When your success is contingent upon knowing the right white people
Edited by Laila Ruffin and Noor Tamari
I grew up on nonprofits. Living in a low-income community where resources are scarce and my predominantly male family often excluded me from their card games and basketball tournaments, I relied on nonprofits to solve childhood boredom, fulfill my lack of female role models, teach me what I know about politics, and ultimately get me into college.
Starting in my pre-teens, a local all women’s nonprofit taught me how to sew and the basics of sign language and how periods work. I became a feminist and realized marijuana should be legal. They gave me scholarships, summer jobs, and adult mentors.
When I entered high school, I joined two college preparatory nonprofits. They boasted getting high achieving, low-income students into top colleges. I wrote scholarship essays and practiced for the ACTs. They helped me fill out my financial aid forms and paid for trips to visit colleges.
I am very thankful for these opportunities. However, the issue is every one of these organizations is run by white people.
Every formalized mentor relationship set up by these organizations paired me with a white woman who lived in an affluent neighbourhood with a stable career, a heterosexual marriage, and white children. Every time I was “honored” enough to speak to the executive directors of these organizations, they were white people who needed to mention that they were so impressed by my drive, my grit, my ability to overcome adversity. I was invited to luncheons and galas. I would speak to donors, I would bare my soul in heartfelt essays to win money.
I stumbled onto a quote recently that has stuck with me: “What are the implications for a social justice movement in which power and resources are being transferred based on one’s ability to develop a relationship with the right white people?” Tiffany Lethabo King and Ewuare Osayande pose this question in the book The Revolution will not be Funded, which speaks on the nonprofit industrial complex, or the NPIC. The NPIC can be described as,
While I began the book with a curiosity towards the relationship between nonprofits and political movements, I concluded it with what can only be described as an identity crisis. I began to question how to be critical of this system while existing as a beneficiary of it.
In a perfect world, nonprofits do not exist. Or they exist in a different capacity. There are no college prep programs for low-income students because there is no income inequality and college is affordable and accessible to everyone. There are no women’s only after-school programs because there is no gender inequality and sex education is taught inclusively in public education. I do not have to document my trauma to win a scholarship or pay money to send colleges my financial information to prove I am poor enough to deserve a piece of their billion-dollar endowment.
But this isn’t a perfect world, these inequalities do exist, and shouldn’t I be grateful I was awarded these privileges despite the statistical unlikelihood that I would’ve?
When I was in high school I co-founded a weekly feminist discussion group with my best friend that we hosted at our local nonprofit. The staff at this organization were extremely proud of us for taking initiative and building a safe space for young women in our community. We were invited to attend several events to speak about our program, to reflect positively on the organization as a whole.
One such event included an invitation to a large house in the suburbs. I remember after my best friend and I gave our spiel, the hostess stood up to address the room of white women. “I know what you all may be thinking,” she began, “what can I, a white woman, do for these kids? How can I help?” and began to detail her experience as a mentor for young women at this nonprofit.
I was baffled. And angry. She understood her privilege not as something that would make it difficult to relate to us, but as something that would make it difficult to help us. Why are we encouraging these women to mentor youth whose lives they have no understanding of? Why don’t they consider giving us money to hire people of color we could identify with, from our own communities? Or opening their homes more so these events were not exclusive to the most palatable and “respectable” members, this time being me and my best friend? Or dismantling the entire system that makes me have to apply for hundreds of scholarships, while your children get to go to private school with college counselors and a trust fund that makes it so they do not even have to consider the possibility of shouldering college debt?
These women didn’t know me. But they believe that their presence in a nonprofit organization was “helping” whatever cause. I’ve been having a hard time understanding myself as both a victim and a beneficiary of white saviorism in the context of the nonprofit industrial complex.
The work my best friend and I did reflected positively on the organization, and in that process, we were platformed and uplifted in a way many other women from the same community weren’t. In the process, however, they tokenized the both of us by making it seem as though we were ‘the exception’ to the norm, rather than recognizing how systemic conditions made it so we had limited opportunities
I understand the sentiment of getting certain hardworking individuals out of unfortunate situations. But why aren’t these white funders and white CEOs and white volunteers funneling their time, energy, and money into dismantling the exact systems that put youth in the disenfranchised positions they so desperately want to save them from? I understand while these systems are being dismantled, organizations like this seem like they should exist so the “top of the low” get out. I just see far too little understanding of the NPIC and its problems from those in charge.
When I meet the all-white board of directors, or get introduced to a donor, or speak at an event, it’s difficult for me to not feel like the diversity hire. I’m a young Dominican woman from a poor community, who grew up in a single-family household. I’m queer and a first-generation college student. I’m nowhere near the least fortunate of Americans, but I have a backlog of sob stories from my youth and tales of overcoming adversity that I can pull out at any moment for whatever scholarship requires me to. I continue to be the poster child for overcoming adversity, bringing my pain and struggle to the light for people who have no interest in fixing the system that caused me harm in the first place. They only want to keep manufacturing respectable youth that “will change the world someday” because these youth were accepted into the same elite universities as their sons and daughters.
I’m not saying these places shouldn’t exist. I think many of them are the foundation for the sense of community I feel in my hometown. My best friendships were formed there. They introduced me to role models and fostered my sense of individuality and my morals as an intersectional feminist. They got me into college. A good one. For free. But is my success story distracting from the fact that almost everyone else in my community was not awarded the same resources and power?
Nonprofits have their plethora of problems, from the way they are essentially colonizers by entering third world countries to “help” them solve problems their home country started or the way they detract from grassroots social movements by trying to please funders by altering their mission. But the only way to completely dismantle systems of oppression is to recognize how you benefit from and contribute to them. I think we all must confront the ways in which we contribute to oppressive systems, our place in social movements, and whether or not we are being responsible with our privilege, funds, and resources.
