“If knowledge is power then understanding is liberation.”
Manulani Aluli Meyer
Artists—especially writers and activists—have long before productively recognized the need to carve out spaces to give voice to injustices and to offer alternative paradigms for being. Yet, the voices of racially oppressed people are often unheard, as they struggle to get published, rendering their accounts sparse. And those who publish are relegated to an inferior status because their experiences do not conform to the dominant white narrative and threatens white supremacy.
First I was disillusioned by academia, and in recent years I have been disheartened by the social good sector. Disrupting our industry is not welcomed. Challenging white ways of doing fundraising is punished as those who suggest alternative paradigms for fundraising and are fiercely attacked. The charitable sector upholds white ways (of knowing) as legitimate, while ways (of knowing) in communities of colour are deemed illegitimate. I see the invisible white allegiances and loyalties across the fundraising profession. I am eye witness to the celebrated white fundraising guru stabbing the colleague of colour and getting away with it. I notice the “DEI work” due external pressures. It is sickening. It is appalling. It is inhuman.
What you permit, you promote. In other words, your inaction is promoting violence. If you’re inactive, you’re probably benefitting from the system. Do you want to benefit from a system that perpetuates violence?
So as we come to understand the limitations of a white supremacist system that favors itself, I see beauty in the vision of Black, Indigenous and other leaders of colour, colleagues, and friends who are imagining it another way.
To move to a place of liberation, we need to have an understanding of the past and herstory.
My beautiful dear friend Nneka Allen, CFRE, COC, PCC is a fearless thought leader in the nonprofit sector. I’ve admired and adored her since the day we met. With piercing pointedness she shares her story of confronting Anti-Black racism in the social good industry in Us and Them: What It Really Means to Belong.
I am humbled to present to you knowledge and truth in-the-making by Nneka. She has courageously taken her vulnerability and pain to chronicle her personal experience. A piece of recorded herstory about how pervasive and insidious racism in our sector is and how it inflicts deep pain in all of us. I am enraged that there has been no action taken to remedy the injustices Nneka has been subjected to by the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) Greater Toronto Chapter and I call for “justice NOW”!
Don’t get me wrong. I have been complicit. I have been a quiet bystander. I have been an enabler. I have been a white woman gatekeeping voices. I have been too hesitant as an onlooker to act in the face of injustice and racism. Enough is enough. I do believe that understanding is liberation and so I continue my own journey to better understanding my role in perpetuating inequity. It is never too late to start your own journey….
Read Us and Them: What it Really Means to Belong
The tide is turning. The waves are set in motion, and they are rippling at this island at the end of the world…..
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