A storm is gathering over American giving.
It is a storm seeded in fear, watered by power, and aimed at those long cast as the problem even as they have labored to be the solution. In a pattern familiar in America, accusation has paved the road to suppression.
On September 10th, another act of political violence stunned the country. No group claimed responsibility, yet retribution was swiftly assigned. Almost immediately, a presidential order designated “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization despite the fact that antifa is not an organization at all. Language became the first weapon, collapsing protest into terror and dissent into threat.
Then came the real target: philanthropy. Foundations and community funds that supported racial justice were cast not as civic actors, but as financiers of extremism. Two weeks later, a directive empowered the IRS, FBI, and DOJ to “investigate and disrupt” any nonprofit allegedly tied to “political violence.”
It sounded procedural. It was not. History reminded us of the machinery of suspicion trained on Black civic life: the wiretaps on Dr. King, the indictments of Black mutual aid. Only now, the weapon is bureaucratic. Not a raid, but an audit.
Under this environment, tax-exempt status becomes conditional, granted or withdrawn by those who claim the authority to define “legitimate dissent.” The language is elastic enough to swallow nearly anything: a march, a bail fund, a voter-registration drive. And for Black-led organizations, historically marked as suspect, the danger is immediate.
These institutions already subsist on a sliver of American philanthropy: just 1.3 percent of all charitable giving in 2022, down from 1.9 percent two years earlier. These are not ideological outfits. They run clinics, reentry programs, youth mentorships. They are democracy’s everyday infrastructure. And they now sit in the crosshairs.
Proximity has always been both power and peril. Those closest to their communities cannot avoid politics, because they confront what policy produces: poverty, policing, disenfranchisement. To feed the hungry is to confront hunger’s design. To house the unhoused is to challenge the systems that made them so. Proximity becomes proof of guilt.
Inside philanthropy, a whisper has begun: Are words like Black, justice, and organizing too risky? Funders urge nonprofits to soften their tone, to file the edges off their truth. But rhetorical caution soon diverts one’s moral compass. Language retreats, then mission follows.
Recently, members of Congress called on the IRS to revoke the status of any group “linked to political violence.” But in a climate where “violence” may include blocking a freeway or criticizing police, such language becomes a bludgeon. Large, white-led institutions, fortified by endowments and legal teams, will endure. Lean, Black-led organizations will not. One inquiry could shutter them. The result is not only silence, but absorption: Black capacity folded back into white institutional control.
To criminalize giving is to criminalize survival.
This assault does not operate in isolation. While philanthropy is scrutinized, voting rights are simultaneously constricted. The Supreme Court now entertains theories that would weaken what remains of the Voting Rights Act, granting states broader discretion to restrict access under the banner of “integrity.” The strategy is coordinated: starve the institutions that build civic power, then close the ballot box to those who would wield it. One hand suppresses the vote; the other strangles the organizing that defends it.
So what do we do when our survival is named subversion?
First, we name the attack clearly. This is not a war on terror. It is a war on Black institutionality: the right of Black communities to build, fund, and govern themselves. To deny that right is to resurrect an old doctrine: supervision as entitlement.
Second, we build shields: shared legal defense, pooled compliance infrastructure, collective accounting. If they come for one, all must respond.
Third, we diversify our base of sustenance. Institutional philanthropy may retreat at the first tremor. But Black communities have always cultivated alternative economies of care capable of outlasting panic.
Fourth, we fight the narrative itself. The battle over meaning is as decisive as the battle over law. Who is dangerous? Who is violent? Who deserves scrutiny? These are moral categories masquerading as factual ones, and they have long been assigned against us.
Finally, philanthropy itself must choose. If it defends only its largest and safest institutions, allowing its boldest and Blackest to be examined into extinction, then its professed commitment to justice will be exposed as convenience.
Because Black philanthropy has never been charity. It is survival technology: the offering plate funding freedom schools, the Masonic lodge raising scholarship money, the neighborhood drive repairing what policy neglects. It is the architecture we build when no one else holds us.
To threaten that is to threaten the fragile scaffolding of Black freedom itself.
Crosshairs are not a metaphor. They are fiscal, legal, administrative, but they all aim the same. They aim to make giving dangerous, to render proximity perilous, to turn devotion to one’s community into liability.
We cannot afford retreat. We cannot ask permission to exist. The fight ahead is not for tax status. It is for the right to build power without being branded a threat.
Because when they aim at our institutions, they are aiming at our community. And when they aim at our community, they are aiming at our freedom. But we have outlived every attempt to make us afraid. And, we will outlive this one: not by permission, but by purpose.
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Janiece Evans-Page is the chief executive officer of Tides, a nonprofit and philanthropic organization dedicated to advancing social justice.
LaTosha Brown is the Co-Founder of Black Voters Matter, Black Voters Matter Fund and Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute.