I had a clever column worked out to open 2021, one that would detail my New Year’s resolutions to be a better grant maker. I had talked with the colleague who illustrates these dispatches for the Chronicle about the most amusing ways to show me as cleareyed and resolute.
And then came the Georgia elections and the white supremacist revolt at the Capitol. Now clever doesn’t feel relevant, and grant making seems distant.
I didn’t know what to say to my kids, or what to text back to my friends and colleagues who wrote to me on Wednesday. (How many variations of “WTF” are there?)
Watching the violent mob roam the Capitol freely, taking selfies with their Trump and Confederate flags, was so confusing as to render me silent.
A series of dispatches on grant making in the coronavirus era by Lisa Pilar Cowan, vice president of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation.
Chiefly, glaringly — I saw the lack of violence toward the white insurrectionists. My family and I kept asking each other “Where are the police?” “Where is the National Guard?” We were watching a phenomena I had never considered, even after years of talking about police brutality; we were watching “police restraint.”
It was a very public, very literal acting out of the difference between how Black people and white people are treated in the United States. It is easy to see manifestations of racism, but harder to see the lack of racist behavior. To see spaces on the Capitol grounds where there were no police, where there was no violence done to the invaders, made the invisible visible.
And now I am stuck between wishing for a world where the police would bash some of those protestors carrying Confederate flags and wearing anti-Semitic T-shirts and KKK tattoos, and focusing on a world where no one gets bashed.
Even as I was watching the news last week, another image kept playing in my head — a Twitter video of a young man who is colorblind putting on a pair of glasses that allows him to see color for the first time.
Watching his reaction of shock and joy as he experiences reds and blues and greens for the first time is incredible, and I spent a few days trying to think about what new sensation could elicit that kind of jolt in me.
Then it came to me — on Wednesday afternoon, I put on a new set of glasses and saw the constant brutal deployment and impact of systemic racism, baked into all our systems, in a way that I had never been able to see them before. The experience has allowed me to see a deeper and more insidious well of racism in America that I can never unsee. And it has made me realize how much went past me during the first 52 years of my life.
How Has My Grant Making Been Blind?
Struggling to make meaning of this, to take action where I can, I consider my work. I wonder to whom I have been invisibly showing restraint. Whom I have allowed to pass through the gates without scrutiny, because they look like me — because they seem safe?
I am not suggesting that I have been blindly funding white supremacists, but rather that my unwillingness to really see has allowed me to ignore some of the ways racism permeates every part of our society and has kept me from imagining or understanding what an antiracist world looks like. People around me — leaders around me — do have the vision. Most of them are people of color, and part of what I am learning is that we need new vision, new strategies, and new leaders to take us to that world. I am eager to follow them and to marshal the resources to support them.
It’s so hard to know what to say or do at this moment. We are so worn down, so shocked, so cold and isolated.
But before the spotlight was stolen from the first Black senator from the state of Georgia by a group of white insurgents, Senator-elect Reverend Raphael Warnock gave an amazing victory speech.
He talked about how his mother, who had picked cotton as a sharecropper in Georgia in the ’50s, had been able to vote for him as a senatorial candidate that day. To end the speech, Warnock recalled how his father “used to wake me up every morning at dawn.” He continued: “But it was still dark. It’s dark right now. But morning comes. And scripture tells us weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning. Let us rise up, greet the morning, and meet the challenges of this moment. Together, we can do the necessary work and win the future for all of our children.”
The glasses I have put on give me no joy. But the idea of following leaders like Warnock — leaders who bring their lived and learned experiences into the spotlight — instead of the withered white men standing at various podiums calling for more and worse versions of the status quo — does seem to offer a chance for joy in the morning.
Maria Mottola, executive director of the New York Foundation, illustrates these columns for the Chronicle.
