Jami Nakamura Lin Nicole Cardoza Jami Nakamura Lin Nicole Cardoza

Question billionaire philanthropy.

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).

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.

This is the Anti-Racism Daily, where we send one email each day to dismantle white supremacy. You can support our work by giving one time on our website, PayPal or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza). You can also donate monthly or annually on Patreon. If this email was forwarded to you, you could subscribe at antiracismdaily.com.

ps – if you can, vote.

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?

GET EDUCATED

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. 

"
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. 

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Nicole Cardoza Nicole Cardoza

Boycott as a form of protest.

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Happy Tuesday!

Thanks to all the fervor yesterday around the action for the day. If you're reading this, you didn't unsubscribe! Grateful to have you here in this work.

Many of you asked about the responsibilities of Twitter and Facebook for moderating the rhetoric Trump shares online, perhaps because of the recent Boycott Facebook movement. It's fascinating to see this unfold, especially because of how important boycotting has been as a form of protest during the civil rights movement. As boycotting goes digital, and many of us are forced to protest from inside, there's an interesting relationship between social media, boycotting, and holding brands accountable.

So we're diving in to understand the historical context, and how we can use our dollars and voice to demand change. If these newsletters are supporting you, considering giving one-time on PayPal or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza), or subscribe for $5/month on Patreon.

Nicole 

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TAKE ACTION

  1. Sign the petition to #StopHateforProfit to join the Facebook boycott.

  2. Choose a harmful brand you've financially supported in 2020. Decide to stop buying from them. Invest into a more equitable company – preferably a BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA+ owned business.

GET EDUCATED

Major brands – like Starbucks, Unilever, Ford, and Coca-Cola – are pulling their advertising revenue from Facebook as part of a coordinated boycott (more via NYTimes). The #StopHateforProfit boycott, organized by the Anti-Defamation League (which I pointed to as a resource in yesterday's newsletter), encourages brands to pause their ad spend for the month of July, and lists ten actions for Facebook to take to improve how they handle racism on their platform (learn more, including a list of all participating brands, on the official website.

The major tech companies, including Facebook, have often cited "free speech" regarding hateful rhetoric. But things changed when Trump tweeted a series of incendiary tweets in late May in response to the George Floyd protests including the phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," a term popularized by a chief of police in Miami referring to how to treat protestors in the midst of civil unrest in 1967, and considered to incite racial violence for years to come. Walter E. Headley was known for his "bigotry" and also said "we don't mind being accused of police brutality" (NPR). 


“There is only one way to handle looters and arsonists during a riot and that is to shoot them on sight. I've let the word filter down — when the looting starts, the shooting starts”.

Walter E. Headley, the police chief of Miami, Florida in 1967 (Source)


Twitter – after years of calls to address Trump's tweets (example on Vox) – had just started to take action, marking tweets about mail-in voting during coronavirus as "potentially misleading" just days before (The Verge). In this case, they decided to shield the public from Trump's tweet's contents, warning that it invokes violence, but allowing users to click through and read it (The Verge). Trump posted this message on Facebook, too, but Facebook chose to do nothing, angering staff and causing walk-outs internally before tensions bubbled to today (MSNBC).

As a result, other tech companies have followed suit. After a public letter from over 650 subreddit leaders (The Atlantic), Reddit removed 2,000 hateful communities, including r/The_Donald, which promotes racism, anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories, and violent memes (The Atlantic). After encouraging racial profiling on its platform, neighborhood social media app Nextdoor removed a feature that allowed users to forward crime and safety posts from within the app to the police (NYTimes). YouTube banned white supremacists David Duke, Stefan Molyneux, and Richard Spencer – along with 25,000+ channels that violate hate speech policies (NY Post).

Facebook makes an estimated $70B each year on advertising – 98% of its annual revenue – particularly from small and medium-sized businesses, so it's unlikely this boycott will bankrupt them. But the lost revenue, especially during COVID-19, where many smaller businesses are cutting marketing budgets, caused Facebook stock to drop by 8% Friday (Bloomberg News) which caused Mark Zuckerberg to release a short statement and changes on Friday, June 26 (which wasn't well-received) (Slate). 

It's important to note here that boycotts against corporation send a moral and financial message. Most businesses can tune out questions on morality. But money? Feelings on current events can be discarded as subjective, but cash is objective. And boycotts harm brand reputations, which have a much more lasting impact than short-term revenue loss. According to research by Brayden King at Northwestern University, most companies are worried enough about their reputations that they’ll change their behavior, even if the number of people partaking in the boycott is rather small (The Atlantic).

“It takes years and years to build a reputation, it takes one bad event to completely destroy that reputation”.

– Brayden King, Professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management

Boycotts have deep roots in our fight for justice. Many people remember the story of Rosa Parks, who was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to a white male passenger. But the Montgomery Bus Boycott that followed was key to creating lasting reform. The Women’s Political Council, a group of black women working for civil rights, circulated flyers calling for a boycott of the bus system on December 5, the day Parks would be tried in municipal court. This, followed by a front-page article from the local paper, rallied 40,000 people to boycott the bus system that day (History).

And for 381 days following, thousands of African Americans continued to boycott the buses, organizing carpools and relying on African American taxi cab drivers who'd charge the same bus fare for rides (History). Initially designed to convince the bus system – whose passengers were 75% Black – to create more equitable rules, the movement led to five women bringing the case to court. By June 5,1956, the Montgomery federal court ruled that any law requiring racially segregated seating on buses violated the 14th Amendment (History). The bus company lost 30,000 and 40,000 bus fares each day of the boycott and was desperate for it to end (more via nps.gov).

Local and national boycotts of the past decade have thrived because of social media (take the #BoycottNike situation in 2018, and #DeleteUber in 2017). So it's unprecedented to see social media being boycotted. But necessary. Because social media has become our digital neighborhood during this global pandemic. Most Americans get their news from social media (Quartz) and that news is more likely to be inaccurate (Pew Research Center). If social media is the soil of this generation's revolution, it needs to be a space where true change can grow. And that takes accountability for how people can use social media to spread racist and hateful messaging.

“Many Americans have spent months inside, on the internet, thinking about what it means to live online. Now many of them are in the streets, thinking about how to tackle racism. More than ever, it’s obvious that the internet is the real world. What happens here matters. What happens here happens out there”.

Kaitlyn Tiffany, staff writer at The Atlantic

So the question remains – should I be boycotting Facebook right now? Deactivating your account is unlikely to move this boycott forward. In fact, it may disconnect you from information and actions you can take in your local community, and the people you should be having conversations with. I'd recommend using it to stay in this work.

Instead, think about how you can boycott brands that are causing harm with your own dollars (like by supporting these Amazon warehouse workers calling for change). And remember that 99.7% of businesses in America are small businesses (via sba.gov). How can you put your money to work in your own community? And not just by divesting from harmful brands – but re-investing in the brands that work for you and the rights of all people. Lastly, make your reasons known by sharing publicly on social media, or sending a private message to the company (or both).

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Thank you for all your financial contributions! If you haven't already, consider making a monthly donation to this work. These funds will help me operationalize this work for greatest impact.

Subscribe on Patreon | Give one-time on PayPal | Venmo @nicoleacardoza

Read More