Color of Change’s Black Joy Organizing

The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views of the SNF Agora Institute or Johns Hopkins University.

Introduction

The phrase Black Lives Matter emphasizes the humanity and dignity of Black life and stands in contrast to the steady stream of media images and lived experiences of Black suffering, often at the hands of police and other state agents. As with many media images, these images are double-sided: while they have helped catalyze activism for police accountability, their recirculation has also been retraumatizing for some Black people. Activists have pushed back with stories and images using the hashtags #BlackJoy, #BlackGirlMagic, and #BlackBoyJoy. As part of this push, the national racial justice organization Color of Change (COC) has focused its aesthetics and culture on Black joy in order to offer a vision of the future the organization is fighting for. The organization’s big-picture aim is to accomplish “change that Black people can feel” in all aspects of their life, from when they go to work to when they turn on the TV, log onto social media, or interact with law enforcement.¹ In keeping with a wide-reaching goal of Black joy, COC has an equally holistic theory of change that covers many issues, ranging from economics to media to electoral justice.

As part of the long history of civil rights organizing for racial justice in the United States, COC emerged in the mid-2000s to take advantage of the new possibilities of the internet for social change work. In the decade since, the organization built an email list of millions of members who signed petitions aimed at corporate accountability, police reform, and other issues.

The organization’s digital savvy achieved a massive scale with an ability to mobilize millions to action. However, when COC began focusing on criminal justice reform specifically, it found that the strategies that had been successful in pressuring corporations weren’t as effective at holding elected officials accountable, so it pivoted to a new electoral strategy aimed at putting more progressive district attorneys and prosecutors in office. COC used its expertise at mobilizing large numbers of online subscribers to action and translated that into mobilizing Black voters to show up to elections in 2016. This new electoral organizing included in-person events such as textathons and door knocking, requiring COC to expand from its digital-first approach into offline organizing.

Ultimately, COC was successful at mobilizing Black voters, but this was unsurprising given the expertise it had built through past campaigns. The organization’s focus on scale had served it well in reaching short-term, high-impact goals such as increasing Black voter turnout, a high priority for the Democratic Party establishment. But scale appeared to not be enough to achieve Black joy and build a political home for Black people. Instead, a focus on depth through long-term, face-to-face relational organizing held out the possibility of more holistic social transformation to promote Black joy. However, a pivot to build deeper relationships with members would require huge investment in new skills, strategies, and structures within the organization. This could be risky because the payoff of a depth approach would only be visible much later. What are the benefits and drawbacks of a scale approach versus a depth approach for a national racial justice organization? Which would best meet COC’s aims?

Learning Objectives for This Case Study

After reading this case study, you should be able to:

• Understand the distinction between scale and depth as different approaches to achieving social change.
• Identify and compare possible strategies and structures that support scale versus those that promote depth.
• Analyze and discuss tradeoffs of these strategies and structures to gain an appreciation of the complex choices that leaders of social movement organizations make.
• Learn about the concept of “Black joy” and its role in movements seeking to advance racial justice and dismantle white supremacy.