My friends, especially those of you in philanthropy: as the clock ticks down on this chaotic year, I’ve been reflecting on whether there’s a New Year’s Resolution that could help guide me forward into 2021. And I was considering maybe something like, “I will do everything in my power to mobilize the philanthropic sector in the racial justice movement.” But that’s not enough, is it?

Because I keep hearing people in our sector worrying to each other about whether it’s all going to snap back to how it was before. People warning each other that racial justice is probably just going to end up being yet another trend in a field that loooooves to grab onto a new fashionable theory every few years.

And I realized. When the people saying those things are White folks who hold some degree of power in the sector — like myself — what we are really saying is, I don’t trust us to keep our commitments.

Think about it. It’s not like there’s a natural law that makes us turn away from the fight for justice, like we did after Reconstruction, after the Civil Rights movement, as polls indicate we’re starting to do now with BLM. There isn’t some Mysterious Force bigger than us that we are somehow powerless to resist.

There’s just… us. Sliding back into what’s easier and more comfortable.

And how many times have I done that with a New Year’s Resolution? Like, 100% of the time.

I’ve made so many resolutions over the years. Lose weight. Exercise more. Keep in better touch with people. And my personal scourge, to stop picking my skin and pulling my hair.

Every one of those, I know, will benefit me in the long term. I tell myself that they are things I truly want and aspire to and am willing to sacrifice for.

But each of those unhealthy behaviors that I resolve to reform… they tempt me because in the short term, they are easy and comforting. There are reasons why these are my usual ways of being. They serve me in some way. And it is so damn hard in the moment to keep making the choice over and over again that will reduce my comfort, that will make things harder, more demanding, the choice that takes away what I am used to.

And of course it’s the same with White supremacy culture, honestly. The truth is that us White folks are used to being in charge. It’s a lot more comfy not to get challenged on our decisions, not to have to be told we are biased and perpetuating injustice. So much simpler to keep doing what brings us ease and privilege in the short term and ignore that it’s not what we aspired to do.

So if we as White people with relative influence in philanthropy are really going to keep our sector and our society moving towards justice, we are definitely gonna need something more than the same-old-same-old attempt to rely on our own limited willpower and wispy good intentions.

We need to put it out of our power to change our minds.

Literally, we need to take this moment — who knows how long it will last? this moment when our sector is relatively open to change —

And we need to change who is in power in our organizations. Especially our C-suites and our Boards. Put power in the hands of people who will never, ever snap back. Who will never say, “Oh, focusing on racial justice in philanthropy? That’s so 2020.”

And yeah, that does mean mostly people who are Black and Indigenous and of color, especially women, and who are already part of the movement for justice; although respect also to the White folks whose lives and work show that they won’t snap back either.

We do of course need to keep working with our fellow White people who currently hold power. We’ve got to keep learning and moving forward together, so our family of folks committed to justice keeps getting bigger and stronger and so there are more people pushing for this change in the deeply inequitable power structures around us. But that’s the key. The point is really not “get White people to hold power more nicely.” The point has got to be, “shift power so it’s not held vastly disproportionately by White people.”

And when we’re talking about shifting who holds power, there’s a word for that, and it’s not “resolution.” It’s revolution.

That’s how we’ll get the accountability we’ve shown that we need. That’s how we’ll find our place in the larger movement that has never ended, never given up, even when we’ve turned away from it before.

So that’s my New Year’s Revolution: use my power to shift power.

Onwards, friends. Wishing health, joy, and justice for all of us in 2021 and far far beyond.