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January 8 - January 10, 2021
Humility is something we could stand to see a lot more of among those of us who control the wealth of the world. Humility is not the same thing as modesty or false modesty. Humility is characterized by an accurate sense of self—assessing not just our weaknesses but also our privileges and strengths, being honest with ourselves about both. The root of the word is related to the soil, like the word “humus.” Humility literally means being close to the ground.
My central argument is that what ails philanthropy at its core is colonialism. Almost without exception, funders reinforce the colonial division of Us vs. Them, Haves vs. Have Nots, and mostly white saviors and white experts vs. poor, needy, urban, disadvantaged, marginalized, at-risk people (take your pick of euphemisms for people of color).
All my relations—Mitakuye Oyasin, as the Lakota say, meaning we are all related, connected, not only to each other humans but to all the other living things and inanimate things and the planet, and also the Creator. The principle of All My Relations means that everyone is at home here. Everyone has a responsibility in making things right. Everyone has a role in the process of healing, regardless of whether they caused or received more harm. All our suffering is mutual. All our healing is mutual. All our thriving is mutual.
As the philosopher Derek Rasmussen put it: “What makes a people indigenous? Indigenous people believe they belong to the land, and non-indigenous people believe the land belongs to them.”
I use the term “white supremacy” instead of “racism” because it explicitly names who in the system benefits and—implicitly—who bears the burden. One of the tactics of domination is to control the language around the perpetrator’s bad behavior. To call the phenomenon “racism” makes it abstract and erases explicit mention of the one who profits from the dynamic. So when I say “white supremacy” it doesn’t just mean the KKK and Identity Evropa and other hate groups.
At its height in the early 1920s (not very long ago!), the British Empire governed close to a fifth of the world’s population and a quarter of the world’s total land.9 When in 2014 a poll among British citizens finds that 59 percent feel that their colonial activities are a source of pride, outnumbering those who feel colonization was a source of shame by three to one, that is white supremacy. When half of those polled state they believe the countries that were colonized were better off for being colonized, that’s white supremacy, alive and kicking, in the twenty-first century.10
Academics who study colonization distinguish between external or exploitation colonization—in which the focus is on extracting goods like tea, silk, or sugar, or resources like human labor, coltan, or oil, in order to increase the wealth and power of the colonizer—and internal colonization, which seeks to manage and control people inside the borders of the empire, using tools like schooling, policing, segregation, surveillance, and divestment. These two kinds of colonialism can and often do coexist. Violence and exploitation are always part of the process. The mantra of colonizers is divide,
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settlers cannot be considered immigrants because immigrants are expected to obey the laws of the land when they arrive, while settlers make their own new laws of the land.
The relatively new field of epigenetics studies how trauma that our ancestors experienced can literally be passed down, attached to our DNA. An essay in a 2013 issue of Discover magazine described it: Like silt deposited on the cogs of a finely tuned machine after the seawater of a tsunami recedes, our experiences, and those of our fore-bears, are never gone, even if they have been forgotten. They become a part of us, a molecular residue holding fast to our genetic scaffolding.20
What we can focus on with decolonization is stopping the cycles of abuse and healing ourselves from trauma. In this way we expand our possibilities for the future. We must heal ourselves by each taking responsibility for our part in creating or maintaining the colonial virus. We must identify and reject the colonized aspects of our culture and our institutions so that we can heal. In healing we eradicate the colonizer virus from society: instead of divide, control, exploit, we embrace a new paradigm of connect, relate, belong.
The irony that wealth made from cigarettes is being used to improve health is mostly lost on the community, eager to get a piece of the pie.
Colonial, white supremacist organizational practices seem inevitable because they were so universally adopted over the next centuries, and they still govern the great majority of our institutions, but they were design choices.
The statistics are dismal regarding the number of white men vs. Others inside the ivory tower institutions controlling wealth. Three-fourths of foundations’ full-time staff are white.14 According to the D5 Coalition’s 2016 report State of the Work, fewer than a third of program officers (32.3 percent) and about 8 percent of foundation CEOs are people of color.15 Only 3 percent of philanthropic institutions are led by Black chief executives, with even more dismal representation for other races and ethnicities.16
Up until now, diversity and inclusion tactics have been about getting different kinds of people in the door, and then asking them to assimilate to the dominant white colonizer culture. But the issue is not recruitment of diverse humans—the “pipeline” focus of the past, laying a seat at the table, as is often said—the issue is creating a culture of respect, curiosity, acceptance, and love. It’s about fundamentally changing organizational culture, what constitutes acceptable behavior, and the definitions of success and leadership. It’s about building ourselves a whole new table—one where we
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For a long time funders have also leaned away from general operating support—always the most helpful type of grant because it can be applied to all facets of an organization’s work as opposed to a single program—although this has finally been shifting in recent years.
The basis of traditional philanthropy is to preserve wealth and, all too often, that wealth is fundamentally money that’s been twice stolen, once through the colonial-style exploitation of natural resources and cheap labor, and the second time through tax evasion. Mostly white saviors and experts use this hoarded wealth to dominate and control—obviously or subtly—the seekers and recipients of those funds.
Over the years I’ve seen really terrible behavior between people of color within philanthropy, I believe because the space for us feels so limited. Inside these privileged, powerful places that are almost entirely white, occasionally a “designated space” opens up for you as a person of color, a token. Quite possibly you’ve never had access to power and all of a sudden, you’re going to these fancy dinners and having meetings with CEOs and mayors. There is a sense of specialness and scarcity, that there’s only a few of us who get in the door, and so you want to hold on to your spot and to the
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With yourself, internalized oppression may manifest as inferiority, inadequacy, self-hatred, self-invalidation, self-doubt, isolation, fear, feelings of powerlessness, and despair. You might drive yourself into the ground in a quest for perfection and acceptance, or the opposite, you might throw in the towel and stop showing up for school or for work. You might develop compulsive behaviors, eating disorders, addictions. You might walk around loudly protesting that exploitation and oppression of people like yourself is a total myth. You might get stuck in one abusive relationship after another.
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Internalized oppression limits us just as much as the oppression coming from someone else. It limits the thoughts we can think, the dreams we can dream, the actions we can take, the futures we can create. It is an aspect of trauma we must heal from, in order to stop the cycles of division, exploitation, and hurt.
The lesson is that thriving is not actually about the leader, it’s about the whole flock. Everyone has the potential to lead, and leadership is about listening and being attuned to everyone else. It’s about flexibility. It’s about humility. It’s about trust. It’s about having fun along the way. It is more about holding space for others’ brilliance than being the sole source of answers, more about flexible shape-shifting to meet the oncoming challenges than holding fast to a five-year strategic plan.
I am frequently asked, What does decolonized leadership look like? Compassionate, empathetic, vulnerable leaders? Servant leaders? Leaders who listen? Yes, and it’s not about the individual. We have to shift from our obsession with individual leaders to a focus on organizational design, which tends to be taken for granted and invisible in most of our institutions.
firmly believe that integrating my Native heritage has contributed to my resilience when I went on to new roles within philanthropy to encounter even greater challenges. As I’ve faced off with more overseers, saviors, and my own internalized oppression, I’ve been able to call upon the aspects of myself that are Lumbee, that are the Leading Bird. As humanity faces all kinds of challenges that have come from the separation worldview—the devastation of the planet, the hate and fear between different religions and races and political ideologies—cultivating integration will be key to healing and
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Some will say that the colonial system of wealth consolidation based on white supremacy has caused so much damage and suffering and is so intrinsically rotten that anything related to it, including the ostensibly altruistic worlds of philanthropy or aid, cannot be fixed, cannot be trusted, should not be saved. Those voices would burn the system to the ground and start fresh. I empathize with that perspective, yet I believe there are parts of the system worth holding on to. The both/and stance is how Native Americans have survived colonization. Evolution occurs both by holding on to the
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Not sure I agree with this...
Stephen Jenkinson, a white Canadian trained in theology at Harvard, best known for his writing and speaking about his work with people who are dying, has also reflected profoundly on what it is to be a non-Indigenous, a settler. He calls it being an “orphan,” a term that includes all the people uprooted from their ancestral homes for whatever reasons, whether it was by choice or not. The European settlers who came to the Americas are orphans, but so are the slaves they brought over, and so are the people lured to America’s shores in recent decades by the promise of work, wealth, and the
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Apologies are due for how that wealth was maneuvered out of appropriate taxation—off shore, into havens, into foundations—and shirked its responsibility in paying for roads, bridges, public schools, firefighters, eldercare, etc.
In the United States and in other nations, the philanthropic community and the financial community, especially those in social finance, could adopt a declaration just like this, and even spearhead the creation of Truth and Reconciliation Committees. I would love to hear funders acknowledge the reality of the situation around wealth, to say, “This is not our money. This wealth was created on the backs of Native people, whose role was never compensated and never acknowledged. This wealth was made on the backs of enslaved Africans. This wealth was made with stolen resources on stolen land with
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To prioritize relationship means that cultivating strong, authentic, caring human connection is valued over and above returns on investments and measurable results. It means recognizing that rather than the cash, relationships are an institution’s greatest asset, even for one that is focused on money.
What if funders moved from hoarding resources and operating in obscurity to becoming transparent, accountable, and participatory? Rather than the formality of professionalism, it would rely on the wisdom of the community. Rather than dinosaur-style “command-and-control” methods that are based in scarcity and separation, funders would embrace abundance and trust.
Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy and the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, explains “proximity” as “Get close to the things that matter, get close to the places where there is inequality and suffering, get close to the spaces where people feel oppressed, burdened, and abused. See what it does to your capacity to make a difference, see what it does to you.”2
it’s called participatory budgeting. In Porto Alegre, Brazil, where the idea was born some 25 years ago, as many as 50,000 residents vote on how to spend public money each year. New York and Boston have experimented with it. And under the Obama administration, participatory budgeting became an option for determining how to spend community development block-grant money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.7
The opposite of investment, divestment campaigns put pressure on investors to get rid of stocks, bonds, or investment funds that are supporting that unhealthy, unethical, or downright evil activity. Divestment activists have successfully demanded that municipalities, universities and colleges, religious organizations, retirement funds, and other institutions stop funding the bad stuff. As we saw with the South African divestment campaign, it can really work. By the mid-1980s, 22 countries, 90 cities, and 155 campuses had pulled their funding from companies that did business in South Africa,
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Misson-related investing
So, to repeat: there needs to be total transparency around where our assets are invested and those assets must be 100 percent mission-aligned, meaning not just do-no-harm but invested in decolonization, in order to heal divides and restore balance.
He analyzed the grantmaking of the MacArthur Foundation, the largest funder in Chicago. “They have $7 billion in assets, and follow the 5 percent payout rule. Out of the $57 million that they give in Chicago, by their own records—I used their own information from their website—only $341,000 went to Black-led, Black-serving organizations.”3
Decolonizing wealth is, at its essence, about closing the racial wealth gap. Poverty is the product of public policy and theft, facilitated by white supremacy.
The institutions of philanthropy as a whole could take 10 percent of their assets—10 percent tithed from each foundation in existence—and establish a trust fund to which Native Americans and African Americans could apply for grants for various asset-building projects, such as home ownership, further education, or startup funds for businesses. This reparations tithing among foundations could happen right now, without legislation, as a demonstration of commitment from the philanthropic community. No specifications around how that money is spent, no reporting. No strings attached. Right now.
Resources need to be placed in funding pools where activists can be central to the decision-making process, and funds need to be structured so they can flow to the emerging landscape of self-organized actions rather than just through formal, pre-existing organizations.
Almost 15 years in the field have shown me that actual philanthropists—those engaged in acts of love for humanity, like my mother—are much more prevalent in the regular population, and only rarely found inside the field’s formal institutions: the foundations. Honestly, the vast majority of foundations have no right to call what they do philanthropy. The word isn’t egoanthropy, expertanthropy, or ROI-anthropy. But in the field, instead of love of humanity, there is a lot of the opposite: ego, greed, fear, blame, and disrespect.
We don’t call it altruism when a mother stays awake all night by her child’s bedside. We don’t even call it altruism when a home care worker stays way beyond overtime, until the hurricane has blown over, to ensure the safety of her elderly charge. We expect certain kinds of people to make sacrifices. Apparently we reserve the term altruism for the privileged, fortunate, entitled people for whom self-sacrifice is a stretch, is unexpected.
When you look more closely, altruism is actually a fundamental reflection of the separation paradigm, the Us vs. Them mindset. Linguistically it’s literally about Other-ing—the word comes from the Latin root alter, “other.” Altruism also is a linear concept: it moves in one direction, from the Have to the Have Not, a one-way flow of resources. Altruism is the poster child for white saviors. The Native worldview shifts the focus from altruism to reciprocity. Reciprocity is based on our fundamental interconnection—there is no Other, no Us vs. Them, no Haves vs. Have Nots. Reciprocity is the
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The Native principle of reciprocity is where the white colonizers and settlers got the concept of “Indian giver.” Natives expressed that any gift was given within the expectation of an ongoing relationship, the idea that I give you this because I know you would (and will, at some point) do the same for me. Mutual dependence is necessary for social well-being. We are symbiotic. All of our flourishing is mutual. The white people got all holier-than-thou about it, how a gift isn’t actually a gift unless there’s no expectation of return. But the cyclical nature of reciprocity is actually the truth
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