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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Silent Sam, the Confederate statue torn down by protesters in 2018, finally has a destination. But the controversy continues.
In response to a lawsuit filed by the North Carolina Division Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc., the university has set up a $2.5 million charitable trust for them, to defray the costs of transporting and housing the monument. The money will come from the school’s endowment, not tax-payer funds, and as part of the settlement, Silent Sam can’t be re-installed in any of the 14 counties that have a UNC System university in them.
In a press release, UNC System board members said that safety concerns were top of mind. “[W]e believe this consent judgment not only addresses those concerns but does what is best for the university, and the university community in full compliance with North Carolina law.”
But Lindsay Ayling, a UNC grad student and activist, told The News & Observer, “This is the latest example of how UNC contributes to white supremacy.”
On Friday came another blow. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation withdrew a $1.5 million grant to UNC when it learned of the charitable trust fund to preserve the monument. The grant, the scope of which had been in development since last spring, had a very specific aim: “Campus-wide educational reckoning focusing on historical truth-telling and confronting the University’s entanglements with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and memorialization of the Confederacy.”
“The news that the university would direct educational funds to re-enshrining a symbol of the Confederacy—erected, incidentally, at the entrance to the campus in 1913, some 60 years after the fall of the Confederacy and toppled by members of the UNC community in 2018— was and is shocking,” says Elizabeth Alexander, Mellon’s president. “From our perspective, with this still-bewildering news that UNC has given a sum that could be spent on so many positive things, including the very work our grant was to support, we decided to stop the grant process. This decision was not easy because we believed in the proposed work that the grant was to support.”
While that must have been a tough conversation, that’s the work, says Alexander.
“The poet Lucille Clifton used to say, ‘I come to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable,’” she said in a recent Q&A with The Chronicle of Philanthropy. “Generosity can feel comfortable, and to me, moving toward justice means questioning and troubling that comfort in very specific and strategic ways.” It’s bigger than writing a check. “And in cases where we’re starting or drawn into tough conversations about injustice and inequality, it means working through them rigorously with our partners.”
When Elizabeth Alexander took the helm at Mellon in February 2018, she was already a cherished name in academic and literary circles, but an unusual choice to lead the country’s largest humanities philanthropy—Mellon has an endowment of $6.8 billion.
She had been the chair of African American studies at Yale, where she also taught poetry; The Light of The World, her memoir that explored her grief after the death of her husband, was a finalist in 2016 for the Pulitzer Prize. She also wrote and recited an original poem at Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural. She had no formal philanthropic experience at the helm, but did serve as director of Creativity and Free Expression at the Ford Foundation.
So when my co-host Jessica Helfand and I caught up with Alexander in New York City recently to record an episode of The Design of Business | The Business of Design podcast, we were eager to learn how she was approaching her still newish job.
After talking with her, we were convinced that she’s turned out to be an inspired choice as well. For one thing, Alexander delivered a master class in inclusive and purpose-driven leadership.
Her episode goes live tomorrow, but given the news of the day, I thought I’d give you a quick preview:
“Darren Walker [president of the Ford Foundation] plucked me out of the chorus line and said what we need is not someone who has been in philanthropy,” she told us. But hidden in plain sight were her credentials. She had extraordinary subject matter expertise as chair of African American studies at Yale. But she also engaged with departments across the university, building an interdisciplinary portfolio with the law school to the divinity school and beyond. “[I]t means you’re actually running a very complex organization.”
In her first year and a half at Mellon, Alexander has been pushing her team to expand the justice aspects of their work, a process she understands is challenging. “[B]ut we just can’t be afraid of those challenges. And I really believe that working through our humanity, via culture together, that’s kind of what I do.”
- In this clip, she talks about finding “aptitude” in the kinds of candidates who are not typically considered pipeline material.
- In this clip, she talks about how her background teaching African American studies and her work as a poet helps her see, frame, and address thorny social issues.
While we didn’t discuss the grant-in-progress with UNC, I can only imagine the conversation that tabled it was a tough but compassionate one. And while there has been a painful outcome for now, I have a sense that this is just one of many conversations ahead. It’s how she seems to roll.
I’ll leave you with a final clip, in which Alexander talks about her philosophy of philanthropy: “The thing about philanthropy is, as a profession, as a discipline, it’s a work in progress. It’s not even a long thing. And I think it’s at its best when it pulls people in who are not of it.”
Like all inclusive thinkers, she notices who has not always been in the room.
“Bigger is not always better,” she
Ellen McGirt
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Editor’s note: This post was updated to correct Elizabeth Alexander’s philanthropic experience.
On Point
Following backlash, Hallmark reverses its ban on gay marriage ads It was the “wrong decision,” says Hallmark president and CEO Mike Perry of the initial decision to pull four ads featuring two newlywed women kissing. “As the CEO of Hallmark, I am sorry for the hurt and disappointment this has caused.” Those ads featuring a same-sex couple were the only ones (of six ads) for wedding planning site Zola which were banned, the result of pressure from a conservative group. But outrage over the ban, on Twitter with #BoycottHallmarkChannel, and by celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and William Shatner, has resulted in the company’s announcement that they will be reinstated.
Los Angeles Times
Airbnb bans more than 60 white supremacists from its site After details of users of the now-defunct white supremacist online forum Iron March were leaked onto the Internet Archive, Airbnb used the information to block their accounts. “This was a no-brainer,” an Airbnb spokesperson told Gizmodo, who also said that all were guest accounts. “Anyone sympathetic to neo-Nazi ideology and violent extremism has absolutely no place on Airbnb, and our community is a better place without them.”
Gizmodo
Fixing Corporate America Last week, raceAhead promised coverage of the Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit's powerful town hall for those who might have missed it—and here it is. As Fortune’s Anne Sraders writes, there were “big ideas for how to fix problems throughout corporate America,” and they centered around courage, “proactively” working for diversity, and creating opportunities. Click through for more on the takeaways.
Fortune
On Background
A tree grows in America If you could picture the waves of immigrants to the U.S as part of a bigger mechanism, say, a living organism, would it change the way you think about immigration? That was the goal of a team from Northeastern University who have taken 185 years of immigration data and transformed it into visualization that resembles the cross-section of a growing tree. “I wanted to portray the United States like an organism that’s alive and that took a long time to grow,” says Pedro Cruz, an assistant professor at Northeastern. "[The visualization] also contains the underlying message that the country was built on diversity." Linked to external realities, like war or welcoming immigration policies, you can see the tree’s growth expand and slow. The visualization begins in 1830, so it doesn’t really touch on the issue of the forced migration of Africans. If you’re Native American, I suppose you’ll have decidedly mixed feelings about the history it depicts. But still, it grew.
CityLab
Can blind people be racist? Sure, they found the wokest blind people around for this short video, but that doesn’t change the fact that these good-natured, mostly white folks took the question seriously and had real insights to share. It appears to be from a series that seeks to deconstruct blindness, not race, so the same crew were asked a bunch of questions in subsequent videos. But the race question is interesting for reasons beyond the obvious. While their blindness does, for some, take racial cues out of their interactions at least initially, most were honest about the fact that “seeing race” had nothing to do with eyesight. Most had been tempted to stereotype others, and one was said that her blindness did little to negate her white privilege. “Yes, I’m racist, I think every white person is racist,” she said. “I participate in institutions, I benefit from capitalism which was built on slavery and racism.”
YouTube
A visual representation of those incarcerated—and those affected by it There’s some 2.3 million people in the U.S. criminal justice system, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit. Photojournalist Morgan Hornsby captured the lives of just some of those people: those in Oklahoma’s prisons. In 2018, the state had the highest incarceration rate in the U.S. The project focuses on families, combining poetry written by women from prison with photography of their families. “Since the effect of incarceration on families is so great, I realized coverage of the issue should reflect that,” says Hornsby.
NPR
Tamara El-Waylly helps write and produce raceAhead.
Quote
“Our doctrine is this: WE ARE FIGHTING FOR INDEPENDENCE THAT OUR GREAT AND NECESSARY DOMESTIC INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY SHALL BE PRESERVED, and for the preservation of other institutions of which slavery is the groundwork.”
—Editors of the Richmond, Va.-based Southern Punch newspaper, 1864.