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Notes | 7 Questions to help figure out if you’re dealing with a performative nonprofit by Sanaa Ali-Mohammed

  1. How do they treat Black, Indigenous, and racialized workers who speak out about white supremacy and racism?
    [Performative] “leaders tend to favour the ones who make them feel comfortable, who aren’t asking the organization and leadership to do better”
  2. How do they approach internal interventions?
    [Performative leaders] “shy away from training and conversations about anti-racism, instead preferring to speak about equity, diversity and inclusion. However, you can’t have equity if you’re not dismantling oppression and talking about anti-racism.”; Performative nonprofits often adopt a “checkmark” approach of “let’s do training, so we can say we’ve done training.” 
  3. How do they quantify their commitments and measure progress?
    “For a sector [like fundraising and philanthropy] that has become so good at quantifying things, that organizations don’t have measurable outcomes [especially for addressing anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism] is concerning.”
  4. How are mistakes, oppression, and harm acknowledged?
    Performative leaders and institutions will often fail to acknowledge or challenge the broader systems — like imperialism, capitalism or settler colonialism — that lead to specific instances of oppression, and will instead focus on the resulting symptoms.
    ..without acknowledgement of harm caused and apology and reparations to those who have been harmed, institutions and leaders cannot form authentic relationships. ;
  5. Do they demand trauma porn?
    Performative institutions demand Black, Indigenous, and racialized people’s stories of overcoming pain and adversity, in many cases in exchange for access to resources like funding.
  6. Do they recognize the complexity of Black, Indigenous and racialized people’s experiences?
    Performative institutions often mask internal issues of racial discrimination through tokenism, which relies on the idea that all Black, Indigenous, and racialized people are interchangeable for one another.
  7. Are they taking risks?
    Authentic allies are willing to take risks to interrupt oppression.

Anti-racism work is not just about training[…] It’s also about shifting culture and policies embedded across all levels of an institution, which requires allocating the time and resources needed to do so effectively. 

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Weekly Round-up | Environmental Conservation, Catalytic Mechanisms, Othering, History, and More

May 30 – June 6
Every week I create a round-up of my favorite reads and listens over the last 7 days. Some links go directly to articles and books, others go to my post with notes.

Monday: The Real Origins of Memorial Day

With this past week kicking off with Memorial Day, I ended up diving into history after reading a news article about the American Legion that silenced a veteran from sharing about the black origins of the day. It’s crazy to me that I was never taught this in all of my years of schooling.

Tuesday: Environmental Conservation and Equity

On Tuesday, I had an interview with an organization that had a focus on environmental conservation and education. Typically ahead of interviews I try to prepare by deepening my knowledge of the organizations issue area.

Wednesday: Othering, Group Identity, and Collective Liberation

I stumbled upon The Othering and Belonging Institute on Wednesday. ‘Othering’ is a critical concept to understand when trying to bridge and heal communities. It has come up again and again as I’ve worked to use liberatory-based language and practices and looked for ways to understand and share an understanding of a collective liberation that connects your freedom to mine, and vise versa.

  • Article: The Problem of Othering: Towards Inclusiveness and Belonging By Powell and Menendian→
    This is a long read, but well worth the time.
    “The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of “othering.” In a world beset by seemingly intractable and overwhelming challenges, virtually every global, national, and regional conflict is wrapped within or organized around one or more dimension of group-based difference. Othering undergirds territorial disputes, sectarian violence, military conflict, the spread of disease, hunger and food insecurity, and even climate change.”
  • Article: Us vs. Them: The process of othering By Clint Curle | Candian Museum for Human Rights→
    “People are different. We can use our differences as an opportunity to share and learn or we can use our differences as an excuse to build walls between us. When we highlight differences between groups of people to increase suspicion of them, to insult them or to exclude them, we are going down a path known as “othering.”
  • Video: Let them Drown – The Violence of Othering in a Warming World, Naomi Klein→
  • Podcast: White v White | Invisibilia Podcast→
    “A city council candidate says he’s black. But his opponent accuses him of being a white man pretending to be black. If race is simply a social construct and not a biological reality, how do we determine someone’s race? And who gets to decide? We tell the story of a man whose racial identity was fiercely contested… and the consequences this had on an entire city.”

Thursday: Big Hairy Audacious Goals and Catalytic Mechanisms

The highlight of Thursday was working with members of the Board of Directors of Parkour Visions to prepare and conduct an annual evaluation. In this conversation we discussed what it meant to measure success, and mused on the potential future of the organization. After our meeting, one board member, Jason, sent me a book that he had found useful over the years–which, turns out, was from the same author of From Good to Great. It was a nice reminder as well to revisit the BHAGs I have for my organizations and personal life.

Friday Night: History of New York City Night-Life

Friday night was focused on fun. I accidentally dove down a rabbit hole of NYC nightlife history. Truly, the 70s, 80s, 90s were a fascinating time to live in the city and these stories captured the life and death of a cultural movement that had far reaching impact.

Weekend Reads: History and Mutual Aid

I finally picked up the next set of books on my list, which include Hood Feminism, Stamped from the Beginning, and The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, as well as the two I plowed through below. I’ve always had a keen interest and passion for history, especially works that challenge and dismantle the white, western-centric stories I was told as a kid.

So much of our understanding of reality, and our interactions with other people, is shaped by our known version of history.

Still in Progress…

I’ve been slowly making progress on these below, and will log them with my notes once I finish (Hopefully this week?)

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On Emancipationist vs Reconciliationist Post-Civil War Perspectives | Eric Forner

Two understandings of how the Civil War should be remembered collided in post-bellum America. One was the “emancipationist” vision hinted at by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address when he spoke of the war as bringing a rebirth of the republic in the name of freedom and equality. The other was a “reconciliationist” memory that emphasized what the two sides shared in common, particularly the valor of individual soldiers, and suppressed thoughts of the war’s causes and the unfinished legacy of emancipation. By the end of the century, in a segregated society where blacks’ subordination was taken for granted North and South, “the forces of reconciliation” had “overwhelmed the emancipationist vision.”

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Ableism

Ableism is “a system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence, excellence and productivity. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in anti-Blackness, eugenics, colonialism and capitalism. This form of systemic oppression leads to people and society determining who is valuable and worthy based on a person’s appearance and/or their ability to satisfactorily [re]produce, excel and “behave.”


You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism.

–A working definition by Talila “TL” Lewis in conversation with Disabled Black and other negatively racialized folk, especially Dustin Gibson; updated January 2020

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The Problem of Othering: Towards Inclusiveness and Belonging By Powell and Menendian

About

The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of “othering.” In a world beset by seemingly intractable and overwhelming challenges, virtually every global, national, and regional conflict is wrapped within or organized around one or more dimension of group-based difference. Othering undergirds territorial disputes, sectarian violence, military conflict, the spread of disease, hunger and food insecurity, and even climate change.

Link to Article

Defined: Othering

“We define “othering” as a set of dynamics, processes, and structures that engender marginality and persistent inequality across any of the full range of human differences based on group identities. Dimensions of othering include, but are not limited to, religion, sex, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status (class), disability, sexual orientation, and skin tone. Although the axes of difference that undergird these expressions of othering vary considerably and are deeply contextual, they contain a similar set of underlying dynamics.”

1. Demagoguery and Power

On the ‘Southern Strategy’ pushed by Republican political strategists: “The idea of stoking anxiety, resentment, or fear of the “other” is not a new electoral strategy in American politics. Appeals to nativism, racism, and xenophobia are evident in almost every period of American history…. [However,] Political strategies informed by “othering” are hardly unique to the United States or even democracies.”

On Demagoguery: “Aristotle and other ancient Greeks warned of “demagogues”—leaders who used rhetoric to incite fear for political gain. Many autocratic and authoritarian leaders stoke nationalism or resentment or fears of the “other” to prop up or reinforce their own support. Such demagoguery usually involves more than mere appeals to latent fear or prejudice in the population. Demagogues actively inculcate and organize that fear into a political force. Where prejudice was latent, it is being activated; where it is absent, it is being fostered.”

2. The Mechanics of Othering

Notes

3. Expanding the Circle of Human Concern

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Weekly Round-Up | Generational Differences, Othering, and Collective Liberation

Every week I create a round-up of my favorite reads and listens over the last 7 days.

Extremely light week this week as I was completely swamped with work!

  • Article: Generational Differences in Racial Equity Work→
    “Leaders and staff have to be able to talk to one another. Elders hold valuable earned knowledge and wisdom. They know the terrain. Younger workers have fresh minds and hearts. They see old problems with new eyes. Both are necessary for addressing our biggest problems. The key is being able to sit in space with one another without turning away, shutting down, or blowing up. That can only really happen once trust has been established. And trust is born out of truth-telling.”
  • Interview: The Catalyst Project; from a place of love→ Strong recommendation to read. Clear articulation around collective liberation.
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Generational Differences in Racial Equity Work by Dax-Devlon Ross

About

Leaders and staff have to be able to talk to one another. Elders hold valuable earned knowledge and wisdom. They know the terrain. Younger workers have fresh minds and hearts. They see old problems with new eyes. Both are necessary for addressing our biggest problems. The key is being able to sit in space with one another without turning away, shutting down, or blowing up. That can only really happen once trust has been established. And trust is born out of truth-telling.

Link to Article

“Are we actually interrupting and dismantling white supremacy, or are we just giving lip service while feeding the systems of oppression that have harmed generations of people?“

By and large, the critics [of organizations & leadership] are younger, often of color, though also white allies. They are newer to the workforce and in direct service roles that power the organization’s mission. Often, they identify with the very people the organization is set up to serve. In short, they are the people closest to the work, yet they find themselves furthest from the decision-making tables that define the strategy, design the delivery model, and determine the core objectives.

Critiques include:

  • The organization “whitens” as you get closer to the top of the organizational chart. Rather than hire from within when coveted positions open up, the organization looks externally for talent.
  • Wealthy white men (some of whom might be Republicans or even Trump supporters) occupy a disproportionate share of the board seats.
  • Staff performance is judged and promotions based on metrics that don’t tell the whole story of their work. Relatedly, perfectionism is celebrated while progress is ignored.
  • Overwork is glorified.
  • Professionalism is code for white.
  • The default development strategy feels exploitative of communities of color and/or obscures the role that systemic racism plays in shaping the problems nonprofits are set up to address .

The people leading nonprofits today were molded and shaped, promoted and rewarded within a social and political context that was fixated on procuring accountability through metrics.

Address your performance metrics. The very notion of quantitative measurement as the gold standard of managing and motivating employees is rooted in capitalist industrialism, the focus of which was mass production by any means, including the exploitation of labor. If you call yourself an anti-racist organization, figure out what’s worth measuring and let the other stuff go.

Clarify decision rights. Let people know which decisions are on the table and which are not and why. A solution: let people know when and how they will be included in decisions as well as who has ultimate decision rights. Also, consider letting people know if they are being included for input gathering purposes only, and let them decide if they want to play that role.

Purity can be its own form of perfectionism. We can’t ask everyone else to see our nuances but not allow for the nuances in others. If you find yourself finding fault with every choice the leader makes, check in with yourself. Are you holding this person to an exacting standard that no one can attain? To advance in any field, one has to be able to work within imperfect systems. Give people the grace and space you would want to be imperfect.

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Catalyst Project: From a Place of Love

About

“How do we organize large numbers of white people to work for the liberation of all people that directly challenges the divide-and-rule strategy of white supremacy?” One of the key responses Catalyst has to this question is the need to develop anti-racist leadership in white communities rooted in collective liberation politics and guided by strategy based in love.

Link to Content

Catalyst believes the change that is needed involves challenging patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy along with all other systems of oppression. Therefore, for us, anti-racism necessarily means working against all forms of domination and working towards collective liberation.

Catalyst’s vision and work are based in need and desire. The need is material: racism needs to end for any and all of us to survive. Racism enables economic exploitation that drives down wages and drives up the cost of living, healthcare, education, and the basic needs that more and more people are unable to meet. Racism erodes safety and health for the people of color it targets, and then works on the rest of us. Racism causes environmental crises that impact communities of color first and worst, and are changing life as we know it for all of us.

Our work is also based on the desire for all of us to live into our full humanity. White supremacy locks up, deports, shoots, and impoverishes millions of people of color. We’re losing epic numbers of people and the brilliance, talents, and potential they’re not getting to nourish. Racism deforms the humanity of white people, by enlisting our participation in violence and by distorting our ability to understand ourselves and people of color outside of a lens of superiority and inferiority. We long for a different world, where people of color are not on guard in a daily war against their full participation in society. We ache for a world where we aren’t conscripted into being foot soldiers for the wars of the 1 percent, at home or abroad.

—

White people are taught to understand racism just as prejudice, and to overlook the institutional power behind it. We work with groups to deepen their analysis of institutional racism, and to locate ourselves both in history and the current realities of racism

On Intersectionality:

…The idea that all systems of oppression are intertwined and depend on each other, and thus must be addressed in a holistic, interrelated way in theory and practice, in our hearts and in the streets;

Intersectionality complicates how we understand relationships of power and what’s needed to transform them, and helps us understand that we can’t organize people around one part of themselves and ask them to check the rest of their lives at the door.

Collective Liberation

Collective liberation challenges divide-and-control tactics by emphasizing how our fate is bound up with each other. With collective liberation as our goal, we seek to create a society where everyone has access to human rights, food, dignified work, housing, education, and health care. It means that “no one is free when others are oppressed,” and it means recognizing that oppression strips all of us of our humanity, keeping us disconnected and alienated from each other and the planet. Within a collective liberation vision, white people work to end racism not for or on behalf of the interests of people of color, but because our lives and humanity depend on the eradication of racism as well. We do this work in service of a liberated world where the 1 percent don’t fight each other for crumbs, where people, including white people, no longer ally ourselves with ruling-class elites who don’t have our interests in mind.

Collective liberation is a vision to move towards and a practice to help get us there. Love is crucial to a practice of collective liberation because it involves extending ourselves for someone else’s growth. As opposed to the traditional concept of solidarity, which can involve a rational calculus of interest between groups of people, love allows for an expansive generosity of spirit that opens the space for mutual transformation.

Feminism

move away from the past mistakes of white feminists who pushed for equal access to the power of white men as opposed to organizing for systemic transformation

Like many white anti-racists, we’ve made mistakes around applying intersectionality to our work; in some cases we organized white people as if they were a homogeneous
group, with identical relationships to institutional power and access to resources.

Organizing from a Place of Love

Traditional models of white anti-racist organizing have a sharp focus on what we are
organizing against. Organizing from a place of love means trying to practice and embody
what we are organizing towards.

On Leadership

….Social movements need leadership to win, leaders who can support more and more people to bring vision, strategy, and organizing skills to our struggle.

Leadership is always present, and when it’s informal, dynamics of entitlement often shape who steps into leadership positions, irrelevant of their experience or suitability for the role

For many of us who were politicized in anti-authoritarian political circles, we have
been schooled in the idea that “we don’t have leaders” and that we don’t need them. We
have been taught to see leadership as inherently hierarchical, and that in order to resist
hierarchy, we need to see our groups as flat and equal, with no leaders. There are several limitations to this culture of “leaderlessness.” First, it makes invisible the leadership that
does exist in our organizations, and the differences in political experience that are actually
a strength and a resource. Second, when we can’t talk about leadership, there’s less space for us to talk about real power differences in our organizations. For example, in male-dominated groups, we’ve had the experience of men using the pretext of “we are all equal here” to avoid being confronted about sexism. “ird, if we aren’t willing to recognize leadership where it exists in positive ways in our organizations and movements, then we are not able to develop a practice of leadership development that supports more people to build their skills and capacity to contribute meaningfully to political struggles.

a key responsibility and quality of leaders is developing more leaders

Key Lessons

  1. Help people locate their stake in the struggle for collective liberation.
    We need white people to make lifelong commitments to anti-racism, not based on feelings of pity or charity for people of color, within the colonial models we’ve been offered of condescension and “the white man’s burden,” with its toxic and genocidal history. These commitments must be based on a longing in our bones, in the depths of our hearts, for a world that meets all of our needs
  2. This work is complex and messy.
    People of color do not have a unified set of demands for white people to line up behind. People of color span the political spectrum, and are not all advancing a liberatory agenda. And among people of color who are organizing for collective liberation, there is still no united banner. White activists need to take the best of what solidarity organizing offers, which is its challenge to internalized white superiority and emphasis on seeking and supporting the leadership of organizers of color with whom you have important political alignment. Not that you have to agree on everything—that is where it’s crucial to develop our own political compass in order to be able to navigate complicated realities of work on the ground. “at also necessitates building actual working relationships. “rough joint struggle, we forge relationships, trust, and dialogue. Sometimes as white people we want to come into an organizing situation and offer our critique and challenge before we’ve gotten our hands dirty doing some actual work. “at’s another function of privilege—deciding that our best role is to sit on the sidelines and critique everything that doesn’t meet our standards, rather than getting in there and offering our labor and skills.
  3. Work with white people while staying grounded in multiracial organizing.
    Who is going to work with white people on issues of racism if not other white people? . Organizing white people to collective action for justice cannot happen in isolation from the guidance and needs of people of color. Real change is going to take multiracial coalitions, and in order for that to happen, we need more white people who are ready to side with justice and see the deep connections they have with communities of color.
  4. Anti-racist organizing is transformative organizing
    It calls upon white people to transform ourselves, to make a lifetime commitment to healing from the ways racism takes us out of alignment with humanity. It challenges us to take collective action, to bring more white people into taking active responsibility to end institutional racism. Transformative organizing refers to the dynamic interplay of change on the individual and institutional levels—how as individuals, we are healed and transformed and grow through the process of transforming how we structure society.

Transformative vs Transactional Organizing

Transformative organizing offers a different model than the common “transactional” style of organizing, which suggests that we organize simply as a means towards a very specific short-term end—the idea that a campaign is built solely towards winning a particular concession. Transformative organizing refers to the dynamic interplay of change on the individual and institutional levels—how as individuals we grow, heal, and change through the process of transforming society. It’s transformative to offer our lives and hearts to the work of collective liberation. In the struggle, we come to find community in deep ways, sometimes after we’ve lost some relationships because of our political principles. It is profoundly powerful to know, deep down, what side we are on, to know where and with whom our interests lie, and to build the future together.

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Weekly Round-Up | Philanthropy, Wealth, Reparations, and Anti-Racism

Every week I create a round-up of my favorite reads and listens over the last 7 days.

I recently joined the Community-Centric Fundraising slack, and have absolutely loved pouring over resources and threads. While I consistently am reading and thinking about the power at play in the world of philanthropy and wealth, this week I dove specifically into some readings about the origins of Philanthropy.

All Week: Anti-Racism & Equity

I also recommend the book Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance by Villanueva, as an excellent primer and “provocative analysis of the dysfunctional colonial dynamics at play in philanthropy and finance.”

Still in the Works…

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Toward A New Gospel of Wealth by Darren Walker

About

Drawing inspiration from Andrew Carnegie’s original “The Gospel of Wealth,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s incisive insights on philanthropy, and writer and critic Anand Giridharadas’s probing distinction between generosity and justice, this New Gospel convenes some of the most important voices in philanthropy to ask and offer answers to a vital question: If there’s a continuum between generosity and justice, how do we push our work closer to the latter?

There is an article & book; The button links to the article.

Link to Article

Walker writes that is a tension and contradiction between “philanthropic efforts to address inequality and the structural economic realities that make it possible for foundations to exist at all.”

in 1889, Andrew Carnegie, of the Carnegie Libraries, authored a famous essay that came to be known as the “Gospel of Wealth.” It laid the foundation for modern philanthropy and led to an era of philanthropic efforts around the world.

In his essay, Carnegie argued that extreme inequality was an “unavoidable condition of the free market system and that philanthropy is one effective means of ameliorating the conditions the market produces.” Warren revisits this premise to examine what the present day realities and responsibilities are in the world of Philanthrophy.

Rethinking the Gospel of Giving

“Philanthropy is commendable,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary” — and beyond that: he underlying structures and systems, the roots of injustice, the causes of human suffering, and the sources of our own privilege.

A 21st-century view of inequality

“Where Carnegie might have identified illiteracy as a source of inequality, for example, we now understand that the reverse is true—or, at the very least, that a complex symbiosis is at work. We understand, in a way he did not, that social, cultural, political, and economic inequalities set in place reinforcing conditions from the very start of life—in homes, in neighborhoods, and in schools—that create cycles of poverty, illiteracy, and lack of opportunity.”

Three steps toward reducing inequality

1 – We need to open ourselves up to more critical, honest discussions about deeply rooted cultural norms and structures, including racial, gender, ethnic, and class biases.

2 – Foundations need to reject inherited, assumed, paternalist instincts—an impulse to put grantmaking rather than change making at the center of our worldview.

3 – We need to interrogate the fundamental root causes of inequality, even, and especially, when it means that we ourselves will be implicated.

“How does our work—our approach to awarding grants, our hiring and contracting policies, even our behavior toward our partners and grantees—reinforce structural inequality in our society? Why are we still necessary, and what can we do to build a world where we no longer are as necessary?“

Our obligation to capitalism

Admin Smith, author of Wealth of Nations, argued: “no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”

Additional Notes

“…the more excluded people are, the harder it is truly to hear them.”