Non-Profit Racial Justice: Sometimes it takes me awhile to connect the dots, but I get there
1) Too many 501c3 non-profits take on jobs that are properly the work of government.
2) Why don't they spend their resources advocating for the right quality of government, instead?
3) They are bad at sharing power. So bad at sharing power, they don't even want to share it through the government.
4) How does safe space figure in?
5) Safe space rhetoric can easily be used to neutralize the contested character of political issues, making the issues palatable to the same people noted in point 3.
6) Racial justice is a triggering issue due to white fragility. (white fragility: “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.”)
7) Racial justice mediated through a safe space will be dictated by the contours of white fragility.
8) So if want to do good work, but you are psychologically averse to sharing power through participating in politics, and sharing power with black people because of white fragility, a 501c3 with safe space culture is the perfect fit, and the only black people who will be able to express themselves have been neutered by the structure of the organization. This is also why a 501c3 with a safe space culture is structurally opposed to effectively addressing racial justice.
(The deep problem is that in the absence of political contest, the default, dominant order is to blame black individuals, rather than the power enforcing the racial order.)
By Irami Osei-Frimpong