Social Justice and the Church Lady Problem

[mark_asphodel]

As some of you who follow me on tumblr gathered, I went to a labor conference this week.  Actually, it was a labor/women's rights convention hosted by a 40-year-old labor/women's right's organization, of which I am a fairly new member.  

It was interesting.  While the individual people I met there were friendly and helpful and some were inspiring, I got a front-view seat to two of the major, major problems facing any person or group trying to advance workers' rights or women's rights these days.

1) Church Ladies are not down with the LGBTQ people

Many articles have already been written about the difficulty in framing queer issues like marriage equality as civil rights issues in the African-American community.  Many organized labor groups, particularly the ones without significant Latino or Asian-American involvement, still seem to be stuck on a "Dr. King" picture of what civil rights is about.  Now, the national AFL-CIO leadership is definitely making a point to be inclusive what with Pride@Work and President Trumka giving a specific shout-out to LGBTQ members in the presentation he recorded for our convention.  Gay rights is on the agenda nationally.  But at the grassroots level, the support from local and state leadership is most definitely mixed, and the senior generation of African-American community leaders tends to be unapologetically against "perverts and dykes."  For many of them, it's a church thing.  You can't just sway these women to the view that dykes are sisters too by informing them that their pastor is full of shit on this issue(*).  Church is their life.  Many of them are missionaries. Some of them are the pastors and reverend ministers of their congregations.  And so when a labor conference brings in a young, energetic, proudly lesbian speaker like our convention this week did, it breaks open a fissure in the ranks.  Basically, just as my local union has a senior leadership of sexist, racist, good-ol-boys who need to retire and get out of the damn way, there are other venerable rights groups out there who are about thirty years behind the times in what "rights" are about and ain't gonna embrace change until the church ladies go to their non-existent sky mansions.

2) Church Ladies are hypocrites

One of the resolutions passed yesterday was a condemnation of good ol' Walmart for their abysmal record of discrimination against female workers coupled with a commitment to aid the organizations that are fighting Walmart.  Not less than three hours later, as I was coming back from lunch, I witnessed a stream of elderly women walking from the Walmart across the street back to the casino complex where our convention was held, all of them encumbered by Walmart bags.  Every one of these fine ladies was a proud "labor sister" from our conference, and every single one that I witnessed personally was African-American.  I'm sure some of the white women there were equally hypocritical (this turned out to be far from the only occurrence of Walmart shopping among our conference goers), but given how women of color get a double whammy of discrimination in the workplace (which was, you know, discussed on the week's agenda), the idea that all these women would vote "aye" on an anti-Walmart resolution and then turn around and organize a Walmart shopping expedition is just mind-boggling.  You can't chalk this up to ignorance.  It's not like some of my friends who happily enjoy Red Lobster and Olive Garden because they don't know about the Darden Group and the class-action lawsuit against it (I was able to get Red Lobster trip nixed during the course of the convention by speaking out on this).  This is fricking Walmart.  The resolution was smack in the convention literature that every participant received.  The resolution was approved unanimously that very morning.  Maybe their lord will forgive these transgressions but I sure won't.

(To her credit, the Church Lady that runs our local chapter was appalled and saddened by the Walmart shoppers, so not every church lady is bad on this particular issue.  I just happened to catch about, oh, five percent of the entire convention and thus a large chunk of the church-lady contingent behaving badly in one go.)

But that's the kind of crap that plagues a lot of the institutions that brought about positive change forty or fifty years ago and are now trying to figure out who and what they are and how they'll survive.  The mission statement's behind the times and the organization's shot through with pious hypocrites, because times do change and hey, a lot of people are hypocrites. One of the things put forward at this convention was an ambitious plan to bring this particular organization in line with current social justice trends and the new workers' rights movement like Fight for 15 that exists outside of conventional labor strongholds.  It was shot down by the membership, but you can bet it'll be back two years from now at the next convention, because that's the only way organized labor is going to make it through another half-century.

Assuming we exist to even have another convention two years from now.

* And just about every other issue, if you ask me.  But being an atheist at these events is even less acceptable than being a dyke so I keep my mouth closed on the God thing.  Can't do much good if you invalidate your moral standing right out the gate.  When the mother of one of my friends and co-workers is the pastor called up to bless the formal dinner in the name of Our Lord Jesus, I get to smile and STFU. We're not even talking "Judeo-Christian" blessings in spite of the presence of quite a few Jewish labor leaders at the event, including some who were being generous with scholarship money and such.  Nope, Our Lord Jesus all the way, without a hint of self-awareness.

Comments

[samuraiter]

Good grief. I'd burst into flames if I were within miles of such a meeting, I suspect.

[queenlua]

I spent a few minutes trying to think of some sort of charitable potential justification for the ladies-shopping-at-Wal-Mart thing and failed.

I mean... in my hometown, Wal-Mart was quite literally the only place you could get groceries & other stuff for a good while, and that's still true of a lot of other small/moderate-sized towns in the area, so it'd be really hard to not shop at Wal-Mart even if you wanted to. (Like, I remember in high school getting kind of annoyed at a food-snob neighbor who was sighing about how she didn't understand why anyone would ever shop at that awful Wal-Mart place, because my kneejerk reaction was, "what, so everyone should drive over an hour to the nearest metro area to shop at overpriced Whole Foods, so they can turn up their nose at other people's food like you do?")

But I'm assuming this is in an area that actually does have some choice in grocers and such, or else there wouldn't really be a point in signing the anti-Walmart thing, eh :/ Disappointing.

edit: also, I had not heard of the Darden Group thing. thanks for the heads-up.

[mark_asphodel]

Walmart is seriously, truly bad. I realize many people in the rural/semi-rural US have no option, but nobody, but nobody, who claims to be any sort of workers' rights activist should set foot in that place except to make trouble. That's like catching PETA members in the fur-coat salon. The best I can say for them is they don't appear to make an especial point of treating LGBT employees any worse than they treat their employees in general, whereas some chains like Meijer treat workers better overall but do have some black marks against them in the LGBT department. Keep in mind we were all at a conference (in Reno). We were all traveling. So you're traveling, and on the last day of a conference you and two dozen friends decide to head on over to Walmart to get 2-3 shopping bags of crap apiece? What justifiable reason could they have possibly had to stock up? It's not like somebody needed to run to the store for medicine and that was the only place open at 3AM.

Some people have no option but Walmart, and that sucks-- but again, these were self-proclaimed labor activists. If they wanted a shopping trip that damn bad they could've chartered a bus. If you actually believe the words coming out of your own mouth, you make the effort. You don't waltz across the street and stock up.

[writerawakened]

That would be like finding PETA workers in the "anywhere-normal-rational-respectable-fucking-human-beings-are" shop.

[mark_asphodel]

Hah. Point taken.

People for Eating Tasty Animals, line up right here.

[thenicochan]

Living in Memphis, as you are aware, I see this type of behavior towards the GLBT community fairly often. Heck, I'm the recipient at work often enough. I can't even begin to recount the number of times I've been told that my "lifestyle choices" were sinful and that my customers would pray for me- with no apparent catalyst!

The JESUS thing is a huge problem. People like that tend to go with JESUS *is* Religion, and any other religion is foolishness/rebellion/trying to get away from GAWD.

[amielleon]

While I think the Church Lady demographic tends to align predominantly with being African American in the less affluent classes, you see many of the very same patterns of what I'd call "social piety" in affluent white Church Ladies in wealthy suburbs.

I feel like for a great number of people, religion isn't about the credo as dictated by holy books and venerated historical figures so much as it is about your community and what it believes. Except when you say you believe so-and-so because of your religion it suddenly becomes a more powerful line than "because my father thought so."

[writerawakened]

Yeah, but Walmart is rolling back prices every day! You can't beat that! (almost wrote "Walhart", whoops)

The unfortunate side-effect of many groups established to champion entirely worthy causes is the disdain and disrespect for similarly marginalized groups. It's certainly not an ubiquitous practice, but it's common enough to really bother me. African-American civil rights activists saying something homophobic or sexist, "feminist groups" making racially insensitive comments, etc.

But those are "other people", so it's okay!

[lyndis]

I've always shopped at WalMart (everything else around here is overpriced) but I can't imagine signing an anti-store anything and then going to that store. IN RENO. WHERE THERE ARE DEFINITELY OTHER OPTIONS. I just. That's amazingly douchey.

[the_geek]

It amazes me to see people talk about how everyone needs their rights, and then they themselves go off to bash other groups which are discriminated against. These sort of things kind of kill my enthusiasm for public action, as so few people really practice what they preach.

On the subject of Walmart, I remember there being this great big local political debate in my area over Walmart wanting to buy an old QFC building (the QFC itself had only lasted I think a year because there was a Safeway about a block away on the main North-South road) and everyone being against it. Of course, it did eventually get built, but it was just a plain grocery store rather than one of their superstores. Then again, I don't think that the issue was so much about people in my area being against Walmart as they were against the kind of people who generally shop at Walmart. They called my area "Snob Hill" for a reason.

[shimizu_hitomi]

Speaking of tumblr, stuff like this is what gives me mixed feelings about internet social activism. On one hand, I like that people on the internet actually have these conversations about hypocrisy and intersectionalism (even if they aren't always the most productive conversations). On the other hand, armchair activists galore...

In my limited experience, I find that similar stuff happens within volunteer organizations too. There's this really weird spectrum of talk vs. action depending on the person -- some of the most involved figures at the local level love to "organize"/plan/come up with ideas, but when it comes down to doing the actual work or actually practicing what they preach... nooooope. And Church Lady types exist even outside the Christian framework, which was kinda surprising to me though it probably shouldn't have been. It makes me wonder a lot about cultural osmosis though, because some of it manifests in very different ways, but some of it... is really quite oddly similar. /tangent