Toxic Tears: White Women’s Power in Nonprofits
My first political lesson was at age five. I had recently migrated to the United States, when I witnessed a white woman refuse my mother a glass of water as she cleaned her home. I will never forget how my mother’s hands smelled of bleach or the many times she called me sobbing while locked inside her employer’s bathroom. My experiences as a former undocumented immigrant and survivor of domestic violence led me to work in the immigrant rights and labor movement. I have worked closely with many white women in the movement.
Because they believe in social justice, many see themselves as fundamentally different than my mother’s employer. But as Black and women of color feminists have long argued, the intersection of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy shapes how white women exercise power. White women’s active role in white supremacy is regularly overlooked since white men are often the public face of egregious violence. While white women’s racism takes different form, it is no less destructive and fatal to people of color. In fact, white women have historically used their gender to claim victimhood in order to mask their power. I have painfully learned that a defining feature of white women’s daily racism, whether enacted in their home or in the nonprofit workplace, is their refusal to name the power they exercise over others. As a former organizer and former board president, I have experienced how racist violence has been reproduced within a workers’ rights organization based in the Northeast United States. Recently there has been a major internal struggle against this racism. While these efforts are now bearing fruit, the problems it is attempting to fix are all too common within nonprofit organizations.
White Gatekeepers
White people, especially white women, hold disproportionate power within nonprofits. National studies conducted between 2006 and 2015 revealed that up to 89 percent of nonprofit executive directors and CEOs across the U.S. are white, while a 2016 report found that 78 percent of nonprofit employees across the country are women. The Building Movement Project published a series of national and state-specific studies about racial inequalities in nonprofits. Its 2019 national study documented that 62 percent of white people in nonprofits come from non-working-class backgrounds. White people use their legal status and privileged access to resources, wealthy funders, foundations, and organizational contacts to establish and maintain nonprofit organizations. They also recruit from their often racially segregated networks: “I was hired by a white woman and became part of a long line of white women who have led [the organization] as directors. It doesn’t feel great to point that out, but I think our former director could relate to me and identified me as a leader partly due to race and culture,” explained a white respondent. White people often rely on people of color to build connections with other people of color who are target constituents or members. Another 2019 report revealed that 36 percent of people of color (versus 14 percent of whites) felt frustrated with having to represent entire communities in their nonprofit groups.
Controlling relationships with funders within and across organizations is a key manifestation of racism within nonprofits.
Controlling relationships with funders within and across organizations is a key manifestation of racism within nonprofits. That same 2019 report documented that 36 percent of people of color (versus 21 percent of whites) lacked relationships with funders. People of color also explained that they “routinely confront the assumption that they are incompetent, and that in order to be heard and have their work seen, they may need a white person who can open doors, facilitate introductions, and communicate that the leader of color is safe to work with.” White-run organizations also reported larger budgets: 54 percent of respondents working in white-run organizations had budgets of $5 million or more, in comparison to 33 percent of organizations led by people of color.
Nonprofits rely on foundation money for their economic survival, and lacking access to funding is detrimental. As others critics have noted, the reliance on foundation money is a key pillar of the nonprofit industrial complex, which has increasingly dominated the social movement landscape in the United States in recent decades. Groups must register with the government as 501(c) 3 organizations to access foundation money and receive tax-exempt donations. The reliance on foundation money has deradicalized movements since funders often impose restrictions and tend to fund work that does not threaten their class interests. The reliance on foundations and funders puts working-class people of color at a disadvantage. As one woman of color wrote, “I’ve watched the white woman who is now the [executive director] tap into all of her networks, and that’s how we’ve gotten funding. And I’ve wondered, ‘Who the hell do I know at that level [of wealth]?’
Another manifestation of racism is founder’s syndrome. Founder’s syndrome is when a founder maintains disproportionate power and influence after establishing an organization. In the early stages of a group, the founder selects staff and board members, often their friends and colleagues, and makes most decisions without oversight and a formal process. The founder sets pay rates and usually receives the most pay. When the founder conflates the organization with their own ego, they struggle to share resources and relinquish control, and view themselves as more knowledgeable and committed to the organization than their co-workers and constituents. This distorted view rationalizes a range of undemocratic and reactive behaviors in the name of “protecting” the organization. As one anonymous author described, “Any challenge by staff was deemed a personal attack on both the founder and the charity itself. The two seem to be almost indistinguishable.”
Racism Undercuts Worker Power
For the last six years I have been actively participating in a worker and immigrant rights group with a radical commitment to building worker power. Racism has undermined its internal democracy and its effectiveness, though. For most of these six years white women made most of the administrative and financial decisions and served as the public face, while organizers of color did most of the work to build the membership. This racist division of labor weakened the organization’s collective decision-making bodies, including its worker committees, its rapid response network, a staff collective, and its first member-elected board. It also undermined an alternative, democratic model for organizing in which a collective of women, rather than a single director, oversaw the organization.
For the first few years, an informal collective composed of three white women, including the founder, and myself, coordinated the organization’s daily work. The founder had informally hired all of us. I regularly overworked my ten paid hours to build our base, working up to 40 hours a week during the peak stretches of campaigns. At the time, I treated the organization as a cause that required self-sacrifice. Unable to keep up with the pace of work (and write my dissertation at the same time, and later work as an adjunct instructor), I did not meaningfully participate in key decisions, including the one to register as a nonprofit. In hindsight, my inability to treat the organization as a workplace and to set firm workplace boundaries, enabled a group culture that overworked its organizers.
The collective later formalized into a co-directorship of three white women and another Latina. In an effort to formalize hiring processes, the Latina codirector underwent a formal job interview and then a one-year process to join the collective. But white co-directors never underwent the same process. As the organization grew, so did hierarchies between the founder and other codirectors, between white and Latina codirectors, and between codirectors and staff (who were mainly people of color). Political differences also existed between those who advocated pressuring targets versus “winning them over” with vague moral appeals, and between those who worked to challenge or reinforce founder’s syndrome.
Base building is at the heart of a grassroots organization. It is powerful and transformative. There is nothing more rewarding than seeing members fully step into their own power and become leaders in the organization and broader movement. Base building means developing trust by holding space for the pain that workers have experienced at the hands of husbands, bosses, and police. It means working evenings and weekends, and being the first person called when a member is detained by immigration agents. Members need to know that the organization cares about them, and organizers are essential to that labor. Without that trust, campaign work is not possible.
There is nothing more demoralizing than seeing this labor devalued. Organizers of color have built most of the membership in the organization, yet because they were hired more recently, they received less pay. Base building should dictate the direction of funding and administrative decisions, not the other way around.
A racist division of labor has created two distinct experiences of the organization. The white public in our area often conflates the group with the white founder because their access to the organization is via English-language press, email, social media, and events. In contrast, immigrant members are connected with Spanish-speaking organizers, mainly organizers of color, in worker committee meetings, food dispensaries, and Spanish-language WhatsApp groups. The struggle to practice language justice only widens the gulf between the two worlds that exist within the organization. More importantly, it hurts our efforts to integrate our working-class members, Spanish and English speakers alike, into a single space and build solidarity across racial lines.
The group also struggled to break the unrealistic workload. As others have argued, a chaotic workplace culture rooted in urgency and burnout is a manifestation of capitalism and white supremacy. In the worst cases, urgency in response to funding pressures often resulted in last-minute meetings and rushed conversations via email that did not allow working-class members with varying literacy levels to meaningfully prepare and participate. In other words, the frantic work pace further debilitated democratic process.
Immigrant staff did the base-building work, but white people controlled the terms of how the campaign unfolded.
White people used their resources and connections to discipline organizers of color. For several months, a team from our organization (which included four Latinx and one white organizer) met with hundreds of farmworkers in order to build a base capable of unionizing their workplaces and winning favorable legislation. The campaign was a collaboration between a union and our group, while an independent labor consultant coordinated the organizing team. In winter 2020, a Latina codirector politely asked the white male labor consultant via email why he put the founder, who does not adequately speak Spanish, as lead campaign organizer. In less than twenty-four hours, the consultant cancelled the campaign, stating: “I initially came to do work with [your group] based on my confidence in [the founder’s] experience as an organizer.” He then dismissed our internal anti-racist process as “infighting” and “organizational power plays,” and insinuated that the Latina organizer who had asked her question was “careerist” and “pushing a personal agenda.” At a meeting, the organizing team asked how this consultant had ever learned about our process to combat internal racism. The team voted for the founder to send an email to the consultant voicing support of her immigrant co-workers. To my knowledge, she never sent the email. Within days, our union partner left the campaign and a national foundation denied the organization a nearly approved grant of $150,000. The impact was clear. Immigrant staff did the base-building work, but white people controlled the terms of how the campaign unfolded.
Urgency and White Supremacy Culture
As racist tensions escalated in mid-to-late 2020, the board’s workload dramatically increased, as it had to put out recurring internal fires. The organization lacked processes to file and investigate grievances, defined as harm caused to an employee due to the violation of organizational policies, laws, or union contract. There was also no union contract and no clear systems of accountability or processes for disciplinary action. This lack of process enhanced founder’s syndrome and the power of mainly white codirectors, who continued to make major decisions without prior board consultation—even though the board, as the employer under the law, was legally liable for their actions. As the first member-elected board, it received no training regarding its legal and political responsibilities, making it difficult to intervene effectively.
Additionally, a difficult tension existed between the urgency of putting out fires and the necessity of slowing down to co-create organizational processes mutually agreed upon by all paid staff and board. As board president, this structure ate me alive. In under two months, I tracked over 100 hours of unpaid work. While this work was exhausting, my class privilege as a postdoctoral fellow gave me a flexible enough schedule to do it, in contrast to working-class board members who work in restaurants and farms. That in itself is a problem: that the demands made on a board president are unrealistic and require class privilege in order to barely keep up with the workload. As the only Latina on the board, I was also emotionally exhausted by the racialized and gendered ways that board members and staff responded to conflict. For instance, some Latino men advised women of color organizers to stop complaining about their white managers.
In another case, an academic white woman resigned from the board after I asked her a question about accountability. For legitimate reasons, she could not attend an anti-racist workshop. I urged her to find another way to participate in these conversations, especially given that she had been appointed to the board by codirectors rather than elected by the membership. Since she was already overworked, I suspect that she found it easier to resign than to process her discomfort and help build worker leadership on the board. Conflict avoidance enabled the organization’s unsustainable pace. Many people ignored problems in order to avoid difficult conversations that could strain group cohesion. They swallowed their feelings, changed the topic, or left altogether. Staff often stayed silent in meetings and were overcome with shame because they could not keep up with a workload that undermined their mental health. This weighed especially heavily on organizers of color, who feared letting down the base. People of color also began fighting with each other, feeling overworked, alone, and unsupported. They also responded with rescuer tendencies, working to soothe white women’s tears and becoming angry with co-workers who “created” conflict by naming racism.
When people of color finally shared their experiences or gave feedback, which took tremendous courage, white women minimized their pain, deflected responsibility, shut down, or responded with angry defensiveness.
White fragility turned increasingly hostile. When people of color finally shared their experiences or gave feedback, which took tremendous courage, white women minimized their pain, deflected responsibility, shut down, or responded with angry defensiveness. And it only got worse. One white woman weaponized other facets of her identity, such as her childhood class background, to avoid taking responsibility for her actions. Identity matters of course. Yet identity is never a substitute for politics—how you act and treat people matters. She also resorted to gas lighting people of color and other white co-workers. It’s a psychological tactic meant to control another person. For example, a gas lighter will say or do something, deny it ever happened, and then question the other person to make them doubt their own reality. Repeated gas lighting is a form of emotional abuse and manipulation, as my therapist reminded me.
Gender shapes how white women practice racism. More so than white men, white women often refuse to name the power they exercise over others. White women disavow their power to play victim and maintain their self-perceptions as being “nice” or “radical.” They smile and stay silent, only to later undermine group decisions. They cry when their behavior is questioned. White women, like all other people organizing against oppression, can choose to practice their politics. White women can choose to self-reflect rather than react. They can choose to practice empathy and curiosity when receiving feedback. They can choose to process their shame as an important step toward taking accountability. Too few white women in nonprofits walk this path. In fact, the nonprofit structure often silences those who dare to name harm that has been caused.
Legal gag orders are a major obstacle to accountability and open political debate within nonprofits. In a hypothetical gag order, the parties involved, usually staff and board members, are not allowed to defame and disparage each other after a separation or the parties can sue. The existence of a hypothetical gag order also cannot be named. For example, a comrade of over a decade shared his experience of rejecting a gag order after a national nonprofit took over his local worker center chapter in New York City. The local chapter wanted to preserve its 100 percent worker board composition and its focus on workplace restaurant organizing, rather than the policy research and legislative campaigns that the national demanded. It became clear that foundations would not fund an independent chapter, and sympathetic local organizations would not publicly denounce the national because they also feared funding loss. And so, the board of the local chapter accepted defeat, and fired all the paid organizers and offered them severance packages in return for agreeing not to sue the organization or to publicly or personally discuss what had happened. “Keep your money, this lesson is too important for the movement,” my comrade narrated during a late night-call.
I almost resigned to escape the violence of historical erasure in my own organization. Such violence activated past traumas, like when my abusive father used legal threats to silence my mother, brother, and me from denouncing his actions. I ultimately stayed in order to be accountable to working-class organizers and board members. Although heartbroken, I believed that the internal battle to combat racism could be won.
The tide is turning and the organization is healing. For months, the staff worked with the Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance to restructure the organization. In late summer of 2021, staff and board gathered at our farm cooperative. Amidst the golden hour, I felt a deep sense of hope as we read the staff proposal to rebuild the group’s decision-making structures. In the short-term, the group has elected new rotating leadership, and is working to mentor immigrant staff and board members, create clear and ethical divisions of labor, implement transparent mechanisms for decision-making and accountability, and participate in healing workshops and anti-racist education. This is critical work to democratize the nonprofit model under which we currently organize. And the hard work is paying off. For the first time in the organization, the workload is manageable and there is equitable pay among all staff. We are also having political conversations about workplace boundaries and non-violent communication that once seemed impossible a year ago. But we also need to go further to confront how the nonprofit model enabled racism and unaccountable leadership in the first place.
…in the long-term we need to disband our nonprofit status and build under another model in which members, and not foundation funds, enable the financial stability of their organization.
This struggle necessitates transforming into a new type of organization entirely. Organizations are like houses: they are the temporary shelters we build to wage class struggle. If white women set our house ablaze, then we must put the fire out. But once the embers stop burning, we need to sit with the words of Audre Lorde: whose tools will we use to rebuild our house? I fundamentally believe that in the long-term we need to disband our nonprofit status and build under another model in which members, and not foundation funds, enable the financial stability of their organization. Slow and intentional collective education and decision-making will need to take place to make that a reality, and to ethically transition in a way that accounts for the current reality that staff rely on their salaries in the midst of a global pandemic. And yet it has never been clearer to me that another chapter needs to be written, because in the end, my commitment is to class struggle, not organizational form.
Diana Sierra Becerra is a popular educator and historian of revolutionary women in Latin America. As a former undocumented immigrant and survivor of domestic violence, she is committed to building revolutionary movements. Watch her latest animation about a rebel radio that took down a US-trained war criminal.
