The Black Power Movement and American Social Work

Exit and Voice in Intra-Organizational Social Movements

EMERGENT MOBILIZATION FRAMEWORK

BOTH THE NABSW FOUNDERS and the social workers central to the Techni-Culture Movement acted on the perception of rising opportunities for change due to an atmosphere of uncertainty within the profession created by the gains of the civil rights movement and the rise of Black Power politics. Civil rights victories meant that by 1966, when these movements of black professionals began, legal segregation had been defeated, removing some of the obstacles to access. But the context of Black Power ushered in a new sort of ambiguity in the profession because it disturbed the racial norms and rules at a different level. The Black Power movement’s calls for community control, power to the people, black pride, and the rejection of white norms and values created a sense of confusion around how black and white people would move forward together into a post-civil rights America. The movement of black social workers is just one manifestation of the contentious negotiations that characterized this era.

Doug McAdam’s (1999) emergent mobilization framework attempts to explain the processes by which mobilization materializes. Recall that first, an external shock caused by broad changes destabilizes previously stable social and political relations, creating an atmosphere of uncertainty. This in turn leads everyone involved to try to make sense of the new environment, which creates space for dissidents to rise up if they perceive either an opportunity or threat. They then either appropriate existing structures or establish new mobilizing structures to carry out innovative collective action.

TABLE 7.1

	CIVIL RIGHTS	BLACK POWER	NABSW	TCM
GOALS	Access	Self-determination	Self-determination and black representation	Self-determination and multicultural representation
DOMINANT FRAMES	Rights	Empowerment	Empowerment/ Social action	Empowerment/ Social action
STRATEGIES	Integration	Separation	Internal bureaucratic insurgency/ Exit	Internal coup/ Voice
TACTICS	Marches, sit-ins, boycotts	Self-help, riots, occupation	Meeting takeovers, issuing statements	Takeovers, making statements, conference

Table 7.1 shows how the two intra-organizational social movements (IOSMs) under examination compare to the Black Power and civil rights movements in goals, frames, strategies, and tactics. While there were differences in strategy and goals, both sets of organizational activists clearly placed themselves in the Black Power tradition. I see these differences as primarily related to critical decisions made by the leaders of the two IOSMs and the organizational identity of the targets. Moreover, I argue that differences in tactics between the larger Black Power movement and these IOSMs stemmed more from the constraints of their organizational context than their ideological differences with the movement.

My analysis of the development of the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) and the Techni-Culture Movement (TCM) shows that they follow closely the path McAdam suggests. The urban rebellions of the late 1960s, the Kerner Commission Report that implicated white institutions in urban violence, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.—all worked together with civil rights gains and the rise of Black Power to create instability and uncertainty within the profession. Ironically, white social workers’ attempts at addressing urban unrest also contributed to the widespread dissent within the profession, as black social workers often perceived these attempts as disingenuous, half-hearted, and wrong-headed. As a result, both the NWBSW and the TCM perceived an opening within the profession to create concrete and meaningful change. In addition, both organizations were organizing within the same profession, drew on highly overlapping activist pools, and employed the language and frames of the Black Power movement. Yet in the end, the TCM appropriated existing structures while the NABSW constructed a new organization from which to mobilize.

The TCM fought from within the committees, conferences, and the board of the NFS. Not only did their action originate within the structure of the organization, but they also mobilized those structures for their own means by demanding black representation, a greater commitment to social action, and a move towards community control in local settlements. The NABSW also got their start by voicing their demands in the apparatuses of the target organization by taking over conference sessions and demanding audience with the NCSW leadership. However, these black activists withdrew their mobilization from inside the organization very early on, and created their own organizational structure for action. Still, even though the NABSW organized from outside, they did not completely withdraw from the profession or other social work professional associations. They still relied heavily on the existing structure of the organization for their actions.

But what factors explain why these two groups took different paths to activism within the profession? Why did one eventually appropriate existing structures and the other create a new one? What might the answer to this question reveal about the conditions under which groups in similar contexts would appropriate existing structures or construct new ones for mobilization? I contend that contrasting organizational identities combined with differences in leadership and key decisions that were made at crucial turning points best explain the divergent outcomes.

ORGANIZATIONAL IDENTITY

Organizational identity is defined as “that which is central, enduring, and distinctive about an organization’s character” (Albert and Whetten 1985). These identities are considered to be relatively durable, so much so that the central features “are presumed to be resistant to ephemeral or faddish attempts at alteration because of their ties to the organization’s history” (Gioia et al. 2000). However, the fact that organizational identities tend toward stability does not mean that such identities are not complex. They are created and maintained through the interaction between outsiders and insiders, and are susceptible to changes in interpretation and translation over time and by different actors (Gioia et al. 2000).

The different organizational identities of the NFS and the NCSW not only shaped the structures black social workers encountered (and thus the outcomes of their movements), these identities were also manipulated by activists in their attacks. The TCM employed the strategy by accusing the NFS of failing to live up to the activist roots and legacy it prided itself on, and/or arguing that its particular style of activism could no longer suffice in comparison to the direct action central to movement politics. The NABSW activists focused on exposing and challenging the NCSW and its “unwilling[ness] to involve itself in social action,” when social action was the order of the day. By appealing to the past heritage of social work in social action, these activists were pointing out and manipulating target vulnerabilities (Jasper and Poulsen 1993) very much created by the intersection of the profession’s history and the historical moment at which the movements within these organizations rose up. Emerging on the heels of the civil rights movement and with Black Power ideas and riots in full swing, the TCM and the NABSW were able to exploit the idea that only social action would do—not only because black social workers said so, but because the times dictated it.

The allegation of irrelevance runs through much of the language that black social workers used during this period of organizing. This was a particularly challenging charge for a profession with such a rocky road to professionalization. The professionalization of social work was in many ways a constant struggle to stay relevant—to stay necessary and as a result continue to be seen as a legitimate profession. But as African American social workers gradually gained more power, they used evolving definitions of relevance to the advantage of their movement. In an earlier period, irrelevance may have been defined by answering the question “What do they do anyways?” Black social workers, however, attempted to redefine the idea of relevance in terms of race, asserting that in order to be relevant the profession needed to be concerned with racial justice and with trying to change the social world of their clients. For example, when black social workers accused the NCSW of being unresponsive and inadequate in their dealings with “black and brown” people, they were in essence advocating for this new racial justice definition of relevance and appropriateness in the field.

The different organizational identities of NFS and NCSW also clearly shaped their response to internal black dissent. The NFS responded with some actual concessions and recognized that times were indeed changing, so it entered a phase of serious reappraisal as reflected in the New Directions process. On the other hand, the NCSW was slow to act and maintained their ostensibly neutral position on social issues.

Because the NFS was publicly and centrally committed to social action and racial justice—or at least racial integration—they were open to the Techni-Culture Movement demands for representation. Despite the defensiveness of NFS leaders, it is clear that the Techni-Culture Movement affected them at a fundamental level. They often drew on their legacy as activists—and on the memory of Jane Addams, in particular—to figure out how to respond to the TCM’s demands or to defend the work they were doing. Settlement leaders seriously grappled with accusations that they were not living up to their identity as activists and social change agents. For example, when interviewed about racial conflict within the NFS, Margaret Berry defended herself by pointing to her previous work in Pittsburgh’s Hill district, a historically black neighborhood in the city. Declaring she spent ten years “in the vanguard of racial justice” there, she attempted to reclaim and reassert her identity as an activist in the face of allegations that the settlement movement had strayed too far from its activist roots.

On the other hand, the NCSW was not affected in the same way by the NABSW’s demands because of their formalized stance against social action. For black social workers to challenge the NCSW, it had to be on different grounds. Rather than asking the organization to live up to its identity, these activists had to go a step further and argue that the organization’s identity was wrong. This was a very different tack, but in short, the push for social action was received differently by an organization that claimed an activist identity than one that explicitly disavowed one, meaning black challengers in the NCSW had to use other tactics and lines of argument than those used by the TCM.

Finally, the different racial traditions of the National Federation of Settlements and the National Conference on Social Welfare contributed to the different outcomes of black organizing. Because of the NFS’s involvement in the civil rights movement and the influence of Jane Addams’s memory on the settlement movement, black social workers within the organization could call on a stated historical commitment to racial equality that settlement people felt more obligated to respond to. For example, Jane Addams is remembered as the mother of activist social work and was involved in the founding of the NAACP, which made the settlement movement an heir to the history of African American uplift. Black settlement workers explicitly drew on this past and asked contemporary settlement leadership to live up to this legacy. But the NCSW did not have this have this same storied history, nor did it or its members identify with its legacy. Accordingly, this organization did not respond as well to charges that it had not kept up with the racial times. Identity and legacy, however, were not the only factors in explaining the divergent paths of these movements.

LEADERSHIP AND STRATEGIC DECISIONS

Morris and Staggenborg (2004) consider social movement leaders to be “strategic decision-makers who inspire and organize others to participate in social movements.” They also point out that a central issue to the study of social movement leadership is “the extent to which the characteristics and actions of leaders, as opposed to structural conditions, matter.” In synthesizing established knowledge about social movement leaders, Morris and Staggenborg find that leaders operate within structures, influence and are influenced by movement organizations and environments, are found at different levels and perform various tasks, and sometimes pursue their own interests and maintain organizations at the expense of movement goals. They also note that different organizational structures produce different types of leaders.

The role of leaders in strategizing and framing definitively shape the course of their movements. Snow and colleagues (1986) explain that collective action frames work by diagnosing the problem, proposing the solutions, and motivating participants to be effective. Social movement organizations must thus engage in highly skilled frame alignment work. But as Morris and Staggenborg (2004) point out, the role of leadership is under-theorized in frame analysis since “social movements often emerge within indigenous institutions and organizations and social movement leaders often have prior lives that are imbedded in community institutions.” So for Morris and Staggenborg (2004), analysis of leadership must take into consideration both the extent to which leaders shape and are shaped by their environment.

Understanding the way that leaders are shaped by their environment is essential to comprehending the different paths that the TCM and the NABSW took toward change. The leaders of these two movements had dissimilar relationships to the black political movement ideologies that were present at the time, and this influenced the strategic decisions they made and the frames they employed in the movement. Their decisions mark critical junctures in the trajectory of these movements, which Mahoney (2000) defines as “characterized by the adoption of a particular institutional arrangement from among two or more alternatives. These junctures are ‘critical’ because once a particular option is selected it becomes progressively more difficult to return to the initial point when multiple alternatives were still available” (513).

In comparing these two cases, one particular strategic decision is especially helpful in explaining why one movement lead to a separate organization while the other resulted in black incorporation: Howard Prunty’s decision to provide and follow through with an ultimatum to the NCSW. Clearly, this is not the only important decision that was made, but it was a key tipping point in the NABSW organizers’ withdrawal from negotiation with NCSW to focus their energies on independent “institution building.” The other critical strategic decision that helps explain this puzzle is Halloway Sells’s decision to transition from a black organization to a multicultural one. Though the TCM was primarily multicultural only in discourse, it laid particular expectations for the group that diverged from the separatist ideology of the Black Power movement.

By the time the 1969 NCSW forum came around, Howard Prunty had been named president of the NABSW. It was at that forum that black social workers presented a series of demands with an ultimatum that they be met by the following day. Not all of the members of the organization agreed about issuing a deadline, but Prunty was unmoved by any dissent.¹ He felt that they had been dealing with NCSW long enough and that it was time that the other side made some concrete moves. So when NABSW submitted their demands on May 26, 1969, the document’s last sentence drew the line: “these demands are to be responded to by NCSW Executive Committee by Noon, Tuesday, May 27, 1969.”² When NCSW leadership failed to reply in time, the NABSW saw two available options going forward: to show weakness on the ultimatum, or cease conversation and focus on their own organization. Following Prunty’s lead, they decided on the latter.

This was by no means the only possible outcome of their mobilization. The NABSW movement started as a general desire for greater black representation and commitment to social action within the organization. It was originally conceived as an internal organization of the NCSW, in that they envisioned themselves as insiders who would push for changes from within as a black caucus of social workers. However, that view unavoidably changed after limited receptivity to their demands and, most importantly, after the failed ultimatum.

Halloway “Chuck” Sells, who emerged as the leader of the TCM, has been characterized as “somewhat of an integrationist,”³ to the extent that people wondered how he ever came to lead a “militant” group.⁴ Some felt that his “integrationist” tendencies made him more amenable to expanding the vision of the black caucus to a multicultural movement because it separated them somewhat from the feared Black Power movement. Whether this allegation is true or not, Sells’s integrationist vision certainly shaped the Techni-Culture Movement’s commitment to working within the NFS. In contrast to the NABSW, the TCM never seriously considered becoming a separate organization.

The move towards a multicultural frame—a model that sought the representation of all people of color on a larger scale—may have precluded the development of a separate organization. While the Black Power model of organizing clearly encouraged separate organizations, the ideas around what a multicultural organization should look like were more amorphous. But it is also important to note that the multicultural model did not work particularly well for the TCM. Although they maintained an ideological commitment to multiculturalism—and by all accounts, Sells really believed in the model—in practice black demands took precedence over all others and the leadership of the group remained black. This mismatch between the stated ideal of multiculturalism and the actual practice of the organization, which favored black interests, certainly opened the group to criticism from other people of color and the NFS leadership. This had the effect of delegitimizing the organizational model. But more than this, the TCM commitment to multiculturalism, shaky as it was, didn’t offer the same sort of blueprint for building a separate organization as a commitment to black power organizing would have.

A CONCEPTUAL MODEL OF INTRA-ORGANIZATIONAL SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Fundamentally, these movements within existing organizations were actually movements to implement the ideas, norms, and practices of the larger Black Power movement into the professional structures of American social work. As such, they are examples of movement institutionalization in the civil sphere—a part of the process of civil institutionalization, defined as the process of the routine implementation of movement ideas and practices in the institutions of the civil sphere. This development is essential to understanding how movements create, or fail to create, social change in the institutions that shape our lives.

The impact of unequal power relations can be felt throughout society. Certainly, inequality permeates social institutions beyond the state. Workplaces and educational institutions, for example, are sites where social relations happen—sites that simultaneously structure and reflect human relationships. This social fact is especially clear to those who face discrimination in the institutions they interact with in the course of their daily lives. African Americans who entered organizations that were previously either all white or in which black people were marginalized absolutely could not ignore this.

American organizations that existed prior to the civil rights movement were formed in, and often explicitly worked to maintain, racial exclusivity. So during the Black Power era, African Americans often entered organizations that were unprepared to wholly incorporate their bodies or their ideas. Integration more or less followed a predictable pattern, in which African Americans attempted to create change and whites responded by defending the status quo. As a result, it is impossible to think about the institutionalization of these movements into the civil sphere without understanding the struggle to make it happen in the first place. These cases suggest a model for understanding social movement institutionalization that places the actors responsible for demanding institutional change at the forefront rather than at the margins.

In the absence of movement-motivated leadership in an organization, interest group members—movement adherents within the institution—must engage in an intra-organizational social movement (IOSM) to institutionalize movement goals. The activists within these organizations may or may not have direct relationships to the movement they wish to institutionalize. They may be, or may have been, movement participants; participation is not strictly necessary. These movements may also, as discussed earlier, appropriate existing mobilizing structures or construct new ones. In general, there is no singular outcome that can be expected of an IOSM. On the one hand, target organizations may absorb some of the movement’s elements, generating movement-motivated changes from within. Another possibility is the creation of what Rojas (2010) calls “counter-centers” within organizations. These counter-centers could take the form of standing committees or caucuses that reflect the original mobilization. On the other hand, activists may create new separate organizations within a field. The numerous black professional associations that were formed in the 1960s and 1970s are a prime example.

To be sure, there are lots of ways in which IOSMs can vary. However, I propose that all IOSMs perform at least three essential tasks in the institutionalization of larger movement goals: translation, tactical development, and issue maintenance (see table 7.2). This process also includes the management of emotional reactions to the prospect of power sharing and other forms of institutional change that may affect relationships and interactions between challengers and power-holders.

First, IOSMs are responsible for framing interests in a way that is relevant to the target institution. As adherents of the goals and ideas of the movement who are also embedded in the institutional logic of the target, IOSMs do the work of translating the movement into their organization. These movement goals may be translated into the policies of organizations or may be implemented as new norms and values within an institution. In the cases of the NABSW and the TCM, they advocated policies and norms related to new racial practices and increased social activism.

TABLE 7.2 Functions of Intra-Organizational Social Movements

Translation	Frames interests of larger movement as relevant for the target organization
Tactical Development	Establishes and or adopts a tactical repertoire in relation to organizational norms and practices of the target organization
Issue Maintenance	Keeps movement issues on the table by maintaining issue visibility and by retaining control over issue framing

Black social workers met, hashed out, and reworked the appropriate goals and frames for implementation within their organizations. This was largely an exercise in identifying the structures within the profession that could be targeted for change. For example, black social workers made specific demands about curricular change, arguing that “schools of social welfare should move diligently to develop curricula that relate to the urban and rural needs of Black and Brown and minority group students, faculty, and the community, as well as the understanding by the white community of their participatory role in the disfunctioning of all groups of people.”⁵ This is a direct importation of the Black Power movement’s focus on institutional racism into the institutional structures of the profession of social work. Similarly, when black psychologists called for a shift in focus from a “preoccupation with the ghetto as a source of the problems to a consideration of the institutions, practices and forces within the larger white community that contribute so heavily to the maintenance of the status quo,” they were asking white researchers to turn to the problem of white racism rather than black pathology in a way that was in line with the Black Power movement’s shift in focus from assimilation and integration to a black-centered model of racial justice.

Secondly, IOSMs develop tactical repertoires that are both constrained and enabled by the norms and practices of the target as well as the tactics of the larger movement. In the case of black social workers and other black professionals, the professional convention intersected with the Black Power movement to shape the repertoire such that taking over convention elements became a central tactic in their activism. The use of strategic absences was another important tactic. Strategic absence is a tactic designed to highlight a lack of commitment to movement issues on the part of a target organization by implying that the meeting or event is irrelevant to those absent. It was sometimes used in conjunction with meeting takeovers, like when black social workers’ walked out of the 1968 NCSW conference. The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) also used this tactic with a certain amount of poetry in their boycott of Nixon’s 1971 State of the Union address when after being denied the president’s audience for more than a year they wrote, “We now refuse to be a part of your audience.” To the CBC, Nixon’s refusal to hear them or to hear the opinions of black Americans indicated that his opinions on the state of the union in relation to black people could not “possibly be accurate, relative, or germane.” Their absence was an obvious statement on Nixon’s presidency and the way that he had been dealing with their concerns. The hypervisibility of African Americans in many of the white-dominated organizations of the period made their absence obvious. African Americans used this to their advantage to illustrate to others within their organizations their irrelevance when it came to dealing with African American issues.

Third, IOSMs engage in issue maintenance. Issue maintenance has two components. First, people within organizations interested in incorporating movement goals must take on the responsibility of keeping their issues on the table. Much of what black social workers had to do was to sustain an engagement with issues that were important to them through continuous conversations and correspondence with each other, their white coworkers, board members, and bosses in a way that maintained the visibility of their issues. However, the maintenance of movement concerns within organizations requires more than just reminding people of the movement’s grievances, or more than just keeping the issue upfront and visible. Issue maintenance also refers to the practice of retaining control over the framing of these issues. For example, when black social workers within the NFS sought a black associate director, they had to resist the white-dominated leadership’s inclination to transform what they thought was meaningful representation by someone who held movement-related ideas into an issue of symbolic or demographic representation. And when the NABSW launched their campaign against licensure, they wrote position papers, published articles, testified before Congress and state legislatures, and more. They had to simultaneously focus on the issue while continuing to rearticulate and reframe the problem as they conceived of it. Whereas proponents of licensing framed licensure as an issue of gaining validity as professionals, the NABSW reframed it as an issue of racial exclusion by placing the interests and experiences of African American clients and social workers at the center of the debate.

These three functions—translating movement issues, developing tactical repertoires, and issue maintenance—are certainly not the only roles that IOSMs can play. Yet these three tasks will likely be central to any intra-organizational movement intent on implementing social change. Based on this examination of black social workers’ movement within their profession, I also suggest that analyses of IOSMs pay close attention to emotional processes. The management of emotions and the emotional dynamic between black and white social workers was a central problematic in this movement.

EMOTIONAL LABOR, OR “MAU MAUING” THE SOCIAL WORKERS

Bringing Black Power into the social work profession required a certain amount of emotional labor.⁶ As Wendy Moore (2008) points out in her study of race in elite law schools, students of color “must manage their emotions and the ways in which they choose to express them in order to negotiate the contradictions between their experiences in a racialized space and the institutional norms that equate objectivity with calm, disconnected emotive responses” (143). But black social workers also performed another sort of emotional labor in dealing with the emotional reactions that their white colleagues had to their demands.

In 1966, Stokely Carmichael published an essay on Black Power in the New York Review of Books. In it, he makes a poignant statement about white responses to Black Power that is worth quoting at length. He writes, “to most whites, Black Power seems to mean that the Mau Mau ⁷ are coming to the suburbs at night. The Mau Mau are coming, and whites must stop them.” He points out that white Americans discuss “plots to ‘get Whitey,’” which aids in the creation of “an atmosphere in which ‘law and order’ must be maintained.” The function of this discourse, Carmichael argues, is to shift the responsibility for action “from the oppressor to the oppressed” (6).

He also addressed white reactions: “Whites chide, ‘Don’t forget—you’re only 10 percent of the population; if you get too smart, we’ll wipe you out,’” while white liberals “complain, ‘What about me—don’t you want my help any more?’” Carmichael slams these responses from white liberals in particular, characterizing them as “people supposedly concerned about black Americans,” but who “think first of themselves, of their feelings of rejection.” “Or,” he notes, “they admonish, ‘You can’t get anywhere without coalitions,’ when there is in fact no group at present with whom to form a coalition in which blacks will not be absorbed and betrayed.” He then reproaches how white liberals accuse Black Power advocates “of ‘polarizing the races’ by [their] calls for black unity, when the true responsibility for polarization lies with whites who will not accept their responsibility as the majority power for making the democratic process work” (6).

After a discussion of what black people can do and what Black Power really means, Carmichael poses a philosophical discussion over whether white people are capable of condemning themselves for white racism—a question he had been exploring in his speeches and writings for some time. He writes,

As for white America, perhaps it can stop crying out against “black supremacy,” “black nationalism,” “racism in reverse,” and begin facing reality. The reality is that this nation is racist; that racism is not primarily a problem of “human relations” but of an exploitation maintained—either actively or through silence—by the society as a whole. Camus and Sartre have asked, can a man condemn himself? Can whites, particularly liberal whites, condemn themselves? Can they stop blaming us, and blame their own system? Are they capable of the shame which might become a revolutionary emotion?

(8)

Here, Carmichael reflects on and challenges a prominent concept of the civil rights movement, namely Martin Luther King Jr.’s argument that the goal of the movement was “to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor” (King 1956, as quoted in Garrow 1986). In Carmichael’s view, white people were incapable of the shame and self-condemnation that King thought would be so revolutionary as to lead to a beloved community, so the Black Power movement would need to do it for them. Indeed, “revolutionary shame” was not the predominant white emotional reaction to Black Power.

Carmichael’s point is especially germane in light of the emotional work that black professionals had to engage in within their professions. Writing in 1966, his words predict how many white social work professionals would respond to the demands of black social workers to incorporate the goals of the Black Power movement into the profession. The Techni-Culture Movement within the National Federation of Settlements is particularly illustrative of this. White social workers spoke of being “under attack” from black social workers and were defensive about the “race work” that they were doing. Carmichael’s observation that white liberals would recenter the issue on their own feelings of rejection when confronted with Black Power bore out in the way that some in the NFS referred to the toll such reforms would take on existing white talent and how they reflected on their role as a part of the establishment. Judith Trolander (1987) would portray the rise of black leadership in the movement as an “abrupt takeover” that “was a slap in the face to many whites,” which led many white settlement leaders to say, “‘to hell’ with the blacks” (211). Margaret Berry also confirms that “some white people, who have fought effectively for inclusiveness, now feel hurt or betrayed when they are excluded.”

In 1970, Tom Wolfe published Radical Chic and Mau Mauing the Flak-Catchers, a literary examination of the relationship between black rage and white guilt that he saw as inherent in black white relations during the Black Power era. It was actually a collection of two essays on the subject: “Radical Chic,” which dealt with white liberal fetishization of black radicalism, and “Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers,” which made a case that black radicals used self-righteous anger to intimidate white liberals, social service workers in particular. He paints a picture of Black Power advocates aggressively marching down to city halls and the Office of Economic Opportunity in camouflage fatigues and leather jackets with plans to intimidate the poverty workers into funding programs they created and giving them jobs. The latter essay basically argues that African Americans capitalized on white fear by intimidating them for their own economic gain. In doing so, he creates a scene in which black people use the steam of the Black Power movement to harass well-meaning social programs and to scare the white do-gooders who worked in them.

The use of the phrase “Mau-Mauing” is particularly symbolic. While the exact origin of the term “Mau Mau” is debated, it is generally used to refer to the Kikuyu people in Kenya who led an uprising against British imperialism between 1952 and 1960. The Mau Mau were painted by the British as a violent and brutal threat to whites and became an international symbol of black anti-imperialism. This symbolism certainly resonated with segments of the American Black Power movement. For instance, several black soldiers returning from service in the Vietnam War formed a radical organization called De Mau Mau, equating their struggle to the anticolonial struggles throughout Africa (Horne 2009).

The term “Mau-Mauing,” however, became widely understood as the strategic use of black anger to induce white reactions, and was popularly used to indicate a belief that black radicals were manipulating white fear as a con or hustle of sorts. In an atmosphere of heightened white fear of African Americans, this snarky term was intended to capture the emotional dynamic between Black Power advocates and white liberals, and served as an implicit indictment of both. However, how one views this dynamic is a matter of perspective.

Certainly, expressions of anger are a common feature of social movements. However, the racial dynamic of these particular sorts of displays complicates our understanding of them. For one, the notion of Mau Mauing, or to blame black activists of Mau Mauing, shifts the focus from white racism (even in its liberal forms) to black anger. This focus on black anger relies on specific racist tropes that paint both black men and women as unreasonably angry, dangerous, and violent while simultaneously depicting the white parties involved as innocent victims of black indignation rather than as active participants in liberal racism. Because these themes are all too common in American racism, discussions of emotion in race-based social movements cannot be race-neutral (see Feagin 2010, and Feagin and Harvey-Wingfield 2010 for a related analysis). Instead, these sorts of interactions have to be viewed in context.

In the context of American race relations, it is essential to recognize that white reactions to black movements are indeed emotional reactions. This is particularly important here because emotionality has tended to be studied only as it relates to groups challenging the status quo. Early theories of social movement development grew out of the distinction between “social organization,” or institutionalized social life, and “collective behavior,” characterized by crowds, riots, and mass movements (Park 1967). This distinction between rational and irrational social behavior was upheld by psychological and political science theories that attempted to explain social movements through concepts like “relative deprivation,” a term which describes the disparity between what a group has and what they feel they should have (Gurr 1970). Gurr (1968) argues that “a psychological variable, relative deprivation, is the basic precondition for civil strife of any kind, and that the more widespread and intense deprivation is among members of a population, the greater is the magnitude of strife in one or another form” (1104). In this way, these early theories tended to treat “popular protest as a form of social pathology” (Aminzade 1984:437). Despite the depiction of social movement participants as deviant and social movements as natural acts of desperation, it is through this early tradition that social movements came to be seen as both agents of social change (Blumer 1951) and the “expression of a wider process of transformation” (Della Porta and Diani 1999:5).

As a reaction to these early characterizations of protestors as irrational and emotional, sociologists spent the 1970s and 1980s attempting to correct these narratives of social movements by rationalizing collective behavior. The most significant reaction to this idea, resource mobilization theory, holds that grievances, which are relatively stable and universal, explain very little about why social movements emerge (McCarthy and Zald 1973, 1977; Zald and Ash 1966; Snyder and Tilly 1972). Because of this, the theory pays close attention to the mechanisms that facilitate action and create the possibility for a social movement, such as the availability of various types of resources, and to the organized, rational nature of social movements. This is done through two points of analysis: (1) a focus on social movement organizations rather than individual actors, which provides a less social-psychological approach, and (2) an investigation into the dynamic accounting for the emergence, development, accomplishments and decline of social movements. Specifically, resource mobilization theory pays particular attention to factors such as the availability of resources to social movement organizations and the position of individuals in social networks, thereby stressing “the rationality of participation in social movements” (Klandermans 1984:583).

Political opportunity models are a response to both collective behavior and, in some cases, resource mobilization theories. Political opportunity theorists (Tilly 1978; McAdam 1999; Tarrow 1983, 1988, 1989; Kriesi 1995; Koopmans 1993) share a focus on the relationship between institutionalized politics and social movements. These models highlight two different relationships between conventional politics and social movements. First, they are concerned with how changes in the institutionalized political arena can create openings for social movement activity. Their second concern is with the difference in social movement dynamics based on the political characteristics of the nation of movement origin (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996).

Both resource mobilization and political process models rejected the early strict social psychological explanations of social movement participation. However, some scholars argue that the pendulum has swung too far away from social psychology. This same move has also led social movements scholars away from the analysis of grievances. For example, Aminzade and McAdam (2001) argue that as a response to “questionable assumptions about irrationality which devalued the movements in which many of them had actively participated, proponents of a resource mobilization approach were typically unwilling to incorporate emotions into their analysis” (21). In this way, these scholars bought into the problematic notion that equates “rationality with legitimacy and emotion with irrationality” (21). So, in order to show the rational nature of these movements, “they ignored emotions and implicitly accepted the assumptions of rational choice theory” (21).

However, in the last twenty years sociologists have made a return to the study of emotions in social movements. Analysts have focused on how movements manipulate emotions both as a means and an end, in addition to how emotions shape the actions of movements (Jasper 2011). A bona fide subfield of social movements studies has since emerged with a focus on emotion. The study of emotion within social movements has thrown the spotlight on the importance of emotion both as a motivating force for collective action at both the individual and collective levels and as an important dynamic within movements (Aminzade and McAdam 2001).