Woke Philanthrophy
Yesterday’s post was my clumsy attempt to steer the conversation (with both my readers) to a topic I am thinking about: the role of nonprofits in the great social compact. Nonprofits as an indispensable participant in both democracy and capitalism, without which democracy and capitalism would eventually crash, not of their immorality, but of their amorality. I guess. I ran across a Heritage Foundation report, of sorts, regarding the alleged danger to America, baseball, apple pie and hot dogs presented by “woke” philanthropists. The title caused me to stop scrolling: The Radicalization of Race: Philanthropy and DEI. I am not sure the publication is really a “report” as much as it is an advocacy piece decrying the progressivism that pretty much necessarily defines nonprofit anyway. I think the reportage is plain old garbage (see what I did there?) and am tempted to dismiss the authors as “privileged” (the polite academic word for “racists”). I would be wrong. We ought to give each other the benefit of our honest biases and engage the biases, not necessarily each other. Plus, I want both my readers to know they can get both sides on this blog. With that, here are some interesting excerpts:
Philanthropy and the Radicalization of Race
Despite the divisiveness, antagonism, and outright racism that CRT engenders, in the years after that fateful Wisconsin gathering in 1989 that launched CRT, major foundations began to increasingly adopt its premises. Similar to what was happening in the corporate world at the time, foundations and other actors in American society made an effort to increase “diversity,” where diversity was defined by race, sex, gender, sexuality, and disability. One such effort was the Increasing Diversity in Philanthropy Committee, which was formed in 1990 and lasted until 2015.
It then continued as the Committee for Equitable and Inclusive Philanthropy. Another initiative was the Diversity in Philanthropy Project. Begun in 2007, 50 foundations and allied leaders came together for this time-limited campaign to expand diversity in the philanthropic field. In 2010, a number of nonprofits, companies, and high-status individuals came together to form the D5 Coalition, a five-year effort to advance philanthropy’s DEI mission. Partners included the Rockefellers, the Kellogg Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Again, diversity was narrowly defined as “the demographic mix of a specific collection of people: racial and ethnic groups, LGBT populations, people with disabilities, and women. In December 2019, the consulting firm Community Wealth Partners convened 21 foundations to form a new coalition—paid for by the Kresge Foundation, which has an endowment of $4.3 billion—including the Rockefeller, Gates, Bush, Hewlett, Kellogg, and Packard Foundations. A two-day summit was called to address how to “Support Nonprofit Leaders’ DEI Capacity.” A report detailing the coalition’s takeaways stated that “DEI work…requires dismantling practices and policies in order to create space for new ways of working.” The Ford Foundation later hopped on the wagon as well by releasing its “Guidance for Engaging Grantees on DEI.” As a result of this coordination, foundations began to ask for DEI statistics from their grantees. Following the death of George Floyd in May 2020, most large foundations significantly increased their funding to DEI causes.
Responding to DEI
DEI has become the guiding principle and dominant focus today of many private foundations, corporations, and the federal government. At the heart of these multi-billion-dollar efforts are certain key assumptions: that America is systemically racist; that all white Americans harbor unconscious racism; that equal rights, meritocracy, and the law itself all reinforce a regime of white supremacy; and that the free market is at least partly to blame. The end result of these assumptions, of this worldview, is that America itself is fundamentally flawed, hopelessly unfixable, and must be radically transformed, which has long been a Marxist goal.
Many of the practices and principles of DEI violate the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act. DEI suppresses rights of some while elevating the rights of others. Numerical quotas, government race-conscious policies, and speech codes do nothing to close the real disparities of achievement, because they do not address the root causes. Simon Fraser University professor Karen Ferguson had it right when she wrote that Bundy and his men dealt with the “psycho-cultural and therapeutic issue of black identity without having to deal with the structural and material issues that initially fostered the call for black self-determination.” That is still the lethal charge against DEI. It works to eradicate all the best aspects of the American experiment that have brought prosperity and possibility to so many: the rule of law, respect for individual rights, and equal treatment under the law. DEI is leading the country to the tyranny of collective rights, where people’s fates are in the hands of elites.
dkj