American Philanthropy and its Discontents
American Philanthropy and its Discontents
5.8.14
If you’re going to make your way in the world of the wealthy these days, you’ve got to show you care about the poor. Elite American schools are blooming with philanthropic groups and activities: spend a semester in sub-Saharan Africa; learn how to measure the effectiveness of nonprofits; maximize your impact.
The experience, of course, is “life-changing”: put it on your college application, talk about it over cocktails. It’s the way you become a person of privilege, but also of substance.
This phenomenon has a past worth understanding. The poor have long provided cultural currency to the rich; in previous moments of intense inequality, the social attitudes and political ideology of elites have understood the ghetto as a credibility gold mine. As the echo of the Gilded Age in our own time has grown clearer, the meanings — and failures — of elite progressivism have become more urgent to understand...
<snip>
If the experience of the working class in the first half of the twentieth century provides any lesson, workers and organizers will wait in vain for elites to initiate this process. We will have to do it ourselves, in numbers; we will have to sustain the confrontation for decades; and we will have to withstand the vitriol — and most likely, the repression — of those we thought were our friends, before enough of them come around or crumble for us to win ...
Much more here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/american-philanthropy-and-its-discontents/