The Effort To Defund Racial Justice

It’s a familiar story. After the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, there was national soul searching and protests, and racial justice suddenly became fashionable. Money that once had been a trickle flowed into racial equity and anti-racism efforts across the board, from corporate diversity, equity and inclusion programs to Black Lives Matter.

Almost as quickly, the intensity of the epiphany began to fade as the public’s attention was absorbed by the COVID pandemic and other, political crises. Predictably, the right wing stepped up its critiques of “wokeism,” especially calls to reallocate funding for police, pointing — ironically — to the street protests as proof of escalating crime that actually necessitated more police. 

While white backlash is part of the historic ebb and flow of the racial justice movement, the 2020 fallout is unique: Emboldened by the popularity of Trumpism and a right-leaning judicial system hostile to racial equity, conservatives are now seeking to defund racial justice itself. 

What this means is that in 2024, Black nonprofits say funders and foundations are in retreat. They are either reducing racial equity granting or watering down the language of Blackness and anti-racism or both. 

The fate of racial equity funding is at a serious crossroads — an inflection point. Without money and, more importantly, without the public interest in equity, the battle for racial justice would continue, of course, but it would be severely marginalized, almost certainly set back. What the movement is facing is a giant wave of right-wing determination, aided by a string of favorable court actions in the past year or so, to not just defund but delegitimize advocacy for racial justice. 

Funders are fearful of legal repercussions, but fearful in a deeper, more existential way as the nation contemplates the political sea change of a second Trump term that feels more than possible. For Black nonprofits long vested in racial equity, the fight is not just to preserve dollars but to make sure donors don’t lose their nerve, now or in the future.

The shift away from funding equity calls for courage — and counteraction. This year, at the behest of the Black Equity Collective, over 100 Black-led organizations signed an open letter to the philanthropic community, calling on it to not just stand firm in the face of the conservative onslaught, but to keep going. Kaci Patterson, founder of the Black Equity Collective, a partnership of funders and Black communities that funds Black-led projects in Southern California (full disclosure: This column is funded by a grant from the BEC), said nonprofits had been experiencing pullback from funders, resulting in reduced support she describes as “mostly window dressing.” Patterson was forced to revise her own budget mid-year, due to a $700,000 drop in funds that were pledged but didn’t materialize. 

Both in the letter and in her daily work, Patterson is encouraging nervous funders not to modify the mission of Black justice, but to redouble their commitment to it. The letter urges funders to read and incorporate into their mission the recommendations released by California’s Reparations Task Force, the first state reparations task force in the country. Taking such an unapologetically pro-Black stance carries risk, for foundations but more so for nonprofits. Patterson believes firmly that for nonprofits on the front lines of the movement for racial equity, there is no other choice. “Do we fear losing money? Yes of course,” she said. “But we have to do this. The work isn’t stopping.”

The stakes are higher than ever, because “the right has more traction now than they’ve ever had,” said Marc Philpart, executive director of the California Black Freedom Fund, a state initiative to support Black-led nonprofits. “So we have to be intentional in telling the truth about power, injustice, how people are systematically trying to dismantle progress. The right’s agenda is white supremacy and fascism. This is not just an attack on Black folks, it’s an attack on democratic principles.”

Philpart sounds unusually blunt for someone in the social justice sphere, which tends to emphasize cooperation and visions of a shared good. But he said the moment leaves him no choice. We are very far from the hopeful moment four years ago, when many foundations acted almost as one to dramatically increase support for racial equity. Of course, that increase was not nearly enough. A 2023 survey of 25 community foundations by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy found that while funding of Black equity among those foundations increased by $125 million, much of it wasn’t long term. Overall, only 2.4% of foundation budgets were spent on racial equity, even though that represented a doubling from 2016-2018. 

Still, foundations were reporting a new, critical understanding about the importance of racial equity, one not captured by funding levels. “We are finally willing to articulate and call out racism as a fundamental root cause of the opportunity gap,” said one foundation leader interviewed in another study of racial equity granting published in 2022 by the Center for Effective Philanthropy. “You can’t talk about closing the opportunity gap without talking explicitly about race.”

But that new certainty started to waver after the conservative and even liberal backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement set in, notably its calls to defund the police. JD Vance, now the GOP vice presidential nominee, attacked liberal foundations as “social justice hedge funds” with a favorable tax status that should be revoked. 

And then the hammer fell when the Supreme Court ruled in June 2023 to ban affirmative action in colleges and universities. The ruling had nothing to do with philanthropy, and in California, such a ban has been in place since 1996. The state’s ban is limited to public universities, but the Supreme Court ruling applies to both public and private institutions. The expansion was viewed as a warning shot, a preview of what a racially hostile judicial branch might take aim at next.

Conservative groups have been filing lawsuits against programs that have racial equity as a goal, claiming they’re discriminatory (one such lawsuit was filed last year against the Black Student Achievement Plan, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s educational equity effort). 

One closely watched case in Georgia centers on the Fearless Fund, which was offering grants of up to $20,000 to Black women entrepreneurs via a competition. Fearless was sued by a conservative group last August that alleged it was practicing discrimination. In May, a federal appeals court upheld an injunction suspending Fearless’ grant program. 

To combat California funders’ rising anxiety about legal attacks and to educate them about what is actually illegal (supporting racial justice is not) and what is merely scare tactics, the California Black Freedom Fund in May launched the Legal, Education, Advocacy and Defense (LEAD) for Racial Justice Initiative, a partnership with lawyers who do just that. Philpart said he is already getting interest from organizations outside the state in utilizing LEAD’s services — another way in which California may be setting the pace for political resistance in the age of Trump. 

We need to. Eric Gorovitz, a tax attorney who advises nonprofits and works with LEAD, points out that groups like Students for Fair Admissions that have been around for years — the affirmative action case started in 2014 — are reaping the benefit of being the right thing at the right time. “The courts have caught up with them,” he said.

Patterson said that’s all the more reason for the racial justice movement to hold firm and increase its own demands. “Martin Luther King said we have an obligation to follow moral law,” she said. “Founders need to follow that morality. Time to call them to the carpet.” 

Copyright 2024 Capital & Main