PUT PHILANTHROPY ON THE FRONT LINES How to decolonize wealth through reparations. Edgar Villanueva
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ur nation is very different now than when I wrote Decolonizing Wealth in 2018. My intention then was to provide a “loving” critique of philanthropy and effectively challenge the status quo of grant-making, particularly how philanthropic institutions and highnet-worth individuals used, or didn’t use, their money to address racial equity. Since the COVID-19 pandemic started in early 2020, the immense tragedies and hardships we’ve endured have altered the way our society sees the world and how we act. What we are experiencing, for the first time in my lifetime, is a vast collective suffering. Continued grappling with the pandemic, the surging of the Delta variant, and more people dying are causing us to fear for our lives and for our families’ lives—we fear an uncertain future, and that we may never return to “normal.” In this time we’ve also witnessed social movements that impacted and shook the structures of power. Politicians in major cities were forced to commit to defunding the police and reinvesting in our communities. Large corporations
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were called out for not doing more to authentically respond to the Black Lives Matter uprisings and the continued conversations on white supremacy and racism invoked by the 2020 presidential election. After a decades-long outcry and organizing effort from Native American communities, the Washington, D.C., football team was forced to retire its racist name. And even in philanthropy, which has been so slow to embrace change, a transformation is happening. When I wrote my book in 2018, the framework I provided to decolonize the philanthropic sector—lifting the white gaze to leverage money as a way to heal—was deemed radical. Fast forward to today: This method of giving is now considered modern philanthropy at its best. There is now an appetite among legacy institutions and high-net-worth individuals to get to the bottom of why we really have disparities in this country and globally around race; and there are more conversations happening in philanthropy about redistribution of wealth to communities of color as reparations. Philanthropy can and should be at the forefront of supporting reparations,
