Philanthropy's Original Sin

From the Carnegie Corporation’s promotion of eugenics to—as Maribel Morey’s new book provocatively argues—its furthering of white supremacy, establishment philanthropy in America has much to answer for, and to resolve. It will have to do so in the coming years, in what will likely be an uncharitable cultural and political context.

In all of American establishment philanthropy’s “deafening clamor of self-approbation,” as one of us writes in The New Atlantis in 2013, “we rarely hear from these foundations about another undertaking that bears all the strategic hallmarks of American philanthropy’s much-touted successes. . . . that the first American foundations were deeply immersed in eugenics—the effort to promote the reproduction of the ‘fit’ and to suppress the reproduction of the ‘unfit.’”

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