Question billionaire philanthropy.
Hello and Happy Sunday. Because we're likely going to be deep into the election this week, let's spend today focusing on corporate America. Jami analyzes how billionaires are often more complicit in sustaining economic and racial inequities than solving them, and unpacks the racial philanthropy gap.
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TAKE ACTION
Read this Vox article that explains the racial philanthropy gap.
Reflect on the corporations and businesses you support. How can you work towards advancing economic equality, instead of supporting corporations that further economic inequality?
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By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)
On October 13th, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced that they were donating another $100 million to support local election offices and polling places ahead of the presidential election (Washington Post). This money followed their earlier $300 million donation towards the same cause (Vox).
Many conservative groups decried the donations, accusing Zuckerberg of partisanship and election manipulation (The Press-Democrat). However, the bulk of the money is being funneled through the non-profit organization The Center for Tech and Civic Life, which is “regrant[ing] the money to local election officials so they can recruit poll workers, supply them with personal protective equipment, and set up drive-through voting” (Vox). The rest of the money is being distributed to Secretaries of State.
However, there are still many other concerns with the funding (and with billionaire philanthropy in general). First, to use a popular metaphor, Zuckerberg’s money is like Band-aid over a bullet wound—the wound being how massively underfunded the elections are this year. This spring, Congressional Democrats and a wide coalition of civil rights organizations (including the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, NAACP, and Indivisible) pushed for at least $4 billion in state election assistance (Civilrights.org), but the bill that passed only included one-tenth of that (NPR).
Instead, municipalities are using Zuckerberg’s money to fill in the gaps, to pay for necessities like ballot drop boxes, additional poll workers, and personal protective equipment (NY Times). This is problematic when we begin to rely on private money instead of pressuring the government to adequately fund our institutions (like when we normalize GoFundMe crowdfunding as an adequate replacement for affordable healthcare.)
It’s sometimes difficult to critique such philanthropy because the money is filling a concrete need. Zuckerberg’s donation does increase voting access. But this type of action is an example of what writer and political analyst Anand Giradharadas describes as actions the ruling class (like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos) takes to pretend that they are not, in fact, one of the sources of the problem. “This is the kind of change that allows you to stand on someone’s back while saying you’re helping them,” he explains (The Guardian). If they donate enough money, maybe we’ll forget about all their problematic, unethical business practices.
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Generosity is not a substitute for justice... One popular [move of the ruling class] is using generosity to obscure one’s own complicity in injustice. You commit an injustice and then rely on generosity on a much smaller scale to cover it up. This is the most obvious move. This happens often enough that when you see an act of plutocratic generosity you should at a minimum be skeptical.”
Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, via an interview with The Guardian
When Jeff Bezos made a $100 million donation to the nonprofit Feeding America in June (CNBC), the gift — which made all the headlines — also functioned as a publicity stunt). This kind of free publicity can work in a corporation’s favor; in Bezos’s case, such headlines might make us forget about Amazon’s consistently poor working conditions, which have become more dangerous during COVID-19 (Vox). The amount of money also seems shockingly large, until you break it down two ways: that the donation was just .07% of his wealth, and that it came out to just $2 for each of the 46 million Americans who rely on food banks (Nonprofit Quarterly).
In January, Bezos was worth $115 billion (CNN), but by August, he became the first person to be worth $200 billion (Forbes) — the same amount as the net wealth of the entire country of Ecuador. In a year when millions of people across the world have lost their jobs and financial stability, when his company refuses to provide data about coronavirus outbreaks to its workers, Bezos gained $85 billion, due to our global ever-growing dependence on Amazon. Meanwhile, his workers can’t even find out if there’s a coronavirus outbreak at their own warehouse (NBC).
In short: this system of philanthropy is used to “reinforce a politico-economic system that enables such a small number of people to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth… and serves to legitimise capitalism, as well as to extend it further and further into all domains of social, cultural and political activity” (The Guardian).
Again, it can be difficult to critique when many of the causes these billionaires support — like racial equality — are things we also believe in. But this version of philanthropy can reek of white saviorism, and can lead to a disturbing dynamic wherein “communities of color come… are forced to beg philanthropic grant makers for resources that... were earned through processes of exploitation in the first place” (Vox).
To fight racism, we must address our society’s economic inequality. Our past newsletters have addressed the massive wealth disparities between white households and households of color. And when we look deeply at the racial and class divides in this country, we understand that no matter how much these billionaires give away, they’ll never make up for what they’re taking from the rest of America.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Billionaire philanthropy often serves as a way for leaders of corporations to “commit an injustice and then rely on generosity on a much smaller scale to cover it up” (Anand Giridharadas via The Guardian)
Jeff Bezos’s net worth has increased by over $85 billion this year — at the same time his Amazon warehouse workers suffer grueling, unsafe warehouse conditions.
To fight racism, we must address economic inequality.
RELATED ISSUES
9/30/2020 | Close the racial wealth gap.
6/30/2020 | Boycott as a form of protest.
9/10/2020 | Fight for fair labor.
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