Darren Walker

“Well, fortunately, Henry Ford left among the things that we were to work on was strengthening democracy. Among the things we do he probably didn't imagine was that in order to strengthen democracy, we would support the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to sue the states of Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia for voter suppression.”

“One of the root causes of the problems we see in the world is racism, is classism, bias towards women and girls, geographic biases, narratives about certain people or certain parts of the world that are held by powerful and privileged people. And these are in large part the barriers that must be broken through if we are to really get at sustainable change. And so I know that sounds maybe unrealistic, but it's necessary that we talk about it and that we talk about the culpability of the people who are privileged the most in the very problems.”

“At the Ford Foundation, our work is really centered on addressing inequality in the world in all of its forms, not just economic inequality, because inequality is more than just about economics. It's about culture. It's about the way in which we see each other. It's about identity. All of these things drive why we have inequality and why inequality is growing in the world.”

Q: “And essentially the question is, how do we then have a storytelling that makes inequality part of the corporate social responsibility agenda? Because traditionally, it's not the case.” A: “Well, this is why we need storytellers. So some of those storytellers themselves need to be CEOs. I mean, talking about the issue of inequality. So when you hear a CEO talk and the reason it's so powerful is because storytelling is more impactful when the person who's telling the story, you wouldn't necessarily expect them to talk about it. And of course, if you have a story about inner city poverty and there is a low income woman from a neighborhood, that story gets told. And we need to hear those stories. But we also need to have someone who isn't the inner city resident. We need a suburban white woman saying, let me tell you the story and my view on this, because that makes it possible for people to see through their eyes, people who look like them talking about things that matter to them. And we know through the data around changing norms and beliefs that people need to see people who relate to them in some way talking about it.”

“Today, we live in an age of inequality, and if we are to build back better, we must reconsider philanthropy. We must consider a different kind of economy and capitalism. And the question for the wealthy, the privileged philanthropists, is not what do I do to give back? But what am I willing to give up? Because without we privileged, powerful, wealthy people acknowledging our complicity in creating and sustaining a system that is based on racism and the kind of capitalism that has generated in these last decades, far too little shared prosperity.”

"And so one of the things that immediately came under attack was affirmative action, which was a policy to redress the white supremacy that is baked into the DNA of this country and our policies. Well, whites, some whites, argued that that was reverse discrimination and took a case to the Supreme Court that outlawed racial quotas. And since that time, we have been in this fight around this issue of reverse discrimination, which is an incredibly pernicious idea to turn a policy that seeks to redress the white supremacy that is built into our nation, to redress that as itself a form of discrimination.”