WHEN YOU’VE LOST THE NEW YORKER
The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
"In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used to tell to keep ourselves sane. Walking to lunch past the Center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs, we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King, Jr., etched into the black marble—“Until justice rolls down like waters”—and intone, in our deepest voices, “Until justice rolls down like dollars.” The Law Center had a way of turning idealists into cynics; like most liberals, our view of the S.P.L.C. before we arrived had been shaped by its oft-cited listings of U.S. hate groups...I felt self-righteous about the work before I’d even begun it.
The first surprise was the office itself....But nothing was more uncomfortable than the racial dynamic that quickly became apparent: a fair number of what was then about a hundred employees were African-American, but almost all of them were administrative and support staff—“the help,” one of my black colleagues said pointedly. The “professional staff”—the lawyers, researchers, educators, public-relations officers, and fund-raisers—were almost exclusively white. Just two staffers, including me, were openly gay.
During my first few weeks, a friendly new co-worker couldn’t help laughing at my bewilderment. “Well, honey, welcome to the Poverty Palace,” she said. . . . And the unchecked power of the lavishly compensated white men at the top of the organization—Dees and the Center’s president, Richard Cohen—made staffers pessimistic that any of these issues would ever be addressed.
An apt description. But here’s the thing: The SPLC has been an obvious fraud for 20 years or more. Why are all the usual media suspects suddenly noticing now?Plus: “We were part of the con, and we knew it.” That could apply to the press, too.---Posted by Glenn Reynolds "
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