"The Revolution Will Not Be Funded"

This post draws its title from the great activist anthology 'The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.'

Nonprofits disrupt radical social change by institutionalizing and bureaucratizing grass-roots movements. Perpetually subsuming cultural production under a capitalist system, art and history are co-opted by the elites – all the while maintaining the philanthropic and self-expressive pretensions of white liberalism. The nonprofit-industrial complex was born of white saviorism and virtue signaling.

What is public history? Supposedly performing a public service by making history useful and accessible. But does that make the world better for everyone or just those there to receive the fruits of our labor – those permitted entry or made to feel welcome? We have long emphasized immediacy, a process of bringing cutting-edge scholarship and new information to the fore for the so-called masses – laypeople. We have emphasized making academic research engaging and accessible.

With all of this focus on the public historian's contribution to the “greater good,” we have lost sight of the power of community – work performed by those not traditionally labeled professionals or practitioners. The original role of art and history as a catalyst for social change, as a medium through which to divine collective memory and meaning, has been appropriated by the so-called "culture sector."

True public history is grassroots history-making that engages community needs. A community’s engagement with its own history is more constructive and dialogue-based. It can be collaborative, cooperative, and interdisciplinary. But the integration of bottom-up initiatives into the mainstream has deconstructed their initial purpose. Given default top-down arrangements, funders and middleman nonprofit organizations dip into resources best allocated directly to local community leaders and their constituents.

The best so-called professional (i.e., credentialized) public historians can do is offer their services, funding, tools, platforms and power to community-based initiatives. We must cease insisting on taking on leadership positions that undermine the notion of service-based work, and cease taking credit and spotlight away from the communities who perform the majority of the labor on such projects. We tend to believe that formal education legitimizes the authority of public historians to tell other people’s histories. “Shared authority” or supporting grassroots projects (note: different from “originating” them) is often an afterthought – a performance of charity and wokeness tacked on at the end of an agenda or planning process.

Who is funding the work? Who has the means – the time and money – to originate such projects? Who gets to control the work, the narrative, and our cultural landscape? It is all based on the stratification of position, rooted in economic, social, cultural and political privilege. Too often, funding, resources, structure and bodies are diverted to service and instruct white practitioners in the ways of socially-conscious art, history, service and dialogue. As we waste time and money on improving their inherently flawed institutions, why are there so few avenues for acknowledging, prioritizing, and championing the work of poor people of color? Rather than asking us to correct/supplement a broken system, why can't we identify ways of supporting independent, community-based, POC-led/driven projects – using waning institutional privilege to amplify the (re)emerging power of grassroots activisms?