On the last day of NPQ's looking-back series, we would like to close with three articles on racial justice and calls for approaching this work boldly, bravely, and unapologetically. Jeanne Bell offers us a window into the history of structural racism that permeates all institutions today. To work on anti-racism, we must first face the music that we have all inherited colonial, imperial "values" that were built on the exploitation of black and brown bodies and the planet. Dax-Devlon Ross writes a candid letter to white friends about how racism also harms them and that in the process of feeling that hurt and outrage, we can begin to understand the trauma that non-white people must survive daily. Finally, Will Cordery calls out to philanthropy to "fund racial justice. Fund the hell out of it," because only by working on anti-racism will we be able, as a society, to free ourselves from structural injustices.
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In a statement published last month on the Sierra Club website, executive director Michael Brune said the Sierra Club must “take this moment to reexamine our past and substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.” Titled “Pulling Down Our Monuments,” Brune’s piece acknowledges the Sierra Club’s practice of lionizing founder John Muir and other early club leaders without commensurate acknowledgement of their well-documented racism and personal connections within the eugenics movement.
Though Brune’s commentary on John Muir got the headlines in the national media, what makes the piece a valuable exemplar of organizational communication about race is the specificity with which he describes the nature and consequences of racism at the Sierra Club—consequences that have lived on well past Muir’s death in 1914. In that specificity, we as readers and stakeholders experience a deeper accountability than we do, frankly, with the indistinguishable pablum of too many professionally crafted organizational statements.
On Friday afternoon I got a call with a buddy I hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years. We met when we were 10 years old playing boys club basketball in Washington, D.C. Back then, we were rivals. He had game, especially for a white boy from Upper Northwest. I wasn’t too shabby myself. As it happened, we wound up going to middle and high school together where we played alongside one another for the better part of six years. I remember spending entire weekends at his house watching and talking about basketball over pizza. We were in 9th grade when Rodney King was beaten by the LAPD, 10th when L.A. residents rebelled. We listened to the same rap albums. We dressed in similarly baggy hip-hop gear. He used to let me borrow his black Grand Cherokee to get my haircut or so I could front with a girl I was trying to impress. We were close. But I can’t recall us ever talking about race.
So when his name showed up on my phone in the middle of the day on a Friday, I didn’t know what to make of it. Why was he calling? Why now?
It turned out that he wanted to see how I was doing. “…with everything happening in the news,” he said, referring to the George Floyd protests, Chris Cooper, and COVID-19.
The country is on fire—right now—yet again. It is on fire with a righteous rage that has come from living under the constant threat of Black death, under the constant fear of state-sanctioned racial violence at the hands of law enforcement and vigilantes. But we as a country have been here before many times. About five years ago, social justice foundations and progressive donors proudly proclaimed that Black lives mattered and that they would put significant resources behind building the capacity of Black-led and Black-centered organizing happening in communities across the country.
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