For over a century the largest American philanthropies, from the Rockefeller Foundation to the Gates Foundation, have promised no less than to promote the well-being of all mankind. Acting on this grandiose mission, these powerful private institutions have had great influence globally and at home in areas such as education, public health, and economic development. However, the often ambiguous results and outright failures of these efforts have exposed the contradictions and conflicts inherent in a program of universal well-being, as well as the boundaries of philanthropists’ putatively limitless circle of care. At home, these limits are most apparent in the racial politics of American philanthropy.  Since the late eighteenth century, African Americans and the American “race problem” have been at the very center of American philanthropy’s domestic agenda. Yet white American philanthropy’s record in promoting black people’s well-being has been decidedly mixed. In her talk Karen Ferguson will interrogate the nature of white philanthropists’ care when it comes to addressing racial inequality in the United States. Who or what, exactly, have they cared about?

Karen Ferguson is a Professor of History at Simon Fraser University and author of Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism (2013).  This project is about the Ford Foundation's engagement with black-power activists in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s and what it reveals about the continuities and changes in racial liberalism as its focus shifted from civil-rights integrationism to multiculturalism. The talk is co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Value of Care Series.