Stacey Abrams and Julián Castro’s recent op-ed — “It’s Open Season on Civil Rights. Philanthropy Must Not Retreat” (October 2) — brilliantly captured the need for philanthropy to forcefully fight right-wing Supreme Court victories.
Castro and Abrams note that the “field should not give in to the manufactured legal crisis by relenting on demands for racial equity” in the aftermath of the affirmative-action ruling. As someone with firsthand experience pushing back against another anti-affirmative action law, I completely agree.
I’ve spent my career fighting for racial equity under the cloud of Proposition 209 — the 1996 California law that prohibits government institutions from considering race, ethnicity, or sex in employment, contracting, or education. I’ve advised clients concerned that the law prevents them from implementing strategies to address racism, including collecting racial demographic information related to salary, establishing equity standards in the legalization of the sale of marijuana, and redoing grant-making criteria to ensure funds are accessible to a diverse pool.
I also launched San Francisco’s first Office of Racial Equity, where we learned that existing employment practices disproportionately benefited white people. In my role, I advocated that we had a responsibility to address rather than maintain these practices out of fear of being sued. Our work helped lead to the passage in 2019 of a law requiring all city departments to annually collect racial demographic information and create racial-equity action plans based on identified disparities in hiring, promotion, retention, and leadership.
The same approach must be embraced in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. As Abrams and Castro correctly point out, collective paralysis will reverse years of positive momentum.
This moment requires building on, not erasing, the progress made since the nation’s 2020 racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd. As terms such as “Black-led” and “BIPOC” began regularly appearing on grant invitations, nonprofits felt empowered to collect important demographic data across their organizations and work to ensure leadership was reflective of their client base.
Critical investments from philanthropy, especially unrestricted general operating support, helped enable such work. At my organization, the East Bay Community Law Center, we were able to make significant investments in our majority women of color work force and pass our first collective-bargaining agreement.
Public commitments to racial justice by philanthropy, such as the joint statement by major donors following the affirmative-action decision, are important and inspiring. Significant strides have been made by foundations in the past three years to diversity their staffs. Nonprofits must push funders to keep up this work, particularly those who are phasing out racial-justice grant making or have removed racial-equity language from their websites, requests for proposals, and communications.
These are unprecedented times for modern philanthropy, and they demand that grantees and donors hold each other accountable in the continuing march toward equal opportunity for all. Together we must lead with conviction rather than fear.
Zoë Polk
Executive Director
East Bay Community Law Center
