The Activist's Handbook. Randy Shaw
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thousands of dollars in debt. They need paid jobs that enable them to work full-time for social change. Obama’s 2008 campaign could have offered such opportunities by retaining its best-trained young organizers to boost the president’s agenda after the election, but this did not occur. With foundation and government support for community organizing having sharply declined in the past decade, idealistic young people face greater challenges than prior generations did in securing full-time, paid jobs working for change. As a result, new generations of activists often lack organizational mentors who can train them in the skills of creating and winning social justice campaigns. This book helps to fill that void.
President Obama’s reelection creates enormous opportunities for activism. As I discuss in the context of the immigrant rights, environmental, and gay marriage movements, activists’ response to the president has proved determinative for their movement’s success. The Republican Party’s obstructionism is a major challenge, as are corporate and big-money interests at the local level. All of these obstacles have been overcome in the past, and can be defeated in the future.
But make no mistake: while having President Obama or another Democratic president in the White House, or a sympathetic mayor in City Hall or progressive ally as governor, opens the door to opportunities, only grassroots activism can translate this into meaningful change. From the Freedom Rides of the civil rights movement, to the “no business as usual” actions of ACT UP, to young DREAM Activists risking deportation to gain a legal path to the American Dream, grassroots activism has been the driving force for change. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the demise of progressive social change have been greatly exaggerated. A generation of activists who understand the tactics and strategies essential for success can bring greater social and economic justice to the United States in the twenty-first century.
1
Don’t Respond, Strategize
In a previous era, social change activists were guided by the immortal words of Mary “Mother” Jones: “Don’t mourn, organize.” These words, spoken following the murder of a union activist, emphasized the value of proactive responses to critical events. Although American activists today face less risk of being killed, they still must heed Mother Jones’s command. A political environment hostile to progressive change has succeeded in putting many social change activists on the defensive, and the need for proactive planning—what I like to call tactical activism—has never been clearer.
Unfortunately, proactive strategies and tactics for change all too frequently are sacrificed in the rush to respond to the opposition’s agenda. Of course, activists must organize and rally to defeat specific attacks directed against their constituencies; if a proposed freeway will level your neighborhood, preventing the freeway’s construction is the sole possible strategy. I am speaking, however, of the far more common scenario where the opposition pushes a particular proposal or project that will impact a constituency without threatening its existence. In these cases, it is critical that a defensive response also lays the groundwork for achieving the long-term goal.
The best way to understand tactical activism is to view it in practice. The Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, where I have worked since 1980, is a virtual laboratory demonstrating both the benefits of tactical activism and the consequences of its absence. The Tenderloin won historic victories using proactive strategies in response to luxury tourist developments threatening its future, but had less success in responding defensively to crime. This chapter also discusses how the Occupy movement used proactive activism to reshape the national debate about inequality, and how activists played into their opponents hands by allowing homelessness to be reframed from a socially caused housing problem to a problem of individual behavior.
THE TENDERLOIN: TACTICAL ACTIVISM AT WORK
The Tenderloin in San Francisco lies between City Hall and the posh downtown shopping and theater district of Union Square. Once a thriving area of bars, restaurants, and theaters, the Tenderloin gave birth to the city’s gay and lesbian movement and was long home to thousands of merchant seamen and blue-collar workers living in the neighborhood’s more than one hundred residential hotels. When I arrived in the Tenderloin in 1980, it was often described as San Francisco’s “seedy” district—a not entirely inaccurate depiction. For at least the prior decade, the Tenderloin had more than its share of prostitution, public drunkenness, and crime. It was notorious for its abundance of peep shows, porno movie houses, and nude-dancing venues; the high profile of these businesses and their flashing lights and lurid signs fostered the neighborhood’s unsavory reputation.
The Tenderloin’s location in the heart of a major U.S. city distinguishes it from other economically depressed neighborhoods. Many people who spend their entire lives in Los Angeles or New York City never have cause to go to Skid Row or the South Bronx; Bay Area residents can easily avoid the high-crime area of East Oakland. However, most San Franciscans are likely to pass through the Tenderloin at some point—to visit one of the city’s major theaters or the Asian Art Museum, to see a friend staying at the Hilton Hotel or Hotel Monaco (both located in the Tenderloin), to conduct business at nearby City Hall, or to reach any number of other destinations. San Franciscans have firsthand experience with the Tenderloin that is highly unusual for low-income neighborhoods.
The thirty-five blocks at the core of the neighborhood constitute one of the most heterogeneous areas in the United States, if not the world. The Tenderloin’s 20,000 residents include large numbers of senior citizens, who are primarily Caucasian; immigrant families from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos; a significant but less visible number of Latino families; perhaps San Francisco’s largest concentration of single African American men, and a smaller number of African American families; one of the largest populations of gays outside the city’s Castro district; and a significant number of East Indian families, who own or manage most of the neighborhood’s residential hotels. The Tenderloin’s broad ethnic, religious, and lifestyle diversity has held steady as the rest of San Francisco has become more racially segregated over the past decades.
With government offices and cultural facilities in the Civic Center to the west, the city’s leading transit hub on Market Street to the south, the American Conservatory and Curran Theaters to the north, and Union Square (one of the most profitable shopping districts in the United States) to the east, in the late 1970s the neighborhood’s economic revival was said to be just around the corner. This widespread belief in the imminent gentrification of the Tenderloin profoundly shaped its future. During that time, Tenderloin land values rose to levels more appropriate to the posh lower Nob Hill area than to a community beset with unemployment, crime, and a decrepit housing stock. Real estate speculators began buying up Tenderloin apartment buildings, and developers began unveiling plans for new luxury tourist hotels and condominium towers.
Further impetus for the belief in imminent gentrification came from the arrival in the late 1970s of thousands of refugees, first from Vietnam, then from Cambodia and Laos. The Tenderloin was chosen for refugee resettlement because its high apartment-vacancy rate made it the only area of the city that could accommodate thousands of newly arrived families. The refugees’ arrival fostered optimism about the Tenderloin’s future in three significant ways. First, the refugees filled long-standing apartment vacancies and thus raised neighborhood property values and brought instant profits to Tenderloin landowners. Second, many in the first wave of refugees left Vietnam with capital, which they proceeded to invest in new, Asian-oriented businesses in the Tenderloin. These businesses, primarily street-level markets and restaurants, gave the neighborhood a new sense of vitality and drove up the value of ground-floor commercial space.
Third, and perhaps most significant, those eager for gentrification expected Southeast Asian immigrant families to replace the Tenderloin’s long-standing population of seniors, merchant seamen, other low-income working people, and disabled persons. The families, it was thought, would transform the neighborhood into a Southeast Asian version of San Francisco’s popular Chinatown.
My introduction to the Tenderloin came through Hastings Law School, another significant player in the Tenderloin development scene. In 1979, when I was twenty-three, I enrolled as a student at Hastings, a public institution connected to the University of California. During the 1970s, Hastings had expanded its “campus” by vacating tenants from some adjacent residential hotels.