We started with grant-making executives, but we knew that even though philanthropic dollars can be catalytic, they alone cannot solve any problem, particularly one as entrenched as racism. Recently we joined with Leadership Greater Washington to expand Putting Racism on the Table to business, government, and nonprofit leaders.
The importance of helping leaders fully understand the realities of racism should not be minimized, but it often is. We try to fix black boys. They aren’t broken. What is broken is the education system, the criminal-justice system, and many of the other societal structures that surround them with a false sense of racial hierarchy. America has made little effort to understand structural racism and implicit bias.
Philanthropy has many opportunities to change that. It can:
- Support research on how best to have difficult conversations about race.
- Award grants to media watchdogs.
- Finance examinations of how black people are portrayed in American history textbooks.
- Examine racial equity in your grant making.
- Establish scholarships for black men who want to become teachers.
- Support research to examine systems in our country, such as education and criminal justice.
- Support work to determine how key systems across the country provide advantages and disadvantages to Americans based on their race.
We have been immersed in that all-encompassing sense of white is good and black is bad. We may not want to say those words out loud, but that is America’s truth. That’s all the more reason why philanthropy must lead the conversations and the actions that will contribute to America’s healing.
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