Review of Decolonizing Wealth by Edgar Villanueva

Is the book the “indigenous wisdom to heal divides and restore the balance” that it claims to be, or more of the same from the colonizer lip service industry we call Philanthropy?

It seems like the promotions team behind Decolonizing Wealth has been agressively targeting a demographic they probabaly call “woke POC” with pictures of attractive black girls in shirts that say “decolonizer” and to be honest, if I’d seen the ads or read the jacket copy before I bought the book, this review would never have happened because what the actual fuck?

Although he is an enrolled member of the Lumbee indian tribe, Edgar looks white as hell in his jacket photo. Add to that a front cover blurb that claims to be “indigenous wisdom to heal divides and restore the balance,” a foreword by a Buffett and jacket copy like “because the Native way is to bring the oppressor into the circle of healing” I probably would have noped the fuck out of this piece and it would have been a shame. Because I actually loved this book.

I got the audio book and narrator Larry Herron’s voice was an excellent medium through which to consume this information. At times, it felt like he wasn’t given a second take as some pauses extended oddly long and sometimes words were tripped over or awkwardly pronounced, but overall his performance was excellent and brought gravitas while holding my interest in the subject of funding and finance under white supremacy, which can get a little dry.

From the foreword and throughout the book, no punches are pulled in the description, assertion, or understanding that the foundations of American wealth are colonization, slavery, and genocid. And that our continued prosperity currently comes from the ongoing perpetuation of all of those things locally and globally.

I have read articles that asserted this, I have read blog posts that asserted it. Hell, I write blog posts that do this, but I have not read a lot of books that made this assertion in this stark a manner, nor have I read a book on funding or philanthropy that would even touch this subject with a ten foot pole.

As Edgar will tell you if you read the book, funding in general and philanthropy in specific is the strangest, whitest colonizer shell game that’s ever been invented. Generational wealth of a mind-boggling magnitude has been made off the free and discounted labor of marginalized people the world over, and it’s philanthropy’s job to funnel an insignificant portion back to the people who have been victimized, but only if they prove themselves worthy of this free money and show significant gratitude and improvement, aka proximity to whiteness, before they can get more. Which usually ends up with white-led, colonizer-perpetuating orgs getting first and exclusive dibs on money while POC-led, organicly-structured organizations must make their own way, as we’ve always done.

In short, philanthropy as a whole is very wealthy white people giving money to middle class white people in order to perpetuate the cycles of violence and exploitation of non-white and marginalized people.

The good news is that with books like Decolonizing Wealth, we’re acknowledging that and talking about how to change it. Edgar is great at depicting the philanthropic superstructure as exploitative while still acknowledging the individuals who work in the field, the vast majority of whom are not there to perpetuate white supremacy or fuel inequity. Like all of us working under the looming structures of oppression in America, they do what they can to mitigate the damage and hold space for humanity.

By directly quoting other philanthopy workers of color, and acknowledging his own privileges Edgar does a fair job at de-centering himself when speaking about the general experience of philanthropy work for marginalized people.

However, this isn’t just a book about philanthropy it’s also something of a memoir of a young native man’s journey into the belly of the beast, so to speak. He talks about what it was like for him to walk into his first big-boy philanthropy job. In an exercise that will probably incite any non-profit workers reading this to rage, he plainly states his salary (I’m not great with numbers, but I clearly heard $70,000 at one point), and describes the way that administrators treated him because of the power he wielded. He also explains just how and why he was so eager to work against his own self-interest, at least initially. Then he walks the reader through his realization of his own power and access and what exactly he did about it once he realized it.

I was dissapointed but also understanding of the discrepency between how he described his early work and pay-scale with the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust verses how he described his later work. In the Kate B. chapters he even goes so far as to describe in detail how he left because his boss, a Black woman, started to sabatoge him. Later, he talks in vague terms about working at a foundation in Seattle and how shameful it is to pretend to be anti-racist while perpetuating racism left, right, and center, but names no names and spills no tea.

I, of course, snooped and found that his author bio lists the Marguerite Casey Foundation in Seattle as one of his former orgs. I checked out their leadership team, and they’re all female (which is not that odd in Philanthropy) but also all fairly white-passing and their CEO is the founder of Hispanics in Philanthropy. (Not the president, the founder, which means she named this org, which will be relevant to my Latinx readership.)

But why, I ask myself, does the president at Kate B. get her bad behavior put on blast while CEO at Marguerite Casey has her secrets kept outside of a few brief, generalized statements the reader must put together on their own? And why do we know that the president at Kate B. is Black, but not that the CEO at Marguerite Casey identifies as Hispanic?

It may be because of proximity. In terms if social circles, Seattle is a lot closer to New York, where Edgar lives and works today than Winsten-Salem, North Carolina, where Kate B. is located. It may because of time. Seattle was more recent. But it might also be internalized anti-blackness, which brings me to the parts of this book that I struggled with.

Like a lot of non-black people profitting off of the new industry of social justice, it feels like Edgar shrouds himself in blackness and uses black history as a medium with which to convey his legitimacy. Which is where I acknowledge that I am not black. I am Chicanx, Latinx, and mestizo. That means that my family came to this country from Mexico, where we felt that we had an indegenous identity, but where mestizo people as a rule have profited off the appropriation of indigenous cultures we no longer participate in because our ancestors threw off their association with indigeneity in order to benefit from their proximity to whiteness. (For more on how appropriators can become appropriated, and visa versa, read anything written about Frida Kahlo in the last 5 years.) Which further means that I am speaking as an outsider to Black culture and experience and I have no authority except the authority of my own flawed perception. Please email me if I’m not getting this right.

That being said, let’s talk about the slave imagery Edgar uses throughout the book. For several sections, Edgar compares the different parts of the Philanthropy industry to different types of slaves on a plantation: field, house, overseer, etc. I can see that he’s trying to illustrate how we who consider ourselves to be free still serve the white supremacist superstructure, and sometimes even more intimately or directly than we know.

However, it stood out to me as a history that wasn’t his to use in this way. At first, I thought that perhaps Edgar himself was Black as well as indigenous. The narrator of his audiobook is clearly a Black man. Edgar spoke at length about the Lumbee tribe’s history, geography, and culture which has lead to many of the enrolled members also being Black, but as we went on I realized that he never directly identified as Black himself. In my research since I finished the book, he never identifies as Black anywhere. However, imagery of Black people has been used liberally to promote his message, and the history of slavery, which is not his history, is used to illustrate concepts that could have been illustrated in other ways.

This, in combination with the call out of the Kate B. Reynolds President makes me wonder if there isn’t some unexamined bias in this book, giving white-passing bad actors the gift of anonymity while exposing a Black woman for the less far-reaching crime of being petty with a man she saw as a professional competition.

Which brings us to his portrayal of women in general. As I said, this is something of a memoir, and he goes into a lengthy description of his over-worked, under-paid mother as a philanthropist. I have no argument about the fact that she is a great philanthropist. Most women and femmes in marginalized communities are, and I really appreciate that he shows readers who may not have the privilege of experiencing this resiliency first-hand what our mothers, sisters and cousins know, do, and take as a matter of course on any given day. That being said, in addition to her great philanthropic work Edgar’s mother was not paid a living wage at any of her multiple jobs, and had her free labor exploited by the church for its own gain. Conversely, at no point does he mention recieving even emotional support from his disabled father, who he characterizes as a great man and a political influncer despite this fact.

Everybody’s family dynamics are complicated. Everyone’s relationship with God is complicated, not to mention colonized people’s relationship with the Christian God specifically. Lots of things are complicated, but theft is simple. Has someone taken something that didn’t belong to them? If the answer is yes, this is theft. In the case of Edgar’s mother, he fails to point out that free or under-paid labor corerced from a mostly femme workforce in the name of God and Children is not philanthorpy: it’s theft.

He clearly looks up to his strong and generous mother, but he also misses out on acknowledging that her greatness came from her personal resilliance, not from her ability to work literally around the clock to support her children and community while his dad had very important political friends and deep meaningful conversations. The one can’t exist without the other, and it struck me that he had written an entire book about the unfair exploitation of marginalized peoples for the benefit of the white, male superstructure and completely neglected to put his own mother in that context.

At this point, you may be wondering about the solutions proposed to “heal divides and restore the balance” as the cover says. And why in the world a person should buy a book that has such clear blind spots and issues? Here’s why: the fact that I can even point out Edgar’s biases and assumptions is because he actually wrote a book about this when no one else in the finance industry has the ovaries to even talk about it most of the time.

This will be an historic volume, and I’m looking forward to what gets made simply because it exists. Other pieces have been written about this topic, and about the solutions which Edgar puts forward in a succunct, logical way that shows just how easily they could be instituted even in our large and complicated country. If we were all on the same page (which, of course, we never are). Other studies have come out supporting Edgar’s assertions and more will come out in the future. But this book feels like a turning point in the fields of philanthropy and funding, two industries where social justice has been and remains to be a taboo subject.

I know many people who will regard Edgars solutions, none of which contain any version of the phrase “pitchforks at dawn” to be a little tame. All of them are couched within the governmental and economic system we currently occupy, but all of them would radically transform the appearance and experience of being in that system for generations to come. And that’s the kind of solution I’m looking for. If you feel the same, pick up this book. It’s going to get referred to a lot in the coming years.

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