Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, understands the gilded nature of philanthropy better than most. Armed with the Foundation’s $13 billion endowment, Walker invests in changemakers who challenge entrenched inequality. Although one of Manhattan’s most well-connected, Walker comes from the very poverty he now fights against. Additionally, as a gay Black man, he is often an anamolous presence among the wealthy white donors who populate the charity events and conferences he attends.
Walker recently penned an opinion piece for the New York Times titled, “Are You Willing to Give Up Your Privilege?” In it, he declares, “The old playbook — giving back through philanthropy as a way of ameliorating the effects of inequality — cannot heal what ails our nation. It cannot address the root causes of this inequality — what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”
The millions of dollars poured into philanthropy often stem from systems that perpetuate and exacerbate inequality. For instance, the H&M Foundation has donated $98 million towards education, equality, and sustainability, but the fast fashion brand is a major player in an industry that, by nature, profits from speedy, unsustainable manufacturing practices and an abuse-riddled supply chain. In 2018, H&M generated $4.3 billion in unsold merchandise and was named in reports alleging the abuse of female garment workers in Asian factories. While the company has taken steps towards sustainability, pledging to become “climate positive” by 2040 and integrating recycled materials into its clothing, these ameliorating actions cannot negate the reality that fast fashion as we know it, by nature and design, is unsustainable and unethical. Donating to causes that save the earth from money that harms the earth is both paradoxical and preposterous.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg co-founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative alongside his wife, Priscilla Chan, investing billions of dollars in its core initiatives of education, justice and opportunity, and science. Recently, Facebook came under fire for doing too little, too late to stop hate speech from proliferating on its platform, prompting the Stop Hate for Profit boycott, in which hundreds of businesses, including big-name players like Adidas and Ford, pledged to pause their advertising on Facebook until sufficient changes were enacted. The boycott is just the most recent development in Facebook’s history of scandals, from the Housing Department lawsuit alleging discriminatory advertising, to the Cambridge Analytica data breach, among a string of privacy-related issues. While some of Facebook’s billions are undeniably supporting worthy causes, the tech giant itself is a perpetrator of the very injustice it seeks to undo.
One of the most frequently touted benefits of Greek Life is members’ positive contributions to their communities. North American Interfraternity Conference (IFC) chapters raise over $20 million yearly and spend over 3.8 million hours serving their communities. According to a 2018-2019 survey, National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) members and alumni donated over $17 million and volunteered nearly 1.9 million hours. Notwithstanding individual members’ positive experiences, racial and socioeconomic exclusivity and discrimination, along with issues like hazing, sexual assault, and alcohol abuse, plague the Greek system as whole, resulting in calls for abolition across college campuses nationwide. Often, Greek organizations are bastions of social power at their respective campuses and thus inherently exacerbate existing inequalities within the student body. Greek organizations are indubitably valuable to the philanthropies they support, but at what cost to the wellbeing of those who cannot or do not partake in the system, or find themselves marginalized once they get in? Does the help outweigh the harm?
Granted, no organization is perfect, and philanthropy can be an effective and even admirable tool for businesses to give back to their communities and perhaps attempt to atone for their faults. However, the system of philanthropy itself is broken. The fate of philanthropy ultimately lies in the hands of donors, and those donors are overwhelmingly white. Ninety-two percent of foundation CEOs and 89 percent of foundation board executives are white, and, according to a 2019 report, “only about 8-9 percent of grant-making from foundations goes into communities of color [in the US].” How can philanthropy be an effective tool for dismantling racial injustice when those who experience it are largely excluded from the conversation? This imbalance of power is even more concerning in light of the convoluted tax code that advantages the rich in charitable giving and grants billionaires generous loopholes. Philanthropy gives the power for change to the most powerful individuals and perpetuates their power, even when helping the underprivileged.
Philanthropy can be a potent force for good, but it is not enough. Too often, philanthropy is offered up as a flimsy band-aid solution for the bleeding systems of American inequality. We must take a good hard look at whether our philanthropic endeavors are truly mobilizing long-term, systemic change, or whether they are feeding our cowardly comfort in marking off the convenient “good deed” checkbox. For philanthropy to work, donations must be combined with long-term radical reformation of the organizations that profit from and perpetuate inequality. H&M must fundamentally alter its fast fashion business model by substantially reducing the quantity and pace at which clothing is produced. Facebook must commit to recrafting and decisively enforcing its hate speech policies. Greek organizations must transform their organizational DNA on a national scale and examine the feasibility of reform and the expediency of abolition on a local scale. We can keep throwing our pocketbooks at the problems our profits and pleasures are causing, but philanthropy will only reach its true potential when we are bold enough to dismantle the unjust systems feeding our institutions.
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