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Holy shit this is a great, tough piece. Why do nonprofits exist? The generous answer is that society is imperfect: people have needs that the government cannot meet (and that corporations refuse to meet). But the cynical answer is that there’s money to be made in nonprofits. Not for the people actually working at them, of course; they make very little. But for their extremely wealthy patrons, the rich people who want to protect their capital from being taxed and expropriated by the government, nonprofits are not only lucrative—they’re an effective way to provide legitimacy to the ruling class. [...] Meeting the needs of millionaires is not easy. When their needs are vague and undefined—or poorly thought through and unsuited to the needs of local communities—it requires labor and stress (and ulcers) to keep them satisfied. It also requires a great deal of exploitation: the people working the hardest at nonprofits often make the least. People will work themselves to literal sickness chasing vague grant imperatives and using their dedication to The Work as a justification for their physical and mental burnout. The treatment of workers in the nonprofit industry is perhaps its most disturbing feature, and it often goes unnoticed by larger society. There is a confusion, a frustration, that arises when you don’t see society changing at the scale or speed with which you’d like it to, especially when that “change”—however vaguely defined—is your literal job. But as long as nonprofits exist, it will be this way. This is because nonprofits exist to manage the contradictions of capitalism. When you find yourself unable to do that—or unable to deal with everyone around you blindly accepting that the contradictions can only be managed, rather than changed—you simply lose your mind, or the lining of your stomach. In the absence of concrete results—and in my experience, the absence of concrete results begins to look more like the norm than the exception—you start to see the concrete function of the nonprofit sector differently. For all the good intentions it’s paved with, philanthropy is an illusion, a mirage. And it tricks you into accepting (or even embracing) the underlying fact of philanthropic giving: that rich people have a lot of surplus capital, from exploiting and immiserating thousands of lives, and they need somewhere to put it. It doesn’t matter if the millionaire is a Koch brother or an eco-friendly crusader. Vast profits, often the direct spoils of exploitation—the rightfully earned wages denied to workers, or the profits made from poisoning people’s water—are plowed right back into a system that, by design, can never alter the balance of power.

It would be naive to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds.

In the protests at Mizzou and Yale and elsewhere, students have made it clear that the status quo is unbearable. Whether we agree with these student protesters or not, we should be listening: They are articulating a vision for a better future, one that cannot be reached with complacency. … We cannot ignore what is truly being said by both groups of protesters: That not all students experience Yale equally, and not all students experience Mizzou equally. These conversations were happening well before these protests, and they will continue to happen until students are guaranteed equality of experience. They are still being forced, however, to first prove that it is worth opening a conversation about either. … Student activism is widespread, because some students are making the most of their college experience. They understand that this may very well be the last moment in their lives when they can confront real issues in an environment where they are forced to encounter people who don’t look like them, who don’t think like them, environments where change is still possible. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and protestors at campuses across the country including Yale and Mizzou are part of a robust, vital tradition that we should not overlook. Today’s student activists are doing the necessary work to ensure that the next generation that participates in the tradition of student activism will be fighting different battles. Or, perhaps, they are doing the necessary work to ensure that students, of all identities, might have a fighting chance to experience college and life beyond more equally than those who came before them.

Neither accommodation nor diversity—the preferred liberal solutions—are good answers to an intersectional critique. With this new conception of how power operates, the standards for what constitutes a safe space have increased. There’s virtually no way to create a room of two people that doesn’t include the reproduction of some unequal power relation, but there’s also no way to engage in politics by yourself. … Even most advocates will admit that literal safe space is a utopian idea. Without a unified radical movement, utopianism can look like petty intransigence or an inability (rather than refusal) to cope with the world as it is. But with insights gleaned from decades of experimentation, scholarship, and struggle, most leftists understand that in the web of power relations there is no real shelter to be found. No one can be so conscious and circumspect as to cleanse themselves of all oppressive ideology before entering a meeting or a party or a concert or classroom. As a result, the meaning of safe space has shifted again. … A safe space, despite the denotation of the phrase, is somewhere people come together and—in addition to whatever else they’re doing—wrestle with the chicken-and-egg problem of how to change themselves and the world at the same time.

Why I don't think I'm a curmudgeon for thinking the green Iran icons are a joke. "…if you believe for one minute that publicly agreeing with an echo chamber is changing anyone’s mind, behavior, or outlook, you need to stand up, locate your disused front door, walk the fuck through it, and then go spend a full (unwired) day doing something to actually help another person."