusion and equity must be built into the solution. OWS has resisted making specific demands, but local groups are taking up campaigns and actions. The challenge and opportunity of this moment is to put these values at the center of their agenda.

The signs are promising. In Boston, Occupiers joined a march that protested gentrification and financial abuse from a racial justice standpoint. In Oakland, the organization Just Cause/Causa Justa has inserted an anti-discrimination agenda, illustrated by a beautiful poster by artist and activist Melanie Cervantes reading, Somos El 99%, which is a prominent feature of the encampment there. (The poster exists in multiple other languages too.) New Bottom Line has asked Occupiers to make pointed, tangible demands of regulators and banks. Occupy Los Angeles has taken up actions supporting homeowners in the midst of foreclosure. A hearty response from other cities would go a long way toward legitimizing OWS as a movement that recognizes the fundamental role of racial discrimination in shaping our economy.

As some Occupy cities are demonstrating, addressing race is far easier when there is already a history of white activists and those of color advancing common goals. In Flagstaff, Arizona, a city where activists have worked alongside Native communities for years, the local Occupy website features calls to resist a fake-snow-making scheme on a mountain sacred to Native tribes, as well as a plan by Senator John McCain and Representative Paul Gosar to reinstate uranium mining around the Grand Canyon. At Colorlines.com, which has covered the role of race in the Occupy movement, one commenter offered the example of Occupy Los Angeles—a city with a long history of collaborative economic justice campaigns with a clear race angle—as a model to emulate. “The LA folks seem to be able to reconcile how to fold race, monetary and social issues all into their messages,” she wrote.

The Occupy movement is clearly unifying. Centralizing racial equity will help to sustain that unity. This won’t happen accidentally or automatically. It will require deliberate, smart, structured organizing that challenges segregation, not only that of the 1 percent from everyone else, but also that which divides the 99 percent from within.

Also in This Forum

Sam Pizzigati: “OWS Revives the Struggle for Economic Equality”
George Zornick: “How to Be a 1 Percenter”
Tamara Draut: “Occupy College”
Sarah Anderson: “The Costs of Wall Street Greed”
Gordon Lafer: “Why Occupy Wall Street Has Left Washington Behind”

Homepage image courtesy of Melanie Cervantes, DignidadRebelde.com