Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 39
The Racial Reckoning that Never Was
Happy Tuesday! As I start my onboarding at Liberation Ventures, I've been super busy, so apologies for missing the Friday and Monday edition. This week I plan to do a Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday edition.
Today’s Hot Takes section gives a bit more context to what I learned in reporting my latest piece for The Plug, published yesterday. Its titled ‘Last Year’s ‘Racial Reckoning’ Seems To Have Skipped Over The Southern U.S.,’ and it examines how the corporate and philanthropic pledges of the last year and a half have flowed to the South.
I talked to an array of folks, including funders, organizers, and corporations, for it. I hope it gives you a better understanding of what this “racial reckoning” has looked like for the region where most Black people live; the South.
I believe the article is blocked via a Paywall, and as part of the freelancing agreement with the Plug, I cannot post it here. So, I hope you (or your organization) can support their work. They are a Black woman-owned and led news outlet focused on the Black innovation economy, and they uplift stories from reporters that I believe would otherwise not get told.
There are a lot of great pieces in this edition that I hope to revisit at least one of them for Friday’s newsletter:
This USA Today piece dives into the latest in what’s going on in Evanston, Illinois, and the idea of housing reparations. This piece is likely behind a paywall for most of you, so I think this will be one of the pieces I dive deeper into on Friday. The outlet also published a separate video breaking down housing reparations.
As detailed in this article for the Washington Post, a school in Texas suspended its first Black principal because of his views on race. Shoutout to the students who staged walkouts this week and to the parents and teachers who went straight to the school board. I hope the principal pulls a Nikole Hannah-Jones when he’s offered his position back and levels up to another school.
As detailed in this article for the New York Times, lawmakers in Alabama are beginning the process of redrafting the state Constitution to erase the racist language still in it, such as “separate schools shall be provided for white and colored children, and no child of either race shall be permitted to attend a school of the other race.” A particular line in the piece mainly stuck out to me, “addressing racist language is a critical part of reckoning with the past.” I couldn’t agree more and hope to write more on this particular topic in future editions.
Lastly, Color of Change launched a new database of racial justice experts who can help Hollywood writer’s rooms and an anti-racist trainer director. You can read more about it in this Hollywood Reporter article or go directly to the two resources here and here.
With radical love,
Trevor
National News
The Plug: Last Year’s ‘Racial Reckoning’ Seems To Have Skipped Over The Southern U.S.
USA Today: One US city plans to pay reparations to Black homeowners. Will the practice expand to yours?
USA Today: Here's how housing reparations can pave a path to homeownership for the Black community
Insight Center for Community Economic Development: Still Running Up the Down Escalator
New York Times: Lesson of the Day: ‘Critical Race Theory: A Brief History
Fast Company: Chase’s new branches aim to combat historic racism in banking
Yale Insights: Numbers, Not Narratives, Remedy Misperceptions of the Racial Wealth Gap
The Plug: Google For Startups Black Founders Fund Awards $5 Million to 50 Companies
Slate: What the Critical Race Theory Panic Was Really About (and the Data to Prove It)
Politico: Why the Culture Wars in Schools Are Worse Than Ever Before
Crain’s Detroit Business: Reparations, institutional change needed to move people out of poverty
Knowledge@Wharton: How Bankruptcy Bias Contributes to the Racial Wealth Gap
Washington Post: Congress is passing up a chance to close a tax loophole — and the racial wealth gap
Duke: RACE, NOT JOB, PREDICTS ECONOMIC OUTCOMES FOR BLACK HOUSEHOLDS
Hollywood Reporter: Color of Change Launches New Writer’s Room Database and Anti-Racist Training Directory
Regional News
New York Times: Alabama Begins Removing Racist Language From Its Constitution
Washington Post: Families beg for Black principal to be reinstated after critical race theory dispute: ‘Nothing short of a witch hunt’
Reuters: 'Critical race theory' roils a Tennessee school district
Yahoo Finance: NYC Expands Pilot ‘Baby Bonds’ Program Citywide to Fund College Plans and Close Wealth Gap
Detroit News: Advocates for reparative policy argue 'we can do better' at Mackinac Island conference
International News
New York Times: France Asks ‘Forgiveness’ for Its Abandonment of Algerian Harkis
Hot Takes
In the words of Lil Baby, shout out to The Plug for letting me write this piece.
Merriam-Webster has three definitions for a reckoning:
The act of calculating the amount of something
The time when your actions are judged as good or bad, and you are rewarded or punished
The act of judging something
So, one may define a racial reckoning, particularly in the context of last year after the murder of George Floyd, as the collective judging of our nation’s history of racial harm.
As someone who had gone to numerous protests before May 25, 2020, I can admit that the protests, especially where I was in New York City, were a sight to see. Not only had I never seen so many people spill out into the streets (which, in hindsight, I think many people were itching for a reason to leave their homes consistently due to COVID restrictions), but they were by far the most multiracial coalition of folks that I had seen at a protest in support of racial justice.
Since then, support for Black Lives Matter has significantly dropped, particularly as the conversation around defunding the police has continued. In addition, white people are less supportive of Black Lives Matter now than they were at the beginning of 2020.
To make matters worse, an analysis done in the summer estimated that of the $50 billion pledged by America’s billion-dollar companies, only $250 million of it materialized. A more recent Washington Post analysis found that $45.2 billion of what was pledged by these companies, or 90 percent, were in the forms of loans or investments from which they will profit, while the other 10 percent were in the form of outright grants.
The day after I sent my piece for The Plug for final review, the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity published a report titled Mismatched: Philanthropy’s Response to the Call for Racial Justice., which they describe as the most comprehensive assessment of racial equity and racial justice funding to date. It was too late to update my piece with info from this report, so I’m using this space to give my preliminary thoughts on the report because it does have a lot to do with my article in The Plug today.
The most important work that this report does is break down the difference between racial equity funding and racial justice funding in a very digestible way.
The report found that racial equity funding was consistently 5-10 times greater than racial justice funding between 2011 and 2018 and that despite the growth in funding over the years in both fields, for every dollar awarded by foundations in the U.S., in 2018, only 6 cents went to racial equity work and only a penny to racial justice work.
The report then goes on to identify five different mismatches between philanthropic responses and movement needs:
Funding for racial equity and justice remains a small portion of overall foundation funding — not commensurate with the scale of racial disparities or the demands of racial justice movements.
The rise in funding for racial equity was portrayed as an overnight occurrence, but in fact, there has been slow but steady growth in the scale of funding and numbers of funders engaged in racial equity.
Co-option of movement language is widespread and used to advance projects that are often not responsive to movement’s call.
Wealthy, white donors impose their priorities rather than supporting the priorities of movements.
Funding for racial justice, grassroots organizing, and movement-oriented work remains low
Numbers 1 and 5 make a lot of sense and align with a lot of what I learned in the reporting I did for my piece, which focuses on how these pledges have materialized in the South, where most Black people still live. I spoke to a coalition of CDFI’s in the South, and it was apparent that while there was an increase in interest in CDFI’s in the South, corporations were funneling support to a few major organizations.
Concerning scale, I highlighted a report from the Institute for Policy Studies, which found that the wealth of U.S. billionaires surged $1.8 trillion during the pandemic, with some CEOs like Elon Musk seeing their net worth increase by over 600 percent. At the same time, millions of essential and low-wage workers struggled to keep their jobs and pay their rent. So while many corporations made public statements and pledges, the amounts were often minuscule compared to what their leaders were raking in last year.
As I shifted focus away from corporations and toward endowed foundations, and while slightly better, the funding (and funders) were concentrated in coastal cities like Los Angeles and New York City, making it very hard to build connections with organizations doing work in the South.
The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy reported that foundations invested just 56 cents per person in the South for every dollar-per-person invested elsewhere. In addition, some states like Oklahoma and Kentucky saw less than one percent of what NCRP calls “structural change funding” go toward Black communities.
While some foundations, like the Ford Foundation, have made considerable and intentional shifts to the South — the overall landscape regarding funding for all organizations focused on racial justice has not transformed in the way it should have.
The racial reckoning that was uttered repeatedly on cable news and national media outlets was never really a reckoning.
One can point to the 22 bills that have been proposed to stop teachers from accurately teaching history to prove that we are so far away from the racial reckoning that we need.
Yes, for a few months, after millions had seen Derek Chauvin crush his knee into the back of George Floyd until he was lifeless, there was a temporary increase in what I might call racial empathy.
I couldn’t find any research really on the notion of racial empathy but I think it makes sense because of the research on racial emotions that has already been done.
Racial emotions are the feelings people experience when they engage in interracial interactions, according to sociologists. Though sociologist Edward Bonilla-Silva points out, this definition does not capture the fact that racial emotions can be experienced when looking at a picture, reading a newspaper, watching a movie, or walking into a location.
I would argue then that for a moment, the racialized emotions that make up our racialized mental models of white people, or in other words how they understand and feel about race within the world, briefly converged with Black people. I believe this happened only because of the sheer cruelty Derek Chauvin displayed as he murdered George Floyd in front of dozens of people.
Neurologists have found that most emotions in the brain and body only last 90 seconds. This is important in the context of social interactions because our emotions enable the judgments we make within the world.
This racialized empathy has obviously waned — but in a true reckoning, would it have?
I believe,
We’ll recognize a true racial reckoning when we see white people’s racialized mental models converge with Black people’s not because a man died on camera, but because they realize it’s the morally correct mental model to have.
We’ll recognize a true racial reckoning when we see corporations make billions of grants, not loans, to racial justice organizations.
We’ll recognize a true racial reckoning when we see most philanthropic funding flows to the South for organizing around creating a racially just world.
We’ll recognize a true racial reckoning, when reparations, both financial and non-financial, are paid to all of those who they owed both here in the United States and across the globe.