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The Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives, White Funding, and Movement Capture: Price of Civil Rights
Abstract
What influence do funders have on the development of civil rights legal mobilization? Fundraising is critical to the creation, operation, and survival of rights organizations. Yet, despite the importance of funding, there is little systematic attention in the law and social movements and cause lawyering literatures on the relationship between funders and grantees. This article recovers a forgotten history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) campaign to protect black lives from lynchings and mob violence in the early twentieth century. I argue that funders engaged in a process of movement capture whereby they used their financial leverage to redirect the NAACP's agenda away from the issue of racial violence to a focus on education at a critical juncture in the civil rights movement. The findings in this article suggest that activists tread carefully as the interaction between funders and social movement organizations often creates gaps between what activists want and what funders think movements should do.
... Specifically, studies have documented how RJOs' relations of accountability towards philanthropic foundations operate as mechanisms of co-optation and capture, whereby white elites mute, depoliticize and socially engineer racial justice movements (e.g. Dunning, 2023;Francis, 2019;Marquez, 2003;Saifer, 2019). In these relations, the RJO is obligated to explain and justify their conduct towards the philanthropic foundation, which can pose questions, pass judgements and exact consequences on the RJO (see Bovens, 2007). ...
... They detail how white-led philanthropic organizations exert substantial control, both material and ideological, over RJOs, including Black-led civil rights organizations (e.g. Francis, 2019;Marshall, 2015), Mexican-American social movement organizations (e.g. Carpio, 2016;Marquez, 2020) and migrant farmworker organizations (e.g. ...
... Rather than highlighting (economic) power inequality, donor control, agenda setting and the institutionalization of leaders in these relations (e.g. Francis, 2019;Jenkins and Eckert, 1986;Kohl-Arenas, 2015;Marshall, 2015), we show how they enforce the symbolic and material dispossession of RJOs and the communities they serve. Future research on philanthropy and racial justice could explore accountability relations through a racial capitalism lens more in-depth by including the perspectives of multiple actors, including philanthropies and community members, and in different geographies characterized by distinct race relations and institutional contexts. ...
Prompted by the Black Lives Matter movement, and COVID-19’s deepening of inequalities, philanthropic foundations are increasingly claiming racial justice as a core part of their mission and strategy. This study uses a racial capitalism lens to examine racial justice organizations’ (RJOs) accountability relations towards the philanthropies that fund them. Drawing on interviews with leaders of Canadian RJOs, we unveil how the racial partitioning of leaders, fantasy and partners in these relations materially and symbolically dispossesses RJOs and the communities they represent. Our study complements the extant literature, which focuses on the depoliticization and co-optation effects of RJO–philanthropy accountability relations. Instead, we show how these accountability relations enforce ‘double dispossession’, thereby reproducing the racial capitalist political economy on which philanthropy is predicated. Our analysis indicates that philanthropy for racial justice, as it is currently practised, is impossible. We further identify the conditions under which it could become feasible.
... Wolfson was visionary in insisting that marriage should be available to anyone regardless of sexual orientation, but his politics were conservative insofar as they valorized the traditional institution of marriage, prioritized the integration of LGBTQ+ Americans into "mainstream" American culture and emphasized consensus-building rather than confrontation in LGBTQ+ advocacy. In the end, Wolfson's entrepreneurship sought to advance LGBTQ+ rights while simultaneously reaffirming conventional social institutions and norms in American society (Spade 2013; and strengthening ties with mainstream political and cultural institutions, such as philanthropic grantors (Francis 2019) and social science researchers (Rosenfeld 2021). In this sense, Wolfson's entrepreneurship in the LGBTQ+ advocacy movement parallels patterns in other social movements -such as the women's movement and the civil rights movement -that have also tended to prioritize the interests and values of relatively privileged subgroups (e.g., Breines 2006;Crenshaw 1989;Strolovitch 2008). ...
... We find it quite plausible that a partial explanation for this regularity is the tendency of political entrepreneurs to emerge from, and advance the interests of, these privileged subgroups. Finally, because entrepreneurs representing marginalized groups are often dependent on privileged groups in society for patronage and resources, they may be constrained from adopting agendas and strategies that directly challenge the interests of the powerful (Francis 2019). Given these constraints, political entrepreneurs are often "conservative revolutionaries" who reaffirm existing values and interests even as they alter them (Landy and Milkis 2000;Skowronek 1997). ...
... Like Wolfson, the wealthy and well-educated donors and foundation leaders who comprised CMC took for granted the desirability of marriage equality and the broader objective of LGBTQ+ integration into mainstream American society (e.g., Proteus Fund 2015). Given that Wolfson and other LGBTQ+ advocates had been prioritizing marriage for years prior to the establishment of the CMC, it is arguably too strong to say that the CMC "captured" the LGBTQ+ legal advocacy movement (Francis 2019). However, it is a fair conclusion that, by providing a huge infusion of funding for samesex marriage advocacy, the CMC further reinforced the marginalization of critics of marriage equality within the community, as well as advocates of alternative issues and concerns. ...
The emergence and dissemination of new legal ideas can play an important role in sparking change in the way activists in marginalized communities understand their rights and pursue their objectives. How and why do the legal beliefs of such communities evolve? We argue that the vigorous advocacy of new legal ideas by entrepreneurs and the harnessing of specialized media to help disseminate those ideas are important mechanisms in this evolution. We use the rise of marriage equality as a central legal priority in the mainstream American LGBTQ+ rights movement as a case study to illustrate this phenomenon. Using a mixed-methods analysis of Evan Wolfson’s legal advocacy and an examination of The Advocate , we investigate how Wolfson developed and disseminated legal ideas about same-sex marriage. We show how this advocacy eventually dominated discussion of the issue among elite LGBTQ+ legal actors and the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ publication. However, Wolfson’s advocacy tended to emphasize LGBTQ+ integration into “mainstream” American culture and prioritized the interests and values of relatively privileged subgroups within the LGBTQ+ community. Our research informs our understanding of the interplay between legal advocacy and media reporting in the development of LGBTQ+ rights claims and the strategies adopted to achieve them.
... et al. 2007;Mosley and Galaskiewicz 2015;Suárez 2012). Similarly, GMOs may not incorporate a community's understanding of a problem when they set their sociopolitical agendas, and data indicate that values and priorities of the white and wealthy are not representative of minoritized communities (see, e.g., Reich, Cordelli, Bernholz 2016;Francis 2019;Villanueva 2018). This is particularly concerning as GMOs are prime sources of capital and resources needed to convert anti-racist social movements into a new status quo (Rojas and King 2018;Schneiberg and Lounsbury 2017) and because grantmakers have historically influenced policy ecosystems to resist rather than foment progressive movements (Bartley 2007;Francis 2019;Wooten 2010). ...
... Similarly, GMOs may not incorporate a community's understanding of a problem when they set their sociopolitical agendas, and data indicate that values and priorities of the white and wealthy are not representative of minoritized communities (see, e.g., Reich, Cordelli, Bernholz 2016;Francis 2019;Villanueva 2018). This is particularly concerning as GMOs are prime sources of capital and resources needed to convert anti-racist social movements into a new status quo (Rojas and King 2018;Schneiberg and Lounsbury 2017) and because grantmakers have historically influenced policy ecosystems to resist rather than foment progressive movements (Bartley 2007;Francis 2019;Wooten 2010). For example, GMOs frequently neglect more radical goals in favor of moderate movements (Francis 2019;Jenkins and Eckert 1986) and they influence grantees to professionalize, forcing activists to work through institutionalized channels (Brulle and Jenkins 2005;INCITE! ...
... This is particularly concerning as GMOs are prime sources of capital and resources needed to convert anti-racist social movements into a new status quo (Rojas and King 2018;Schneiberg and Lounsbury 2017) and because grantmakers have historically influenced policy ecosystems to resist rather than foment progressive movements (Bartley 2007;Francis 2019;Wooten 2010). For example, GMOs frequently neglect more radical goals in favor of moderate movements (Francis 2019;Jenkins and Eckert 1986) and they influence grantees to professionalize, forcing activists to work through institutionalized channels (Brulle and Jenkins 2005;INCITE! et al. 2007;Wooten and Couloute 2017). ...
Grantmaking organizations (GMOs) exert considerable influence on education systems, public policy, and its administration. We position the work of GMOs—in the distribution and management of funds for the public good—as a form of public management. Using recent work on racialized organizations from sociology, critical theories of race, and institutional theory, we address the role of GMOs in dismantling or reproducing inequalities. In doing, so we develop a new construct—racialized change work—to refer to the purposive action that organizations take to build new, equitable organizational arrangements or tear down old, inequitable ones. We develop quantifiable and testable propositions for how racialized change work might spread (engagement), how it might stick (institutionalization), and what effects it may have on producing equitable outcomes (impact). We build these propositions in the context of U.S. higher education and demonstrate their portability across areas of public policy and administration. We conclude with a discussion of our contributions back to the theories from which we draw and their relationship to public administration.
... Movement leaders can face internal backlash from members who disagree with litigation tactics (NeJaime 2011;Vanhala 2011). The costly process of litigation can divert resources away from other social movement activities used to generate change, and litigation success can lead to demobilization (Francis 2019;Southworth 1998;Vanhala 2011). Mobilizing rights claims through formal legal channels is not always a feasible option, as Chua shows in her study of gay rights mobilization in Singapore, and activists must make strategic choices about what contexts to mobilize the law in (Chua 2012). ...
... For example, the Black Power Movement's expansive demands for Black cultural studies rooted in community-education at universities were institutionalized as departments and curricula that largely mimicked preexisting disciplines (Rojas 2010). Similarly, the Civil Rights Movement's campaign to end lynching was abandoned because funders were more comfortable prioritizing school desegregation (Francis 2019). ...
Sociolegal scholars have long debated the effectiveness of legal mobilization as a strategy for achieving social change. In addition to evaluating outcomes of wins and losses in court, they have identified several indirect effects of legal mobilization on social movements. Mobilizing new rights concepts can increase support for a movement, divide its base, and create new political allies or opponents. A win in court might lead to rights being institutionalized but not enforced, and it can serve to demobilize a movement base. This article contributes to this body of literature by arguing that movement groups can strategically mobilize the law to engage in co-optation from below – learning about an agency in order to build more effective organizing strategies. Using data gathered as a participant ethnographer in a grassroots environmental justice organization, I show how organizers used meetings with state regulators to learn how the agency interprets and enforces environmental laws and adjust their tactics in response. This study also demonstrates the value of conducting in-depth studies of local legal contests even as we seek to understand the role of the law in navigating our most pressing global challenges.
... Quinn et al., 2014a;Reckhow & Snyder, 2014). Although scholars have long studied how elites drive or resist social change in ways that preserve their power, there is limited empirical research on how postsecondary grantmakers work within or push beyond the racialized status quo (Brandtner et al., 2016;Francis, 2019;Wooten, 2010Wooten, , 2016. We know even less about the cumulative effects of postsecondary grantmakers on racial inequity over time. ...
... This funding pattern is one instantiation of institutionalized racism, whereby it is legitimate and expected that white organizations are better resourced. Moreover, despite espoused equity orientations, many foundations have supported dismantling core civil rights policies, such as court-ordered and voluntary school desegregation (see e.g., Arnove, 1980;INCITE!. et al., 2007;Morey, 2021;O'Connor, 2009;Ravitch, 2013) or shifts from disruptive to assimilationist interventions (Francis, 2019;Jenkins & Eckert, 1986;Rojas, 2010;Rooks, 2006;Shiao, 2004;Wooten, 2016). We know little about how to model the gap between grantmakers' espoused racial equity commitments and their contributions to inegalitarian outcomes in higher education. ...
... We also attempt to assist nonprofit educators in these efforts by revisiting and critically examining the histories of the U.S. nonprofit sector that are commonly used in nonprofit management classrooms and by presenting tenets for a critical pedagogy that can equip students with the capacity to challenge the selective tradition that underpins contemporary understandings of the U.S. nonprofit sector and its work. It is our hope that in doing so, we will enable both educators and students to ask vital questions about such issues as white supremacy, moral innocence, and colorblindness (e.g., Applebaum, 2010;Conyers & Fields, 2021;Heckler, 2019;Sullivan, 2014) as well as the tampening and movement capture of racial and social justice organizing (Francis, 2019;Hammack, 2002) relative to nonprofit work and thus to contribute to a more race-conscious nonprofit and public administration field (see Blessett & Gaynor, 2021). We also seek to encourage educators and students to revisit and reclaim the histories and contemporary practices of care work, mutual aid, and philanthropy in communities of color which have too often been excluded from NME (e.g., Freeman, 2020;Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018;SenGupta, 2009). ...
... Attention to the history of social movements also allows students to grapple with the complex interplay between formal nonprofit organizations and movements for social change. For example, as Francis (2019) recovers the history of the NAACP in the early twentieth century, she finds that funders engaged in "movement capture," using their financial leverage to redirect the NAACP's agenda away from the issue of racial violence. Beam (2018) challenges a "flattened history" of LGBTQ social movements, tracing their transitions to official nonprofit status, and highlighting the tensions and development of often "profoundly anti-institutional" organizational structures. ...
Nonprofit management classrooms are filled with students who yearn to
“do good” in the world and yet, in practice, they confront a dissonance
between their vision of doing good and the realities of nonprofit work.
This dissonance is in part created by contemporary nonprofit management
education (NME) through the development and perpetuation of a selective
historical tradition of the nonprofit sector which mythologizes the sector
and its work. These traditions and myths of the nonprofit sector are based
squarely in white American and Eurocentric values and downplay the histories of people of color and thus perpetuate whiteness as central to nonprofit norms and practice. We present a critical reading of these histories in an effort to help educators and students reclaim and reimagine the histories of the nonprofit sector and offer tenets of a critical pedagogy that emphasizes historical consciousness and a praxis of emancipation so that nonprofit educators and students can re-envision nonprofit theory and
practice in the future.
... Much of the literature on race and class in philanthropy has focused on the resulting suppression of social change and social justice movements. Analyses of the 'nonprofit industrial complex' (Rodriguez, 2007) have highlighted implications of the institutionalization of social justice and social change work in nonprofit organizations, which reinforce dependent relationships with external stakeholders, impose restrictions and barriers and lessen agency and autonomy in decision making (see Wilson, 2009;Francis, 2019). Drawing from critical race theory, Willner (2019) points to contemporary managerialism in social change organizations, and the pressure to reinforce the status of those with power. ...
Philanthropic organizations, and the nonprofits that rely on philanthropic giving, are built upon a vast and persistent racial wealth gap in the United States. In this chapter, we call for intentional and sustained attention to intersections of race and class in the dynamics between organized philanthropy and nonprofit organizations. Combining scholarship on elite philanthropy with critical theories of structural racism, we argue that systems of unearned white advantage have simultaneously fueled organized philanthropy and muted the philanthropic contributions of communities of color. We examine how interactions between organized philanthropy and nonprofits facilitate the racialization of these organizations as spaces that center the interests of white donors and encourage the reproduction and reinforcement of racial inequality in core functions of nonprofits. Finally, we consider the implications of the perpetuation of white supremacy in the sector and offer avenues for transformation in policy, research, and practice.
... Pada abad ke-20 M, perjuangan untuk hak sipil mencapai momentum kritis, dipimpin oleh tokoh-tokoh karismatik seperti Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, dan Malcolm X. Mereka adalah pilar-pilar gerakan yang mengejutkan Amerika dan dunia dengan perjuangan damai mereka untuk kesetaraan rasial (Francis, 2019). Meskipun terjadi perubahan hukum dan kebijakan yang signifikan, termasuk pembentukan Civil Rights Act 1964, perubahan sosial yang lebih dalam dan berkelanjutan masih harus diupayakan (Sawir, 2020). ...
This study analyzes the important role of the Civil Rights Movement in shaping United States society through a historical approach and its impact. It explores the movement's long history, from its 19th-century roots to the monumental struggles of the 20th century, revealing how it emerged in response to rampant social, racial, and political injustice. By examining key figures, strategies, and important events, this study traces the evolution of the movement from the anti-slavery era to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Additionally, it examines the movement's impact on American society, highlighting significant transformations in law, policy, and societal perceptions of civil rights and equality. The study also documents the movement's legacy in driving systemic change and shaping views on inclusion, justice, and diversity. In conclusion, the Civil Rights Movement has played a crucial role in shaping modern American society by laying the foundation for progress toward equality, justice, and human rights, with its legacy continuing to influence ongoing struggles for a more just and inclusive society.
... 278). Francis (2019) argued that on the one hand, research has shown that fundraising is essential to the operations and sustainability of rights organizations, while on the other hand, a funder's influence could begin to control the organizational agenda. ...
As millions of U.S. citizens began to shelter in their homes due to the COVID-19 global pandemic in 2020, another phenomenon began to take shape in the late spring. The murder of George Floyd had been committed and shared widely on the news and social media. As it did, a groundswell of discussions and social activism through a revitalized Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement further shifted the narrative of racial equity and justice in the United States. The impact of this narrative was broad, and corporations began to change their public statements, branding, products, services, workforce, and management structures. This qualitative descriptive phenomenology study aimed to investigate and describe the shifts in corporate social responsibility (CSR) behaviors as observed through corporate engagements at Association of Independent Technological Universities (AITU) schools. Using the framework of stewardship theory as presented by Davis et al. (1997), research was conducted through semistructured interviews with corporate relations officers and gift recipients at AITU schools to understand the shifts in corporate behaviors and the philanthropic impact on universities and their underrepresented student populations. As a result of the literature review and the analysis of the data collection, the research uncovered three conclusions: (a) Corporate philanthropy maintained its status as a partnership tool through the phenomena; (b) the social context in which corporate entities were operating had shifted as a result of the death of George Floyd and, therefore, the direction of corporate funding changed; and (c) corporate philanthropy became more focused at AITU schools with more targeted support for DEI-related programs and initiatives as well as workforce development efforts. Academics and corporate leaders who are evaluating corporate philanthropy priorities may find this study helpful as it explores both perspectives of the partnership.
... Even in the case of the civil rights movement, the Ford Foundation and others focused more on funders aims and vision than on the aims and dreams of the activists. This kind of interaction between funders and social movement organizations can result in a gap that separates what communities need and what foundations think movements should accomplish (Francis, 2019). Moreover, some foundations' internal policies and practices continue to perpetuate inequality. ...
... As Eikenberry (2009) points out, philanthropic organizations often raise and spend their money in elite geographies and do little to redistribute resources to economically disadvantaged communities. Elite philanthropy has helped to normalize generations of unearned White wealth (Allen, 1970;Morey, 2021;Rodriguez, 2017;Villanueva, 2018), divert social movements (Francis, 2019), center the interests and emotions of White donors, and constrain the work of racial equity and racial justice organizations (Cyril et al., 2021). The economic segregation in the sector is reflective of long-standing regional and residential segregation, where the overrepresentation of White, suburban interests in high-capacity nonprofits leads to the defense of White, suburban interests (Danley and Blessett, 2022. ...
... 24 Moreover, the moral hazard problem caused by external support exposes resistance groups to domestic state repression. 25 Thus, as much as state repression requires proper justifications from the audience, the contexts of domestic state repression toward the resistance are also critical within this relationship. ...
Does the regime type of a foreign state supporter of a resistance movement influence violent repression by domestic states facing resistance? Studies on resistance movements have recently begun to explore the effects of third-party support on the behaviors and successes of the movements themselves and the governments they oppose. While this literature has unearthed
important findings on the impact of external interventions on behalf of resistance groups, one area of research that remains unexplored is how the political features of third-party actors shape the behavior of governments that face resistance movements. This study investigates how the domestic political characteristics of foreign supporters of resistance movements affect the repressive behaviors of domestic states facing resistance. Looking specifically at the regime type of foreign state supporters of opposition groups, we argue that resistance movements that receive assistance from democratic foreign states deter domestic governments facing resistance from using
violent repression. Such governments recognize the selection effects associated with democratic intervention and the reputational costs associated with human rights practices and thus, they are less likely to commit physical violence against dissidents. Our findings for resistance campaigns during the
period of 1981–2013 support our expectations that external support from democratic states for resistance movements reduces the likelihood of domestic governments facing resistance using violent repression against dissident groups.
... In a comparative context, the fresh set of questions raised by Cobb & Elder (1971) and their collaborators on the democratic nature of agendas is "a research agenda that remains unfulfilled to the present day" (Zahariadis 2016, p. 11; but see Jones et al. 2019a). From a long-term historical standpoint, agenda concepts have been little integrated into studies of historical institutionalism or democratization (for partial and quite recent exceptions see Francis 2019, Jones et al. 2019b, Carpenter 2021, Schneer et al. 2022. Finally, democratic theory points to particular concepts to which empirical analysts should pay more attention when thinking about agendas. ...
The study of agenda setting has become curiously disconnected from democratic theory and democratization. Following Schattschneider, Dahl, and recent developments in political theory, I call for its reintegration in theoretical and empirical realms. The concept of agenda democracy allows for better understanding of contests over institutions, significant historical-institutional transformations, the study of inequality and its mechanisms of generation and maintenance, and the building and undermining of democracy. Agenda democracy requires a broad understanding of agendas (beyond a mere menu of final policy choices), recognizes that many democratic regimes have institutions that systematically render agendas nondemocratic, and compels us to look at the interstices of institutions and society (party transformation, petition and grievance mechanisms, advocacy campaigns, initiatives to expand what I call the shortlist of the possible) for moments of significant change. Agenda democracy compels the examination of democratizing agenda restrictions, the study of conservative organizations in politics, and the consideration of decomposing the term “movement.”
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 26 is June 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
... Particularly so in consultation with substantive scholarship on the political economic antecedents of the contemporary carceral state (e.g., Garland, 1985Garland, , 2023Gottschalk, 2015;Hinton, 2016;Muhammad, 2019;Wacquant, 2009). Complementary critical philanthropy and governance literature also exists (e.g., Collings-Wells, 2022;Eikenberry, 2006;Eikenberry & Mirabella, 2018;Francis, 2019;Goss, 2016;Wacquant, 2022) as does critical work on substance use and ...
Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy is critical reading for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars interested in governance, political economy, ethics, equity, and the origins and influence of the ‘economic style of reasoning’ on federal policymaking and corresponding values and priorities. Elizabeth Popp Berman (2022) meticulously draws on over 3,000 primary and secondary resources and archival sources to elucidate how this ‘economic style of reasoning’ was legitimated and institutionalized through multiple pathways, including government offices, law and policy schools, and policy research organizations. This engaging, accessible book covers contemporary concerns, including student loan debates, and concludes with proposing what values, thoughts, and actions may facilitate ambitious reform efforts, in such areas as health and the environment.
... Particularly so in consultation with substantive scholarship on the political economic antecedents of the contemporary carceral state (e.g., Garland, 1985Garland, , 2023Gottschalk, 2015;Hinton, 2016;Muhammad, 2019;Wacquant, 2009). Complementary critical philanthropy and governance literature also exists (e.g., Collings-Wells, 2022;Eikenberry, 2006;Eikenberry & Mirabella, 2018;Francis, 2019;Goss, 2016;Wacquant, 2022) as does critical work on substance use and ...
Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy is critical reading for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars interested in governance, political economy, ethics, equity, and the origins and influence of the ‘economic style of reasoning’ on federal policymaking and corresponding values and priorities. Elizabeth Popp Berman (2022) meticulously draws on over 3,000 primary and secondary resources and archival sources to elucidate how this ‘economic style of reasoning’ was legitimated and institutionalized through multiple pathways, including government offices, law and policy schools, and policy research organizations. This engaging, accessible book covers contemporary concerns, including student loan debates, and concludes with proposing what values, thoughts, and actions may facilitate ambitious reform efforts, in such areas as health and the environment.
... Particularly so in consultation with substantive scholarship on the political economic antecedents of the contemporary carceral state (e.g., Garland, 1985Garland, , 2023Gottschalk, 2015;Hinton, 2016;Muhammad, 2019;Wacquant, 2009). Complementary critical philanthropy and governance literature also exists (e.g., Collings-Wells, 2022;Eikenberry, 2006;Eikenberry & Mirabella, 2018;Francis, 2019;Goss, 2016;Wacquant, 2022) as does critical work on substance use and ...
Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy is critical reading for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars interested in governance, political economy, ethics, equity, and the origins and influence of the ‘economic style of reasoning’ on federal policymaking and corresponding values and priorities. Elizabeth Popp Berman (2022) meticulously draws on over 3,000 primary and secondary resources and archival sources to elucidate how this ‘economic style of reasoning’ was legitimated and institutionalized through multiple pathways, including government offices, law and policy schools, and policy research organizations. This engaging, accessible book covers contemporary concerns, including student loan debates, and concludes with proposing what values, thoughts, and actions may facilitate ambitious reform efforts, in such areas as health and the environment.
... At best philanthropy is "reformist rather than supporting any fundamental challenge to underlying structural causes of social injustice" (Ostrander et al., 2005, p. 43). Third, other scholars describe how philanthropy has sought to co-opt social change efforts when they have gone 'too far' in seeking radical change that would dramatically alter the status quo or change becomes too contentious (Francis, 2019;Kohl-Arenas, 2014;Roelofs, 2003). Francis (2019) described the power that the Garland Fund had over the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), moving the NAACP away from racial violence to education. ...
There are growing calls that philanthropic foundations across the globe can and should advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. Initial evidence indicates that foundations have indeed responded as evidenced by pledges to change practice, increased funding for racial justice, and the emergence of new networks to support equity and justice. However, there is also great skepticism about whether the field of foundations are, in fact, able to make lasting changes given numerous critiques of philanthropy and its structural limitations. In this article, we summarize these critiques that suggest factors that make institutional philanthropy resistant to calls for equity and justice. We posit that a core obstacle is a lack of conceptual coherence within and across academic and practitioner literature about the meanings of terms and their implications for practice. Therefore, we propose a transdisciplinary conceptual framework of justice philanthropy that integrates the fragmented literature on justice-related aspects of philanthropy emerging from different disciplinary traditions such as ethics, political theory and political science, social movement theory, geography, public administration, and community development.
... Particularly so in consultation with substantive scholarship on the political economic antecedents of the contemporary carceral state (e.g., Garland, 1985Garland, , 2023Gottschalk, 2015;Hinton, 2016;Muhammad, 2019;Wacquant, 2009). Complementary critical philanthropy and governance literature also exists (e.g., Collings-Wells, 2022;Eikenberry, 2006;Eikenberry & Mirabella, 2018;Francis, 2019;Goss, 2016;Wacquant, 2022) as does critical work on substance use and ...
Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy is critical reading for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars interested in governance, political economy, ethics, equity, and the origins and influence of the ‘economic style of reasoning’ on federal policymaking and corresponding values and priorities. Elizabeth Popp Berman (2022) meticulously draws on over 3,000 primary and secondary resources and archival sources to elucidate how this ‘economic style of reasoning’ was legitimated and institutionalized through multiple pathways, including government offices, law and policy schools, and policy research organizations. This engaging, accessible book covers contemporary concerns, including student loan debates, and concludes with proposing what values, thoughts, and actions may facilitate ambitious reform efforts, in such areas as health and the environment.
... Powerful empirical analyses of the effects of state and philanthropic funding on movements for social and economic justice demonstrate that social movement organizations tend to be deradicalized, over time, through their relationships with government and/or philanthropic funders (Ferguson 2013;Francis 2019;Kohl-Arenas 2016). This paper suggests that some of the same mechanisms that have been identified as at the center of deradicalization processes also pose barriers to UA organizations as they consider collaborating, as a movement, to advance their commitments to justice and equity. ...
This paper offers a critical analysis of program evaluation in contemporary urban agriculture. Drawing on data from an exploratory study designed at the request of and in collaboration with urban agriculture practitioners in Massachusetts, it describes both their critiques of extant practices of program evaluation and their visions for alternative ways of telling the story of their work. Related, it explores practitioners’ interest in building capacity for policy advocacy, working collectively to create transformative social change, and, related, establishing new kinds of relationships with state and philanthropic funders. Building on scholarship that has observed that urban agriculture is characterized by an internal contradiction—i.e., its simultaneous orientation to “neoliberal” (social service) and “radical” (social justice) agendas (McClintock in Local Environ 19:147–171, 2014)—this analysis calls attention, especially, to the complex role of metrics, which may not only entrench neoliberalism in UA organizations, but also provide a mechanism for challenging its assumptions and advancing the radical project of food justice.
... The Gramscian critics note that NGOs perform a system-maintenance function (Katz, 2006). The NGO sector's status-quo bias is also encouraged by philanthropic foundations, many of which have been established by industry titans (Fisher, 1983;Francis, 2019). In sum, NGOs begin to show some level of failure when their agendas and advocacy do not represent the preferences of the underprivileged, who are often neglected by markets and states. ...
An extensive literature identifies conditions under which markets and states work efficiently and effectively towards their stated missions. When these conditions are violated, these institutions are deemed to show some level of failure. In contrast to the study of market and government failures, scholars have tended to focus on non-governmental organizations’ (NGOs) successes instead of failures. This is probably because they view NGOs as virtuous actors, guided by principled beliefs rather than instrumental concerns, not susceptible to agency conflicts, accountable to the communities they serve, and working cooperatively with each other. A growing literature questions this “virtue narrative.” When virtue conditions are violated, NGOs could exhibit different levels of failure. In synthesizing this literature, we offer an analytic typology of NGO failures: agency failure, NGOization failure, representation failure, and cooperation failure. Finally, given NGOs’ important role in public policy, we outline institutional innovations to address these failures.
... Political scientist and philanthropy scholar Megan Ming Francis uses the phrase "movement capture" to describe what happens when funders, acting as self-interested actors, use their financial positioning to influence the strategies of civil rights organizations (Francis, 2019). Generally interested in promoting their own goals and ideas about how to achieve them, foundations can act in ways that pull grantees toward the whitewashed, power-blind, and technocratic mindset that is prevalent across mainline philanthropy, and away from grantees' often-transformative views on the change that is needed and how to get there. ...
... For example, project-specific support, which is typically shorter term, rather than long-term general operating support, can lead organizations to focus on narrow programmatic efforts while lacking the resources to maintain the organization overall (Berry 2016;Callahan 2014;Hertel-Fernandez 2016;Teles 2016). Potential recipients may also "chase money" or create projects designed to win funding rather than to fully serve the organization's mission (Brown 2015;Francis 2019;Krause 2014). Finally, recipient organizations work to solidify funding relationships rather than substantive policy change (Mosley 2012). ...
The Tax Reform Act of 1969 introduced formal legal barriers designed to limit the political activities of foundations. How do these constraints affect foundations’ funding decisions and the capacity of public interest organizations that rely on philanthropic support for their advocacy work? We argue that the policy regime governing private foundations’ work has produced two layers of feedback effects that not only shape philanthropic behavior, but also create real obstacles for grantee organizations and their advocacy efforts. We contend that, particularly for recipient organizations who (1) have a primary mission of political advocacy and mobilization and (2) rely heavily on philanthropic support, the policies governing foundation behavior can create incompatible goals between grantors and grantees pursuing policy change. Drawing on records of grant activity, archival material, and elite interviews, we explore this argument using a salient case study: anti-predatory lending reform. Ultimately, we find that policy restrictions on foundation giving may limit the capacity and threaten the success of advocacy organizations engaged in grassroots political work necessary to promote policy change, thus curtailing the potential for the very reforms foundations are eager to pursue.
Scholarly work in American politics has yet to confront one of the nation’s starkest inequalities: lethal violence. The risk falls disproportionately on Black Americans, but much like poverty and inequality, lethal violence is a broadly American problem that African Americans are disproportionately likely to experience. The lack of attention to life-threatening violence has limited our understanding of race, criminal justice, and the nature of the American state. We draw on work in American political development and racial politics to extend a racialized state failure framework for understanding the United States as a high-violence society. Life-threatening violence declined dramatically in the nineteenth century in countries where state building involved the integrated consolidation of centralized violence monopolization and universal male suffrage. Such efforts faltered in the US, however, and violence thrived. We argue that this racialized state failure is the result of two reinforcing features of American politics: anti-transformative racial orders and institutional fragmentation. Fragmentation has long provided opportunities for anti-transformative racial orders to limit national intervention in violence control and enfranchisement, even during critical junctures when institutions are less determinate, and actions by decision makers are more likely to generate change. We illustrate the disruption of state building by racial orders, which minimized the state’s capacity to delegitimize violent self-help during two critical junctures in the US: Reconstruction and the crime wave of the mid- to late twentieth century. The resulting institutional configuration, which we refer to as forced localism, reinforces the jurisdictional authority of highly constrained state and local institutions in violence attenuation. The consequence is exceptionally high rates of serious violence and a harsh and exclusionary criminal justice system, with Black Americans exceptionally vulnerable to both.
From the toils of Fannie Lou Hamer and Barbara Jordan emerges a twenty-first-century leader, Stacey Abrams. This Element explores the strategic organizing acumen of Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi and across the South, and the rise of Barbara Jordan, the second Black woman elected to the House of Representatives and the first Black woman from the US South to head to Congress. The leadership skills and collective political efforts of these two women paved the way for the emergence of Stacey Abrams, candidate for governor of Georgia in 2018 and 2022, and organizer of an electoral movement that helped deliver the 2020 presidential victory and US Senate majority to the Democratic Party. This Element adds to the existing literature by framing Black women as integral to the expansion of new voters into the Democratic Party, American democracy, and to the political development of Black people in the US South.
The intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-Black violence prompted talk of racial reckoning among educational grantmakers in 2020 to 2021. This study examines the nature and extent of this reckoning, offering insights into policy actors’ responses to racialized crises. Through an analysis of grantmakers’ professed policy repertoires—consisting of administrative practices, sites of intervention, and sources of expertise—we delineate the mechanisms shaping grantmaker responses to sociopolitical crises. While some grantmakers temporarily shifted administrative practices in response to COVID-19, deeper changes remained elusive. The study highlights how institutionalized white-centered norms and practices persist within educational policymaking, constraining material progress toward racial equity. Moreover, it underscores the pivotal role of proximity to racial injustice in motivating substantive changes to policy repertoires. We conclude with an appeal to grantmakers and other policy actors to shift from performative reckoning to tangible reparative actions that can weaken racialized structures.
Changing the world in court – this is what strategic litigation is all about. In an interdisciplinary study, Lisa Hahn examines under which conditions such change can be achieved and why the collective mobilization of law is essential for this. Strategic litigation unites people in a litigation collective and thus contributes to overcoming individual barriers to access to justice. Lisa Hahn reaches this conclusion by drawing on legal mobilization theory, through a historical reconstruction of seminal court cases and by examining strategic litigation as an instrument for implementing the human right to access to justice. Empirical case studies on migration and surveillance provide unique insights into litigation collectives.
Purpose
Exploring how racism continues to persist throughout public and nonprofit organizations is central to undoing persistent society-wide injustices in the United States and around the globe. The authors provide two cases for identifying and understanding the ways in which philanthropy’s whiteness does harm to K–12 students and communities of color.
Design/methodology/approach
In this article, the authors draw on critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, specifically Cheryl Harris' work to expose the whiteness of philanthropy, not as a racial identity, but in the way that philanthropy is performed. The authors characterize one of the property functions of whiteness, the right to exclude, as working through two mechanisms: neoliberal exclusion and overt exclusion. Drawing on this construction of the right to exclude, the authors present two cases: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the City Fund.
Findings
Whether intentional or not, the Gates Foundation and the City Fund each exclude communities of color in several ways: from changes to schools and districts, parents' experiences navigating school enrollment due to these changes, to academic assessments and political lobbying.
Originality/value
These cases provide a way for researchers and practitioners to see how organizations in real time reify the extant racial hierarchy so as to disrupt such organizational processes and practices for racial justice.
The twenty‐first century has been one of democratic backsliding. This has stimulated wide‐ranging scholarship on the causes of democratic erosion. Yet an overarching framework that identifies actors, behaviors, and decision processes has not been developed. I offer such a structure that includes elites (e.g., elected officials, the judiciary), societal actors (e.g., social movements, interest groups, media), and citizens. I discuss erosive threats stemming from each actor and the concomitant role of psychological mechanisms. The framework highlights the challenge of arriving at a holistic explanation of erosion within a given country during a finite period. It also accentuates why scholars should regularly consider the implications of their specific findings for democratic stability. I conclude by discussing various lessons and suggestions for how to study democratic backsliding.
Philanthropy is a contentious and often polarising topic within egalitarian social movements. There are good reasons for this. Philanthropy is reliant on the inequalities inherent in the capitalist system, is fundamentally at odds with democratic relationships, and can moderate or control the activities of recipients. This article therefore starts from the premise that philanthropy violates egalitarian ideals in very significant ways. However, it goes on to suggest that, absent a ruptural change that would drastically weaken the bases of philanthropic wealth, there is a strategic and contingent case for its selective use so long as it pushes existing configurations of power in more egalitarian directions. In making this case, the article draws primarily on the work of Wright (2010) but also on recent developments in the political theory of philanthropy. It calls for a critical literacy around philanthropy that combines an openness to experimentation with a clear-eyed sense of its significant risks. In this respect, it outlines specific conditions and strategies that movements should adopt if they pursue or accept philanthropic funding. Firstly, movements must deliberately articulate and actively defend their transformative vision, clarifying in the process the tactical place of philanthropy within this. Secondly, they must resist funder conditionalities, and preserve egalitarian modes of organising in the face of practices which undermine participatory ideals and threaten relations of care and solidarity. The article’s chief contribution is to integrate normative insights with lessons from the sociological literature on movement-philanthropy relations, for the sake of systematically untangling a live and troublesome issue within the praxis of radical movements.
Private organizations that produce public goods often receive offers for funding from large donors who seek to influence the nature of the public goods produced. We consider a model in which the potential for large donor influence creates a commitment problem for the organization in the sense that, from an ex ante perspective, the organization sets the price for influence too low given the opportunity cost. Our analysis identifies determinants of the likelihood of large donor influence and assesses various mechanisms that can alleviate or exploit the commitment problem—greater transparency, organization leadership preferences and/or incentives, and targeted small donor campaigns. Finally, we assess how an option to walk back influential large donor contributions or an inability to commit to longer-term agreements with influential donors alters the implications of potential large donor influence.
JEL Classifications: D64; L31.
In this article, we examine external agents' effect on nursing's professional evolution and the consequences for the discipline's collective agency, social contract, and self-regulation. Situated within Foucault's theories of power, we review how the power of organizations reaches into the fabric of everyday life and explore how philanthropic foundations have influenced a diverse array of disciplines, including nursing. Through a genealogic lens, we examine nursing history and professionalization and conclude with concerns surrounding nursing's exercise of its collective agency during one of the most significant, discipline-shaping activities of modern times-Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Future of Nursing initiatives.
In Short
• As postsecondary grantmaking foundations make sense of recent sociopolitical crises, including inequities exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic; attention to the Movement for Black Lives following the summer 2020 uprisings; and more openly racialized politics, they have been catalyzed to reconsider their racial equity commitments.
• Grantmakers are expanding beyond their historically white-dominated networks for knowledge and expertise on where to channel their influence toward transforming postsecondary education.
• These grantmakers are also reflecting on avenues to shift their grant dollars to funnel more funds to BIPOC-led and community-embedded recipient organizations.
• Without internal and external accountability to harness lessons of the last 2 years, grantmakers (and their grantees) risk returning to status quo practices that effectively entrench racialized hierarchies.
The definition of philanthropy is contested with variations across time and global context. The article will centre on the Caribbean with its numerous identities to highlight inclusive philanthropic practices. Through an analysis of Caribbean history, theoretical foundations, and contemporary analysis, three social classes or ideal types are identified. These include 1) the colonial dominant, 2) the Black or creole middle class and 3) the resisters or grassroots/marginalized populations. Drawing on these ideal types, the analyzes three categories of philanthropic practice developing within and through the Caribbean, including 1) the philanthropy of colonial dominance, 2) philanthropy of cultural mediation and 3) philanthropy of anticolonial resistance. The Caribbean offers an ideal context for understanding traditional forms of philanthropic action and 'philanthropy from below,' highlighting issues of power, oppression, and social transformation that impact the region's ongoing development.
This qualitative study explores the case of Children’s Savings Accounts or CSAs (also called Child Development Accounts or CDAs) by constructing a case study that includes both the national landscape of CSAs and a focal CSA program. Through a corpus of over 150 texts related to CSAs, 30 semi-structured interviews with proponents and supporters, and participant observation of CSA meetings and conferences and program activities for over one year, this study explores the role of framing and cultural discourses in making CSAs more focused on education. This shift occurred in how proponents talk about them, frame them, and how they are implemented. Though proponents initially framed CSAs as solving problems of welfare and poverty in the early 1990s, over the last three decades, proponents shifted toward framing CSAs in terms of educational aspirations and attainment. This educational aspiration frame resonates with cultural discourses about education and social mobility and serves to create consensus among diverse policy designs across the national landscape of CSA programs. Proponents today frame CSAs as a solution for educational problems such as racialized achievement gaps. This framing shapes the meaning of CSAs and their implementation: schools are seen as crucial partners as CSAs attempt to build ‘college-bound identity’ and metrics like academic achievement are proposed for judging the success of CSAs for changing students’ orientation toward their futures. This case illuminates the role of framing and discourse in the process of educationalization, wherein broader social problems are transformed into educational problems and the implications of this process for the organizational structures and practices. These practices elaborate and institutionalize CSAs in particular ways. This study contributes conceptually to identifying mechanisms of educationalization and implications of educational frames ‘winning out’ over other alternative frames for new social policies.
We examine the ways in which change in civil society has contributed to the erosion of democracy in the United States. Democracy demands that people commit to pluralistic self-determination, which means that people must be willing to seek power and also share it. We argue that civil society plays two important roles in sustaining people’s willingness to do both: first, civil society cultivates a capacity for expressing choice; and second, it teaches capacities and provides opportunities for people to negotiate power. We show that in recent decades, civil society’s emphasis has moved more toward expressing choice and away from the creation of venues for negotiating power. We conclude with recommendations for researchers, civil society leaders, funders, and policy-makers who are interested in committing to forms of civil society that take power seriously.
Nonprofits in cities often exist in segregated contexts in which leadership in high-capacity nonprofits reflects the whiteness of surrounding suburbs while leadership in grassroots nonprofits reflects the makeup of residency (low-income people of color). We build upon a small but burgeoning literature that uses critical race theory to better understand whiteness and segregation in the nonprofit sector. Using ethnographic data in Camden, New Jersey (NJ), we identify three key emergent findings on the impact of a segregated nonprofit sector: (a) the sector’s segregation reflects regional, residential segregation; (b) White, suburban overrepresentation in high-capacity nonprofits leads to a defense of White, suburban interests; and (c) these dynamics contribute to economic segregation within the sector. In our conclusion, we lay out a wider theoretical discussion of how these factors are interrelated.
The COVID crisis has demonstrated how the divide between de�mocracies and autocracies affects the lives of people in both types of societies, in critical ways. In this chapter, I focus on how authoritarian governments have responded to the pandemic politically, economically, and socially. At�tending to the specific cases of China, Turkey, and Hungary, I examine how the state of emergency induced by the pandemic has served some authoritarian regimes, how their power over their populations has in�creased, and how they have found in COVID a political opportunity.
As the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated housing precarity, tenant organizations grew in numbers and salience. But membership-based tenant organizations predated the pandemic and will persist beyond it. There are (at least) hundreds of them in localities across the country. Many aim to advance sweeping change. In doing so, they face formidable tasks: politically organizing in race-class subjugated communities, working in opposition to powerful actors (corporate landlords, property managers, etc.), and navigating complex and sometimes hostile local political institutions (city councils, mayors, rent boards, etc.). How do these organizations build power and effect change in the face of such obstacles? Drawing on a rich body of original qualitative evidence (participant observation and in-depth interviews), this paper explores the politics of local tenant organizations. We assess the origins of such organizations, how they are structured, and how they pursue political change. In doing so, we offer a rich descriptive account of phenomena that have largely escaped the attention of political scientists. We find that tenant organizations can cultivate radically different ways of conceptualizing political economy, carve out a distinctive political focus on race-class subjugated communities, and create critical opportunities for otherwise marginalized actors to develop and exercise political power.
This article examines a moment of crisis and experimentation in philanthropy from the late 1960s to analyze how race shapes philanthropy. Specifically, it considers two giving circles in Boston launched as a linked funding initiative to address economic and racial inequality: (a) a group of wealthy, White suburbanites who started the Fund for Urban Negro Development to direct donations with “no strings attached” to the other, (b) the Boston Black United Front Foundation, an entity started by Black power activists in the city. Using archival records of the two groups, I analyze their efforts to decouple hierarchies of race and giving in funder–grantee relationships, and connect scholarship on African American history and philanthropy to that on donor control. I frame the notion of “no strings attached” giving as relative and shaped by positioning and identity in ways that produce multiple understandings of the material and abstract “strings” of philanthropy.
This volume brings together leading political scientists to explore the distinctive features of the American political economy. The introductory chapter provides a comparatively informed framework for analyzing the interplay of markets and politics in the United States, focusing on three key factors: uniquely fragmented and decentralized political institutions; an interest group landscape characterized by weak labor organizations and powerful, parochial business groups; and an entrenched legacy of ethno-racial divisions embedded in both government and markets. Subsequent chapters look at the fundamental dynamics that result, including the place of the courts in multi-venue politics, the political economy of labor, sectional conflict within and across cities and regions, the consolidation of financial markets and corporate monopoly and monopsony power, and the ongoing rise of the knowledge economy. Together, the chapters provide a revealing new map of the politics of democratic capitalism in the United States.
This article discusses the rise of an approach to philanthropic giving known as philanthrocapitalism. I relate it to a new paradigm in management theory that has claimed that private profit making naturally aligns with improved public welfare. I show how growing belief in the inherent “compatibility” of corporate missions and public benefits has led to new laws and contributed to major shifts in how giving practices are structured and legitimated. The original point made in this article is that the philanthrocapitalist turn is more than simply an organizational change in the structure of different philanthropic institutions. Rather, the belief that profit-making and public welfare are naturally aligned also has significant, undertheorized implications for different principles in European-American legal traditions. The ascendancy of the philanthrocapitalist approach represents a subtle but profound displacement of belief in the need for democratic checks and balances on the use of public funds for private enrichment.
UK philanthropic foundations are being subjected to greater scrutiny in how they address racial inequality with their funding distribution, yet the deeper critical question of whether these foundations perpetuate racial inequality in their very ethos, practices and existence remains unanswered. These foundations provide over £6.5billion of grants annually to the charitable sector, hold substantial power and influence over social movements and justify their charitable status by stating that they are addressing issues such as poverty and inequality. Yet many private foundations were built on a Victorian paternalistic model of gracious benefactor and grateful beneficiary and against the historical context of empire‐building, slavery and colonialism which embedded ideas about ‘race’ within philanthropy. Furthermore, delineation between the deserving and undeserving poor connected with these formulations of race, to position subjects of colonies inequitably within this charitable paradigm and reinforce stereotypes. At the time, this formed the justification for the expansion of missionary or colonial philanthropy overseas which was the biggest philanthropic cause of the pre first world war era and which can be traced back as the basis for the ‘white saviour complex’ exhibited today within UK foundations, as they continue to operate a colonial social architecture. This inherent and unchallenged colonial social architecture used for grantmaking and funding distribution imbues processes and practices with the same ethos and principles exhibited by colonialism, resulting in a ‘neo‐colonial philanthropy’, the tenets of which are identified and explored. In addition, as racial inequality remains one of the most critical issues of our time, it is asserted that foundations will need to understand the historical context of the UK’s colonialist history in order to recognise the link with racial disparities exhibited in communities today. This direct connection together with their own inbuilt colonial architecture necessitates an urgent conversation for Foundations about whether reparative or restorative justice is a more effective operational paradigm and the long term solution needed to address neo‐colonial philanthropy or the ‘Empires new clothes’.
The legacy of the American plantation system of the Antebellum South is frequently examined for its influence on American government. However, we do not discuss at length its influence on philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. We attempt to address this shortcoming by contextualizing the plantation narrative within the nonprofit sector. We then pose and start to answer three questions to provide a path forward for the sector to address current and future challenges. We conclude with a personal narrative in which we grapple with some of these questions.
Hurricane Katrina submerged thousands of single-story, slab-on-grade homes in low-lying New Orleans, disproportionately displacing African Americans they sheltered and sustained. Critical disaster studies cast charitable individuals and organizations as sponsors of Black survival, yet nongovernmental aid programs remain marginal to scholarship on environmental justice and Black geographies. This paper sheds light on the funding programs, public-private partnerships, and design-build projects by which philanthropies and charities aid Black, Indigenous and other People of Color (BIPOC) in retreat from flood hazards. This nested case study of HUD’s Neighborhood Stabilization program and the Salvation Army’s EnviRenew program shows Black developers, planners, and architects of retreat from New Orleans’s Pontchartrain Park Historic District gained public, private, and philanthropic sponsors at steep costs: the loss of land, life, and leadership in sustainable development. Drawing on administrative data, legal documents, and stakeholder interviews, the mixed-methods analysis finds new housing built above projected base flood elevations inside flood hazard zones not by choice or by chance, but in compliance with aid programs requiring Black participation in land buyout programs (Road Home) and Black facilitation of green home building and buying (Build Back Better). The Pontchartrain Park case of “management failure,” which included rescinded grants and land takings, not only illuminates the macroeconomics and microaggressions that restrict where and how Black resettlement takes place. Ultimately, this article reveals climate mitigation patrons relocate BIPOC households and heritage from endangered places in theory, yet, in practice, their relief formulas may house marginalized minorities in precarious places above measured risks.
In this article, I bridge critical sociological perspectives on penal institutions with insights from the sociology of disaster to advance a critical race theory of prison order in the wake of COVID-19 and its afterlives. Penal institutions officially categorize people as detainees, inmates, or prisoners in order to deliberately relegate human beings to a degraded social status, ultimately in service of an intentionally racist system. I theorize why prisons are natural epicenters for COVID-19, identifying the following institutional parameters as social factors: (1) death is by institutional design, where prison order is arranged so that people categorized as prisoners die socially, psychically, and physically; (2) promoting institutional survival rather than human survival is second nature during a disaster because the preexisting social organization of prison life serves this purpose; and (3) when a disaster strikes causing severe loss to people and resources, uncertainty is managed by implementing strategies that magnify the death(s) of incarcerated people in exchange for the life of the institution.
Along the Archival Grain offers a unique methodological and analytic opening to the affective registers of imperial governance and the political content of archival forms. In a series of nuanced mediations on the nature of colonial documents from the nineteenth-century Netherlands Indies, Ann Laura Stoler identifies the social epistemologies that guided perception and practice, revealing the problematic racial ontologies of that confused epistemic space. Navigating familiar and extraordinary paths through the lettered lives of those who ruled, she seizes on moments when common sense failed and prevailing categories no longer seemed to work. She asks not what colonial agents knew, but what happened when what they thought they knew they found they did not. Rejecting the notion that archival labor be approached as an extractive enterprise, Stoler sets her sights on archival production as a consequential act of governance, as a field of force with violent effect, and not least as a vivid space to do ethnography.
This study examines one organization from the radical left of the 1920s and 1930s: the American Fund for Public Service. Little known today, but infamous in its time, the American Fund represented a united front of anticapitalists—anarchists, socialists, communists, and left-liberals—which attempted to revitalize the left in order to end capitalism and, therefore, war. Financed by Charles Garland, an eccentric, 21-year-old Harvard dropout, the Fund performed the difficult task of allocating relatively meager resources among the most promising radical ventures, typically militant labor organizations. The philanthropy's directors represented a who's who of the labor left of the period: Roger Baldwin, Norman Thomas, Scott Nearing, James Weldon Johnson, and more. The fund anticipated philanthropies later in the century which meant to challenge the status quo beyond reformism. This study will be of interest to scholars of labor relations, radical politics, American history, and philanthropy.
Did the civil rights movement impact the development of the American state? Despite extensive accounts of civil rights mobilization and narratives of state building, there has been surprisingly little research that explicitly examines the importance and consequence that civil rights activism has had for the process of state building in American political and constitutional development. Through a sweeping archival analysis of the NAACP's battle against lynching and mob violence from 1909 to 1923, this book examines how the NAACP raised public awareness, won over American presidents, and secured the support of Congress. In the NAACP's most far-reaching victory, the Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional rights of black defendants were violated by a white mob in the landmark criminal procedure decision Moore v. Dempsey. This book demonstrates the importance of citizen agency in the making of new constitutional law in a period unexplored by previous scholarship.
This is an intellectual, political, and institutional history of scientific racist thought focused on the Carnegie Corporation’s antipoverty philanthropy with “poor whites” in South Africa (1927–1932). I trace the origins, analysis, and outcomes of the Carnegie Commission in apartheid law and in cultural and social organizations that synchronized Afrikaner Nationalism. I study the conditions that shaped the study and of how the study was used in building South African social science about race and poverty. This case study analyzes how a global racial order—“global whiteness”—working with the racial logic of white vulnerability, provided the conditions for the Carnegie Poor White Study. In discussing the theory of global whiteness, I demonstrate that white supremacy has been essential for constituting both epistemic knowledge in academic disciplines and for constituting nation-states. The influence of international philanthropy on the creation of a distinctly racial conception of citizenship and democracy in South Africa during the consolidation of grand apartheid and Afrikaner Nationalism indicates a need for research on racial polities that foregrounds race in the making of international affairs. Waste of a White Skin addresses how non–South African philanthropic institutions were invested in making white identity and entrenching racialized citizenship and democracy. The Carnegie Corporation’s focus on “poor whites” expanded the politics of scientific racism and the idea of a civilizing mission that had South African society and social science as its beneficiaries. I extend our understanding of the history of apartheid to include pre-World War II U.S.-based racial philosophies and policies; I reveal how the racialization of poor whites functioned with other processes to establish “grand apartheid” in 1948; and I articulate a theory of global whiteness that emerges from the literatures on race in international relations and racial blackness and empire. Through this, I raise questions about how international debates on race affect domestic racial citizenship. I point to how a global racial regime—global whiteness—constitutes domestic racial policies and, in some ways, animates black consciousness. I also indicate that the supposed discontinuity of racial geography is, in fact, porous and nearly always permeable.
Unjust Deeds explores the history of an often overlooked civil rights milestone: the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). In a group of cases from St. Louis, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., six African American families challenged the hardening boundaries of the nation’s racial ghettos as they fought desperately to hold onto their homes. Aided by the NAACP and local civil rights attorneys, they attacked the legal legitimacy of racial restrictive covenants, one of the most pervasive instruments of residential segregation in the 1940s. Their dramatic campaign culminated in a unanimous Supreme Court victory that left the struggle for justice under the law forever transformed. Unjust Deeds explores the origins and complex legacies of the covenant cases and reveals how the campaign against housing discrimination—in both its successes and failures—helped to reshape the postwar nation. Providing a critical vantage point to witness the simultaneously personal, local, and national dimensions of legal change in the twentieth century, this book ultimately offers a new understanding of the evolving legal fight against Jim Crow and the making of the civil rights movement in neighborhoods and courtrooms across America.
When the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education was handed down in 1954, many civil rights advocates believed that the decision, which declared public school segregation unconstitutional, would become the Holy Grail of racial justice. Fifty years later, despite its legal irrelevance and the racially separate and educationally ineffective state of public schooling for most black children, Brown is still viewed by many as the perfect precedent. Here, Derrick Bell shatters the shining image of this celebrated ruling. He notes that, despite the onerous burdens of segregation, many black schools functioned well and racial bigotry had not rendered blacks a damaged race. He maintains that, given what we now know about the pervasive nature of racism, the Court should have determined instead to rigorously enforce the "equal" component of the "separate but equal" standard. Racial policy, Bell maintains, is made through silent covenants--unspoken convergences of interest and involuntary sacrifices of rights--that ensure that policies conform to priorities set by policy-makers. Blacks and whites are the fortuitous winners or losers in these unspoken agreements. The experience with Brown, Bell urges, should teach us that meaningful progress in the quest for racial justice requires more than the assertion of harms. Strategies must recognize and utilize the interest-convergence factors that strongly influence racial policy decisions. In Silent Covenants, Bell condenses more than four decades of thought and action into a powerful and eye-opening book.
Fifty years ago African Americans were severely oppressed. Not only were they unable to enjoy many of the basic citizenship rights guaranteed by the US Constitution but also, under Jim Crow, blacks were denied the franchise, barred from interacting with whites in public spaces, and trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder, where they were relegated to the poorest paying and least desirable jobs. The modern civil rights movement, a major social force in the mid-1950s, was the vehicle through which African Americans and their supporters overthrew Jim Crow. Partly as a response to this groundbreaking movement, scholars have constructed a new concept of social movements where organization, strategic thinking, cultural traditions, and political encounters figure largely as explanatory factors in analyses of social movements.
This essay examines the ubiquitous presence of Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery and wrestles with the impossibility of discovering anything about her that hasn't already been stated. As an emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world, Venus makes plain the convergence of terror and pleasure in the libidinal economy of slavery and, as well, the intimacy of history with the scandal and excess of literature. In writing at the limit of the unspeakable and the unknown, the essay mimes the violence of the archive and attempts to redress it by describing as fully as possible the conditions that determine the appearance of Venus and that dictate her silence.
A pathbreaking history of the development of scientific racism, white nationalism, and segregationist philanthropy in the U.S. and South Africa in the early twentieth century, Waste of a White Skin focuses on the American Carnegie Corporation's study of race in South Africa, the Poor White Study, and its influence on the creation of apartheid.This book demonstrates the ways in which U.S. elites supported apartheid and Afrikaner Nationalism in the critical period prior to 1948 through philanthropic interventions and shaping scholarly knowledge production. Rather than comparing racial democracies and their engagement with scientific racism, Willoughby-Herard outlines the ways in which a racial regime of global whiteness constitutes domestic racial policies and in part animates black consciousness in seemingly disparate and discontinuous racial democracies. This book uses key paradigms in black political thought-black feminism, black internationalism, and the black radical tradition-to provide a rich account of poverty and work. Much of the scholarship on whiteness in South Africa overlooks the complex politics of white poverty and what they mean for the making of black political action and black people's presence in the economic system.Ideal for students, scholars, and interested readers in areas related to U.S. History, African History, World History, Diaspora Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Sociology, Anthropology, and Political Science.
This Article argues that scholarly accounts of civil rights lawyering and politics have emphasized; incorrectly, a narrative that begins with Plessy v. Ferguson and ends with Brown v. Board of Education. That traditional narrative has relied on a legal liberal view of civil rights politics - a view that focuses on court-based and rights-centered public law litigation. That narrative has, in turn, generated a revisionist literature that has critiqued legal liberal politics. This Article contends that both the traditional and revisionist works have focused on strains of civil rights politics that appear to anticipate Brown, and thus have suppressed alternative visions of that politics. This Article attempts to recover these alternatives by analyzing the history of civil rights lawyering between the First and Second World Wars. It recovers debates concerning intraracial African-American identity and anti-segregation work, lawyers'work and social change, rights-based advocacy and legal realism, and the legal construction of racial and economic inequality that have been elided in the existing literature. It thus contends that the scholarly inquiries that have been generated in both the traditional and the revisionist work should be reframed.
Today, most Americans lack constitutional rights on the job. Instead of enjoying free speech or privacy, they can be fired for almost any reason or no reason at all. This book uses history to explain why. It takes readers back to the 1930s and 1940s when advocates across the political spectrum - labor leaders, civil rights advocates and conservatives opposed to government regulation - set out to enshrine constitutional rights in the workplace. The book tells their interlocking stories of fighting for constitutional protections for American workers, recovers their surprising successes, explains their ultimate failure, and helps readers assess this outcome.
At first glance, the Ford Foundation and the black power movement would make an unlikely partnership. After the Second World War, the renowned Foundation was the largest philanthropic organization in the United States and was dedicated to projects of liberal reform. Black power ideology, which promoted self-determination over color-blind assimilation, was often characterized as radical and divisive. But Foundation president McGeorge Bundy chose to engage rather than confront black power's challenge to racial liberalism through an ambitious, long-term strategy to foster the "social development" of racial minorities. The Ford Foundation not only bankrolled but originated many of the black power era's hallmark legacies: community control of public schools, ghetto-based economic development initiatives, and race-specific arts and cultural organizations. In Top Down, Karen Ferguson explores the consequences of this counterintuitive and unequal relationship between the liberal establishment and black activists and their ideas. In essence, the white liberal effort to reforge a national consensus on race had the effect of remaking racial liberalism from the top down-a domestication of black power ideology that still flourishes in current racial politics. Ultimately, this new racial liberalism would help foster a black leadership class-including Barack Obama-while accommodating the intractable inequality that first drew the Ford Foundation to address the "race problem." Copyright
Starting in the 1970s, conservatives learned that electoral victory did not easily convert into a reversal of important liberal accomplishments, especially in the law. As a result, conservatives' mobilizing efforts increasingly turned to law schools, professional networks, public interest groups, and the judiciary--areas traditionally controlled by liberals. Drawing from internal documents, as well as interviews with key conservative figures, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement examines this sometimes fitful, and still only partially successful, conservative challenge to liberal domination of the law and American legal institutions. Unlike accounts that depict the conservatives as fiendishly skilled, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement reveals the formidable challenges that conservatives faced in competing with legal liberalism. Steven Teles explores how conservative mobilization was shaped by the legal profession, the legacy of the liberal movement, and the difficulties in matching strategic opportunities with effective organizational responses. He explains how foundations and groups promoting conservative ideas built a network designed to dislodge legal liberalism from American elite institutions. And he portrays the reality, not of a grand strategy masterfully pursued, but of individuals and political entrepreneurs learning from trial and error. Using previously unavailable materials from the Olin Foundation, Federalist Society, Center for Individual Rights, Institute for Justice, and Law and Economics Center, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement provides an unprecedented look at the inner life of the conservative movement. Lawyers, historians, sociologists, political scientists, and activists seeking to learn from the conservative experience in the law will find it compelling reading.
Historians of the Civil Rights era typically treat the key events of the 1950s Brown v. Board of Education - sit-ins, bus boycotts, and marches - as contributing toward a revolutionary social upheaval that upended a rigid caste system. While the 1950s was a watershed era in Southern and civil rights history, the tendency has been to paint the preceding Jim Crow era as a brutal system that featured none of the progressive reform impulses so apparent at the federal level and in the North. As the author shows in this reappraisal of the Jim Crow era, this argument is too simplistic, and is true to neither the 1950s nor the long era of Jim Crow that finally solidified in 1910. Focusing on the political development of the South between 1910 and 1954, this book considers the genuine efforts by white and black progressives to reform the system without destroying it. These reformers assumed that the system was there to stay, and therefore felt that they had to work within it in order to modernize the South. Consequently, white progressives tried to install a better - meaning more equitable - separate-but-equal system, and elite black reformers focused on ameliorative (rather than confrontational) solutions that would improve the lives of African Americans. The book concentrates on local and state reform efforts throughout the South in areas like schooling, housing, and labor. Many of the reforms made a difference, but they had the ironic impact of generating more demand for social change among blacks. The author is able to show how demands slowly rose over time, and how the system laid the seeds of its own destruction. The reformers' commitment to a system that was less unequal - albeit not truly equal - and more like the North, led to significant policy changes over time. As this book demonstrates, our lack of knowledge about the cumulative policy transformations resulting from the Jim Crow reform impulse, impoverishes our understanding of the Civil Rights revolution. Reforming Jim Crow aims to rectify that.
The huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few defenders today, yet reforms to reduce the number of people in U.S. jails and prisons have been remarkably modest. Meanwhile, a carceral state has sprouted in the shadows of mass imprisonment, extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It includes not only the country’s vast archipelago of jails and prisons but also the growing range of penal punishments and controls that lie in the never-never land between prison and full citizenship, from probation and parole to immigrant detention, felon disenfranchisement, and extensive lifetime restrictions on sex offenders. As it sunders families and communities and reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship, this ever-widening carceral state poses a formidable political and social challenge.In this book, Marie Gottschalk examines why the carceral state, with its growing number of outcasts, remains so tenacious in the United States. She analyzes the shortcomings of the two dominant penal reform strategies—one focused on addressing racial disparities, the other on seeking bipartisan, race-neutral solutions centered on reentry, justice reinvestment, and reducing recidivism.In this bracing appraisal of the politics of penal reform, Gottschalk exposes the broader pathologies in American politics that are preventing the country from solving its most pressing problems, including the stranglehold that neoliberalism exerts on public policy. She concludes by sketching out a promising alternative path to begin dismantling the carceral state.
Disciplining the Poor explains the transformation of poverty governance over the past forty years—why it happened, how it works today, and how it affects people. In the process, it clarifies the central role of race in this transformation and develops a more precise account of how race shapes poverty governance in the post–civil rights era. Connecting welfare reform to other policy developments, the authors analyze diverse forms of data to explicate the racialized origins, operations, and consequences of a new mode of poverty governance that is simultaneously neoliberal—grounded in market principles—and paternalist—focused on telling the poor what is best for them. The study traces the process of rolling out the new regime from the federal level, to the state and county level, down to the differences in ways frontline case workers take disciplinary actions in individual cases. The result is a compelling account of how a neoliberal paternalist regime of poverty governance is disciplining the poor today.
Introduction An Inheritance Rejected From Progressivism to Radicalism The ACLU and a New Social Order Free from the Bonds of Old Institutions Workers Will Lay Down Their Tools To Promote the Well-Being of Mankind Pacifists as Radicals It Takes Warm Hearts Chosen to Box the Left Compass A Sane Enough Radicalism Spend It Here and Now Scientific, Pragmatic, Efficient Emancipation of Their Class in Every Sphere Bolsheviks in Patriots' Clothing Tempers Flare The Rebel Girl Comes Aboard Surveying the Left Enemies on the Left Education and Culture Recipient Testimonials "Negro Work" Passaic Vanguard Press Friction Within and Without Little Left to Repress "The Manifold Discriminations That Beset Him" Shift to Low Gear We Did Quite a Lot of Good Bibliography Index
After Brown v. Board of Education was decided, Professor Herbert Wechsler questioned whether the Supreme Court's decision could be justified on the basis of "neutral" principles. To him Brown arbitrarily traded the rights of whites not to associate with blacks in favor of the rights of blacks to associate with whites. In this Comment, Prof. Derrick Bell suggests that no conflict of interest actually existed; for a brief period, the interests of the races converged to make the Brown decision inevitable. More recent Supreme Court decisions, however, suggest to Professor Bell a growing divergence of interests that makes integration less feasible. He suggests the interest of blacks in quality education might now be better served by concentration on improving the quality of existing schools, whether desegregated or all-black.
This paper critically evaluates the theory of patronage and professional social movement organizations (SMOs) advanced by McCarthy and Zald (1973, 1975, 1977) and the social control theory advanced by their critics (McAdam, 1982; Wilson, 1983; Haines 1984a, 1984b) in interpreting the development of black insurgency. Drawing on time-series analysis of the patronage of private foundations, structural facilitators, and the changing goals, organization and forms of black insurgency between 1953-1980, we find support for the social control theory insofar as: 1) the black movement was an indigenous challenge with professional SMOs playing a secondary role; 2) elite patronage was reactive and directed at moderate classical SMOs and professional SMOs; 3) this patronage professionalized the movement, strengthening the staff in classical SMOs and creating new professional SMOs; and 4) these processes did not generate movement growth and may have accelerated movement decay. Yet, contrary to the social control theory, we also found that: 1) movement decay had multiple sources, professionalization being secondary to partial success and strategic problems; and 2) professionalization may have weakened the challenge but did not transform movement goals or tactics. "Channeling" may be a more apt metaphor than "control" for analyzing the effects of patronage and professionalization on social movement development.
In sheer numbers, no form of government control comes close to the police stop. Each year, twelve percent of drivers in the United States are stopped by the police, and the figure is almost double among racial minorities. Police stops are among the most frequently criticized incidences of racial profiling, but while studies have shown that minorities are pulled over at higher rates, none have examined how police stops came to be encouraged and institutionalized. Pulled Over deftly traces the strange history of the investigatory police stop. The authors show that who is stopped and how they are treated convey powerful messages about citizenship and racial disparity in the United States. For African Americans, investigatory stops erode the perceived legitimacy of police stops and of the police generally, leading to decreased trust in the police and less willingness to solicit police assistance. This holds true even when police are courteous throughout the encounters and follow seemingly color-blind institutional protocols. In a country that celebrates racial equality, investigatory stops have a deleterious effect on minority communities that merits serious reconsideration. Pulled Over offers practical recommendations on how reforms can protect the rights of citizens and still effectively combat crime.
Risa L. Goluboff is professor of Law and history at the University of Virginia. This essay is drawn from her book, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Harvard University Press, 2007).
1. 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
2. In viewing Jim Crow as both a racial and an economic system, I draw on Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Harvard University Press, 2001), 101; and Thomas J. Sugrue, "Affirmative Action from Below: Civil Rights, the Building Trades, and the Politics of Racial Equality in the Urban North, 1945-1969," Journal of American History 91 (2004): 145-173.
3. 109 U.S. 3 (1883); 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
4. 198 U.S. 45 (1905).
5. I am not saying here that any particular argument became analytically unavailable. As an analytical matter, a variety of arguments are always available. See, e.g., Duncan Kennedy, "The Structure of Blackstone's Commentaries," Buffalo Law Review 28 (1979): 205-382; Mark Kelman, A Guide to Critical Legal Studies (Harvard University Press, 1987). Rather, I am suggesting that historically some arguments are more culturally available in a particular time and place. See, e.g., Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (Oxford University Press, 1992).
On its fiftieth anniversary, Brown v. Board of Education no longer enjoys the unbridled admiration it once earned from academic commentators. Early on, the conventional wisdom was that the courageous social engineers from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund (NAACP LDEF), whose inventive lawyering brought the case to fruition, had caused a social revolution. Legal academics and lawyers still widely acclaim the Brown decision as one of the most important Supreme Court cases in the twentieth century, if not since the founding of our constitutional republic. Brown's exalted status in the constitutional canon is unimpeachable, yet over time its legacy has become complicated and ambiguous. The fact is that fifty years later, many of the social, political, and economic problems that the legally trained social engineers thought the Court had addressed through Brown are still deeply embedded in our society. Blacks lag behind whites in multiple measures of educational achievement, and within the black community, boys are falling further behind than girls. In addition, the will to support public education from kindergarten through twelfth grade appears to be eroding despite growing awareness of education's importance in a knowledge-based society. In the Boston metropolitan area in 2003, poor people of color were at least three times more likely than poor whites to live in severely distressed, racially stratified urban neighborhoods. Whereas poor, working-class, and middle-income whites often lived together in economically stable suburban communities, black families with incomes above 20,000 to live in neighborhoods with high rates of crime and concentrations of poverty. Even in the so-called liberal North, race still segregates more than class.
Some of the nation's wealthiest philanthropies, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Broad Foundation have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in education reform. With vast wealth and a political agenda, foundations have helped to reshape the reform landscape in urban education. In this book, Sarah Reckhow shows where and how foundation investment in education is occurring and analyzes the effects of these investments within the two largest urban districts, New York City and Los Angeles. In New York City, centralized political control and the use of private resources have enabled rapid implementation of reform proposals. Yet this potent combination of top-down authority and outside funding also poses serious questions about transparency, responsiveness, and democratic accountability in New York. Meanwhile, a slower, but possibly more transformative set of reforms has been taking place in Los Angeles. These reforms were also funded and shaped by major foundations, but they work from the bottom up, through charter school operators managing networks of schools. This strategy has built grassroots political momentum and demand for reform in Los Angeles that is unmatched in New York City and other districts with mayoral control.
This essay attempts to discern some of the general features of a legal system like the American by drawing on (and rearranging) commonplaces and less than systematic gleanings from the literature. The speculative and tentative nature of the assertions here will be apparent and is acknowledged here wholesale to spare myself and the reader repeated disclaimers.
I would like to try to put forward some conjectures about the way in which the basic architecture of the legal system creates and limits the possibilities of using the system ;as a means of redistributive (that is, systemically equalizing) change. Our question, specifically, is, under what conditions can Iitigation be redistributive, taking litigation in the broadest sense of the presentation of claims to be decided by courts (or court-like agencies) and the whole penumbra of threats, feints, and so forth, surrounding such presentation.