White Courtesy Telephone

Philanthropy’s Response to Katrina: A Ten-Year Perspective

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 An edited version of this post was published by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) in the Summer 2015 edition of its Responsive Philanthropy newsletter.

A CITY OF TWO TALES

Local responses to the upcoming commemoration of Hurricane Katrina have been decidedly mixed. Some who lived through the storm and its aftermath are anxious. They expect many of the images and stories in the media to be painful. They have their own memories of homes and neighborhoods destroyed and loved ones lost. Some harbor a grief that has never cycled through its stages or been properly resolved.

Others see an opportunity to show the city in its glad rags, having come so far in so many ways from the destruction that millions witnessed on their television sets. Ironically, a new levee system makes New Orleans one of the best-protected coastal cities in the United States. There’s a strong ecosystem for entrepreneurs. The city is open for business.

Certainly one of the casualties of the storm will be a nuanced account of what happened in the ten years after Katrina made landfall. As Thomas Kuhn famously remarked, there are no theory-neutral observations. Each of us will see these events through the filter of our own worldviews, our “theories” of how to interpret the mundane and the extraordinary. Our assessment of the progress New Orleans has made since 2005 will be shaped (some might say “distorted”) by our own agendas. As the tenth anniversary of Katrina approaches, many of the stories served to us will be in the style of Dickens, brimming with rogues and children in rags. Others will be triumphalist tales with titles like, “The Five Things Successful People Do After An Unprecedented Catastrophe.”

Let the reader beware. My own prejudices and obsessions will become apparent soon enough.

THE PHILANTHROPIC RESPONSE TO KATRINA

The official Katrina@10 observances will rightly commemorate the individuals who lost their lives and livelihoods in the storm. During these somber occasions we’ll mourn the citizens who left the region and never returned, and we’ll count our own lucky stars. We’ll also take the opportunity to thank once again the individuals, families, foundations, church groups, businesses, and others who contributed so much to the reconstruction and rebirth of New Orleans. There are still thousands of volunteers who return year after year to put up houses or paint ramshackle schools. I’m still moved when I see them, walking back to their hotels from their labors. The locals toot their horns at them and wave in appreciation.

I’ve been a frequent critic of the philanthropic sector. I’ve poked fun at pompous CEOs and bloviating program officers. In the spirit of self-improvement, we can legitimately raise the question of whether or not, in response to Katrina, organized philanthropy did the right things in the right measure. We can justifiably ask what $3 billion in private contributions accomplished for New Orleans’ most vulnerable citizens. I’m happy for the field to engage these questions, but prefer that this happen some other time, perhaps, in some other essay.

More pressing, I believe, is the question of why, when current realities are as harrowing as anything we might have witnessed ten years ago, we lavish so much attention on the past. If a normally constituted human being had eight fingers instead of ten, we’d have finished our commemorations two years ago and have a good head start on forgetting, once again, the lessons of 2005.

A TALE OF TWO ZIP CODES

Rather than drag the reader through the entire chamber of horrors, let me focus on a representative statistic,* published three short years ago in a report titled, Place Matters for Health in Orleans Parish:** “Life expectancy in the poorest zip code in the city is 54.5 years, or 25.5-years lower than life expectancy in the zip code with the least amount of poverty in the city, where it is 80.”

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which of these ZIP codes is predominantly black and which is predominantly white.

And I invite the reader to slow his or her headlong rush through this article and allow that one statistic to sink in a bit. Twenty-five and a half years. The difference in life expectancy between males and females in the United States is currently about five years. This should be enough to get our attention. Perhaps like me you’ve wondered why this difference in life expectancy hasn’t generated more hand-wringing, more conference panels, more calls to action. A ten-year difference in life expectancy would be nothing short of a national scandal. A fifteen-year difference would be unthinkable.

But twenty-five and a half years? Here we have a kind of Katrina unaccompanied by torrents of rain. Here’s an implacable flood driving the poor in our city to deaths that are obscenely premature.

The Negro spiritual bids us to

Wade in the water
Wade in the water, children
Wade in the water
God’s gonna trouble the water

What an image for a city that still experiences the trauma of too much water! What an act of faith our obedience requires, for we’re told that it’s God’s angel who troubles the water, and it’s this act that brings healing to those who wade in.

What kind of healing do we need to feel the full weight of that solitary number: twenty-five and a half? What can foundations do to help trouble the water a bit, to quicken our pulses at the idea that our neighbors might be dying twenty-five years before we do?

Ten years ago, I watched events in New Orleans unfold from a safe distance. I was living in Washington, DC, at the time and my fellow Washingtonians and I clucked our tongues at the images on our TV screens. Some of us remarked that ‘there for the grace of God goes Washington, D.C.’ We shared a sense that black lives appeared to matter as little in our nation’s capital as they did in the American South.

Is there perhaps some way that philanthropy can help us remember the present more vividly than we recall the past?

A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

If you work at a foundation, if you have the privilege of funding the good people who help us remember the present, please know that much is expected of us. A higher consciousness, a greater sense of urgency, a more robust response to current suffering and injustice.

Years ago, I sat with a group of academics, one of whom described the research he had just conducted on the role of philanthropy in the Civil Rights Movement. His primary conclusion was that foundations had initially been circumspect and very slow on the draw.# They came around eventually, as they did with many progressive movements, when all the difficult work had already been done. And even then, they played a minor role.

I, the self-appointed spokesman for organized philanthropy, was indignant. I knew personally of many foundations that had taken risks to advance the cause of social justice. Here in front of me was yet another uninformed foundation-basher. But still his thesis gnawed at me, and the more I tried to negate it, the more clearly I saw how the exceptions proved the rule.

The Movement for Gender Equality, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring—we let them spend their rage and bury their dead. After that, we convened them and funded those who knew how to speak to their betters. This was photo op philanthropy, the kind that smiles for the camera as it places one foot on a trophy that others had the courage to bag. Perhaps this will happen with the Black Lives Matter movement. Perhaps it too will devolve into an endless series of convenings in cold hotel meeting rooms, a polite request to stop the killing, an infographic or two.

The foundation response to Katrina was very different. It was not at all photo op philanthropy but rather something sacred. It might not have been perfectly strategic (whatever that means), but it came very much from the heart and therefore had its own kind of perfection. I know the overwhelming majority of my fellow New Orleanians share my gratitude for the generosity of so many.

The problems with organized philanthropy—the work of foundations and the like—are more systemic; they extend far beyond our attempts to respond to any one disaster. These problems explain why it’s the Pope, rather than a foundation president, who’s deemed by Fox News to be the most dangerous person on the planet. Understanding this slight to our field should presently be occupying the greatest minds in philanthropy.

For now, dear reader: If you’re moved to do so, make your pilgrimage to New Orleans this summer. Give us an opportunity to thank you again. We can mourn together for the dead. And, most importantly, arm in arm, we can find a way to honor the dignity of those who are thankfully still with us.

 

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* For a broader picture of “Inclusion” in the New Orleans metro area, see The New Orleans Index at Ten: Measuring Greater New Orleans’ Progress Toward Prosperity, available from the Data Center website.

** Prepared by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Orleans Parish Place Matters Team in conjunction with the Center on Human Needs, Virginia Commonwealth University Virginia Network for Geospatial Health Research. The full report is available at http://www.orleansplacematters.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/CHER-Final-text.pdf.

# There were some notable exceptions. Cf. http://ncrp.org/campaigns-research-policy/36-campaigns-research-a-policy/1081-freedom-funders-philanthropy-and-civil-rights-movement. 

Cooks Gone Wild!

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Leslie Lilly is the immediate past President and CEO of the Community Foundation for Palm Beach and Martin Counties.  Her professional career spans more than twenty-five years in the charitable sector, primarily in the American South and Appalachia. In this guest post, Ms. Lilly breaks with White Courtesy Telephone tradition by appearing intelligent and balanced.  —Eds.

There is a price to pay for willful ignorance sustained at someone else’s expense.  Paula Deen will have a long time to consider what she might have done better or differently, or perhaps stopped doing altogether, in the aftermath of the bad kitchen behaviors that are now public record.  Her fans as well as her detractors are in full-throated defense or condemnation, depending at which end of the table they have chosen to sit.  

The public uproar started when Deen went on video for a court deposition.  A former employee in one of her restaurants filed a lawsuit accusing Deen of employment discrimination.  The deposition had the same flavor as a cook show episode, albeit a very different topic.  Deen was her flamboyant self; her cup of folksiness ran over as she described at length her racial attitudes.  It was quite a performance.  She owned up to her naughtiness at having used the “N” word, expressing her regret and sorrow and that she never meant to hurt anyone.  She was sorry, sorry, sorry.  She loves black people.  

Well, all hell broke loose.  There have been more television interviews, more apologies, explanations and tears.  Yet the more Deen talks and tries to negotiate her way out of this briar patch, the more excruciating her anguished protests of repentance become.  She’s been seared like a steak by the public shaming.  The charitable-minded have come forth and counseled against an excess of blame, i.e., “those without guilt should cast the first stone.”  These outpourings of humility must account for Deen’s latest cookbook rocketing to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list.  So when will we be done?  

Some say, because she is not a young woman, we should forgive her white, “old school,” Southern way of talking about race.  She has suffered a painful comeuppance, including the loss of millions in product endorsements; and though misguided, her comments weren’t intentionally nasty, just like utterances we’ve heard from other nice people we know.  Why, heck, some of them are even our relatives!  Meanwhile, others who - listened to what she said, saw hoop skirts and Massa’s plantation resurrected before their horrified eyes.  These are the people who do not think it would be fun is re-live the 19th Century, especially in the South.  To them, Deen’s racial attitudes were simply offensive.

Deen is a savvy entrepreneur who has successfully capitalized on Southern culture and culinary heritage by making “Southern” the heart of her brand; so she isn’t just dishing up fried chicken and collard greens when she is promoting her business.  She is selling a version of an “authentic” South for which she is the star spokesperson. When you go out on that limb, you own it.  When she says Southern white folk are less prejudiced toward black people than others she is too polite to name, she does so with the credibility of someone divulging a family secret as if it’s the gospel truth to her millions of trusted fans.  She defends her racial attitudes, saying all Southern white people have this “special” relationship with black folk because their shared history is deeply and commonly rooted in the South.  This white chauvinism conveniently ignores the pain and suffering endured by blacks as Southern slaves. Deen’s great-great-great-great grandfather was a slaveholder.  Had this “special” relationship been internalized in Deen’s narrative, a more racially sensitive perspective might have emerged to also change her behaviors.  It would have helped had they also been enlightened by her modern reference to the two hundred years of struggle by African-Americans to achieve racial equity in this country.  It is terribly painful to witness someone so deeply out of touch with the arc of their own Southern history; and who has given so little thought to the harm it does to infect others with old deceits.  

The civil rights movement ended Jim Crow, the segregation in our public schools, and won the right to vote for millions of disenfranchised African-Americans.  This past June, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act; the George Zimmerman trial got started; and a hard-fought battle for a comprehensive immigration bill took place in the U.S. Senate.  We are not living in a post-racial society.  Deen’s fall from grace is a reminder of how easy it is to lose your way when your brain disconnects from its moral compass; or, in another painful episode of same, given the gravity of the Zimmerman trial, is it ever appropriate to tell a knock-knock joke when lives are lost and at stake?

Related articles

Paula Deen, an American Story

I'm black, and I forgive Paula Deen

Crowdsourcing a Good Conversation About Race

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When news broke recently about the UC Berkeley “racist bake sale,” a colleague of mine, responding to clumsy media coverage of the event, tweeted, “Another bad conversation about race.”

But what would a good conversation about race look like?  How many of us have been lucky enough to participate in one?

I’ve taken part in my share of stinkers.  I’ve also experienced a number of conversations—all of them facilitated by younger people in the nonprofit field, coincidently—that transcended the tensions, the cowed silences, and the embarrassing references to best friends who are black (or Latino, or Asian, …).

For the sake of concreteness, imagine a diverse group of people who have come together to address the racial inequities in their community.  Imagine that there are conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans, Mac and PC users among them.

What, in your view, would be the understandings and principles that would make for a good discussion about racial inequity?  I’ve started a list:

The conversation would be action-oriented.  Each time we met, there would be homework for each of the individuals and organizations involved.  The entire discussion would be in service of taking concrete steps to eliminate inequities.  Participants would hold themselves accountable to nothing less than this end.

The discussion would be grounded in data and in the lived experience of discrimination.  Many discussions that touch on race are long on speculation and short on concreteness.  For me the ideal discussion would be informed by the kind of nuanced sociological analysis that takes full account of the structural, cultural, and other factors that contribute to intergenerational poverty.  It would be grounded in the best academic research available and in a deep knowledge of history.

Missteps would be charged to the head not to the heart.  Sooner or later, somebody will say some boneheaded thing that will trip somebody’s wire.  Perhaps a white person will call a black person “articulate” (implying that the speaker is articulate—for a black person).  Perhaps a black participant will paint the white community with too broad a brush.  I’ve seen the atmosphere of many diversity trainings poisoned by well-meaning people who succumbed to the temptation to provide an offending speaker with a lesson in politically correct speech.  My advice: Let it go (for the moment) and move on to find common ground.

Find ways to surface and address, in a positive way, the mistaken notions and assumptions you know are lurking in the minds of participants.  To take one example, I know from speaking with many white people that some wonder why black leaders don’t do more to discourage single-parent families.*  Better, in my opinion, to find a way to put these doubts on the table and address them constructively, than let them continue to cast a cloud over the proceedings. And again, grounding the conversation in real data and analysis can help a group get past these hurdles.

Be far more eager to learn than to teach.

What’s missing from this list?  Please share your own experiences in the “Comments” section below.

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For an excellent discussion of this issue, read chapter 4, “The Fragmentation of the Poor Black Family,” from William Julius Wilson’s newest book,  More Than Just Race.

 

The Other Persistent Myth About Hurricane Katrina

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As we approach the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I’m struck by two enduring misconceptions about the storm that I frequently encounter when I travel outside the Gulf South.

One of these is very familiar to my fellow New Orleanians: It’s the idea that what happened to the city during the time of Katrina was a “natural disaster.” As any schoolchild in the Lower Ninth Ward can tell you, fifty-three breaches in the federally constructed system of levees is anything but natural, especially when we consider that the storm failed to score a direct hit on the city, skirting it rather to the east.

The second misconception is equally troubling.  To understand it, we need to review some uncomfortable facts:

• 69 percent of black children can’t read at grade level in the 4th grade, compared with 29 percent of white children.  (That 29 percent of white children can’t read at grade level in the 4th grade is itself barbarous.)
• 1.46 million black men out of a total voting population of 10.4 million have lost their right to vote due to felony convictions.
• One in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 is under correctional supervision or control.
• 45 percent of black children live below the federal poverty line (a bar that’s set embarrassingly low).
• The net worth of black families is $6,100; the net worth of white families is $67,000.
• Of black males born this year, 29 percent can expect to spend some time behind bars.  One in 14 black children has a parent in jail or in prison.  One in 20 black men is incarcerated, compared with one in 155 white men.  For every three black men in college, there are four in prison.*

Matched pair testing and other studies continue to demonstrate the pervasiveness of racism in hiring practices, in housing, in educational settings, and in other domains.

These are national statistics, not statistics for New Orleans proper.  Which brings me to the second great misconception about Katrina.

Outside of Louisiana I frequently encounter the notion that the inequities surfaced by Katrina were endemic to the South and that it took a disaster like Katrina to expose them.  This is wrong on both counts.

What happened was that a category 5 hurricane blew ashore and laid bare what was already in plain sight not only in New Orleans, but in many cities across the United States and indeed across the world. All we had to do was look and see.

Despite all the investments in the Gulf South since Katrina, despite all our hand-wringing and breast-beating, these inequities persist to this day.

Many New Orleanians are rightly committed to rebuilding “better than before.”  But what will this mean when it comes to our commitment to our most vulnerable neighbors?  Will a little bit of progress here and there lull us, as it’s done before, into accepting overwhelming inequities?

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* These statistics and others may be found at morehousemaleinitiave.com.

Interview With Wayne Bennett, Author of The Field Negro

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Wayne Bennett’s blog, The Field Negro, explores race in America in an unexpected way. His writing mixes cultural polemics with humor to provoke conversation and insight about one of our country’s most fraught subjects. He’s always a good read. The following interview was conducted by e-mail …

1. You write a blog called “The Field Negro.” That’s a provocative name for a blog. Why did you choose it?

I chose it because of one of my favorite speeches of all time: The Malcolm X speech to the SNCC workers in Alabama in 1965. This is where he outlined the dichotomy between the house and field Negroes in America, and why, as a result, it is hard for black folks to unify around particular causes.

I wanted to identify with the field Negroes in my writing because that’s how I view myself in the ongoing debate. Someone who works hard and represents the masses.

Besides, I wanted a title that makes people uncomfortable.

2. Do you ever get called out for what you write on your blog? What’s the one thing that, in retrospect, you most regret having written? What was the post that generated the most controversy?

I get called out all the time. I get more nasty e-mails than you could ever imagine.

I rarely regret anything I write, but if you put a gun to my head I would have to say calling Condy Rice “the bad perm lady.” After the Don Imus incident where he called the Rutgers basketball players “nappy headed hoes” and I ripped him for it, I realized what a hypocrite I was, because I was in essence doing the same thing to Secretary Rice.

It’s hard to say which post generated the most controversy. I have had a few. My post about white people and their pets pissed off a lot of white folks. And my post about the 12% rule for black folks pissed off a lot of black people. I always get a lot of heat for supporting the Jewish people on various issues as well.

3. [The foundation I work at] administered a poll to [the members of a] giving circle …, and one of their questions was this:

In the long run, the most effective way to address a region’s racial inequities is to (choose only one):

1. engage the entire community in discussions about race and white privilege
2. address systemic issues (e.g., laws, policies, etc.) that lead to unequal outcomes
3. empower low-income communities politically (through voter registration drives, etc.)
4. bring more low-income people into the middle class through literacy and skills training, small business development programs, and improving public education
5. just wait another 50 years until younger, less bigoted generations assume positions of responsibility and power

How would you answer this question and why?

I love numbers 3 & 4. Education. Education. Education. It is the greatest equalizer in America. I would also push for more political involvement among underserved communities—if it’s one thing a politician fears is numbers at the ballot box—and financial education for poor people. It is very important that we learn how to save and manage our money.

4. As regards conversations (and actions) in the public sphere touching on matters of race and ethnicity, what trends have you seen over the past ten years?

It’s getting better, but folks in the majority are still afraid to talk openly about race and ethnicity. The mainstream media won’t touch it because they know that it makes most folks in America uncomfortable. The only time we talk about it (race) is when we have to. (See the Henry Louis Gates incident at Harvard which led to Obama’s “teachable moment.”) And when it infringes on the political debate such as the case with immigration reform.

5. What do you regard as the most definitive work (book or article) for anybody wishing to understand race in America?

Oh my, where do I start? There are so many great ones … I have a couple: Why Black People Tend To Shout by Ralph Wiley. The Racial Contract by Charles Mills. The Arrogance Of Race by George Fredrickson. The Mis-Education Of The Negro by [Carter G.] Woodson, and All God’s Children by Fox Butterfield. From the conservative side I would recommend Shelby Steele’s The Content Of Our Character. There are more, but those jump out at me.

Oh, and how could I forget? You have to read The Field Negro.

6. In your view, how important a force has Hip Hop been in bridging racial divides? What are the cultural and other forces that you believe have the most promise in helping to unite us?

Hip Hop, in a way, has helped to bridge the racial divide. Especially among young people. They are our future, and young white kids from the burbs are trying to relate to young black kids from urban areas. Which, to me, is a good thing. Music and the arts is probably the best way to bridge the racial divide without actually getting down and talking to each other. But this comes with a caveat from me. Unfortunately these kumbaya moments can be somewhat superficial. We still have to explore our differences and try to understand each other on a deeper level and in more meaningful ways to have true racial harmony in America.

7. What can we look for in The Field Negro in the coming months? What other blogs would you recommend to our [readers]?

I am just going to keep writing about what I see every day and how I feel regardless of who it offends. I hate to say it, but I really don't have time to read a lot of other blogs. Still, there are other bloggers who I admire. Rippa from the Intersection Of Madness & Reality comes to mind, and I love all the bloggers in the Afrosphere. They all work so hard and put so much energy into their blogs.

 

Notes on R*ce

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I.

We’ve had seven generations pass since the Emancipation Proclamation, but only two since the end of Jim Crow and one since the last protest over the court-mandated desegregation of Boston’s public schools.  It’s been a little more than a year since the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York published its report on the discrimination and occupational segregation that pervade the industry.  Given the importance of the restaurant industry to so many of our local economies, the study’s findings should give us pause.

Researchers sent equally-credentialed pairs of testers—one member of each pair white, the other a person of color—to apply for server positions in 138 fine-dining Manhattan restaurants.  The study showed that:

Testers of color were only 54.5% as likely as white testers to get a job offer, and were less likely than white testers to receive a job interview in the first place. …

The work experience of white testers was twice as likely to be accepted without probing.

White testers with slight European accents were 23.1% more likely to be hired than white testers with no accent. However, testers of color with accents were treated no differently than testers of color without accents.

Researchers also used 2000 US Census data to compare the earnings of white workers and workers of color employed in front-of-the-house positions.  Even after controlling for job experience, education, and command of English, the study found that workers of color “pay a ‘race tax’ in the form of 11.6 % lower earnings than they would have if they had the same qualifications but were white.”

And this is not an isolated result.  Decades of matched pair and other studies have provided evidence of racial bias in the workplace and other domains.*

II.

The Opportunity Agenda recently released a publication titled Ten Lessons for Talking About Racial Equity in the Age of Obama.  In it the author writes:

Experience from around the country shows that discussing racial inequity and promoting racial justice are particularly challenging today.  Some Americans have long been skeptical about the continued existence of racial discrimination and unequal opportunity.  But with the historic election of an African American president, that skepticism is more widespread and more vocal than ever.

Ironically, at a time when many expected the national conversation to shift, race has become the issue that dare not speak its name.  I’ve noticed the change: a palpable reluctance of late to engage the topic in polite company, as if ignoring the elephant in the dining room will keep him from upsetting the table we’ve laid for ourselves and for our visions of a “post-racial” America; as if talking ever did that much anyway.  In my adopted city of New Orleans, brilliant young leaders of color are engaging the issue in new ways, more by doing than by talking.  We have a new mayor who understands how race has affected and continues to affect our region.  New generations are being born who are playing together, gaming together, singing the latest Hip Hop anthem together.

Is this the way out?  For one generation after another to rise up until it’s completely unremarkable that a black man should be president of the United States?   Will these demographic shifts translate finally into equitable outcomes, or will we need to press the issue until the sun goes cold?

Part of our reluctance might come from exhaustion, from decades of living with the effects of segregation and racial antipathy.  We feel powerless to eliminate a disease that has so far resisted cure.  Overt racism, implicit racial bias, white privilege, structural racism: the pathogen long ago developed new strains and underwent a kind of social metastasis.  We can change unfair policies, for example, but how do we shift attitudes and habits of mind?  The problem with the stuff inside our heads, of course, is that its ill effects don’t stay confined to that space.  The problem more generally is that both misery and good fortune are selective about whom they visit and in what neighborhoods they choose to reside.

III.

I’ve been grateful for those times in my life when the universal has triumphed over the particular, when some ray of light has penetrated the typical fog of my petty thoughts and plans.

I remember when my partner and I visited Manhattan shortly after the 9-11 attacks. Late at night, en route to Ground Zero, we stopped to spend a quiet hour in a Midtown coffee shop.  I was surprised at how readily we opened our hearts to one another and to others we met. We were buoyed at the time by an oceanic feeling of oneness with our neighbors.  Religion, race, age, gender—these seemed to melt away in the face of an overwhelming tragedy.  Outside the coffee shop and still a long way from Ground Zero, there was a smell in the air of something burning. We turned south and soon saw the devastated buildings that lined the site of the Twin Towers.  A strange light surrounded the crews who worked in the pits.  We saw the bobbing of cranes. From a distance, there was something very human about their movements, stooped as they were, feeling for life in the ground.

The saber rattling began several weeks after that.  Our divisions reasserted themselves and deepened.  It was then we realized we were in danger of losing something important: the conviction that men and women of good will needed to reach across their differences to find one another in the rubble.

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* See, for example, J. Bussey and J. Trasvina, “Racial Preferences: The Treatment of White and African American Job Applicants by Temporary Employment Agencies in California” (Berkeley, Calif.: Discrimination Research Center, December 2003); D. Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology, 108, No. 5 (2003), 937-75.

 

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

Class-Talk in the Third Sector

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Via Gift Hub : The American Ruling Class, a new documentary from Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham, will air July 30 and 31 on the Sundance Channel.  What follows is a reworking of an earlier post on the subject.

Discussions of socioeconomic class are rare and fleeting in the nonprofit sector.*  This is a great shame.  Thirty years ago, the powerful images and texts of American Pictures taught me the meaning of the word “underclass.”  I didn’t hear the word used again with any frequency until Hurricane Katrina blew ashore.

Nobody talks about the underclass anymore.

Foundations are fortunate to do their work largely independent of government and corporations (including the media).  They have a good chance of introducing the topic of class and sustaining the conversation.  Yet despite continuing reminders about the myth of class mobility in this country, and an oft-stated concern for low-income communities, there are significant barriers to engaging the topic:

1.  Race, not class, structures the primary American narrative of oppression   In their book Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s,  Omi and Winant write that

Historically speaking, the call for “class” unity across racial lines has amounted in practice to an argument that non-whites give up their racially based demands in favor of “class” unity on white terms.  This will not be achieved by appeals to “class unity” or by reliance on “bargaining power theory,” which merely offer an abstraction to minorities confronted by racial inequities in the workplace.

Likewise in the nonprofit world, class-talk is sometimes seen as a distraction from issues that are more clearly rooted in racial antipathy.

2.  Class-talk produces in some a mental cramp   Paul Kingston and his intellectual heirs have argued that American society is essentially classless.  These authors don’t deny that sociologists, political scientists, and others can usefully divide the American public into various income categories.  What they deny is the notion that the members of these categories share “life-defining experiences” that license our referring to them as members of a distinct, coherent class.  Make of this kind of argument what you will.  It reminds me of Bill Clinton’s narrow definition of “sexual relations.”

3.  Class-talk is impolite   Few topics will more quickly cast a pall over middle class dinner parties than the history of class struggle in the United States.  In 2003, the President effectively silenced the critics of his tax cuts by accusing them of fomenting “class warfare.”

How do we incorporate class-talk into nonprofit work in a way that doesn’t elide hundreds of years of racial oppression?  How do we bring the lived experience of the poor and working poor into institutions governed by middle class values and norms?  How do we dispel the myth that America is essentially a classless society?

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* Based on recent data from the White Courtesy Telephone Department of Armchair Sociology that conducted a mental survey on this subject approximately 45 minutes ago.

The Maddening Calm: Talking Around Social Change

There’s an urgency in the deliberation of social activists that’s often missing from conversations among those of us who work at foundations.

Social activists breathe fire.  At their best, they’re deeply knowledgeable about the manner in which historical accident, human nature, and ideology have interacted to produce oppressor and oppressed.  There’s plenty of impassioned debate; the causes and the people they champion have an immediate presence.

The atmosphere changes when foundation folks gather to address social problems.  Often, in my experience, there’s a maddening calm.  We’re likely to replace fire by a polite and strangely apolitical bonhomie.  You’ll find many former activists among us, brimming with good ideas and good intentions, striving in our own way to make some kind of difference in the world.

But there’s been a subtle shift.

When somebody in the foundation circle puts the issue of race on the table, to take one example, it’s sometimes treated like Aunt Betty’s Mayonnaise Surprise—one of those potluck dishes everybody comments on but few dare sample.  Those of us in this circle have learned to preserve the outward calm, and we pass over in silence those subjects that would often add the greatest value to our philanthropic interventions.

I pray that I may live to see the day when these two benevolent circles—activists and philanthropoids—converge.  In the meantime, we foundation folks have a lot to learn from our more incandescent cousins.

What activists tend to do well is ask the question, How did we get to this state of affairs in the first place?  The best social activists make it a point to understand the history, the basic assumptions, the habits of mind, the structures, the policies and the laws that led to the creation of social inequalities.  They ask: What are the mechanisms by which these inequalities are sustained?  What has been the legacy of hundreds of years of slavery, colonialism, and other forms of oppression?

Asking these questions is not an idle exercise.  If we fail to ask them before we engage in any kind of philanthropic activity—and, in my view, we fail to ask them roughly 99 percent of the time—we’re simply proposing a kind of triage on society’s wounded that will do good for some, but keep intact the flow of victims.