In his recent piece, “Philanthropy’s Identity Focus Strengthens the Right. Is There Another Way?,” David Callahan argues that the left’s embrace of identity has backfired, fueling polarization and making space for Trump, while philanthropy should turn toward a universalist politics. But this framing misdiagnoses the problem and risks reinforcing the very dynamics it claims to solve.
Let’s be clear, it is not movements led by Black, Indigenous, brown, women, LGBTQ or disabled communities that fractured American politics. What polarizes is the deliberate stoking of white grievance, patriarchal fear and a long tradition of racial resentment. History shows this clearly — the civil rights movement, women’s suffrage and disability rights all were “identity-based struggles” (and much more) and are the very basis upon which the democracy Callahan seeks was founded.
Far from dividing, they expanded democracy for everyone. Today’s backlash is not evidence that organizing by and for the most oppressed is flawed. It is proof that progress and power-building among these groups threatens entrenched power in the hands of the few.
Callahan’s call for a return to universal ideals misses this point. Universalism that doesn’t account for the people most excluded is hollow. To talk about freedom, fairness and opportunity in the abstract, while ignoring who has been systematically denied them, is to repeat old, and frankly tired, mistakes, especially when the very forces dismantling democracy are doing so by directly attacking these oppressed groups.
Centering the experiences of those most proximate to harm is not the opposite of “universalism,” which we would call “liberation for all,” and the only real solution to inequality; it is the only way universalism can be made real.
This is also where philanthropy’s role has been misdiagnosed. The problem has not been “too much identity,” but rather too little sustained investment in building long-term power. While the right has poured resources into institutions, media ecosystems and narrative strategies for decades (according to the Global Philanthropy Project, anti-gender and anti-rights actors received over $3.7 billion in 2013–2017), philanthropy has too often treated “identity-based” organizing as short-term or supplemental. Funders have focused on elections in ways that will never help us win justice, let alone elections. What is needed is not a retreat to the middle, but deeper commitment to infrastructure and leadership rooted in communities that have a track record of moving us forward, of visioning just worlds that are inclusive, and of sustaining (and saving) democracy time and again, as do, for example, Black women and gender expansive people.
That’s why it is especially frustrating to see john powell’s work on targeted universalism invoked almost as an afterthought. His framework is not about diluting identity in the name of unity; it is about showing how universal goals must be pursued through strategies that begin with those most marginalized. To co-opt his life’s work as justification for moderating demands for justice is to miss its essence entirely. And it is a long tradition of using voices from the very community Callahan is trying to silence, dismiss and delegitimize. Doing so at this time of heightened attack is not only irresponsible but dangerous.
If philanthropy is serious about building a durable “majoritarian” politics, what we would call instead a politics for the masses, the path forward is not asking movements to be quieter (in other words, less Black, less disabled or less trans), and less direct in naming violence. It is confronting the real forces driving division: the cultivation of fear, the weaponization of racism, the retrenchment of patriarchy and the protection of privilege. Retreating to the middle will not unify us; it will only abandon those who have always been asked to wait their turn. “Common dreams” are being forged at the crossroads of solidarity among the most oppressed, within Black and Asian and Queer solidarities, for example. True “common dreams” are possible only when they are built from the ground up, in solidarity across race, gender and class, with the courage to confront power rather than sidestep it.
Tynesha McHarris is Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of the Black Feminist Fund.
