“We’ve been made to understand that Bill Gates is a philanthropist,” writes Tim Schwab after reporting on the Gates Foundation for years, “when he is, in fact, a power broker.” The allusion to Robert Caro’s massive volume on Robert Moses’s reign in New York City’s municipal governance, which sought to explain how an unelected man in an ostensibly democratic polity could amass so much influence, is likely no coincidence. The Gates Foundation is the wealthiest nonprofit in the United States. It’s the second-largest funder of the World Health Organization (after the US government), and it operates as a powerful and influential industry titan. It funds, for example, more malaria research than the entire pharmaceutical industry. As an individual, Bill is also the US’s largest landowner. When he and his then-wife, Melinda, announced their divorce in 2021, it was no exaggeration to call it an event with geopolitical ramifications.
The broad contours of Bill and Melinda Gates’ trajectory are by now familiar. As the story goes, Bill rode the wave of innovation in information and communications technology in the late 20th century, cofounding Microsoft and becoming the world’s richest man. Then, he decided with Melinda to change course, pledging to eventually give all their wealth away by forming the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Since then, the Gateses have been most comfortable in the future tense, with visions, goals, and proclamations of proposed distributions of their vast fortune. In the present, the numbers remain so large as to feel abstract. As of 2022, the Gateses have given their foundation $59 billion, with another $36 billion coming from Warren Buffett, leaving it with an endowment of $67 billion and an annual budget of around $8.3 billion.
On May 13, 2024, Melinda Gates announced her departure, along with $12.5 billion, from the organization that will be known moving forward simply as “the Gates Foundation.” With the foundation in transition, the time is ripe to take stock of the role it played in the world during its first quarter century. Two new books—Tim Schwab’s The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire and Amy Schiller’s The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It—offer some of the most extensive critical assessments yet of the Gates Foundation’s philosophy and the political implications of the mammoth power it has grown to wield over the lives of everyday people across the globe.
The Gates Foundation’s early reputation was glistening. In 2005 alone, Bill was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and the couple appeared with Bono on the cover of Time, where they were deemed “The Good Samaritans” and crowned Persons of the Year.
This was in some respects a historical anomaly. Controversy tends to follow American foundations of this scale, particularly at their beginnings. John D. Rockefeller was famously denied a charter by the US Congress when he attempted to incorporate his foundation in 1913; policymakers saw a ploy to distract from Standard Oil’s ongoing antitrust case and had little faith that the robber baron would truly segment his foundation’s work from the interests of his business. The Ford Foundation, in the decades after it became the country’s largest, following Henry Ford’s death in 1947, was the subject of continuous political scrutiny, culminating in a set of legal reforms in 1969 that placed new restrictions on the biggest foundations.
Yet when Bill and Melinda Gates launched their foundation in 2000—their reputations smarting, like Rockefeller’s a century earlier, from a high-profile antitrust investigation—little pushback followed. Writing in the 1990s, the historian of philanthropy Peter Dobkin Hall concluded that the post-1980 era was one of unusual acceptance of philanthropic power, perhaps unprecedented since the 1700s. Rather than scrutinizing, Hall wrote, “the power centers all along the political spectrum are busying themselves with establishing and building up the privatized instrumentalities of public influence.” The spirit of the times was perhaps best embodied in Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World, the 2008 treatise by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green arguing for a privatized, business-inspired approach to solving social problems. (Bill Clinton wrote the foreword.)
From the beginning, the foundation encountered some skeptics, often emerging within the specific sectors of social policy the Gateses were seeking to influence; the education critic Diane Ravitch, for instance, famously referred to Bill as the “nation’s superintendent of schools.” Yet they were hard to hear over the din of mainstream embrace. Hall’s assessment, however, came with a warning: “If history is any guide, the current consensus is only temporary.” In the 2010s—as Citizens United opened the floodgates to dark money in politics, a reinvigorated labor movement challenged private funds pouring into charter schools and right-to-work legislation, Occupy Wall Street returned wealth inequality to the center of political discourse, and high-profile movements for racial and gender justice proliferated—prominent voices on the left rediscovered the tensions between philanthropy and democracy, opening the foundation and organizations like it to greater scrutiny.
Two particularly salient critiques caught on. One traced how money accumulated by unjust means could be withheld from public coffers through the charitable deduction and tax-exempt foundations, then used to advance private priorities with little public accountability—what theorist Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the “private allocation of stolen social wages.” In 2018, journalist Anand Giridharadas helped to import this critique from academic circles and trade publications to mainstream discourse with Winners Take All, which blasted the “elite charade” of the Davos class that papered over the unjust sources of its wealth and sought to “change the world” without meaningfully tackling structural inequalities and class conflict. Another related critique examined the distortions that the priorities of ruling-class elites and their charitable foundations could impose on grassroots social movements—the process political theorist Megan Ming Francis dubbed “movement capture.”
In this reinvigorated discourse about philanthropic power, it wasn’t that the Gates Foundation was absent, exactly; many commentators mentioned the scope of its power and the various tensions and contradictions it implied. Scholars, meanwhile, have been producing thoughtful examinations of the Gates Foundation for years. Linsey McGoey’s No Such Thing as a Free Gift interrogated the foundation’s early interventions in health and education in an early takedown of the “philanthrocapitalism” concept, while Megan Tompkins-Stange’s Policy Patrons used confidential interviews to examine the influence of the foundation and its peers on education reform in the US. Yet perhaps because the foundation had built up so much goodwill in the preceding decade, because its bread-and-butter programs were focused on domains that typically engender little attention in US politics (public health in the global South), and indeed perhaps because of the foundation’s expertly honed, well-resourced PR machine, it figured less prominently than one might expect. In the words of Tim Schwab, there was a tendency to “describe [Gates’s] power rather than interrogate it.”
This is the breach into which The Bill Gates Problem, Schwab’s pugnacious denunciation of the foundation, steps. Rather than a detached assessment, the book is best read as an indictment, one with an explicit aim to knock its subject off a pedestal. (In marked contrast to the foundation’s emphasis on the equal leadership of Bill and Melinda Gates, Schwab argues that Melinda was marginalized within the foundation before her departure and thus focuses his analysis largely on Bill.) As a journalist on the Gates beat for several years before the book’s publication, Schwab was iced out by the foundation throughout his research process. Accordingly, the book relies on a source base of grantees and former employees (often anonymously or on background), the information the foundation posts on its website about its grants, and investigative reporting from other journalists and academics. Decrying celebratory Gates “lore,” Schwab sees a need to even the scales.
The portrait that emerges is a locus of power in the Gates Foundation’s offices in Seattle that oversees a complex landscape of interlocking initiatives spanning health, education, agriculture, sanitation, journalism, and other topics. Gates’s persistent investment in the nonprofit corporate form is itself noteworthy. Some tech industry peers, like Mark Zuckerberg, have incorporated their main charitable vehicles as for-profit entities, while others have just promised that the benefits of their for-profit ventures or vanity projects will one day trickle down. (The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently declared in a widely circulated essay that “technological innovation in a market system is inherently philanthropic.”) The Gateses, meanwhile, continue to expand the coffers of their trusty 501(c)3.
In doing so, the Gates Foundation forges something of a “philanthrocapitalist” middle path, merging the corporate structure of 20th-century moguls-turned-philanthropists with the worldview of Gates’s fellow travelers in the 21st. The foundation’s go-to move is “market-shaping”: optimizing existing markets for social ends where they exist, and trying to create them where they don’t. The stated goal of its involvement in Common Core education standards in the US was to “unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching.” Another effort, called Gavi, operates as a clearinghouse between donors (which consist of the foundation and global North governments) and pharmaceutical companies, brokering deals to buy and distribute vaccines to poor children in global South countries. The hope is that these private companies will eventually be incentivized to expand distribution in those countries on their own.
Schwab’s critique of market shaping sometimes hinges on means rather than ends. In his assessment of Gavi, for instance, the problem stems not from trying to address vaccine shortages in the global South, but from the initiative’s failure to address the root of the issue: pharmaceutical companies’ monopoly. Vaccine patents continue to rest with a few companies that don’t see profitable markets in poor countries; rather than trying to change this system, Gates has contentedly “nibbled around the edges,” resulting in a still-suboptimal vaccine supply that enriches these firms and costs Gavi’s participants a fortune. A similar dynamic played out with COVAX, the Gates-driven initiative to supply the world with COVID vaccines. Despite a Gavi-like attempt to raise money from rich countries to send vaccines equitably to poor ones, the global North ended up with first dibs while the global South lagged. With vaccines a scarce commodity and rich countries desperate to immunize their own populations, pharmaceutical companies sold to the highest bidders, leaving poor countries to fend for themselves. For an organization extolling the virtues of market incentives, Schwab notes, Gates seemed caught surprisingly off guard by the vagaries of an actually existing marketplace.
At other points, the book argues that the foundation’s priorities themselves lead to misdirected resources. Eradicating polio, for instance, has been a longstanding Gates goal, despite persistent questions from health experts about the wisdom of pursuing last-mile polio cases while other preventable illnesses like measles remain more prevalent. The world of philanthropy, of course, is littered with questionable bases for evidence and disputes over cause prioritization—but the stakes change when the foundation in question has an endowment with a value that would rival a medium-sized national economy. Given the scale of the foundation’s influence, its decisions carry enormous implications. Gates’s prioritization doesn’t just shape where its own money goes, Schwab shows, but has convinced governments to augment the foundation’s $8 billion invested in polio eradication with billions more of their own—possibly to the detriment of funding for preventing other, more pressing preventable illnesses.
The section where Schwab’s critiques come together most cohesively deals with Gates’s forays into family planning. As the historian Felicia Kornbluh has recently emphasized, women marginalized by racial and colonial hierarchies have historically had to fight on two fronts for bodily autonomy: for protection from coercive sterilization measures on one hand, and for the right to abortion on the other. On both sides, the Gates Foundation’s record is troubling. FP2020, a global initiative focused particularly on Africa, for example, pursued a broadly agreeable goal—increased access to contraceptives—in a way that reflected a distinct, arguably neocolonial ideology and operated at a scale usually seen from a state actor. Focusing on long-term contraceptive implants in poor communities, the foundation worked aggressively on the ground to stimulate their demand, aiming to reach 120 million women in just a few years (ultimately falling short, but still reaching 60 million). The foundation’s market shaping “worked”—but came with costs. Journalists in Uganda, for example, found women looking for other forms of contraception leaving the clinics with Gates-funded implants instead. While the foundation has gone to great rhetorical lengths to distance itself from the kind of racist, coercive, and eugenics-inspired population control initiatives that were central to many 20th-century foundations’ involvement in the global South, the program raises questions about how clean the break with this past has been. Effectively, Schwab argues, the program violated the reproductive autonomy of women in Uganda and elsewhere and limited the accessibility of other treatments and tools that might advance a more liberatory program of reproductive justice.
On the other front, the Gateses decline to fund abortion services in any form. In addition to the constrained possibilities this implies for the people the foundation seeks to serve, the contrast with state power here is striking. In the US, state funding of abortion is a contentious, public political issue. Democrats often run on a platform of repealing the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the domestic use of federal dollars for abortion. Similarly, the “global gag rule,” which bars recipients of US foreign aid from providing (or even advocating for) abortion services abroad, routinely flips in and out of enforcement when the White House changes hands. While maddening, these are policies that can, ostensibly, be contested by constituents, politicians, and social movements. By contrast, we only know that the Gates Foundation avoids abortion because Melinda Gates volunteered it in a blog post in 2014, and there’s no path to challenging it.
Potential conflicts of interest pop up so frequently in Gates’s world, and Schwab reports them so exhaustively that it becomes legitimately hard for a reader to keep track. In February 2020, Bill Gates penned an op-ed on preparing for COVID-19 for the New England Journal of Medicine; in the journal’s required disclosure section, he simply wrote “numerous.” One conflict might erode an author’s credibility; enough of them, seemingly, transcended the need for disclosure altogether. At a minimum, disclosure of potential conflicts by the foundation and its grantees seems necessary—and, as Schwab documents, surprisingly rare. (In the interest of supporting that norm: I was a junior staffer for several years for an organization that counted Gates as a significant funder.) On a broader scale, though, it remains difficult to assess when and how these conflicts manifest.
A chapter on journalism illustrates the ambiguity most starkly. In an industry in crisis, few outlets are in a position to reject philanthropic largesse. Coverage of the places and issues that pique the Gateses’ interests—health, education, poverty in the global South—is often an early casualty of austerity measures. When Gates donates, what does the foundation get in return? In Schwab’s accounting, funding journalism allows Gates an invisible thumb on the scale of news coverage, promoting positive stories and suppressing negative ones. We have a few concrete instances of the foundation attempting this (and usually failing), but the implication is clearly that the foundation’s influence permeates in more pervasive, more subtle ways than an evidentiary smoking gun can account for. Relaying the take of an anonymous source, Schwab writes, “You would be very hard-pressed to prove there was any effort at editorial control,” but that “the foundation uses a variety of coded language and nonverbal signals to clearly telegraph its editorial desires.”
This kind of vague and unfalsifiable assessment may well make Gates Foundation officers and grantees alike bristle. As Schwab notes, many of the people working in various corners of the web of Gates-funded institutions likely don’t know about or fully understand their intertwining. The impact seems to be on overarching structures rather than individual decisions. It’s not that the foundation is telling a journalist what to write about a sanitation project it funds in Kenya—it’s that the journalist got the job and took the trip to report on sanitation in Kenya in the first place. Midcentury social scientists who zigged where Ford and Rockefeller zagged faced barriers continuing their research; Schwab relates a similar story of a well-respected vaccine researcher who scrambles to cobble together small grants after his differing goals for a malaria vaccine seem to have alienated Gates.
Potential conflicts of interest pop up so frequently in Gates’s world, and Schwab reports them so exhaustively that it becomes legitimately hard for a reader to keep track.
Is the Gates Foundation, then, just reproducing the power dynamics of the midcentury establishment? There are certainly continuities. Yet one dimension of the book points to a key difference: the extensive involvement of the founders themselves in decisions big and small. The philanthropic power brokers of generations past often kept the influence of their founders at arm’s length. The Gateses, on the other hand, embrace a “giving while living” ethos and seem to relish the notion that they are uniquely equipped to shape the foundation’s work. For much of the foundation’s history, Bill, Melinda, and Warren Buffett comprised the entire board (which has since grown to eight people). As Bill put it in 2019, he prefers a “hands-on” approach to take advantage of the “skills that I’m addicted to.” Anyone who follows the foundation’s public profile, or views the promotional Netflix series Inside Bill’s Brain, can attest to the link that Bill and his circle see between his own cognitive ability and experiences and the foundation’s strategic acumen.
As a result, details that may scan initially as gossipy character study—from Bill’s domineering management style at Microsoft, to his yearslong association with Jeffrey Epstein, to the fallout from the couple’s divorce—are unavoidably relevant. Schwab makes particularly insightful connections between Bill’s quest for monopoly power at Microsoft, for instance, and the Gates Foundation’s prioritization of intellectual property in its vaccine programming. Yet taken too far, this individualistic approach to understanding the foundation hits limits. In 2015, the historian Stanley Katz noted that laudatory coverage of the Gateses—in this case, from the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof—tended to be overly credulous about their claims of personal influence over an organization of thousands. “Is it plausible,” he asked, “to think that malaria will be eradicated as a result of bedroom or breakfast room chat?” Schwab’s focus on biographical explanations for the foundation’s missteps and the shortcomings of its founders’ personalities risks becoming a mirror image of Kristof’s, turning an examination of an institution with a global footprint employing thousands into a one-man show.
In contrast to Schwab’s narrow case study, Amy Schiller’s The Price of Humanity zooms out to address bigger questions about philanthropy’s embeddedness in American politics more broadly and the implications this relationship holds for the health of democracy. Schiller is both a political theorist and a fundraising consultant, and the book’s participant-observer perspective draws on a notably eclectic set of thinkers and historical allusions. The tone is by turns earnest and breezy, at times resembling the irreverent nonprofit blogosphere more than a dense tome of theory. (A heading to a section about the Gateses: “TFW you love humanity, but not humans.”) Bits aside, though, this is a complex, often transgressive intervention. While the Gates Foundation is Schwab’s all-consuming subject, it serves here as the introductory piece of a larger story—a case that can pry open a larger set of truths about contemporary philanthropy’s shortcomings.
In short, the problem is this: figures like the Gateses, and the philanthropic practices of millions of others who follow their cues, blend philanthropy into a consumer marketplace. They establish an “exchange rate for generosity,” thinking in terms of individual welfare and morality instead of collective rights and obligations. The value of a project is measured in narrowly quantitative terms of return on investment, directly comparable with the expected value of any other kind of purchase.
Where did this kind of investment-driven thinking about human beneficence come from? Some commentators have located it in the neoliberalism of the late 20th century; others, the advent of industrial capitalism. Schiller stretches further still, locating them in the early Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo. It was Augustine and his contemporaries, she argues, who first articulated the notion that “the poor” were a distinct class worthy of special attention that redounded to the spiritual benefit of the giver, rather than one part of a cohesive citizenry: “The poor to whom we give alms! What else are they but porters through whom we transfer our goods from earth to heaven?” At a glance, it’s an odd comparison to draw with the relentlessly rationalistic and secular Gates approach. What binds them together, Schiller argues, is an instrumentalizing tendency that renders aid recipients abstractions. For Augustine, the prize was the kingdom of heaven; for the Gateses, it’s seeing a line go up from the office in Seattle.
The strength of this approach is its ability to synthesize. For all their differences, elements of the global nonprofit sector often contrasted with one another—bureaucratic power brokers like the Gateses, consumerist fundraising platforms like Kiva microloans and TOMS shoes, the utilitarian iconoclasts of the effective altruism movement—all share this tendency, Schiller argues. Counter to the consequentialist turn toward evaluating philanthropic ends rather than means, she is intensely interested in what the process of giving does for its practitioners, which seems, in no small part, to be to make them feel good about themselves. (Kristof, for instance, calls making a Kiva loan “great therapy.”)
The stakes of this consumerist model of giving may seem relatively low. If a donation goes somewhere good, what’s wrong with feeling good about it? It’s a complicated question: social scientists have long investigated the practical consequences of what they call the “warm glow” model of giving. Yet for Schiller the important consequences are political. What does the expectation of a tangible “return” on individual altruism do to a society? The pitfalls become clearer with Minnesota Freedom Fund, a bail fund that faced a dramatic backlash when its resources ballooned in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Unable to see their money moving out the door, donors accused the organization of being “race grifters.” To Schiller, this was a symptom of a philanthropic culture that has “replaced solidarity with individualism, collective liberation with individual gratification.”
Most recent critics of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector from the left focus on giving by elites and are agnostic about its continuation, if not actively against it. If the world had adequate welfare states—to say nothing of redistributing the means of production—wouldn’t much of the need for private philanthropy disappear? At first glance, Schiller’s argument resembles this line of thought. Donors, she argues, should simply have no business providing basic needs like food, shelter, education, and health care. The best a figure like MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos who is giving money away to a broad set of organizations at a clip genuinely unprecedented for a billionaire, can hope for in this framework is to be a “poster child for philanthropy’s futility in the face of structural injustice.” These are obligations to be fulfilled by a well-resourced, responsive state.
Yet The Price of Humanity in fact makes a striking case for the possibility, and indeed the importance, of a certain form of philanthropy in a democratic society. Schiller essentially wants to flip effective altruism, with its belief that philanthropy ought to follow a rigid utilitarian outlook toward reducing suffering on the global scale, on its head. The proper place for philanthropy, in this outlook, is the things that, as the ancient Greeks would put it, move humanity from “bare life” to the “good life.” Where effective altruists like Peter Singer expressed disgust at the outpouring of philanthropic support for Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral when it burned in 2019, Schiller sees a model of “collective effervescence.” The public libraries built by Andrew Carnegie at the turn of the 20th century provide another model: rather than providing social goods on the basis of their expected market returns, philanthropy ought to provide “sanctuaries” from the market. In short, Schiller argues, we need “government for bread, philanthropy for roses.”
The surprising pair of LeBron James and Jane Addams represents the potential of a form of philanthropy under capitalism that cuts against the problems Schiller identifies in two main ways. First, she argues, the philosophies undergirding the free bicycle program at James’s “I Promise” school in Akron, and Jane Addams’s arts-driven settlement house programming at Hull House, promote freedom and flourishing in addition to the fulfillment of basic needs. Second, each of these donors worked alongside the state, rather than competing with it—James by establishing a public school rather than a charter, and Addams by agitating for expansions to the welfare state. There is a contradiction here with the book’s vision for a state that takes care of the domains these philanthropists have worked in—Addams and James are both using philanthropy to provide services Schiller contends should, in the long run, be the domain of the state. But for Schiller, James and Addams’s extensions into other, “sanctuary” realms provide a model that might be possible in the absence of such a state—what some might call “non-reformist reforms” that serve to move calls for structural change farther rather than blunting them.
The path to getting to this reformed vision of philanthropy is unclear—this is a work of political philosophy, not a roadmap. But Schiller does call for a set of steps to move reality incrementally closer to this vision of a more expansive state alongside a more targeted, regulated philanthropic industry. Echoing a common refrain of sector observers since at least the 1970s, she calls for tax reform that would “democratize” philanthropy by making it easier for a greater proportion of the nonrich to give; doing so, theoretically, could grow the funds available for private philanthropic support of “roses” while checking the ability of elite philanthropists to pick and choose their preferred kinds.
Finally, and most abstractly, Schiller calls on societies to “embrace magnificent philanthropy”—the provision of things above and beyond what’s needed for survival. “The biggest risk this book takes,” she writes, “is proposing we reallocate resources away from urgent needs of life and death, that philanthropy be judged—counterintuitively—by the nonutility of what it funds.” It is, indeed, a tension that the book ultimately does not resolve. In a world bereft of the state capacity, even Schiller’s role models for a democratic practice of philanthropy find themselves carrying out crucial tasks of social reproduction. Should the zero-sum view of resource allocation that looms so saliently for effective altruists, and their fellow travelers like Bill and Melinda Gates, be so easily sidestepped? And on the other hand, can philanthropy in a capitalist economy ever—even if affixed with important limits—serve a positive, redistributionary, and life-affirming role in the lives of the global masses?
Schiller’s and Schwab’s books offer some of the clearest accounts of the Gates Foundation’s power and influence on the global scene. The picture we are left with is one that reinforces many existing critiques of elite philanthropy as an antidemocratic force, if one made unique by its enormous size and the inevitable idiosyncrasies of a foundation directed so extensively by one couple. Whether directly or indirectly, Gates makes decisions affecting millions of lives from the top town, with little transparency or accountability. While some of these decisions can result in apparent solutions to urgent problems of global inequality, the foundation’s reliance upon a fundamentally extractive, neocolonial, and antidemocratic system of private market capitalism renders their mission to “help all people lead healthy, productive lives” limited from the jump.
In the final accounting, then, the distinction between Bill Gates as “philanthropist” versus Bill Gates as “power broker” may be beside the point. To be sure, the foundation amasses and deploys tremendous power with few democratic checks on its activities. But the Gates Foundation is a rule—albeit a colossal one—not the exception, of how private philanthropic power operates. If the biographical particulars of Bill and Melinda Gates make for compelling reading, in other words, they are best understood as symptoms of a particular set of structural circumstances. Schwab himself seems to concede this point. Solutions to the problems billionaire philanthropy poses, Schwab writes, must do more than root out the individuals who currently occupy its seats of power: they must “reorganize our economy and society in a way that doesn’t allow the accumulation of such extreme wealth by a very small group of people.” It’s an odd ending note, if substantively the right one, for a book called The Bill Gates Problem and situated firmly in the genre of muckraking individual biography.
By contrast, the project of The Price of Humanity is, essentially, to imagine how private philanthropy would fit into that reorganized society. For an author setting out to reform philanthropic practice rather than abolish it or render it superfluous altogether, Schiller’s “government for bread, philanthropy for roses” ethos is genuinely radical. Yet it is hard to imagine real-world circumstances where this elegant bifurcation holds. Carnegie libraries provide a case in point. Built by a man who famously amassed his wealth on the backs of exploited steelworkers, the libraries have long since been integrated into the public sector. In the first half of 2024, many in New York were forced to cut their hours due to struggles over the city’s budget. Projects for the collective good at scale, whether fulfilling basic needs or providing social sanctuaries, can rarely rely on private beneficence alone.
An in-depth reckoning with the Gates Foundation as a discrete actor was overdue. A reckoning limited to the actions of one foundation, however, has its own limitations. As Gilmore’s framework of “stolen social wages” reminds us, philanthropic pursuits at scales large and small are necessarily embedded in a broader political economy of racial capitalism. There are no shortcuts to uprooting the patterns of exploitation and inequality that underpin it. 
This article was commissioned by Charlotte E. Rosen