As James Baldwin tells us, “People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”
Police are captured on video murdering black people. When people rise up in protest, they are brutally attacked by militarized police. Journalists are violently targeted for doing their job of reporting on this uprising. And all the while, political leaders fan the flames, inciting violence and dismissing the righteous anger of those in the streets.
Today is a day for all of us in philanthropy, most particularly those of us who are white, to hold ourselves and our institutions to account. We must take responsibility for our continued complicity in white supremacy and take hold of this moment to bring change now.
While we enjoy the comforts of our positions, we let the organizations doing the real work every day for decades limp along with crumbs from the philanthropic table.
We reinforce the white supremacist notions of merit by insisting that leadership exists only if it comes in a form we recognize and respect, rather than acknowledging that leadership takes many forms –– and it is not our role to define them.
We insist that knowledge is the purview of the academy, or at least those educated and anointed by elite institutions, rather than the product of the experiences of people facing oppression.
We lie to ourselves and say that small black-led organizations are “not ready” for larger grants that would allow them to blossom into the powerful entities they can and should be. We trap these organizations in a painful cycle of applications and reviews while outsiders, usually white “professionals,” dictate strategy and solutions.
And we do all of this in service to our own power. We hide behind process and procedure to ensure that grantees are always in the position of supplicant, always at a disadvantage because of the opacity of our processes; always held at a distance from where the decisions are made.
No Excuses
Whether we do this intentionally or not is irrelevant. We cannot feign ignorance in the face of constant criticism and feedback from the people on the ground. Ignorance of intention is not an excuse for outcome, and we are seeing the outcome of our participation in racist systems on the streets every day and night.
The history of philanthropy is not, by and large, a history of the pursuit of justice and equity. Many of our institutions are a byproduct of the accumulation of wealth derived from the theft of land and labor, made off the backs of working people, sustained by a taxation system that protects the interests of the wealthy above the interests of society. For these ongoing oppressions, which have fueled the anger erupting on our streets, philanthropy shares culpability.
From within the walls of philanthropy and from without, we have been called out as fundamentally unjust institutions. We have had so many opportunities to get this right, but persist in making shortsighted decisions, bound by the limitations of our own assumptions and experience.
History Lessons
Historically, when we could have led, we made tragically wrong turns. Philanthropy supported urban-renewal programs throughout the ’50s and ’60s that devastated communities of color in the name of so-called progress.
During the civil-rights movement, philanthropy made funding available for the fight to desegregate schools, but not to end lynching and state-sanctioned violence, forcing movement leaders to narrow their focus.Foundations offered short-term funding in response to high-profile incidents like the Watts uprising in 1965, but that support quickly fizzled out. Just six years ago, when militarized police terrorized protestors in Ferguson, philanthropy opted for rapid-response grants, rather than long-term commitments to advance calls for an end to racial bias in our criminal-justice system.
The events across the country in recent days should convince us that our approach is immoral and insufficient. The structure of much of our grant making is designed to protect institutions in perpetuity by hoarding money that could be put to use right here, right now. Until we see past our own comfort and agree to give over resources and the power that goes with them, we are collaborators in systemic racism.
Now is not the time for another review or another survey or another toothless effort to promote change. Now is the time to fundamentally decide whether we are prepared to do what is necessary by committing the resources in our control, make amends, and begin building a just world.
Lori Bezahler is CEO of the Edward W. Hazen Foundation.
