.d.
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I didn't look at Reed's PDF on the first post. I click on it, and started looking at professional resumes and didn't get the connection. I was expecting an article or something like that.
So now getting back to the PDF listed people and organizations. I can see what Reed is talking about. There is a whole cottage industry in this scene. My problem was tracking down a guy like Tim Wise and wondering why bother with this guy? On the other hand, with a whole fleet of organization `experts' earning a living doing consultant gigs I can see the reason to point them out.
It turns out that I am familiar with this phenomenon from another angle. A similar devolution of a once upon a time disability rights politics took place here, over time.
What I think is important to point out though is _how_ the withdrawal into some conventional, easily accepted, capital friendly line took place. Instead of naming people and pointing to organizations, I think it is more concrete to write about the social and economic processes through which this transformation took place. This is not an ahistoric process, but it is a well known one. We used to called it getting co-opted.
My answer is pretty simple. Money. For awhile related federal legislation provided grants for civil rights education and training. An organization could apply through the DoJ grant programs and get money to carry on civil rights training. I worked in the first year of this training grant system and watched some people really get the more radical messages about disability and human rights. We worked in region nine, which meant all the highly conservative inland western states like Arizona, New Mexico, lboColorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. The locals also got trained on how to legally enforce those rights through OCR and other administrative law channels. This was in 1981 and the start of the big chill. One of these training sessions held in Cheyenne, Wy. was chaired by a Boston accented, Irish Catholic, lesbian, on crutches. She was overtly all of the above. She started off talking about her working class dad in some neighborhood in Boston. It was not a pretty sight.
When the federal grant money ran out, some the local orgs here turned to the foundation system where the general mission statements got really watered down and vague. Also to keep an operating budget in foundation money a lot of time was spent shopping for this money and assembling multiple sources, so the mission statements got even more vague to fit a small collection of sources. In a federal system, you have to write close to the guidelines. In the foundations system you make more vague statements of purpose. In addition, these organizations started contracting their services to corporations as management level employee development. I wondered at the time, is there some corporate tax credit involved? I went to one of these later session done at Sun Microsystems in the mid-90s. Very lame.
It took me a long time to see this devolution process. The early demands had some very concrete implications in the the political economy. These were for out of institutional living and into public housing. That demand some how got to become accessible housing. At the other end of this process, which I also thought of co-option, all that concrete demand was gone. It had been transformed into tolerance sessions for corporate management at Sun. At that session, Sun was demonstrating their `commitment' to the `cause' by showing off its GUI and mouse of the period. These days, it's reduced further to voice and touch screen issues in technology.
>From education, employment, and housing, there is nothing left but some
technology issues? That's the public concept. Meanwhile down in the
trenches, what I used to see was just appalling. An old woman sitting in
shit in her trash filled apartment. After sorting through her bills and
mail I found her social worker's number. After I got back to the stupid
job, I spent about three hours tracking the SW down. Of course there was
a message machine. I finally heard from the SW a day or so later and
described the situation of her client.
CG