Tirrea Billings

Summer 2020 sparked a reckoning around racial justice after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, not just in the United States but across the globe. The wave of support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and broader demands for racial equity pushed foundations and corporations alike to meet the moment by putting dollars behind these efforts. Commitments to racial equity reached $16.5 billion, nearly three times the previous year.

Last year, I went out on a limb and launched philanthropy unfiltered, a newsletter that confronts and critically examines the nonprofit industrial complex and how it undermines liberation. I began doing this after enough experience in the sector revealed the flaws hidden behind the glossy mission statements – how power and privilege influence who is heard, whose work is deemed worthy of funding, and whose isn’t.

I was 20 years old when I realized how whitewashed my education had been. It took a course dedicated to African American literature - where we read books like Narrative of Sojourner Truth, The Souls of Black Folk, and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - to reveal the dawning horror that much of the "history" I'd learned wasn't mere omission, but a lie. Recently, several articles have bubbled to the surface calling out the biases and inaccuracies of history textbooks.