Q&A with Rashad Robinson
Rashad Robinson is the President of Color Of Change, a leading racial justice organization driven by more than 7 million members who are building power for Black communities. One week after the elections, 17 foundation presidents gathered virtually for the Presidents’ Forum on Racial Equity in Philanthropy, to continue to explore and strategize around centering racial equity within their organizations and in the sector. Robinson led a discussion around the role of power, philanthropy and the leadership imperative. The following is an edited version of the transcript.
What type of infrastructure do we need in an era of such dramatic social media use, particularly to combat the spread of misinformation? What role should philanthropy play?
Rashad: This has been a point of focus at Color of Change. The infrastructure we've built has been one of the clearest paths to policy change at some of the big platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Our biggest challenge was that we had to win an election and get someone in office that was actually going to take action on regulation.
A couple of things have to happen. Because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, tech platforms believe the rules about truth in targeted marketing that apply to media outlets do not apply to them, and they believe they are not governed by civil rights law. This is how Facebook could, for example, have ads about housing only targeted to white people or ads about jobs only targeted to men. After a lot of pressure and a lot of work in the legal community, Facebook settled lawsuits related to that type of advertising, but the actual issue still needs to be addressed.
We also need to strengthen the Federal Trade Commission, and I believe we need a new regulatory body, similar to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that can enforce regulations as new products come out. If we don't have some rules of the road and accountability mechanisms, the same as we needed for our meat and our dairy and our cars and so much else, the people running our democracy and our economy will continue to have the philosophy of moving fast and breaking things. We need rules in place that rewire the incentive structure for these platforms long-term. We're not going to get that right away, but that is the North Star to ensure growth and profit don’t come above safety, integrity, and security.
The growth mechanisms for these various social media platforms — the internal structure and the internal profit model — are designed to do what they're currently doing. We've been spending a lot of time on accountability on those platforms. It is tiring to sit in the room with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Jack Dorsey of Twitter and the leaders at Google, and fight to have them put policies in place that they actually admit they may not fully be able to enforce. It is exhausting to understand that when they actually do put in policies that they say they can enforce, they may not enforce them when it comes to powerful folks that they want to be cozy with.
At the beginning of COVID, I was on the phone with Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, talking about the misinformation and disinformation about COVID on the platform. We had some demands, a list of things that we wanted pulled down. She was telling me all the things they were doing, things that two months before she told me they couldn't do when it came to voting and democracy. We were involved in ensuring as much of the misinformation (specifically targeted to Black people) as possible was removed. They responded to us because we had an infrastructure in place. They did not respond to government groups; they responded to groups that represented real-world communities. As we consider the new infrastructure that needs to be built around social media misinformation, if the infrastructure is not powered by people who will hold folks accountable, it will not be powerful enough to actually get what you want.
What is the balance or the difference, if any, between funding organizations and funding infrastructure? How can infrastructure be built through foundation investments?
Rashad: I think of Color of Change as infrastructure. A lot of organizations that reach, engage and build power for people are movement infrastructure. Movements need organizations that are ideas-based, that are policy-based, that focus on the key concerns of a community. But when a moment has the potential to become big, the trusted partnership of groups that have been with the community for years is vital.
In President Obama's book, Dreams From My Father, he talks about, during his time at Columbia University, knocking on doors for a group that does a lot of environmental work. They sent him into Harlem to tell the Black people to recycle, and he said it felt really shady to him. President Obama lived in New York City, went to Columbia in the early 90s, late 80s, and Black people in Harlem had a lot of things to deal with besides being asked to recycle. This also connects to the question around how to bring a racial justice message to rural people. A lot of this is about deep canvass, building relational organizing, and building trusted partnerships. It is about infrastructure and supporting the people in those communities to build over time and not think that we can message our way out of this, that there's a quick catch phrase we can say to people to get them over their uneasiness. That’s something we have to build with a lot of time and energy.
Stacey Abrams is a great example of this. I remember talking with her about the Census and getting rural Black churches wired for the internet so people could actually do their census work. Now those churches have internet, and people recognize that they have new opportunities and a new place to gather and a new place to have conversations. Infrastructure can be looked at a lot of different ways, but the way to get where you want is not by coming into communities to say, ‘I believe in this specific issue,’ but starting with the people and advancing the issues.
We host a series of Black women's brunches, and we never go and say, ‘Hey, let’s talk about bail reform!’ We start those conversations by saying, ‘What does Black joy mean to you? What do you think is impeding Black joy?’ The issues that come up are health, their communities, jobs, all of the things that build on the agenda that you're working on. I think sometimes we want to move very quickly with people and as a result, we end up getting slowed down.
How can we advance racial equity and climate change education in rural America? What can we do to build the infrastructure that we need?
Rashad: People want you to ask what their concerns are. They want you to meet them where they are — not just one time — and that requires infrastructure and meeting folks’ needs. As we move out of the post-COVID era and into a new world, it's going to mean finding ways to bring people together and give them a sense of community, then allowing that community to unlock what people actually want.
This is not a messaging game, but that doesn’t mean messaging isn’t important. Philanthropy often talks in the active voice about people and the passive voice about systems. They talk about vulnerable communities. The Black community is not vulnerable. We've been under attack. We've been targeted. We've been exploited. We say Black people are less likely to get a loan from the bank instead of saying banks are less likely to give loans to Black people, then we spend our time doing financial literacy programs for Black people instead of executing structural change inside of banks that have harmed, excluded, exploited and red-lined Black people. We'll say Black women are less likely to get jobs at X place, instead of X place excludes Black women from jobs. We get pipeline and mentorship programs instead of structural changes to deal with misogyny or racism.
With COVID, we'll say Black people are dying instead of talking about how Black people are being killed and what we're being killed by. If we start saying things the right way, we can also start putting energy the right way. You all have the potential to shape a narrative through the resources you move, how you move them and the demands you make or the relationships you make through that money. We have to focus on fixing the systems rather than trying to fix the people.
What areas of work do you think will be front and center over the next year, in terms of where change is happening as we move into this next era statewide and nationally?
Rashad: Local and statewide work is going to be key. Change begins in local communities. There's four different types of leadership we need in this moment: mediators, fighters, winners and builders. Mediators are particularly key, because they are the folks that work on the inside to make a plan and make as much as possible happen.
Joe Biden ran as a restoration candidate. That means restoring us back to something else. Obama was a change candidate, and Donald Trump was a change-the-rules candidate, which is an archetype that means you throw out all the rules. Restoration is not going to be enough for a lot of the people who were animated and felt empowered by participation. We're going to have to win at the local level and in local communities and make changes that leverage these new dynamics and these new conversations that move things forward and make people's lives better. I do think that COVID and COVID relief from the national level are vital, but so is making sure the right communities are included and that all communities are prioritized fairly.
Ongoing strengthening of rural infrastructure is also important. If you watched the maps of the election cycle, you saw how changes in suburbs and the potential for changes in rural communities gets us a stronger, more representative coalition of who is impacted by the inequality in our country, by the ways in which jobs and resources do not flow equitably and people are harmed by the systems and structures. I also think that our movement needs to invest in narrative infrastructure. The other side has a 24-hour news station, a network of radio stations and is leveraging social media platforms, which are designed to propel their messages. We can get beat before we ever get to the door and then get beat again after we leave the door because of all of these information bubbles. We're going to need our own infrastructure while working to change the rules of the current structures at play.
This is not about one particular issue. People don't experience issues, they experience life, and the forces that hold folks back are deeply interrelated. Our racist criminal justice system requires a racist media culture to survive and thrive, to create the demands for it, to create the incentives for it. Political inequality goes hand in hand with economic inequality.
All of that is important, and that is my case for power. That is my case for what it means to unlock power, and more and more, I am heartened by philanthropy wanting to be in conversations about power, because the folks you will empower by supporting efforts to build infrastructure are the very people that were designed to be helped by philanthropy. The idea is not to create charitable solutions to structural problems, it is to change the structures themselves. If we can get there, then hopefully over time we will need less charity, because we'll have more justice and more freedom.