From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth
Darren Walker
224 pages, Disruption Books, 2023
In ordinary times, hope is a precious resource. But in these extraordinary times, it is radical—and a responsibility.
In the pages of my new book, From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth, a choir of voices call on us to improve the systems and structures that shaped us, to engage with the root causes of our most urgent crises, not just the immediate consequences, even when those root causes implicate us. They challenge us to trust the people and communities most proximate to problems to shape the most effective solutions to those problems—to value their lived experience as equal to established expertise.
This requires moral leadership and moral courage: that we fix our eyes over the horizon, beyond the next earnings report or the next election, and toward a long-term vision for a more inclusive, equitable society. It also defies us to do something perhaps even harder: to step away from the extremes and from the edge, away from sanctimony and certitude, and to listen and learn with curiosity, and openness, and empathy—with tolerance for one another.
I’m pleased to share this excerpt with the radical optimism that we can, and must, and shall overcome. Through our triumphs and our defeats—two steps forward, one step back—we will continue our ascent from truth, to reconciliation, to the fullest measure of justice: absolute equality for all people.—Darren Walker
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In January 2020, I wrote a New Year's message reflecting on what I called “the hard work of hope.” I anticipated a difficult year ahead.
At that moment, inequality had reached staggering, all-time highs, all around the world. As I described in the New York Times, many well-intentioned friends would deliver soliloquies about dazzling economic growth, at home and abroad. But what I knew, informed by my own life's journey, was that the social-mobility escalator had ground to a halt, setting in place an inescapable, insidious hopelessness that had begun to asphyxiate democratic values and institutions. With many millions teetering on an economic precipice, the anxiety, resentment, and grievances were gathering, and the forces exploiting this insecurity were sure to respond with increasing mendacity and impunity.
I asked rhetorically, then, “What new crisis needs to befall us before we, together, are spurred to collective action?” If we weren't moved to organize and mobilize for justice after the turbulent first two decades of the twenty-first century after all that we had endured—would we ever be?
Little did I imagine.
For several weeks, a novel coronavirus had been spreading across Asia and Europe. The very same day I shared my New Year's From Generosity to Justice essay, in fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in the United States.
And then, everything changed. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, it happened slowly, then all at once.
The same March week that Americans closed schools and offices—canceling competitions and performances—police officers in Louisville shot and killed Breonna Taylor in her own home. As the virus raged that spring, George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, with untold billions of people watching on televisions, tablets, and smartphones around the globe.
Many took to the streets, demanding an overdue reckoning with our nation's history and legacy of racism—not only in America's criminal justice and mass incarceration systems, but, as significantly, in our classrooms and workplaces, throughout our culture and society, the world over.
And then, of course, the President of the United States refused to concede a free and fair election. Insurrectionists desecrated the United States Capitol and attempted to overturn the United States Constitution. This was the worst, but hardly the only, effort to disenfranchise on a scale unseen since Jim Crow.
To me, the historic disruption underway is something altogether different in kind, not just degree. I commented in a 2022 opinion essay that our nation seems more irreparably divided than ever before in my lifetime, barreling down a parallel path, perhaps, to the one our forebears traveled in the 1850s.
Our converging crises of extreme inequality, racial injustice, and autocratic, anti-democratic impunity multiplied not just by each other, but also by a pandemic that has claimed more than 6.5 million lives (and counting)—pose grave peril to our survival, as does a changing climate that is pushing our life-sustaining ecosystems to the brink of collapse. The droughts and floods, the storms and fires, all are worsening. Further, the distortion of our capitalism, and the inequality it continues to produce, have overloaded this burden onto the backs of the poor, the marginalized, and the vulnerable.
We are staring down existential risk—and as a global and national community, our window to act is closing. If we only do what we've always done, the trauma of these last few years will be only the beginning.
In this context, philanthropy has, by necessity, initiated a number of bold experiments since the beginning of 2020. For one, we continue our work to treat courageous visionaries on the frontlines of social change with greater respect—as our partners, not our vendors—providing them the resources and flexibility to chart the way forward.
For another, we are using more of our assets more fully beyond our historic pattern of granting only 5 percent of our endowment value, each year, as required by the United States tax code. At the Ford Foundation, this was the guiding principle behind our $1 billion commitment to mission-related investments, which are proving the potential of capital markets to deliver both a financial and social return. And during the depths of 2020, the same philosophy led us to finance a $1 billion social bond, effectively doubling our payout rate and injecting a capital booster to the organizations meeting our cascading crises. Many of our fellow funders are deploying similar strategies to unlock the power of the other 95 percent.
With From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth, I hope to recenter attention and action across the public sector, business, and civil society on these approaches and others. After all, the ideas within this book, conceived and championed by a new generation of rising leaders, are demonstrating their mettle under fire.
Ultimately, I feel more strongly than ever that philanthropy is not one kind of action or entity, but rather a continuum that spans from generosity on one side to justice on the other—and that we must push our work, wherever and however we can, beyond the former to the latter.
At the turn of the last century, it was a Chicago muckraker journalist and humorist, Finley Peter Dunne, who coined that most illustrative phrase: “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” We must do both, as my friends Elizabeth Alexander and Ken Frazier contend here.
As I see it, “comforting the afflicted” is about our charity, our kindness, our magnanimity—about providing relief and recovery. But “afflicting the comfortable” is about our pursuit of justice—how we reimagine and reform. One asks that we "give something back," but the other insists that we “give something up.”
Afflicting the comfortable compels us to recognize the inequalities that make relief both necessary and possible: caste, as Isabel Wilkerson perfectly phrases it; decades of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, greed-is-good excess; the conscious choices that aggregate into a conscienceless capitalism. Afflicting the comfortable demands that we reckon with the ways in which we, ourselves, benefit from vast disparities in access and agency, voice, and value. And afflicting the comfortable obligates us to rectify to repair the deep inequalities that deceive us into ignoring how and why we put ourselves first and others second, resetting the cycles of privilege built into our laws, norms, customs, and behaviors.
All of this constitutes a new gospel of giving, defined by timeless terms and tenets, as I argue in these pages. It calls on us to improve the systems and structures that shaped us, to engage with the root causes of our most urgent crises, not just the immediate consequences, even when those root causes implicate us. It challenges us to trust the people and communities most proximate to problems to shape the most effective solutions to those problems to value their lived experience as equal to established expertise.
This requires moral leadership and moral courage: that we fix our eyes over the horizon, beyond the next earnings report or the next election, and toward a long-term vision for a more inclusive, equitable society. It also defies us to do something perhaps even harder: to step away from the extremes and from the edge, away from sanctimony and certitude, and to listen and learn with curiosity, and openness, and empathy—with tolerance for one another.