Whatever happened to #CharitySoWhite?
How white supremacy and burnout led us to mostly disappear for over a year, and what we are doing to come back stronger.
Table of contents
A campaign fuelled by personal trauma
After a year and a half of internal reflection, we are a team of people who have been fractured, humbled, and rebuilt with stronger bonds throughout this process.
In 2019, the #CharitySoWhite online campaign was coined to create space for People of Colour (PoC) to safely share their experiences of racism and to call on the charity sector to change.
In that long overdue conversation, we shifted the narrative on charity sector racism; from denial it exists, to acknowledging the systemic harms underpinning the sector and the harm this causes.
We set out with hope, belief, and tenacious passion to ensure that no other PoC in the sector would have to endure the workplace problems we had. We quickly grew a large audience of people who shared in these horrors, and well-meaning allies shocked at them. We reached notoriety and milestones with campaign wins, public speaking, advocacy, and events, as well as sector commentary weekly (sometimes daily).
As a group, having each faced the force of white supremacy in the charity sector, we felt passionate about driving systemic change. At the time, this looked like commenting on every racist incident and coddling every leader over coffee. This was not sustainable. We burnt out.
The engine of #CharitySoWhite was fueled by personal trauma, a resource that doesn’t come in regulated measures. When we considered doing less where we could, or bringing new people into the team, a culture of hierarchy, hazing, and mistrust within the group made it untenable.
It was unwise to invite PoC into the committee, presented as a place where experiences were validated and channelled into change, when the PoC already in it felt unsafe and unwelcome. Unequal power and hierarchy came to define our “flat structured” activist collective. Success became an individual pursuit chased through the lens of white supremacy, replicating those toxic dynamics we wanted to escape.
We were acting from a space of pain having experienced harm, so we prioritised the urgency to react over intentionality, care and boundaries for ourselves and each other. Today, we want to return to our values of accountability and honesty by sharing our story with you and holding ourselves to account.
Radical change requires radical change. Change of self, change of thought, change of behaviour.
Many of you have asked us individually “what’s going on with #CharitySoWhite?”. Beneath the fake smiles and dismissive rehearsed lines, here’s the long answer: a story of activist burnout; the difficulty of building a movement; and how a culture of white supremacy can exist in activist spaces…even those dedicated to dismantling white supremacy itself.
From movement building to activist burnout
Virality is not a solid foundation for anything. Three people in the charity sector started the #CharitySoWhite hashtag after a tweet about racist content in a charity training slide went viral. It became a hashtag that prompted many PoC staff to share their stories of workplace racism.
The hashtag became a team, which then became an organising committee. The committee membership quadrupled in size over six weeks, but our strategy and approach did not scale up; we were haphazard, reactive, urgent, and still led by three.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we were immediately compelled to highlight how PoC in the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector were going to be the hardest hit. We made a name for ourselves through writing a racial disparities in COVID-19 report, alongside regular comms and media appearances, but established unhealthy working habits and expectations for volunteer committee members in order to maintain this newfound notoriety.
While the stream of stories about racism in the charity sector was endless, the energy to keep sharing and commenting was increasingly finite. All work was given a false sense of urgency and necessity, demanding unreasonable and arbitrary turnaround times. We all believed – without any concrete discussion – that we were a flat structured organising group, but we were behaving and ruling like a committee, in which members had varying roles, status and power.
The hamster wheel of reactions wore us down, while we also campaigned for funders to change their funding methods and began to engage with senior leaders. The success of our ringfencing campaign for funders to create equitable emergency funding pots made us realise that we needed to focus more strategically on how racism operates within the charity sector.
An essentially unilateral decision by a few members split us into subgroups to achieve this. We know what working groups represent: a tactic of white supremacy to create a perception of work. It is bureaucracy designed to reinforce hierarchies of decision-making, specifically utilised to make organising as a collective more difficult.
The fractures, tensions, and discontent across our organising team were exacerbated by this new structure and by our existing hierarchy. By Spring 2021, we had paused work to try and refocus on strategy. But we were burnt out, and couldn’t put the little remaining energy we had into organising with people we didn’t trust or feel respected by. Attempts at mediation weren’t met, and the remaining members spent the next two years trying to find answers and closure, focusing on what went wrong.
White supremacy culture exists in anti-racist activist spaces
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and statements of good intent were our gravel. We need more than ‘good vibes’ to create a structure where power is shared rather than hoarded, and to ensure voices are of equal volume and validity. It requires work and a shared vision of being participants – not egos – in community. With the gift of hindsight, we recognise that we failed in this regard, and hierarchies of power took root in our organising committee. We were outwardly fighting against racism, and yet we found ourselves battling inequity and oppression internally too.
We know that white supremacy is systemic, and that it isn’t about individual incidents; it's about how those incidents uphold the system of power designed to oppress. As an organisation, we structurally internalised the charity sector’s white supremacist power dynamics.
We reflected the system we were trying to dismantle when tenured members implemented a top-down approach, and focused committee efforts on asking individual white leaders to “fix” the sector. This was not a collective decision, and individual members felt discomfort they were unsure they could voice. This myopic approach was driven by respectability politics and individual “networking,” creating one-to-one relationships with leaders that were gatekept by individuals.
Rather than building community, we built fences and gatekept knowledge. By focusing on direct advocacy with white leaders we gatekept access to power. By centering whiteness in our work we prevented ourselves from delivering on the promise of amplifying the voices and experiences of PoC in the charity sector. And the unequal power dynamics in our team meant that at times we were trying to girlboss our way around the table of power rather than building a radical community for change.
Conflict was dismissed through the classic white supremacist tactic of martyrdom – the idea that we all must suffer because the goal is well-intentioned. Conflict was compounded and hidden, handled by individuals trying to protect each other rather than support the people who felt harm. Colourism and victimhood were pandered to, as well as feminine fragility.
This lack of conviction leached out externally as #CharitySoWhite came to be seen by white leaders as a critical friend they could ask for performative engagement, rather than a campaign holding their feet to the fire. We drowned in their requests for meaningless conversations wanting to "pick our brains”, “speak at lunch and learns”, or quotes and promotion to rubber stamp their pathetic attempts at anti-racist work.
The worst part is, we actually engaged in it, assuming this was the agreed upon team protocol. We believed that those in positions of power could and would change, once they knew how bad things were. We drifted so far away from our focus on systemic change and prioritising PoC working in the sector, to appealing to the leaders with job security, safety, and protection from oppression.
Absolutely nothing was solved by CEOs admitting racism existed. It was a pat on the back for the few, with no impact for the many - the many in our committee and the PoC who had put so much trust and hope in us.
A fragmented community
Meanwhile, #CharitySoWhite publicly delivered two training programmes for PoC across the sector on building collective power, and shared resources to support PoC – both of these undertakings were contradictory to what we were practising within our collective.
We have learnt that there is no success without community, especially in organising. Every tactic must be brought back to that. Our former approach, based on boardrooms and performative statements, gleefully delighted in winning individual seats at the table. The correct approach is always to flip the table.
White supremacy shaped the power dynamics within our organising team and the campaign tactics that we used. Internalised white supremacy also meant that we became gatekeepers of anti-racist activism, instead of building a movement for anti-racist change in our sector.
We created further distance to our communities by failing to build an organising team that was representative and radically inclusive; we were a group of young professionals in London. We naively assumed that we all shared the same beliefs politically and personally, and would all behave in good faith to support the most disenfranchised. This was never discussed explicitly, and key to our resulting issues.
Members of violently oppressed groups – specifically Black women and Palestinian women – experiencing global violence were not validated, supported, or protected. This included excluding Black Women members; ignoring anti-Blackness in the committee and sector; DARVO-esque behaviour when Black women asked why the name and platform was being used for clout by white women-led, Brown/Black women-excluded campaigns without other members’ consent; tone policing of members’ views on party politics; and telling shorter tenured members they conflated ‘brave space’ with ‘safe space’ when their concerns over Zionism were raised.
Support for these groups should have been a priority, but instead we watched as members were forced to leave a group with growing problematic homogeneity. The intersectional approach crucial to any community organising endeavour was interpreted selectively by those who had a longer tenure in the committee, which directly translated into limiting accountability for unacceptable views and behaviours.
We used an external mediator to hear all perspectives and experiences, and found there were many shared troubling experiences that should never have occurred.
We were very careful to not approach this as HR protocol, but to reset the organisation and make sure it is a space that functions outside the context of any single individual. We want to make sure it has core principles and expectations that are flexible and respectful. It is not held together by single touchpoints, but through the existence of a community.
Most importantly, we did this so we could start feeling the joy and safety this campaign had previously brought all of us, and to recentre the meaning, connection and belonging #CharitySoWhite holds for us all.
Sharing our journey and reflections with you all is a necessity. It is our attempt to demonstrate accountability to each other and to PoC in the charity sector.
A non-exhaustive list of our many mistakes
Recreating and upholding white supremacy culture:
We were wrong to recreate white supremacist culture and let it go unchallenged due to our discomfort.
We were wrong to think that the levers for change sat solely at the top of organisations, in overwhelmingly white leadership teams and boardrooms. Change can and does come from the bottom and from the collective, and focusing on leaders hampered our ability to drive deep cultural change in the sector.
Much of our work was reactionary and focused on highlighting how racism operates within the charity sector. This was especially apparent on our Twitter early on, where we would focus on calling out organisations without thinking through the impact this could have. Amidst the constant call outs, we didn’t stop to note that we simply lacked the power for our criticism to have lasting impact and consequences on organisations.
We did not use our resources effectively and managed to burn out whilst not delivering forums for conversation and community engagement. The division of labour disproportionately fell on ‘junior members’, while praise was claimed by those furthest away from the work. We did not take care of ourselves and our team effectively, and the pressure of doing this work has had a negative impact on the mental health of many of us in the team.
Lack of knowledge on key aspects of anti-racism:
We were wrong for not doing more to grow our team and embed a higher commitment to intersectionality and learning within our organising team. It meant that we lacked the necessary nuanced knowledge and skills to discuss and tackle anti-Blackness, antisemitism, anti-Palestinian racism, and more.
We particularly want to acknowledge that we did not do enough to tackle anti-Black racism within the charity sector, and left the work of focusing on anti-Blackness and on Black History Month to our Black women committee members. Many of the harms committee members endured were based on misogynoir – the violence Black Women experience – and this was recognised too late by the non-Black members of the committee.
Burnout and wellbeing:
Our reactive practice was ableist. Committee members with disabilities could not wholly participate and were made to feel like they were not “working hard enough” to keep up with our unsustainable pace of working.
We did not establish clear boundaries for the work and ourselves. By focusing our attention on leaders we wanted to appear respectable in order to influence them. But this focus on respectability politics meant that at times we held ourselves back from expressing ourselves and providing radical critique of racial power dynamics in the sector.
Being part of the organising committee exposed some of us in the team to experiencing racism from our employers, and we did not adequately support or protect each other when such things occurred.
Our passion for the cause meant that we wanted to do it all and that we were constantly developing new comms and new projects. This was all on top of busy day jobs and other commitments. We overworked ourselves and expected everyone to commit a lot of their own time to doing the work of #CharitySoWhite, even during the height and uncertainty of the pandemic. This expectation of long hours is steeped in ableism and has been a barrier for building anti-racism and anti-oppression into our work and practices.
So, what comes next for #CharitySoWhite?
This has been a long, difficult, and confessional piece to write. It is a very raw and honest reflection of what has happened and where we are going. It represents the end of a long period where we have completely dismantled #CharitySoWhite and now embark on rebuilding the campaign from the ground up in an entirely different charity sector landscape. At times we thought the campaign would die, but it was just going through its terrible twos.
We do not have slick and organised plans for a new way forward, and we are taking things one step at a time whilst allowing ourselves the space to slow things down and be intentional. That is key to ensuring that our mental health and wellbeing is a priority as we move forwards. But we have come together to form a vision for the future of #CharitySoWhite. We don’t need roadmaps, strategic ambitions, organisational structures, WIPs, Slack channels, awards, metrics and KPIs; we need the strength and safety that comes from knowing we are in a shared fight for our humanity in the sector.
We want to become a community-led space for envisioning a future where racism is dismantled within the charity sector and where PoC can thrive as their full unapologetic selves. Our strength as a collective is as facilitators and organisers, so we want our rebuild to create spaces for PoC to vent, get support, know their rights, and navigate a cruel and unwelcoming sector.
We have been far too nice to white leaders. We are not a department store for consultancy services, or questions about whiteness. The internet is free, we are not.
We will always ask the question of who we are helping with the work we do. We will signpost to work being done by other activists and other PoC in the anti-racism space, not to help white leaders, but to help those with lived experience and authority promote their skills and services.
PoC in the sector we apologise for not being there, for failing you, for not replying to emails, for taking advantage of your support. We don’t expect your forgiveness, we just offer our apologies.
Thank you, if you are reading this, for being on this journey with us and letting us bare our souls. We hope that this piece helps us reconnect with PoC working in the sector and rebuilds trust. And we hope that you’ll be with us as we move forward on this journey for community-led anti-racist change in the charity sector.
#CharitySoWhite
