What Progressives Must Learn from the ACORN Debacle

I've been expecting it for months, but I was still
bummed to see the official announcement: ACORN, a decades-old
community organizing powerhouse, will be closing its operations
permanently as of April 1. As I wrote last year, ACORN has been the subject
of a concerted attack by the right and was largely abandoned when
liberal supporters, including President Obama and Democratic members of
Congress, distanced themselves. But the attack on ACORN isn't about
ACORN alone. It's an important element of a conservative strategy to
discredit the Obama administration, destroy organizing capacity among
progressives and quiet voices for real change. They've helped shut
ACORN's doors. Now, it's up to us to make sure the onslaught stops
there.

A quick recap. For many
years, ACORN has been attacked by conservatives for its massive voter
registration program. Accusations of voter fraud during and after the
2008 election were eventually rejected by the courts, but they drew
national attention nonetheless, fueled by efforts to link the
organization to Barack Obama and by an earlier ACORN embezzlement scandal. Then, conservative
activist James O'Keefe--who was arrested recently for plotting to
tamper with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu's phones--released a video
purporting to show ACORN staff advising a pimp and a prostitute on how
to get away with tax fraud. The Brooklyn district attorney investigated that incident--in part by simply
watching the unedited tape, something news organizations failed to do--
and concluded that there was no unlawful activity at ACORN. But it was
too late: Congress had already responded to incomplete news stories by
banning ACORN from receiving government contracts, including for
mortgage counseling and voter registration. A federal judge has ruled that ban unconstitutional, by the way.

I'm not ACORN apologist. The
organization had some serious quality-control issues, and hasn't always
played well with others. The embezzlement could have been handled more
forthrightly, for example, and in the struggle over Brooklyn's Atlantic
Yards stadium project, a number of New York activists charged ACORN with
cutting an inadequate deal with developers. I am struck now, though, by
the ease with which a 40-year-old stalwart could be taken down with a
flimsy, if concerted right-wing smear campaign. Some of the challenges
ACORN faced are commonplace among progressive organizations and leaders.
Loose internal oversight combined with poor media and communications
skills left the organization prey to shoddy corporate journalism, all of
which contributed to this outcome.

Conservative
groups routinely make the same sorts of mistakes, but they don't
generally result in such massive losses. Why? Because conservative
activists are not in the business of challenging entrenched power.
Progressives have to remember that we run an oppositional movement, even
with a Democratic president of color in the White House. We are
fundamentally about changing the dominant way society is set up, and
that will always make us a more likely target of attack than those
working merely to maintain the status quo.

Race wasn't the sole motivating factor behind
the ACORN attacks, but the situation has some important racial dynamics.
The vast majority of ACORN's membership was black and Latino, and their
work was centered in black and Latino neighborhoods. So although the
organization engaged rarely in an explicit racial analysis,
conservatives were able to play easily on racial stereotypes that paint
people of color as oversexed frauds and cheaters. The one-bad-apple excuse, so effective in
relieving police departments of responsibility for violent, racist cops,
never seems to apply to institutions with large numbers of people of
color. And images of O'Keefe dressed as a pimp and plotting crimes with
black people quickly overwhelmed the facts--that at least one ACORN
office called the cops on him, that the video contained demonstrably
false assertions about ACORN's federal funding or that it was heavily
edited, to name a few.

Now we have
to move forward, whether we're filling the organizing space or building
other resources for poor people of color. It will be tempting to think
that if we all keep our practices clean we can avoid ACORN's fate. But
if we do our work well, we should expect similar attacks and know that
long track records won't protect us. We will have to be as creative,
broad-based and rigorous about our defense as we are about our other
campaigns. If there isn't already a plan in place, this is the time to
make one.