Shapeshifters: Black girls and the choreography of citizenship

Abstract

Worker Community Building Initiative, which managed $50 million in philanthropic giving. These initiatives purportedly identified ways in which growers and workers could collaborate in a ‘win-win’ model for improving working conditions as well as economic prosperity. But as the author argues, this model failed to address the more basic conditions and causes of poverty and inequality for farmworkers. One interesting insight that emerges from these case studies is that grass roots organizers and nonprofit organizational staff are sometimes forced to negotiate, interpret, defy, or subvert the conservative agendas of funding organizations in order to advance activist initiatives that challenge the dominant power structures. As the book reveals, a central dilemma or contradiction of self-help philanthropy is that activism on behalf of farmworkers and immigrant labor actually threatens the social and economic infrastructures of organizations that fund such nonprofits, since nonprofits will most often be supported by surplus capital that is the result of wealth acquired at the expense of low-wage workers. One might wonder whether or not this contradiction is a permanent and intractable problem at the heart of nonprofit funding organizations. Kohl-Arenas concludes her study by saying that we are caught between two views of poverty: the self-help narrative that urges poor people to help themselves by changing their behaviors, negotiating conflict, and working within systems of power; and a narrative about the self-determination and dignity of poor people’s movements that demands ‘ ... respect, in treatment, in pay, [and] in rights and opportunities... ’ (189). My only criticism of this well written and fascinating organizational study is that the author, in her final analysis, seems to retreat from the normative conclusion(s) for which she has so painstakingly made a case throughout most of the book. The self-help narrative is a ‘myth’ after all. The descriptions of how professional managers of nonprofit organizations struggle with this narrative are poignant and revealing. But readers might also want more practical guidance about how best to challenge the prevailing assumption that a solution to poverty involves ‘asking the poor to help themselves’.