of the devastated Gulf Coast was not a government obligation but an individual burden. The president would chip in as a volunteer and hammer some nails, but the full resources of the U.S. government would not be required. The president showing up at a volunteer site was a public relations tool to put a kind face on this cruel philosophy. “A conservative recovery agenda,” said Harden, “means not everyone gets to recover.”
It’s also worth noting that the most valuable “charity” work never makes it onto anyone’s resume. It’s the mutual aid that oppressed communities show each other as they help each other survive. This work rarely makes it onto resumes or into the news or in tax deductions, but it is part of most poor people’s daily struggle.
A lack of structural analysis on the part of nonprofits didn’t just happen; it was the result of deliberate planning by the wealthy and powerful. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence make this point in their crucial book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, which thoroughly examines the ways in which movements and charities have their agendas set by the wealthy who fund them, rather than by the poor and working class people they claim to serve.34 For example, prioritizing the funding of policy and legal reform rather than organizing, to redirect “activist efforts from radical change to social reform,” writes author and scholar Andrea Smith in the book’s introduction. Even funding leadership development is a tool to keep power hierarchically controlled by elites within oppressed communities and to have influence over those elites.
INCITE’s use of the term non-profit industrial complex deliberately references prison industrial complex, the term for the interconnected web of government and corporate interests that perpetuate mass incarceration, surveillance, and state violence. “While the PIC [prison industrial complex] overtly represses dissent the NPIC [non-profit industrial complex] manages and controls dissent by incorporating it into the state apparatus,” writes Smith. “Essentially, foundations provide a cover for white supremacy. . . . People of color deserve individual relief but people of color organized to end white supremacy become a menace to society.”35
This nonprofit industrial complex pushes competition within our movements. If there is an organization based in the community we want to work in, doing the work we want to do, we are not taught to find ways to support them. Instead we are taught to see that organization as an obstacle.
“The idea that these same elite institutions that are invested in maintaining capitalism are going to be the ones that produce the knowledge that solves poverty is very much what philanthropy invests in,” says Dean Spade, the founder of Sylvia Rivera Law Project. “That’s who runs philanthropy, that’s who gives to philanthropy, and that’s who is employed, as program officers, often as foundation heads.”36 Often these foundations directly employ family members of the wealthy person who started it, paying more in salaries than they give away—another way that the wealth is kept in the same circles.
From their positions of wealth and power, the foundations attach conditions to their generosity, often dictating what social movements will look like and what goals they will pursue. Radical redistribution of wealth, for example, might be seen as “unrealistic” and therefore not worthy of funding. Instead these wealthy benefactors might encourage the recipients of their largesse not to seek a change in tax law that would eliminate the exception enjoyed by foundations. This happened in 2009, when President Obama proposed lowering the cap on tax deductions for charitable contributions from 50 percent of income to 28 percent, the level it was at during the Reagan administration. Foundations and nonprofits formed a united front to fight the proposal.37
Spade notes that U.S. nonprofits have corrupted movements by demanding non-systemic changes and upholding a status quo. “Through the rise of the nonprofit form, certain logics that support criminalization, militarization and wealth disparity have penetrated and transformed spaces that were once locations of fomenting resistance to state violence,” he says. “Increasingly, neoliberalism means that social issues taken up by nonprofits are separated from a broader commitment to social justice; nonprofits take part in producing and maintaining a racialized-gendered maldistribution of life chances while pursuing their ‘good work.’”38
Spade sees this shift in many post-1970s movements. “The analytical frameworks of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which focused on broad, population-level disparities, [were] replaced by individual discrimination-based understandings of racism, homophobia, ableism, and sexism, both in law and popular culture,” he writes. “The result, thus far, has been legal reforms that mostly maintain—and often bolster—systems of maldistribution and control in the name of equality, individuality, and even diversity.”39 The kind of reform led by those who have privilege does not offer real change. It uses buzzwords like diversity and may address individual complaints, but leaves the cause of the problems untouched, even unmentioned.
Aside from foundation funding, how do movements lose a focus on systemic change? The post-1970s period saw a dropoff in radicalism among nonprofit workers and union members during a period in which communist and socialist groups saw a drop in membership—both from disillusionment among their members and from massive state repression that imprisoned movement leaders. While these revolutionary organizations also had internal conflicts or contradictions, they did help keep an anticapitalist analysis front and center. At the same time that this foregrounding of alternatives to capitalism disappeared, neoliberal economics pushed hours higher and wages lower, while stranding more young people in debt and leaving people with less free time for activism and more fear caused by precarious economic conditions.
The savior’s behavior is raced and gendered and classed. Hollywood teaches us to cheer for the lone hero riding in to save the day. People with race and gender privilege are taught by white supremacy and patriarchy that they have a certain authority to impart to the world. As Sarah Hagi has written, “Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.”40
The social myth of the savior leads to reflexive praise of police, soldiers, and prosecutors. We use “fighting crime” as a synonym for doing good and “getting help” as a synonym for calling the police. Neighborhoods are called “good” when they lose their diversity and “safe” when the original inhabitants feel unsafe.41 Systemic abuses are ignored or characterized as aberrations within a system intended for good. Those who abuse from positions of power are viewed bad apples. When police kill another young Black man, we say that the criminal justice system isn’t working instead of noting that it is working just the way it was constructed. The lack of popular outlets for systemic solutions also affects many people without privilege. It can push working-class people to join the army or become police out of a genuine desire to help people, making them further invested in systems of violence and control.
From a young age, children are told that change comes from saviors, not mass movements. Students are mostly taught the “great man” theory of history—a simplistic nineteenth-century idea popularized by Thomas Carlyle, who wrote in 1840 that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.”42 In this view, President Lincoln ended slavery, while the revolts led by enslaved people are rarely mentioned. Benevolent capitalists, rather than struggles of organized labor, are responsible for the gains of working people. The civil rights movement won victories due to the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. (or perhaps by some combination of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson), not because of the millions of unnamed Black people who struggled and died for liberation.
Students are certainly not taught that slavery did not end—that the Thirteenth Amendment allowed slavery to continue if one was convicted of a crime—or that the central accomplishments of the civil rights movement have been slowly chipped away, as rights to vote and equal education are “reformed” away by voter ID laws and underfunded school districts.43
Karl Marx critiqued this view of history back in 1846. “Civil society is the true source and theatre of all history,” he wrote, “and how absurd is the conception of history held hitherto, which neglects the real relationships
