"Support to Raheem 'Did Not Come with Expectations of Meeting Project Deliverables'"

A brutal line from a brutal piece, about a nonprofit founder that took advantage of post-George Floyd fundraising largesse to enjoy a lavish lifestyle while producing nothing. There are two general ways that nonprofits fundraise forever while accomplishing nothing: first, by making their mission too vague to have any specific definition of success and thus to never fail; second, by making the mission too ambitious for anyone to ever believe that it can be accomplished. The supposed project of Raheem AI, to build a remarkably complicated AI-powered (lol) alternative to calling 911, falls in the second category. Unable to create anything like what he had said he would build, and living in the freewheeling period of do-gooding donors and corporations throwing money at racism, the founder did the sensible thing and took a lot of expensive vacations on the donor dime. That he also appears to have entirely fabricated his origin story is par for the course.

The sheer amount of graft and corruption that attended the vast orgy of donating associated with the George Floyd protest movement was perfectly predictable, but I think it’s still undersold as a reason for why that branch of politics has receded. Indeed, I think I’m guilty of underselling it myself. It’s worth saying that no political movement could have emerged from that scenario with clean hands; there was so much loose cash floating around all over the place, since institutions who fear the consequences of appearing insufficiently devoted to the cause always feel like they can spend their way out of such accusations. Pretty much every righteous political movement has had its own graft problem, all of them. Still, an incredible amount of giving meant an incredible amount of corruption. And as the months drifted by and it became clear that the American establishment was perfectly able to absorb what was happening, despite all the angst, and as the forces of culture war steadily pecked away at that short-lived feeling of unity, the inevitable discovery of million dollar mansions bought with donated cash helped push a lot of previously-excitable liberals into their quite and embarrassed era. To their credit, New York produced a couple investigative stories into BlackLivesMatter-related corruption, back when it was still somewhat risky to do so. Some people complained and, predictably, the journalist was called an Uncle Tom on Twitter. But there was a sense of the other shoe finally dropping, and before long people quietly removed the black squares from their Instagram profiles.

It’s that quote in my headline that gets to me, though: the embarrassed foundation that gave the dodgy nonprofit a lot of its funding, saying that it wasn’t upset that nothing was produced because it expected nothing, in an effort to save face. “We gave money to that racial justice nonprofit, but obviously we didn’t expect anything to come from it” is a perfect encapsulation of what the past four years have been like. From the widespread and angry insistence that society’s relationship to law and order was being actively rewritten, to a plain-faced admission that nobody really ever expected anything from the money that was being throw around…. Golly! It’s a shame that Bill Cosby is the figure most associated with the concept of the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” because that’s a very real thing that Black people very much have to labor under, made more toxic by the fact that it’s the supposedly most progressive white people who are most often guilty of it. I genuinely think “we gave money to this racial justice group but don’t worry, we knew they weren’t going to do anything with it so we’re not disappointed” is more insulting than a conservative hyperventilating about how BLM rioters are going to burn the whole country down. The latter attacks Black activists, in fear of their power; the former assumes away their power as an expression of ostensible respect. One thing that has not changed in the past four years is the preeminence of condescension in American racial discourse.

Now, educated and savvy white people still feel palpable atmospheric pressure to appear to give a shit about race and racism, but where there was a clear lane in the earlier era (BLM sign in the window, cutting a few checks, sending the right tweets) now there’s very little in the way of coherent racial politics at all. Well, except for “vote Kamala.” Say what you will about defunding the police, but at least it’s an actual policy idea. Now all that’s left is the sweaty palms of white urbanites who feel like they have to brazenly signal how not-racist they are, even as most of them are too embarrassed to play the 2020 hits. Forgive me for harping on this, but as I’ve said multiple times, what was genuinely remarkable about the rollout of my book was the degree to which passionate defenses of the BlackLivesMatter protests were overshadowed by resentment over my bringing it up - the “everybody already knows this was a big embarrassment” attitude I got from so many corners. It’s not just that this period has been so swiftly and thoroughly put in the rearview by our chattering class; it’s that so many of them act as though everyone should have the manners never to bring it up again, since it’s so awkward. There’s an open and direct sense in which the liberals who made the George Floyd moment possible now see all of that as cringe, which is something worse than simply being misguided or directionless.

And yet, not open and direct enough, really. I’ll ask again: why doesn’t some big establishment media entity put together an ambitious package designed to interrogate what the hell happened, in American liberalism and American media, from 2012ish to 2022ish? NYT, NYMag, New Yorker, even a GQ or somewhere like that. What the hell happened to liberals and to the media that they controlled? Why did the default media worker morph from being a center-left technocratic Ezra Klein wannabe into an intersectionality-worshipping radlib with vague economic politics? How did the various checks and balances within news media break down to the point where naked advocacy for a particular ideological project became the default? Why did so many journalists who did not take that turn themselves go along with it anyway, keeping their heads down? Why did they apparently feel such a sense of ambient danger in not going along with that crowd? How did it come to pass that this revolutionary moment seemed to crack up so quickly after it had absolutely dominated our politics and media, and how did so many people have brazenly slink away from the fallout, pretending they were never there? Why haven’t we had a real postmortem about all of this?

I mean, the answer is obvious - because the people who would cover this story are embarrassed by how earnest they so recently were, would prefer to avoid bringing up what they so recently believed, and still feel intense fear over the possibility of appearing to have less than perfect racial politics. The people who would feel indicted by such a story are the people who tell the stories, the media class, and few workers in the business are willing to openly go to war with so much of the industry. I can’t blame them for worrying, but at some point somebody has to step up. You would be forgiven for assuming that I’m volunteering for the gig, here, but I’m in fact just about the worst person to write such a piece. At least a large part of this work would have to be done by the kind of person who lived it, some well-educated writer or reporter who started the 2010s cloaked in comfortable Obama liberalism and came out of them wrapped in critical race theory and Gloria Anzaldua. Certainly, to have credibility among the people who most need to read such a piece, the writer would have to be well-respected and have good liberal credentials. The trouble is that such a writer would have to be comfortable holding themselves up to a harsh light (easy) and holding their professional peers and friends up to it as well (hard). And, like I said, many people seem to be deeply invested in just moving on, putting that period safely into the Tupperware of history. So it’s hard to imagine anywhere of prominence commissioning such a thing. But there’s few ventures that would be of greater use, in the long run, for journalism and the media industry.

Meanwhile, as for the nonprofit grift, well. You’ve gotta be careful where you put your money. As I point out in the relevant chapter of the book, even nonprofits that are guilty of no illegality have exquisitely fine-tuned systems for turning your money into ash. The only way any of this gets fixed is if supporters of progress get ruthless, especially with themselves. If you actually care about racial justice, police reform, and grassroots politics, you have to be willing to get your hands dirty and point out just how badly everything related to the 2020 moment has turned out. I do, so I am. Or you can be the kind of risk-averse liberal who got invested in this stuff when it was personally and professionally convenient and washes their hands of it when the going gets tough. And it’s tough now.