Editor’s Note: On September 9, Inside Philanthropy published an article by our editor-in-chief, David Callahan, “Philanthropy’s Identity Focus Strengthens the Right. Is There Another Way?,” and then a response the next day, “Retreating on Identity Will Not Unify Us,” by Tynesha McHarris, who is cofounder and co-executive director of the Black Feminist Fund. Here, Callahan and McHarris continue their dialogue.
David Callahan:
Tynesha McHarris and I have both spent our careers working for social change, and I suspect we broadly agree about what kind of country and world we’d like to see.
Where we’re not in alignment is on the specific causes and kinds of organizations that philanthropy should prioritize most at this moment. McHarris wants funders to double down on work that centers identity, while I’ve argued for a move away from these approaches.
In recent articles here and here, I’ve called on funders to shift priorities after years of scaling a progressive nonprofit ecosystem that is out of sync with the core concerns of working-class people of all races. While polling has long shown that economic issues are overwhelmingly the top priorities for these Americans, philanthropy has given such concerns short shrift over the past decade. Instead, it has placed a far greater priority on racial justice, LGBTQ rights, climate change, reproductive rights, gun violence and more.
While these are all crucially important issues, and many bear directly on economic wellbeing, they are not the top concerns of working-class voters, including young people and those of color, as I detailed in my article here. Not surprisingly, many struggling Americans do not view progressive civil society groups and a Democratic Party closely aligned with these groups as mainly focused on improving their lives economically, but rather as focused elsewhere.
This basic mismatch helps explain why many voters of color have moved right in recent elections or just stayed home, and why young people swung heavily toward Trump last year. If this realignment endures, the MAGA movement has a strong chance of consolidating political dominance over an extended period.
In the face of this alarming prospect, social change funders have a profound interest in helping the left-of-center coalition reverse its shrinkage and find ways to connect to a larger swath of Americans. Universalist appeals around affordability are the most obvious way to do that, as Zohran Mamdani, among other political leaders, has recently shown. At the same time, to be responsive, funders should set priorities that align with those of the communities they seek to serve and empower. This would mean investing much more deeply in work focused on economic security, especially grassroots organizing on issues like wages and benefits. It would also mean investing in ideas and narrative strategies that center the economy in the messaging of the left-of-center coalition — so there is no ambiguity about what that coalition mainly stands for.
If legacy foundations dip into their endowments and living donors step up their giving, as I and others have repeatedly called upon them to do, such new investments need not mean shifting resources away from existing grantees. Nowhere have I suggested abandoning groups working on voting rights, criminal justice reform, reproductive rights, LGBTQ issues, and more. Nor do I wish to “silence, dismiss and delegitimize” the communities these groups represent, as McHarris suggests. Much of the organizing on economic issues I’d like to see scaled up is spearheaded by women and people of color. That’s also true of the civic participation groups that I’ve suggested funders back at a much greater level as we look to the 2026 midterms and next presidential election.
Overall, the main goal of my recent writings has been to push philanthropy to close the mismatch between what kind of social change work it prioritizes and what concerns working-class Americans care about most.
At the same time, I’ve also spotlighted a separate, serious problem with how things have played out over the past decade. Even as social justice efforts on race and gender have failed to generate the mobilizing effects for the left that many anticipated, they have proven to be a potent mobilizer for the right, helping to activate white nationalism, stoke male status anxieties and drive zero-sum political appeals. Moreover, the backlash to the woke left hasn’t just been confined to whites and men; it also helps explain the defection of culturally moderate voters of color from the left-of-center coalition, as well as independents.
McHarris and I think differently about how funders should navigate political backlash on issues of race and gender. To her, the solution is to double down on existing work on identity, backstopped with far greater resources.
I don’t think that will work, given how the left’s identity focus provides fuel for the right’s divisive, fear-based strategies, as Steve Bannon has openly acknowledged. The more we lean in here, the more MAGA benefits.
This dynamic is another reason funders should seek to shift focus to economic concerns, in addition to better aligning their grantmaking priorities with those of working-class communities.
I understand McHarris’ reservations about seeming to make any concessions whatsoever to the forces of reaction. But, to me, it’s crucial to keep in mind an overriding goal here: to block the authoritarian right and, someday soon, put in place elected leaders in Washington and more states that will recommit to building a more inclusive, fair and just society.
This is a political challenge, even as the stakes are deeply moral. And in my writing, I’ve approached it as such — looking at what it will take to reverse recent defections from the left-of-center coalition, connect with a broader swath of working-class voters, and win power. Everything I’ve seen and heard in recent years suggests that issues of economic opportunity must be at the center of this project.
If McHarris believes that identity appeals offer a better way forward, it’d be good to hear her thoughts on why and how such a strategy is likely to work out, leading to the shifts in political leadership that we both want to see.
Tynesha McHarris:
David Callahan’s essay leans on two myths liberals should have retired long ago. The first is that race, gender and class can be separated into neat little buckets. The second is that movements advancing racial and gender justice are somehow responsible for fueling the backlash of white nationalism and authoritarianism. Both are wrong. And worse, they recycle the oldest playbook: blaming the people fighting for freedom instead of the forces trying to destroy it.
We may agree on “what kind of country and world we’d like to see,” but we differ on what it takes to get there.
Let’s start with the history Callahan conveniently brushes aside as he’s focused on the “working class.” Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, immigrant, disabled and women leaders have always organized with a class analysis. The 1963 March on Washington wasn’t just about civil rights; it was literally called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The Black Panthers demanded housing, healthcare and jobs, right alongside an end to racist policing. Black women led the welfare rights movement because they knew you cannot separate economic dignity from racial and gender justice. Suggesting otherwise is like pretending water and wet are two different things.
Today’s “working class” is not a 1950s stereotype. It includes unemployed and underemployed people, care workers, migrants, women and trans people whose struggles are inseparable from questions of race and gender.
Callahan seems to have some issues with the Democratic Party that he may want to address separately instead of conflating them with social justice organizations and movements. What he is missing is that what he calls “identity organizing” is actually leadership from and centering the most oppressed communities, leadership that makes society better for everyone. Black feminists, for example, have fought for reproductive justice, voting rights, fair wages, land rights and decent work. Their victories expand possibilities for all working-class people, including white men. That is true universalism.
Let’s be plain. This system, including the two-party machine that protects a small, wealthy elite, is not working for anyone. The evidence is clear. Billionaires recently got a tax cut while food aid was gutted and families were pushed deeper into hunger and precarity. By contrast, the deep transformation Black trans sisters are fighting for around gender is not a threat. It is a blueprint. Their struggle expands what freedom and dignity can look like, and those gains ripple out to strengthen society as a whole.
Instead, Callahan insists that racial and gender justice movements have “activated” white nationalism. From my perspective, white supremacist and fascist movements in this country never went away, nor has their influence. During Reconstruction, racist elites spread fear of “Negro domination” to justify lynching and disenfranchisement. Reagan turned Black women into caricatures of “welfare queens” to gut social programs. At every turn, the oppressed are blamed for the reactionary rage of their oppressors. To claim today’s movements are “causing” white male anxiety is like blaming someone for getting in the way of a punch. The fist was already coming.
And the numbers don’t lie. In 2020, 58% of white voters backed Trump. Only 12% of Black voters and about a third of Latino voters did. In 2024, Trump made small gains with some young Black and Latino men (some appealing to a desire for power over women), but his base remains overwhelmingly white, with strong support from white voters who are struggling economically as wages stagnate, unions collapse and income inequality balloons.
But here’s the thing: Instead of being met with solidarity and shared economic vision, too many of those frustrations were channeled by elites into resentment. The right offered those voters a simple story that their hardship was caused not by corporations or billionaires but by immigrants, by women, by trans kids in schools, by Black communities supposedly getting “special treatment.” It’s the oldest political bait-and-switch in the book. It is a strategy to divide the working class, and those within the working class with a modicum of privilege are told to hold onto their crumbs.
Instead, we need to build unity because of differences, not in spite of them. Picture young white people flooding the streets, chanting Black Lives Matter. Cis women holding their trans family close in the fight against patriarchy. Labor movements organizing to stop arms shipments intended for the genocide in Palestine. Black workers keeping vigil outside detention centers, setting up camp so migrants know they are not alone.
What movements are actually building is far more sophisticated. Leaders like Zohran Mamdani prove that universalist appeals in politics don’t mean abandoning recognition of the differentiated impact of this system on different groups’ identities. Rather, they mean weaving struggles together. Mamdani has fought for housing, healthcare and the care economy precisely because he understands how race, gender and class are intertwined — just as in our own lives, these are not issues that can be easily put in buckets. As he himself has said, you can’t fight for housing justice in Queens without fighting racial injustice, because housing has always been racialized. That’s not an add-on. That’s the point.
On philanthropy, let’s be clear. The amount of funding going to what Callahan calls identity groups (a reductive and dangerous nomenclature), has been peanuts. The narrative that philanthropy has poured limitless resources into racial and gender justice movements is fiction. Yes, there was a (minute-long) surge in pledges after 2020 (following the violence and killing of Black people that mobilized what the New York Times has called the largest movement in U.S. history), but follow-through has been uneven, and the actual dollars pale in comparison to what’s needed. At the first attacks on DEI, a lot of foundations wanted info scrubbed from grantees’ websites and their own. Callahan, given his experience in philanthropy, should know better. The foundation world has been too white and too careful for far too long. Despite that, movements are still being scapegoated as if the modest funding to their causes somehow single-handedly fueled the resurgence of authoritarianism in this country. That distortion is itself part of the backlash playbook. The truth is, there are more than enough resources to fully fund racial and gender justice movements, which are themselves advancing some of the most progressive multiracial, class-solidarity economic justice work. To pit these movements against a so-called “working class” agenda is not strategy; it’s sabotage.
So here’s the choice philanthropy has to make. Keep chasing the mirage that class can be cleanly cut away from race and gender, or invest in the leaders and movements who are building strategies strong enough to actually defeat authoritarianism. History has already given us the answer. Every time democracy has bent to fascism, it was because people convinced themselves that conceding ground might calm the mob. Spoiler alert: It never has.
David Callahan:
In my article above and elsewhere, I’ve argued that there is a deep mismatch between the priorities of the philanthropy-backed social justice left — which is closely identified with the Democratic Party in voters’ minds — and the priorities of working-class people of all races. As a consequence, the left-of-center coalition is weak and getting weaker as many voters of color and young people move to the right. This realignment has been the exact opposite outcome from what progressive funders had hoped for and expected over the past decade or more.
Tynesha McHarris doesn’t appear ready to confront these uncomfortable realities or to puzzle out why, exactly, so many of us on the left have gotten things so wrong. Instead, she confidently suggests that the way forward is to better resource existing strategies.
This feels like complacency to me, and brings to mind Albert Einstein’s famous quote: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
That quote was recently repeated to me by the leader of a top progressive funding intermediary, who added: “Anyone who says we have all the answers and knows the way forward is wrong.”
I’ve often encountered that same sense of humility in my conversations with dozens of progressive leaders, and I feel quite humbled myself by this moment. But there’s very little uncertainty in McHarris’ commentary, which signals to me that she has yet to fully engage with emerging electoral trends that should have everyone who cares about social change in full freakout mode.
While McHarris mentions Trump’s gains among voters of color, she’s not telling the full story about what’s happened and why, or just how ominous the implications are. Since 2012, Latinos — one of the fastest-growing cohorts of the electorate — have swung right by 14 points and, in 2024, Trump didn’t just win “some” young Latino men by appealing to their misogyny, as McHarris suggests. He won a majority of Latino men of all ages, a 13-point swing from 2016 when this same group overwhelmingly voted for another woman candidate, Hillary Clinton. Young Latinos have swung the most — 76% of Latino 18- to 29-year-olds voted for Clinton in 2016, while just 57% voted for Kamala Harris last year.
Likewise, AAPI voters — the other fastest-growing part of the electorate — have been moving right, swinging 13 points since 2012, with young people again leading this shift: 18- to 29-year-olds in this group swung right by 19 points. Black voters, meanwhile, have shifted 11 points to the right since 2012.
These overall trends have been much more pronounced in specific places, like South Florida, the Rio Grande Valley, the Bronx and South Los Angeles. I encourage readers to spend time with the New York Times’ detailed maps of shifts in both the 2020 and 2024 elections to gain a more granular view of what’s been happening.
McHarris is correct that Democrats have continued to win a majority of nonwhite voters, especially Black voters. However, the realignment that has occurred so far was sufficient to secure Trump’s win last year and his near-win in 2020, as well as other key races in recent years. What’s more, there are strong reasons to believe such realignment will continue, and even accelerate, as I’ve discussed elsewhere.
This shift to the right among key Democratic constituencies should provoke deep reflection on the assumptions guiding a lot of grantmaking, advocacy and organizing. How did we get things so wrong?
I’ve attempted my own answer to this vexing question in recent articles, focusing on three points: First, progressive funders and strategists didn’t anticipate the deep danger of sidelining core economic issues; second, they overestimated the potency of appeals around rights and identity, as well as climate, to mobilize key constituencies; and third, they underestimated the degree to which these same appeals would serve as a counter-mobilizer for the right.
Since McHarris doesn’t concede that progressive funders got anything wrong, it’s no surprise that she dismisses my explanations of why things went off track.
McHarris insists that economic concerns have not been sidelined, since issues of class are deeply entwined with race and gender, and social justice movements have always organized in ways that reflect these interconnections. That is certainly true, but McHarris misses a key present-day reality: Most Americans, including working-class voters of color, have not seen economic issues as the dominant narrative thread of the social justice left over the past decade, or of the Democratic Party, as I detail elsewhere.
The perception that progressives are uninterested in people’s economic struggles might not matter so much if key Democratic constituencies were strongly motivated by the priorities that the social justice left has emphasized, but this hasn’t turned out to be the case.
Like so many others, I long assumed that Trump’s open racism, misogyny and nativism would trigger a powerful, ongoing backlash among the groups he’s targeted. I’ve also assumed that the issue of climate change would be a powerful galvanizer for young voters worried about their future. But none of this has happened to the degree many of us imagined. On the contrary, Trump has done far better with voters of color than any Republican in modern history.
It’s taken me time to admit this difficult reality, which feels deeply counterintuitive. McHarris is still not there.
Various analysts and advocates have offered explanations of why the left’s social justice messaging has often fallen flat with voters of color. A key observation here is that frameworks that focus on oppression and racial hierarchy fail to resonate with many Latinos and AAPI voters, who don’t see themselves within such frames, and are instead focused on their opportunities for upward mobility. Many younger Black people, meanwhile, feel well removed from the civil rights era, even as that historical experience remains a touchstone for older Black voters.
These dynamics are complicated, but you’d never know that from listening to McHarris, who seems uninterested in puzzling out what is driving political realignment among voters of color. Instead, she mostly attributes these shifts solely to the right’s effectiveness at dividing the working class with grievance politics. To be sure, that’s an important factor — in particular, online misinformation is rife in communities of color. But larger forces are clearly at work here. And if progressives can’t figure out what’s going on and how to respond, MAGA is likely to consolidate power with a coalition that includes growing numbers of nonwhite voters.
As for my last point, that the left’s identity appeals have been a mobilizer for the right, McHarris takes umbrage that I would even say such a thing out loud. By doing so, she suggests that I’m blaming and scapegoating social movements. Here again, though, she’s sidestepping an uncomfortable reality that progressives need to engage with.
Nowhere in my writing have I blamed justice advocates for providing fuel for white nationalism and male backlash. Instead, I’ve made a factual observation: Mobilization on identity almost invariably produces counter-mobilization on identity. The right understands this ugly cycle and has intentionally exploited it. Steve Bannon wants the left to keep leaning into identity. This is a winner for MAGA in a majority white country with a strong white nationalist movement and deep patriarchal currents.
McHarris argues that social justice advocates shouldn’t think strategically about backlash, since “the fist was already coming.” I just disagree. Common sense suggests that if your messaging is helping your political opponents, you look for other ways forward. What you don’t do is shut down the conversation by slamming anyone who raises the topic.
I would offer that same advice more broadly to the progressive left. This is not a moment to retreat to moral certainties and call out anyone who deviates from the script. We’re in a bad place, and we’re going to need a lot of open-minded, creative thinking to find a way out.
Tynesha McHarris:
I reached out to David Callahan upon reading his initial piece, “Philanthropy’s Identity Focus Strengthens the Right. Is There Another Way?,” because what he framed as a diagnosis, I see as dangerous misdirection — one that risks fueling funders to abandon racial and gender justice movements at the very moment they are under the fiercest attack.
Callahan says I’m complacent, that I refuse to “confront reality.” What I refuse to do is confuse panic with strategy. The real complacency is believing we can appease white nationalism and authoritarianism by sidelining the very communities they are hell bent on erasing. Now is not the time for retreat. Now is the time to recommit to lifting up the most precarious and vulnerable.
I understand that Callahan represents a faction that wants to win elections in the short term at any cost. Don’t get me wrong, I want to win, too. Elections are critical battlegrounds, especially in this moment when authoritarianism is not creeping but charging forward. But to me, a Black feminist who has dedicated her life to justice, winning is not limited to election outcomes. Elections are tactical steps, not the endgame.
And here’s the truth: We won’t even win elections through Callahan’s strategy. History is clear. We don’t secure durable victories by abandoning the very people who have always carried progress forward. Black women, immigrants, Muslim, queer and trans people are the voters and leaders who tip elections, and they will not be mobilized by a politics of erasure. They are mobilized when their whole lives are seen, defended and invested in.
We won’t be doing that if philanthropy turns its back on the rights of trans people, immigrants, Latinx, Indigenous, Muslim and Black communities, especially while the Trump administration works to criminalize DEI and dissent, ban books, gut the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, abduct migrants and erase the history of slavery and genocide from our national memory.
At the same time, the federal government is being weaponized to intimidate, harass and punish funders, movements and community leaders. And no surprise, the first targets in this unconstitutional, vengeance-driven agenda are organizations advancing racial justice, immigrant justice and civil rights, as the right-wing smear tank Capital Research Center brags in its so-called “investigations.”
So now, philanthropy should shift gears and embrace race and gender-blind “working class” issues? I disagree. The administration’s intimidation tactics toward philanthropy are designed to sow fear, and many are retreating. But this is when we must stand together, especially with those at greatest risk.
This is why I cofounded the Black Feminist Fund. Because only a sliver of philanthropy was reaching Black feminists, we committed to long-term, capacity-building investments in groups working toward transformative change across the globe. And it is working. These efforts are strengthening entire communities economically, politically, socially and culturally.
And the data makes it plain: When you fund Black feminist movements, you are funding working-class struggles. In April 2025, Black women lost more than 100,000 jobs, the largest decline of any demographic group that month, and their unemployment rate jumped from 5.1 % to 6.1%, while rates for white and Latina women stayed relatively flat. Black women are among the hardest hit by a racial agenda disguised as economic policy. Investing in the movements Black feminists lead is not symbolic; it is how you strengthen the working class itself.
Callahan wants us to believe we can choose class over race and still win. History says otherwise. Nikole Hannah-Jones reminds us that after Reconstruction, poor white sharecroppers allied with elites who held the wealth because whiteness was the bigger payoff. That’s not ancient history, it’s a pattern. Every time democracy has bent to fascism and white supremacy, it was because people convinced themselves that conceding ground on rights would somehow buy stability. It never has.
And let’s not romanticize the “working class” as though it were neutral. As I have shared in previous writings, today’s working class is women, immigrants, care workers, queer and trans people, Black and brown communities. You cannot fight for housing justice without fighting racism. You cannot fight for wages without confronting the gendered devaluation of care. Race, gender and class are not separate buckets, they are inseparable.
Do I think philanthropy’s response to racial justice since 2020 has often been shallow, performative, even transactional? Absolutely. Too many foundations rushed out pledges only to retreat at the first sign of backlash. Movements felt used for box-checking and short-term civic engagement cycles. Those failures are real. But the answer is to deepen the work, not abandon it.
Meanwhile, Trump’s so-called “economic agenda” has done nothing for working-class communities. No wage gains. No expanded safety net. Just tax cuts for billionaires while families are pushed deeper into precarity. To focus philanthropy only on “pocketbook issues” is to fall into the right’s trap, reducing politics to gas prices while ignoring authoritarianism’s real project. As the Othering & Belonging Institute points out, weaponizing race and gender is not a side tactic of authoritarian regimes, it is the strategy.
So let’s be honest. Election outcomes matter, and we cannot afford to lose them. But they are not the only measure of progress. The real test is whether we will stand together in courage or collapse into preemptive compliance. Call it identity politics. Call it saving democracy. Call it what you want. The reality is that lives and freedoms are on the line.
Time is of the essence. We cannot waste it on false choices.
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