Accomplishments, whoever introduces him has their work cut out for them. Born in lafayette, louisiana, Darren Walker was one of the first children in the nation to benefit from the head start program. He went on to were a scholarship at the university of texas at austin, where he would graduate with degrees in government, speech communication, and law, before pursuing a successful career as an attorney and an investment banker. For the past three decades, mr. Walker has been one of our nations foremost philanthropic executives. He has served as chief operating officer of harlems Largest Development corporation. Vice president of the rockefeller foundation, cofounder and chair of the u. S. Impact investing alliance, and for the past seven years as president of the Ford Foundation, where he overcease an endowment of 13 billion and 600 million in annual grant making. He is dedicated to tackling the most difficult issues in the world. He was among the most committed supporters of residents in new orleans after hurricane katrina. He led the way toward building a more just and financially Sustainable Future for the city of detroit. And as president of the Ford Foundation, he is contributing to the Economic Empowerment of tens of millions of americans across the country, including here in the south. In a groundbreaking 2015 essay toward a new gospel of wealth, and more recently in his book from generosity to justice, mr. Walker called upon americans to rethink the way we approach philanthropy, to shift from a charityminded approach to one that addresses the inequality that necessitated the charity in the first place. In that spirit, hes announced the Ford Foundations giving in reversal from its first 50 years would focus sole on the funding projects that address inequality. Tonights just an introduction, as was said, mr. Walker will be visiting duke. Were fortunate to say several times this spring, working alongside students, faculty and staff to forge partnerships with our neighbors here in durham aimed at combating injustice in the south. He is a leader of uncommon vision and purpose. I am delighted to have him here at duke. Please join me in welcoming Darren Walker. [applause] hello, good evening, good people, and welcome again to the 2020 Terry Sanford distinguished lecture. My name again is jay pearson, and tonight i the honor and pleasure of sharing the stage with mr. Darren walker, who serves as the current president of the Ford Foundation. In the interest of time and not overwhelming you with repetition on mr. Walkers complishments and honorifics addressed during the introduction, ill take a minute or so to lay out the format for tonights event. Mr. Walker and i will share the stage in directed conversation for about 35 minutes. We will then entertain questions from audience members. We have mic runners who will come to you if you raise your hand, and we ask that you first stand if youre approached and that you try your best to have a concise, well formed question. Thank you in advance. As discussed by dean kelly, while truthful and discussions on serious issues like inequality, injustice, supremacy oppress and domination by their very nature likely to be discomforting for some of us. We theep our exchange this evening will also be enlightening. We hope you dont miss the Important Message associated with this discussion. If you read the book or have seen previous interviews, you already know the compelling life story of mr. Walker swrks the groundbreaking work hes doing at the Ford Foundation and inspiring at other organizations. Tonight we propose to merge these two perspectives, the personal and the professional. As someone who has emerged from the populations and communities fill an throipy frequently propose to see serve, mr. Walker benefits from a unique constellation of experiences that grant insight into the fenn unanimous characterizing inequality difference from toes brought to bear by the typical head of a thrill an pop i organization, that is his real value. We will delve into how Lessons Learned from these experience have influenced his thoughts his action as pertains to the Ford Foundations mission that a fill appeary writ large, as well as how they hold promise for improving the nation and the world. Finally, the topics and questions we will be discussing this evening were solicited and collected from a series of collaborative meetings and conversations between Durham Community members, duke staff, as well as faculty. Out of recognition of and respect for the value of the diverse random perspective associated with these contributions, i will indicate those questions that were received of in advance by Durham Community members. So, mr. Walker, lets start with the bigpicture question. You open your book with a statement written by Andrew Carnegie some 130 years ago. In it he cites the importance of philanthropy. The previous referenced to end poverty champ bied by Terry Sanford was championed 57 years ago from. Your perspective, what, if anything, about the nature of inequality and how philanthropy proposes has changed since carnegies observations and fords efforts and from fords efforts until today . Thank you, professor, and good evening, everyone. I feel really blessed and enormously grateful for the invitation to be the Terry Sanford lecturer this semester. Of course, the opportunity to come to duke to this amazingly magical place that seems year in ly in its beauty and its excellence, and in its richness, you cant help but eel that this is a rich place. And it reeks of it. And it is an interesting thing that well get to in a moment, but i do want to say that it is just always such a warm embrace hen i come to durham and thats why when my friend once again intervened in my life to probably rig the system so i could be named the Terry Sanford lecturer, i readily accepted. I think your question of Andrew Carnegie and the fund for north very a and today is a important one that really, first of all, we have to acknowledge Andrew Carnegie. Andrew carnegie was a radical for his day. Andrew carnegie believed that everyone in america should be literate, should have a library, have library books. He actually didnt have a problem with inequality. Andrew carnegie believed that inequality was just a natural phenomenon, and that the real estion was what did men like himself who benefited from their natural hard work and their superior intelligence and all of the things that brought them their wealth, what would they do with that wealth . To benefit society . He was a radical, but he doesnt look like a radical today. The fund for North Carolina that governor sanford led was also a radical idea, a disruptive idea, because it challenged the status quo in this state. T demanded that institutions look at the ways in which they existed and engaged with particularly poor, lowincome, black communities, and i think we have to acknowledge that while we in this country have , de tremendous progress everything has changed and nothing has changed. And what i mean by that is, we have made phenomenal progress in this country at reducing the isparities, at demonstrating see the tial for us to integrated better schools, employment that works for more people. We have demonstrated tremendous progress. Those demonstrations have been just that, demonstration projects. We have been unable to at scale sustain the progress, and that is, to my mind, the greatest challenge, because we actually generally speaking know what works. Name a social ill, a challenge that we face as a country, and theres a demonstration or a series of demonstrations that show us what work. Name something. How to increase student achievement for young black boys. We know how to do that in this country. And there have been randomized control trials out the wazoo to show us where it has worked. Those have been demonstrations. We have been unwilling to scale them, to invest in them, and to sustain those investments. So my challenge is to all of us and to philanthropy is to root that we look at the causes of, one, the problems that we are identifying, and two whats the root cause of our inability to invest in the things we know that works . In ew carnegie believed he didnt ut uestion that the negro libraries got secondhand books or no books at all. John d. Rockefeller was a radical to establish spelman college, to take what had been a small, Fledgling College for negro women and to believe that negro women should have a fouryear degree. It was a radical idea. Now, he wasnt creating a Scholarship Program to send those negro girls to radcliffe or vassar with his daughters, and there was a curriculum designed for those women that was different from the curriculum that was designed for his daughters. But he believed that they should be educated. But the root causes were left unexamined, and part of the reason the root causes were ft unexamined is because privilege the people do not like being made uncomfortable. And to engage in a root cause nterrogation makes the beneficiaries of the very systems and structures that , duce their advantage approximate makes them vulnerable. And one of the great things about privilege, because ive lived with privilege, and ive lived without privilege. Living with privilege is really good. Because what privilege is is sed to buy you insulation from being uncomfortable. I mean, how many times have i heard parents say, i worked hard so that you can have the privilege that i didnt have, so that those things that i had to worry about, you dont have to worry about. You can take for granted. Thats privilege. And every parent wants that for their child, particularly a parent who grew up hard or poor or but that privilege then ince late them from actually engaging in some of these really difficult conversations. Thank you. It sounds like youre talking about different but persistent manifestations of inequality, enduring inequality. And second question is, and tonights talk is moving from inequality to injustice. Theres a literature in the world that i live in in the academy that addresses different types of inequality. For example, economic, racial, or structural. There are also multiple definitions of these different types of ininookity based on the response you just save. Can you share with us what type of inook wallity you believe is the root cause and how you propose to define that, that type of inequality . I think the root cause is racism and classism. Think we and it becomes incredibly uncomfortable. First, because in this country, i believe, i believe in america. I am certain that there is no where one world with your background or my background could have generation n june the level of social and economic mobility we have experienced. So i was born in the bottom decile, and i am absolutely right in the 1 . And i am grateful for that, but to the s not blind me reality of the historic racism in our very foundation. And how we in this country have hat conversation where we both where we are comfortable with the contradictions of who we are rather than a romanticized version. I love thomas jefferson, and i get hell because i opened my annual letter a couple of years ago with a quote from jefferson to his friend, Samuel Dupont in 1816, and he wrote Samuel Dupont and said the work of america is to build a just nation. So i included that, and, you know, i got some people saying on twitter, why would you be quoting that horrible, racist, sally hemings, all that stuff, right . Because jeffersons words were brilliant. Were absolutely brilliant. Now, yes, he was a hypocrite. Bsolutely. But i want to hold jefferson to his words. So i use his words to demand of him that he deliver on those words, in spite of his hypocrisy. And to hold his hypocrisy and is brilliance at once, because that our f the fact founders were racist, they also left us the tools to fix what and so i think where we have to begin in this country is to have an ability to manage the complexity of both of those area tives in a nation where we have only had a narrative of deification. So we have had a narrative that is this romanticized idea of , and that romanticized idea, i hold that too. That lso hold a reality is the lived experience, certainly of folks of color, of poor white people, and that to me is whats critical to our ability to engage. And i think what has happened is in our society today, too many of us are taking oppositional positions on that narrative continuum. And some feel that it is important to protect, and some kneel we have to tear it down. And and i believe that we have o be able to bridge, because we are like the soul of any of us. I mean, if you have any religious tradition or you believe anything, i mean, i grew up in the south as a baptist. I mean, we have a soul. But our souls need nourishment, d we, if left to our own will, will do things that are harmful to our souls. And souls need healing, and i think thats what this country needs. So how do we think about the kinds of conversations that helped us heal . And understand you got to be able to diagnose what were healing from. Thats a part of it. You opened by referencing jefferson and the mood towards a just nation. Can you give us a combination of what that would look like and how you imagined that . What does justice look like, and how do we get this . Whats the pathway . I think the pathway is to is gnize that our democracy combined by a set of systems, structures, cultural and social practices, and those systems beginning with the economic designed to get us what we got. So there is no facet of our life in this country, and that no social problem we should be surprised about the outcomes. So none of us should be surprised about the fact that we are the most overly incarcerated nation in the world on a per capita basis much thats a fact. And we have designed a criminal Justice System to get us that. I mean, im not surprised. If you look at the inputs into the outputs, it is actually a perfectly designed system to get us that. D so every aspect of our lives, those systems, and the design of them, will get us more justice or less justice. And so i think we have to focus n every system and ask ourselves, is this system more ed to generate justice, more fairness, or is it designed to create more injustice . And this is not this is not a unique phenomenon. I mean, the Ford Foundation has offices all around the world, a function of is the way, and particularly those who are privileged design society. I was in our Eastern Africa office, and people said we have ot to hire we have hired an overabundance, because the lua ethnic groups in the office feel like theyre already privileged in that society, why is it that assets, whos in power, etc. , now to many of my colleagues, theyre just all black in east africa. How hard can it be . Well, they have inook wallity too, and it is designed by the privileged ethnic groups to benefit them, and the minority ethnic tribes and groups, it could be like a conversation in harlem in 2010. I mean, the conversation is about how they are exclude and had how the privileged ethnic group at the top of the pyramid makes it hard for them to scomber have access to the economic benefits, the benefits for land, the benefits for agriculture, whatever. You go into the urban slums, and you look at whos in the slums in nairobi, and you find out their ethnic, it is often those ethnic tribes who are rural, who are minority. You go to the nicer neighborhoods and see whos living in those, this is design eople people structures that are based on historic, that are intended to reate hierarchy. That is a global phenomenon, and in the United States it has absolutely manifested in the way in which racism and White Supremacy was designed and everything around that, and it is regrettable, but it is a fact. And if that fact makes us uncomfortable, deal with that uncomfortable, the discomfort, because in order to solve it, we happened to understand how do we get it out of our system. So if im understanding correctly, youre suggesting that inequality is foundational to the construction of the nation. Its attached to the structural mechanisms that manifest in the institutions. And it either promotes or con strains justice. So lets take a look at a practical example of this. In your book, you mention worldwide improvements in birth outcomes as illustrative of how Justice Informed movements can improve social conditions and reduce inequality. The u. S. , however, has not seen similar improvements in birth outcomes, and blackwhite birth outcome differences, particularly maternal mortality, actually increase with higher income and more formal education. In fact, why do american women who have less than a High School Education have better women utcomes than black who have College Degrees . How do we zwhare sir zphell to you, what does that reflect about the u. S. Social order, particularly the state of affairs on this inequality and injustice . At t reflects the depth with race credits progress. Race, not income. Because income is not necessarily an equalizer. How is e conundrum of that you have black women th a fouryear credential, with higher income, achieving Poorer Health outcomes than white women without a fouryear degree with less income . How else can you explain that . I mean, i think the data and the research on this, the way has prevented, constrained economic gains, do not translate into better social and health outcomes. Translate into more social mobility, it does not translate into less social isolation. And so, i think we have to ask again , and that what do we do about that . Forof the real challenges to say, what do we do about that . Frustrations for , the diagnosis is not that hard. Clear. A are pretty its the, what do we do about this . And i think that is the hard work,