White Courtesy Telephone

Equity and Philanthropy

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Editor’s note: Guest blogger Chris Cardona worked for eight years in philanthropic affinity groups and is chair of the advisory board for the NYC Venture Philanthropy Fund, a new giving circle that supports NYC-based social entrepreneurs in developing innovative solutions to persistent social problems.  In this post, he riffs on the effects of diversifying the ranks of professional philanthropoids …

“Equity and philanthropy” was the theme of a convening for emerging leaders of color in philanthropy hosted last week by the AIM Alliance, a partnership of three philanthropic-studies academic programs in Arizona, Indiana, and Michigan.  I walked away with mixed feelings.  My colleagues are doing important work, and more and more academic centers are taking the challenge of forming philanthropic skills.  But this discussion remains in its infancy.  We are far from understanding the causal connection between greater representation of diverse groups in philanthropy and more grantmaking dollars flowing (or not) to these nonprofits.

For example, the numbers tell us that the representation of diverse communities on the staffs of foundations has risen since the early 80s, though not on pace with their growth in the population. The level of giving to diverse communities has remained stagnant at levels far below proportionality.

Representation of diverse communities increases, giving to them does not. Doesn’t look good, eh?

But here’s the thing: The growth in representation among people of color has been concentrated at the program and support levels.  At the CEO and trustee levels, it’s largely business as usual (with the important exception of white women making inroads as CEOs).  So people of color continue to be underrepresented in the key decision-making roles.

It’s involvement in decision-making that we need to be pushing on.  From diversity we move to equity: the point is not just to have more diverse people in philanthropy, but for more grant dollars to flow to diverse communities. And from equity we move to democracy: the point is not just for more grant dollars to flow to diverse communities, but for members of these communities, the direct beneficiaries, to be involved in the process of decision-making. That’s democratizing philanthropy, and it’s where advocates for diversity can have the most long-term impact.

Black Courtesy, White Courtesy: The Great ARNOVA Race Debate

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Editor’s note: Two weeks ago an ARNOVA member set off a campfire of controversy by warmly recommending the White Courtesy Telephone blog to his colleagues.  For those of you unfamiliar with the group, ARNOVA is an association of extremely intelligent people who study the nonprofit sector.  WCT investigative reporter Rachel Tension was able to obtain a transcript of the highly charged ARNOVA discussion, parts of which are reproduced below.  (We changed the participants’ names because we were too lazy to ask their permission to use their real names.)  In Washington, DC, it’s dog eat dog.  In academia, it’s the opposite, so we were frankly hesitant to approach the subject without some professional assistance.  We invited WCT semiotician-on-retainer, Monique Nescafé, to help interpret the transcript for us.  Dr. Nescafé’s work for the past several years has focused on neomaterialist narratives in the novels of Jennie Adams.  This is her first guest post with WCT …

I am so very happy to be invited to write for the White Telephone of Courtesy, and especially to comment on the post-capitalist discourse of ARNOVA members.  They say the American mind is closed.  No, my friends, he is wide open, like the pore of some gigantic sweat gland.

Consider this small exchange:

Alas, … I find the name [White Courtesy Telephone] unfortunate. It may indeed be useful but the title is off-putting.
—Betty

I am in the process of considering the title for my upcoming book, so I have titles on my mind.  Can you clarify what it is about the title of the White Courtesy Telephone blog that makes it off-putting? …
—Dorothy

I think the title of “white courtesy” gives the impression that there is something else possible like “black courtesy”—i.e. that there are disparate courtesies for different groups. Or even worse—that there is no other courtesy other than white courtesy.  I have been involved in discussions with other groups who would therefore find the title offensive. Unless of course you mean it ironically (like we don’t have white courtesy).  At the very least, I do not actually understand what “white courtesy” means.
—Betty

In her brilliant rejoinder,  Betty lays bare the racial insensitivity of the White Courtesy Telephone editors.  This is not in dispute: these editors often make light of subjects that would be better treated with reverential silence.  I applaud Betty.  Her act of problematization, of affirming a posttextual paradigm of reality—the impression of a racialized there-for-me—is, in my view, an intellectual tour de force.

How does she do it?  She describes herself as being in a superposition of affective eigenstates: while it’s true that she feels “put off,” she simultaneously postpones her feelings of offense as she considers an ironic reading of “white courtesy.”  She is put off, but she is not quite yet put off.  (A monk asks Dongshan Shouchu, “What is Buddha?” Dongshan answers, “Three pounds of flax.”)  And although Betty does not actually understand what “white courtesy” means, she complains about the phrase anyway.  If confusion is the first step to knowledge, then Betty is clearly very knowledgeable.

Betty also brilliantly presences the elided contextuality of the ARNOVA discourse by referring to “other groups” that would find the blog’s name offensive.  This kind of offense-by-proxy is the mark of a generous individual, willing to be offended not only for herself but on behalf of others as well.

And so, what is it ultimately that puts the “white” in White Courtesy Telephone?  Another ARNOVA commentator chimes in:

… we know words make a difference, so what I’m interested in is: why did the creators of white courtesy telephone pick that name, rather than, say, ‘black courtesy telephone,’ or just plain old ‘courtesy telephone’?

Was it in order to prompt this very discussion?

Or do white courtesy telephones have a special connotation not shared with courtesy telephones of other colours?

I may be exposing my ignorance here—but that’s because I’m ignorant.
—Nigel

Did Monsieur Ruesga, when he chose the name White Courtesy Telephone, choose it in order to “prompt this very discussion”?  It is possible, n’est-ce pas?  He might very well have anticipated the ARNOVA exchange as a sommelier anticipates a Montrachet 1978 from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.  How delicious, to inquire after coloured telephones through the fog of a fine wine.  While these coloured telephones may have a special significance, we will henceforth, in deference to our subject, refer to them as telephones of colour.

Children in Detention

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The mood in House 5 is somber.  Eight children ranging in age from 14 to 17, three of them girls, sit patiently as a young lawyer reviews their rights.  Several days or weeks earlier, the children, unaccompanied by family members, had been arrested at different parts of the U.S.–Mexico border attempting the dangerous crossing.  They were fleeing the poverty of their home countries.  They had come for work or to be reunited with their parents.

“How many of you are from El Salvador?” the lawyer asks them in Spanish.  Four children raise their hands.  “How many from Guatemala?”  Three more hands go up.

One young boy who looks a little taller and fairer than the others explains as best he can that he’s Romani—a Gypsy—but also speaks a little Romanian.  The advocate assures him he’ll be briefed later that day in his own language.  The boy neither smiles nor frowns, but folds his arms and looks past the pink and blue curtains into the brightly lit courtyard outside the window.  His eyes focus on a distant point as he struggles to piece together the meanings of the few words of Spanish he can recognize.

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The children’s detention center in Phoenix is a series of squat, cinder block buildings with an adjoining soccer field and a small swimming pool, surrounded by a large metal fence.  The facility is managed by Southwest Key Programs, an Austin-based nonprofit.  Staff members, most of them women, do their best to care for the 130 children in their charge.

One of the most striking aspects of this facility is the complete absence of any Mexican children.  According to Aryah Somers, a staff attorney with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, there’s a “gentleman’s agreement” between Mexico and the United States that all Mexican nationals apprehended at the border will be immediately returned to Mexico.  According to reports, it’s common for unaccompanied children to be dropped off in Mexican border towns in the middle of the night and left to fend for themselves.

Before coming to this facility, non-Mexican children might have spent days or even weeks in border jails.  Children have reported being deliberately mistreated while in Border Patrol custody.  According to the Florence Project, these children

are handcuffed, forced to sleep on the floor without blankets or pillows, denied medical treatment, and verbally and physically abused.  Children report that they are given only one piece of bread in the morning and a small taco at night, and then punished when they say they are hungry and ask for more food.

It’s worth noting here that only two countries—the United States and Somalia—have failed to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

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Robert Putnam’s “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century”

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1.  In case you haven’t heard all the hoopla, sociologist Robert Putnam, most famous for his book Bowling Alone, has published a new article arguing that “In the short to medium run, … immigration and ethnic diversity challenge social solidarity and inhibit social capital.”

2.  It’s an excellent article; a thought-provoking read. Apart from a dicey section on the multivariate analysis of data to control for the effect of certain variables, the study is accessible to non-experts like me.  Don’t make the same mistake as 98 percent of the people who are currently dismissing Putnam’s results: read the article for yourself.

3.  An aside: More interesting than Putnam’s article, in my view, has been the sociology of its reception. There’s a palpable hesitancy, in polite liberal circles, to bring up the subject.  First, it’s never his article, but rather somebody’s gloss on it that my colleagues suggest I read.  Second, no person of conscience broaches the subject of Putnam’s article unless, in the same breath, he also recommends a book or article that purports to advance a countervailing thesis.  Putnam’s work is clearly radioactive.

4.  Never fear the truth, whatever it might be.

5.  Putnam’s article might ultimately rival Christine Letts’s “Virtuous Capital” for the volume of eyebrow-raising commentary it will generate—much of it, I predict, involving a great deal of hand-wringing.

6.  Liberals are in some ways hoist on their own petard: Putnam uses variation in ethnic/racial category as a proxy for “diversity.”  This is what I sometimes refer to as the Whitman’s Sampler Model of diversity, an impoverished notion that enables well-meaning liberals to declare victory when they have “one of these, one of these, and one of those” on their staff or on their board.

7.  Putnam’s results will play handily to those conservatives who believe that self-segregation works with, rather than against, “the grain of human nature.”  We hear this kind of argument in apologetics for “a conservatism comfortable with materialist self-interest.”  These same conservatives will likely pass over in silence those sections of the article that review the many benefits of increased immigration and diversity: greater creativity; better, faster problem-solving; and more rapid economic growth, among others.  Putnam never argues that diversity is, on balance, a bad thing.

8.  Putnam’s results discredit the idea that greater diversity is correlated with increased inter-ethnic hostility.  He stresses that “[d]iversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation.”  To put it another way, “In more diverse settings, Americans distrust not merely people who do not look like them, but even people who do.”

9.  Putnam points out that:

All our empirical analysis to this point has involved ‘comparative statics’—that is, we have compared people living in places with different ethnic mixes at one point in time—namely different American communities in the year 2000. Although our evidence does suggest that it is the level of diversity that matters, not the rate of change, we have not yet considered any ‘dynamic’ evidence about the effects of immigration and diversity over long periods of time within a single place (whether a single community or the nation as a whole). Exploring the dynamics, as opposed to the comparative statics, of diversity and social capital requires entirely different methods, and my research group has only begun to explore those avenues.

What would these further studies likely reveal?

10.  Finally, and most importantly in my opinion, Putnam doesn’t argue that we can’t learn to respond to ethnic and racial diversity better than we currently do.  We’re not fated forever to respond irrationally to fear of the “other,” however much recent history has inclined us to this view.

Refreshing Candor From An Immigrant Rights Advocate

We asked Q—, a national immigrant rights advocate, to describe the current environment in her field.*  Here’s her surprising answer …

“The immigrant rights movement is going through an overwhelming, tense, and confused time, which is hopefully setting the stage for changes that have been needed for a long time.

“The down side:

“A lot of people didn’t like the immigration reform legislation in the Senate this year.  But now the only thing that might have been a solution is gone, and both political parties are saying they won’t pursue anything comprehensive and humane for at least the next several years.  And that means the lives of immigrants are likely to get a lot worse before they start to get better.

“We’re facing the entrenchment and elaboration of a separate and unequal legal system for immigrants that doesn’t provide checks and balances necessary for ensuring that the government follows the law.

“We’re facing a lack of hope among Americans—including immigration activists—that the federal government can fix anything, let alone anything as complicated as immigration policy.

“We’re facing an overwhelming number of anti-immigrant measures introduced in cities and states.  According to the National Conference of State Legislatures,

As of July 2, 2007, no fewer than 1404 pieces of legislation related to immigrants and immigration had been introduced among the 50 state legislatures.  From January to July 2nd 2007, 170 bills became law in 41 states ... State legislators have introduced roughly two-and-a-half times more bills in 2007, than in 2006.  The number of enactments from 2006 (84) has more than doubled to 170 in 2007 ... In the continued absence of a comprehensive federal reform of the United States’ challenged immigration system, states have displayed an unprecedented level of activity.

“We’re facing racial profiling, as people are being asked for their documentation on traffic stops if they look ‘foreign.’

“We’re facing attacks in Congress that keep chipping away at the rights of immigrants to argue their cases in court, the power of judges to make decisions about individual cases, and assurances that detention facilities keep people safe.

“We’re facing the enforcement of ‘material support’ laws that define immigrants and others as terrorists if they have ever provided any help to a rebel group, even if that rebel group fought alongside American troops, and even if the choice was to carry water for an army or be shot in the head.

“We’re facing a seemingly endless trail of death at the US-Mexico border.

“We’re facing the tangled interests and assumptions of African Americans, Latinos, labor, agribusiness, churches, and practically every other politically powerful interest group.

“Many immigrant rights activists are feeling overwhelmed and scared.  A lot of people are angry, and some are more reflective than they had been.

The Rules of the Game

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The July 13, 2007 edition of the Wall Street Journal Online reported on a new video game called Karma Tycoon designed to teach kids about “fiscal responsibility and social entrepreneurship.”*  Web-based youth organization Do Something and JPMorgan Chase teamed up to bring us a game in which

The more good you do … the more Karma you get!  The more Karma you get, the more grants your not-for-profit is eligible for .... the more money you get, the more good you can do!  The more good you do … the more Karma you get!  The more Karma you have, the bigger of a Karma Tycoon you will be!!

Noimsayin?  Good, good.  Stay with me.  According to Do Something CEO Nancy Lublin, “Karma Tycoon is like a vitamin in a Twinkie.”

Twinkalicious!

Coming out at the end of this month is a new arcade-style game for inner-city kids that teaches them the rules of American civic life.  Playfully called Bootstraps by its creators, the main screen is tilted to suggest an uneven playing field.  On level one (“Mettle Detectors”), players use their joysticks to avoid falling fragments of decaying school buildings.  Intermediate levels challenge kids with monsters like the enchantress Mainstream Medea who attempts to demoralize players by flashing images of “illegals” and “welfare queens.”  Heavily armored Rightwingthink Tanks chase players down tracks that require them to execute dangerous, life-sapping, maneuvers called “Bell Curves.”  The game ends when a player reaches level ten with a few Dignity Points intact.

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* “‘Tis Not Simple to Give Gifts” by Christian C. Sahner

Black and Brown on the Immigration Debate

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As we move closer to the 2008 presidential election, an increasing number of politicians and political operatives will attempt to use the immigration issue to drive a wedge between the Black and Brown communities.

Some will blame the hiring of low-skilled immigrants for the decline in employment among Black American men.  (A very thoughtful article by Bill Fletcher, Jr. at the Black Commentator addresses this issue.)  Others will point to longstanding tensions between African Americans and Latinos. 

But those of us inside and outside these communities need to resist the claim that it’s a zero-sum game.  We need to acknowledge the legacy of hundreds of years of slavery, colonialism, and other forms of oppression.  We also need to begin shifting our focus from the competition for low-paying jobs to guaranteeing a living wage and strong safety net for all Americans.  One immigration advocacy organization puts it this way:

As long as the “ladder” that allows different race and ethnic groups to, over time, climb into other employment opportunities (through training, employment, etc.) is broken, multiple groups will get stuck at and compete along the same rung – for the unskilled, non-stable and, for the most part, non-union jobs in the secondary sector.

According to a new study by the Economic Mobility Project, American men have less earning power today than their fathers did (when adjusted for inflation).  Workers are losing ground.  And we have yet to fully appreciate the links between the dynamics of labor markets in the United States and increasing globalization.

The more our Black and Brown communities are divided and conquered, the less likely they’ll be able to counter the larger forces eroding their earning and savings power.

The Color of Generosity

I’m wearing a magic cloak that blunts the effects of biting sarcasm from fellow bloggers, so I’m emboldened to say that Warren Buffett’s gift to the Gates Foundation will cement what is for many Americans the archetype of the philanthropist: a wealthy, socially conservative white male considerably past middle age.  We know, of course, that Great Givers come in all colors and genders* from every income category, even though their generosity doesn’t often make front page news.

We’re reminded of this when we read contemporary versions of the parable of the widow’s mite, like this Washington Post story on the extraordinary generosity of Thomas Cannon, an African American postal worker who had given away an estimated $150,000 to charity by the time he died.

The African American community has a reputation among fundraisers for being especially generous.  On average, blacks donate to charity 25 percent more of their discretionary income than whites.  In 2004, African Americans made $11.4 billion in charitable contributions.  According to the author of the Post story, “That kind of giving tends to be curiously overlooked by critics who describe their black countrymen as selfish underachievers who lounge around waiting for handouts.”

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* Yes, all genders, even the in-between ones.