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Reflection

The flag is a powerful, potent symbol of the United States. The structure and colors of the flag communicate a narrative about this country; a seemingly fixed narrative about who is and isn’t included and on what terms. The very form of the flag masks the aggression, oppression, imperial aspirations and highly imperfect process of becoming the nation we are today.

While trying to hold in my mind the complexity of the racialized past and present of the United States, I struggle to imagine a different way to represent our nation. How can we begin to imagine ourselves as a nation in which all of the people who have built this country voluntarily or involuntarily, warily or with enthusiasm, in rebellion or in collaboration, are recognized as integral to this place that we call home? What visual image might start to represent this collection of people and make the space for our multiple narratives, so we are defined by our coming together, rather than by who we are and who we are not?

The persistent oversimplification and reduction of our national narrative by glossing over, simplifying and excluding the stories of entire communities, white, black and everything in between these two extremes of domination and subordination, undermines our ability to reach our fullest potential, as individuals, communities and as a country. We need to revisit and re-imagine our national narrative so that it includes the stories, the successes and failures, sadnesses and joys of all of our communities. One or two-dimensional representations of our country and our people obliterates the space for subtly, and denies that aspect of our nation that is its very source of our creativity and dynamism—namely our people.

Just as the structure of the flag needs to be challenged so that our national symbol includes all of our people, so too do the structures of our society. Through policy and practice, we need to recognize and address our different histories and how those histories impact our present lived realities. Most importantly, we need to ask ourselves how we shape policy and practice so that success is the rule rather than the exception in all communities. When crafting policy, how are we taking into account our different histories?

As a member of a number of progressive funder networks, predominantly white, I see many opportunities to support this change of policy and practice right at home. Some of these opportunities will succeed, some will fail, but all of these will offer openings to learn how to be better allies in the struggle for social justice and racial equity. At the Women Donors Network, we have started to wrestle with issues related to race, and our efforts, while sometimes frustrating, give me hope. Below I share some of seeds that we have planted and some of our future aspirations.

A significant number of our community members have been long time supporters of social justice, and racial justice in particular. However, despite numerous attempts to work on race by individual members in the context of the organization, the work and community of WDN has not yet been substantively transformed. Following hurricane Katrina, WDN members began to direct significant financial resources to recovery work in the Gulf region through a partnership with the 21st Century Foundation. This personal investment into racially charged situation catalyzed a small group of members to meet to try to explore how we as a community could more actively support racial justice.

We quickly started to realize that part of the challenge was that our creativity about how to be better allies had really been immobilized by our outward focused aspiration to have a racially diverse membership. We started to realize that first we needed to look inward to figure out how best to be allies rather than continue to look to others for answers. Namely, who holds wealth in this country and why? Would having a racially diverse membership “solve” race for WDN or would it just provide cover? And, importantly, are our actions aligned with our values and are there ways to live our values that might, in the long run, attract individual philanthropist of color?

A parallel line of questioning around community organizing started around the same time as our members struggled with being members of the political party that was, at that time, out of power. Individually we were clear that we had come together to find community, but equally clear was that we had only begun to self organize and exert our collective power in the larger political landscape.

A number of us started to come to realize that as individual philanthropists working in community, we are well situated to support significant steps towards racial equity if we are willing to do the hard work that we must do to align our values with our actions.

We are creating opportunities for our entire membership to learn about and understand structural racism. We are working to adopt practices within our own institution and in our relationships with other institutions that explicitly take into account the role of race and other forms of systematic oppression, such as class, gender and sexual orientation. That is, we are starting to figure out ways to hold ourselves accountable for understanding how history, policies and practices shape outcomes and to apply this understanding to all aspects of our work together. Even when we don’t think a structural analysis is needed, we are going to challenge ourselves to do one and figure out how it will inform our work.

We are planting the seeds to embrace racial complexity. Our understanding of race needs to be more finely gradated and nuanced to include knowledge of all racialized communities, and to understand how racialization continues to evolve over time. By lifting up the importance of considering race in our actions, collectively we are becoming increasingly aware that we can no longer claim to be working in a world defined by black and white, but rather need to recognize how race is used to limit options for Native Americans, African Americans, Asians, and Hispanics.

We are working on developing the confidence to talk about race constructively and are challenging ourselves to learn how. Increasing numbers of our members are realizing how negative racial stereotyping continues to be used, both implicitly and explicitly, to undermine public support of policies that we are passionate about and that could move us in the direction of racial equity and social justice more broadly.

We are at the beginning of this evolution, but are excited about the possibilities. Individual members have made commitments to these ideas, and we are looking for ways to share these practices with the membership at large and shape them into organizational best practices. For example, individual members have made commitments to supporting leadership of color and long term relationship building across race, class and gender lines for ourselves and for other social change stakeholders.

Other members have recognized that supporting leadership means a lot more than financial resources. By using our connections to individuals in power, we can help to lift up and amplify the voices of people who don’t have ready access. As individuals who give financial support to people in public office, we need to improve our tools for partnering across race and class to hold public officials accountable and for challenging them to transform policies and practices that continue to uphold racial disparities.

By shifting our framework for how we work to understand race from one that is purely interpersonal to one that is structural and systemic, the Women Donors Network has been able to deepen our internal conversation and understanding about race in a way that has opened up our creativity and has increased the possibilities for what we can imagine. We have begun to acknowledge the energy generated by racial anxiety and have started to redirect it into proactive, anti-racism next steps. We are learning as we walk, but we no longer need to accept that the current racial relationships are a given, unchangeable or even that things are as they seem. In Seeing the World in Black and White, looking closely reveals unexpected delights of color and texture, speaking to the unfulfilled potential of this nation. As we at the Women Donors Network look more closely at the potential that our organization holds to be a partner in the struggle for social justice, we see that we have unfinished work to do on race and that by doing that work, we are engaging in a process to reclaim our full humanity. The seeds have been planted and the roots are taking hold.