ACORN, Heal Thyself
The group's problems lie within.
It's hard to imagine the scandal that has engulfed ACORN taking place in a less media-driven age. Two self-styled moviemakers, one playing a pimp and the other his whore, go to the community organization's offices on both coasts to seek help buying a home in which the woman can ply her illegal trade. No problem, says one ACORN worker after another; just set up a phony business that looks legit and we will help you realize your dream. (Click here to follow Ellis Cose)
It's eminently watchable video in the way that Jerry Springer is watchable. You view it with a mixture of in-credulity and disdain. Is it possible, you ask yourself, that people can be so obtuse? In this era when gotcha videos quickly go viral, the filmmakers have become instant superstars. And in short order, Congress voted to cut off ACORN's federal funding, the Census Bureau banned the nonprofit from working on the 2010 census, the IRS dropped the group from its tax-assistance program, Bank of America cut its ties, and politicians fell over each other running away from the organization.
So what are we to take from this weird story? No one is seriously suggesting that ACORN is now in the brothel business. And even ACORN is not defending the dimwitted staffers caught on tape, whom it fired.
The lesson for the organization's CEO, Bertha Lewis, seems to be that ACORN is the victim of a journalistic smear. "They go after the largest community organization in the country" and make it "a diversion to the failed eight years of the previous administration," charges Lewis. ACORN's employees, after all, committed no crime—"not one piece of paper was filed." Indeed, staffers in some offices had the good sense to throw the wacky couple out, but the "doctored" videotapes captured none of that.
For all its recent troubles, ACORN (which stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) has done a lot of good work. The group played a key role in getting relief to Katrina victims and in highlighting the issue of voter suppression. It has made homeowners of untold numbers of poor people. But it's easy to forget that when the organization seems awash in impropriety. Last year the brother of its founder was accused of embezzling nearly $1 million from the group. And then ACORN was accused (unjustly for the most part, it says) of voter-registration fraud.
Lewis, who was named CEO in the wake of the embezzlement scandal, acknowledges that ACORN's management system has been weak, but claims the organization was fixing that problem. "We were already doing some hard self-examination" when this latest scandal hit, she says.
That self-examination seems not to have gone far enough. To dismiss the actions caught on tape as just "a handful of folks who did not live up to our professional standards" (as Lewis does) is to gloss over the likelihood that their actions reflect a more systemic problem. In its essence, ACORN is a group of outsiders fighting against the powerful. If a bank takes people's homes, ACORN's first impulse is to urge them to take the homes back, even if that act of civil disobedience puts them on the wrong side of the law. Combine that impulse with a predisposition to identify with marginalized people (including prostitutes), and it's hardly surprising that the undercover filmmakers elicited a sympathetic response. Unfortunately, the staffers' misplaced compassion made them oblivious to the difference between right and wrong.
ACORN's defenders argue that any government money the group might have misused is minuscule compared with the waste and fraud perpetrated by huge contractors such as Halliburton—an argument that, though true, is beside the point, since Halliburton's credibility, unlike ACORN's, has little to do with its moral standing. Similarly, the question of whether the tapes were edited with prejudice is beside the point, since there is no approach to editing that would make aiding illegal-brothel owners OK.
The moral of this scandal is not that ACORN is composed of bad people, but that it's too forgiving of its own failings. That it's squarely in the sights of partisan holy warriors hungry for its scalp no doubt reinforces that tendency. But in the end, ACORN's ruin may not be the radical right, which can hurt its funding but can't take away its 400,000-plus members. Its biggest problem may be itself, and its inability to see its own potential.
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Ellis Cose, author, columnist and contributing editor (since 1993) for Newsweek magazine and former chairman of the editorial board and editorial page editor of the New York Daily News, began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times—becoming, at the age of 19, the youngest editorial page columnist ever employed by a major Chicago daily. Cose, who is also an independent radio producer, is a popular campus lecturer and public speaker.
In addition to serving as a columnist, editor and national correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, Cose has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today (where he has also served as an occasional columnist and member of the board of contributors) and a member of the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press. He has also been a fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, a senior fellow and director of energy policy studies at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political Studies, and a consultant to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Cose's Bone to Pick: On Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge, was published by Atria (a Simon and Schuster imprint) in April 2004. The book is a wide-ranging look at a number of societies—the United States, Ghana, South Africa, East Timor, and Peru among them—and their ways of coping with cruelty and pain. The Washington Post had this to say: "The complex questions surrounding 'forgiveness, reconciliation, reparation, and revenge' probably require a scholarship of jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology, history and literature. This is the kind of ambitious enterprise that the world's great religions deal with. But Cose meets the challenge, and Bone to Pick ranges over centuries of contested histories, across five continents, spinning individual tragedies in and out of collective traumas, seeking the nature of 'forgiveness, albeit as a proxy for a larger set of values.' … The truth may be a prized (and politicized) commodity in the quest for social justice, but as Cose observes, quoting Czech novelist Milan Kundera, 'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' Bone to Pick is a timely reminder of that axiom and a useful addition to the canon of that struggle."
Cose's The Envy of the World, an in-depth essay on the state of black men in America, was published by Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon and Schuster) in 2002 and has appeared on several best-seller lists, including the Essence magazine list, where it was number one. Newsweek featured the book on its cover and National Public Radio produced a special a program based on it. Kirkus Reviews called The Envy of the World, "A slender volume with a substantial and significant message." The Washington Post described it as "lucid, eloquent and deeply personal book." The Chicago Tribune called its author "a gifted, rhapsodic essayist." "Cose charts both an urgently argued history of black masculinity and a moving and nuanced snapshot of where it is now," declared Publishers' Weekly. The paperback edition was published in January 2003.
In May 2004 the Rockefeller Foundation issued Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education—a major report authored by Cose on the legacy of the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision and the current challenges facing American educators. The report was the basis of a Newsweek cover feature and for a David Broder column and other stories in the national press. In November 2006, the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC's Annenberg School published Cose's Killing Affirmative Action: Would ending it really result in a better, more perfect Union? That report, featured in several newspaper and in Newsweek magazine, examined California's 10-year experience living with Proposition 209, the measure that ended affirmative action in the public sector in California.
Cose's best-selling The Rage of a Privileged Class, a book-length essay on race in America, was published by HarperCollins in January 1994. It was featured as a Newsweek cover story and described by The New York Times Book Review as a "disciplined, graceful exposition of a neglected aspect of the subject of race in America." His A Man's World (published by HarperCollins in June 1995), was featured in a front page review in The New York Times Book Review. The Washington Post called it "a valuable, cogent and well-written contribution to an enormously complex subject."
Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (published in January 1997 and also excerpted in Newsweek) explored America's continuing obsession with race. The New York Times Book Review called it "a book this country desperately needs, one with genuine healing potential," and included Color-Blind among its best book of the year recommendations for 1997. Cose edited an essay collection entitled The Darden Dilemma published by HarperCollins in March 1997. His debut novel, The Best Defense, was published by HarperCollins in September 1998 ("a formidable first novel...crisp, fast-paced and engaging. In a genre glutted with lightweight fare, The Best Defense reaches higher"— The Seattle Times).
Cose is also the author of A Nation of Strangers, a history of American immigration, published by William Morrow and Co. in 1992 and of The Press, published by Morrow in 1989. He is the author of Energy and the Urban Crisis (1979) and the editor of Energy and Equity: Some Social Concerns (1978), both published by the Joint Center for Political Studies. He also wrote The Rebirth of Community Power, published by Westview Press: 1983.
At the Institute for Journalism Education (at the University of California, Berkeley), Cose designed and directed a widely quoted study on journalism careers published by IJE: The Quiet Crisis: Minority Journalists and Newsroom Opportunity (1985). He also instituted and served as inaugural director of IJE's Management Training Center at Northwestern University.
In his capacity as president of Ellis Cose, Inc. Cose has produced, written and hosted the pilot for a multimedia documentary series: "Against the Odds." The radio project (which has received funding from the Ford Foundation and will be distributed by Public Radio International) profiles individuals who have overcome tremendous adversity. It aspires to provide continuing and better coverage—in public radio but also on the web and in other media, including print—of people and communities often relegated to the margins of society. It also aims to stimulate thinking on how they, and their respective societies, can overcome that marginalization. The pilot focuses on a young man from a refugee camp in northern Kenya who, studying by the light of a rechargeable lamp, managed to get himself into Princeton University.
Cose has appeared on The Today Show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC Evening News, Good Morning America, the PBS "Time to Choose" election special, Charlie Rose, CNN's Talk Back Live, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has been interviewed for British, Brazilian and Canadian television. He is also a judge for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Cose has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and numerous journalism awards—including the University of Missouri medal for career excellence and distinguished service in journalism, two Clarion awards, and four National Association of Black Journalists first place awards. He was also named the 2002 winner of the New York Association of Black Journalists' lifetime achievement award, winner of the 2003 award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists as well as the winner of two New York Association of Black Journalists' first place 2003 awards for commentary and magazine features. In 2004 Cose was named the first recipient of the newly inaugurated annual Vision Award from the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. In 2006 he won a Unity award for commentary and also shared in a first place award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
A Chicago native, Cose holds a master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy from George Washington University. He is married to Lee Llambelis, former legal director for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and current director of intergovernmental relations for the Attorney General of New York. He has a daughter, Elisa Maria.
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