Activist Communities

Activist communities are those that seek some sort of structural change in existing social, political, or economic systems, or in some combination of those arenas. They are often distinguished from mutual-aid or self-help organizations that tend to avoid seeking political or social change. Activist movements are often categorized by the type of community in which they organize. These include communities delineated by geography (which may become involved in, for instance, neighborhood organizing), issue (typical issues being civil rights, labor, and health care), and identity (with people coming together for social activism based on their shared gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age, or disability).

Among geographically based activists in the United States, the most common type of activist community is the neighborhood organizing group. Neighborhood activists are often distinguished from neighborhood associations, which generally are not interested in structural social change. These latter groups are often focused on socialization or neighborhood preservation, including the maintenance of property values and, often, the exclusion of “undesirable elements” from the area. Neighborhood activists are more likely to be working for more equitable access to resources, such as financial capital, public services, or health care. They tend to operate in lower-income neighborhoods or neighborhoods of color. Neighborhood organizing continues to be a substantial area of activism in the United States. Geographically based activists—and neighborhood activists—are present not only in the United States but also in other nations. Just as segregation—often by class or ethnicity as much as by race—persists in other countries, geographic activism is also present. In some countries, such as the United Kingdom, neighborhood-based activists might be considered to have had more success in contributing to public policy and action.

Issue-based activists are perhaps the most common in the United States. They attempt to form communities of interest on a policy issue or set of related issues. These often are national in scope, although statewide and even citywide communities are often formed, sometimes as chapters of larger national organizations (examples include local chapters of the Sierra Club or Common Cause). In modern U.S. history, some of the most important activist communities have been issue based. These include communities that campaigned for workers' rights and that helped organize unions, the feminist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the civil rights movement, and the antiwar movement of the 1960s. Similar movements are present in the twenty-first century. Some of the newer issue-based activist communities include the antiglobalization movement, the living wage movement, and the movement in support of campaign finance reform. Similar issue-based activists exist across the globe. Antiglobalization activists, for example, are quite active in Europe, gaining particular attention for protesting against American cultural and agricultural importation, an activity perhaps epitomized by the general rejection of Euro Disney.

While not entirely new, identity-based activist communities are currently perhaps the most controversial. Identity-based activists believe that the common history, circumstances, and legacies of individuals that share a certain key trait—such as race, gender, ethnicity, or disability—require that their activism be based in such [Page 2]identities. Individuals of the same or similar identities or experiences, the argument goes, need to band together to work for change on behalf of their community. Advocates of this school of activism often argue that other approaches are too often dominated by white male leadership and perspectives. While older identitybased activist communities, such as, for example, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), often permitted and even encouraged the support of those not sharing the identity, many modern proponents of this approach do not seek such external support.

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