Darren walker to do serving as president of the Ford Foundation and will be the 2020 stanford distinguished lecturer and given all of his extraordinary accomplishmentshou whoever introduces him has their work cut out for them. Born in louisiana one of the first children of the nation to benefit from the Headstart Program he went on to earn a scholarship at the university of texas austin where he would graduate with degrees in government, speech communication and lobby for pursuing a successful career as an attorneyyst and investment banker. For the past three decades, mr. Walker has been one of our nations for most philanthropic executives. s serving as chief operating officer as the Largest DevelopmentCorporation Vice president of the rockefeller foundation, cofounder and chair of thehe us Impact Investment alliance and for the past seven years as president of the Ford Foundation. He oversees an endowment of 13,000,000,000. 600 million of annual grant money. He is dedicated to tackling the most difficult issues in the world and among the most committed supporters of residents of new orleans after Hurricane Katrina and led the way to building a more just and financially Sustainable Future for the city of detroit and as president of the Ford Foundation contributing to the empowerment of tens of millions of americans across the country including here in the south in a groundbreakingre 201515 essay and more recently in his book generosity to justice he calls upon americans to rethink the way we look at the charity minded approacht to one that addresses the inequality that necessitated the charity in the first place in that spirit he has announced the Ford Foundation is giving only projects that address and a quality. Tonights introduction he will be visiting duke several times this spring working alongside with partnerships here to combat in justice in the south he is a leader of uncommon vision and purpose i am delighted to have him here please join me to welcome darren walker. [applause] good evening good people welcome again to20 the 2020 distinguished lecture i have the honor and a pleasure to share the stage with mr. Darren walker as president of the Ford Foundation in the interest of time not overwhelming you with repetition of his accomplishments to address the introductions i will take a minute before tonights event we will share the stage and directed conversation for about 35 minutes and then entertain questions from we will comeers to you if you raise your hand and we ask you first stand if you are approached and that you try your best to have a concise and wellformed questio question. Thank you in advance. As discussed while truthful and honest discussions like inequality and domination and injustice by their very nature are likely to be discomfiting for some of us we hope our exchange this evening will be in my end and hope you dont miss the Important Message associated with this discussion. If you read the book or have seen previous interviews you already know that compelling story as well as the groundbreaking work at the e. D foundationcu tonight we propose to merge these two perspectives and as someone who has emerged from the communities frequently proposed mr. Walker benefits from a unique constellation to that characterize differently from those brought to bear of philanthropic organizations and how Lessons Learned from these experiences with a vision plan with the Ford Foundation mission as well as they hold wellbeing in the world and finally the topics and questions we are discussing is collected from collaborative meetings as well as faculty at a recognition for that perspective associate with the contributions to indicate those questions that were conceived of in advancerh,. Lets talk with a big picture question you open the book with a statement written by Andrew Carnegie and in it he cites the importance to address inequality the previously referenced North Carolina championed by Terry Stanford funded by the Ford Foundation 57 years ago from your perspective what if anything about the nature of inequality and how philanthropy proposes to adjust it has changed since the current ag on carnegie operation from today . Good eveningg everyone. I feel really blessed and enormously grateful for the invitation for the Terry Sandford lecture this semester with the opportunity to come to this amazingly magical place that seems otherworldly with its beauty and its excellence you cant help but feel this is a rich place. [laughter] and it reeks of it. [laughter] and it is an interesting thing we get to in a moment but i do want to say it is just always such a warm embrace when i come to durham and thats way when my friend Joel Fleishman intervened into my life so i could be named a stanford lecturer i readily accepted i think your question of andrewew carnegie and the fund for North Carolina today is a very important one that first of all we have to acknowledge Andrew Carnegie he was a radical for his day and Andrew Carnegie believed that everyone should be literate and have a library and Library Books and he actually didnt have a problem with the quality and believed it was just a natural phenomenon and the real question was those who benefited from the natural hardsu work in their superior intelligence and all the things that brought them their wealth what do 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 ledno was also a radical idea a disruptive idea because it challenge the status quo and demanded that institutions look at the ways in which they existed and engaged with poor or low income or black communities. And we have to acknowledge well we in this country have made tremendous progress , everything has changed. And nothing has changed. We have been unable to upscale, sustained the progress, that is to my mind the greatest ngallenge because we actually generally speaking know what works. , name a social ill, a challenge that we face as a country and there is a demonstration or a series of demonstration that show was 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 controlled trials out the wall zoo to show us where it has worked. Those have been demonstration, 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 through the lawyer and to be is to demand that we look at the root causes of one the problems that we arere identifying into, what is the root cause of our inability to invest in, the things that we know that work, andrew believed in literacy, he did not question that the negro libraries that secondhand books or notebooks at all, John B Rockefeller was a radical to establish Spelman College to take what had been a Small College for negro women into believe that negro women should have a four year degree was a radical idea, now, he was not creating a Scholarship Program to said the scholarships with his daughters and there was a curricular design for those women that was different from the caligula 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 left unexamined is because privileged people do not like being made uncomfortable and to engage in a root cause interrogation makes the beneficiary of the very systems and structures that produce their advantage, it makes them vulnerable and one of the great things about privilege, ive lived with privilege and i lived without privilege, living with privileges really goodd because what privilege is supposed to value is insulation from being uncomfortable. , how many times have i m heard parents say ive worked hard so you can have the privilege that i did not have. So those things that i had to worry about you dont have to worry about, you can take for granted, that is privilege and every parent wants out for their child, particular parent who grew up hard or poor but that privilege then insulates them from actually engaging in these really difficult conversations. Thank you. It sounds like youre talking about different but perfec perst manifestations of inequality enduring inequality. So the second question is into nidthe title is inequality from justice, there is a rapidly evolving literature that 11 in the academy that addresses different types of inequality for example, economic, racial or structural, theres also ultimate definitions of the different types of inequality based on the response that you gave, can you share with us what type of inequality you believe is the root cause and how you propose to define that type of inequality. I think the root cause is racism and classism, i think w we it becomes incredibly uncomfortable, first because in this country we believe, i believe i believe in america that i am certain there is no place in the world where someone with your background or my background could have experienced in one generation the level of social and economic mobility that we have experienced. I was born in the bottom deciles and i am absolutely right in the 1 . And i am grateful for that, but that does not bind me to the reality ofhe the historic racism that is imbued and are very isfoundation. And how we in this country have that conversation where we both are comfortable with the contradictions of who we are, rather than a romanticized version, i am 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 i got some people saying on twitter, why would you be quoting that, all the races, all that stuff. Because jeffersons words were brilliant, they were absolutely brilliant. Now yes he was a hypocrite, absolutely. But we i want to hold jefferson to his word, 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 his brilliance at once because in spite of the fact that our founders were racist, they also left us the tools to fix what was wrong, so, i think where we have to begin in this country is to have inability to manage the complexity of both of the narratives in the nation where we have only had a narrative of deification. We had a narrative that is romanticized idea of america, and that romanticized idea, i hold that to, but i also hold a reality that is the lived experience, certainly of folks of color, poor white people in that to me is what is critical to our ability to engage in a think what happened in our o society today, too many of us are taking oppositional positions on the narrative continuum and some feel that it is important to protect in some feel that we have to tearte it down and i believe, we have to be able to bridge because we are like the soul any of us, if you have any religious tradition or you believe anything i grew up in the south and the baptist, we have a soul, our souls need nourishment and we if left to our own will will do things that are harmful to her soul and souls need healing, i think thats what this country needs. So how do we think about the kinds of conversations that help us heal, understand you have to be able to diagnose what we healing from, that is a part of it. D you open by referencing jefferson and the move towards a just nation. Can you give us the definition of what that would look like and how you imagine that came, what is justice look like, what is the pathway. I think p the pathway is to recognize that our democracy is defined by a set of systems, structures, cultural and social practices in those systems beginning with Economic System is designed to get us what we got. So there is no facet of our life in this country, there is no social problem that we should be surprised about the outcomes. So none of it should be surprised about the fact that we are the most overly incarcerated nation in the world on a per capita basis, that is a fact and we have designed a criminal Justice System to get us that, i am not surprised, if you look at the input and two outputs, it is actually a perfectly designed system to get us that. And so every aspect of our life, those systems in the design of them will get us more justice or less justice and i think we have to focus on every system and ask ourselves, is am system designd to generate more justice, more fairness or is it designed to create more injustice, this is not a unique phenomenon, the Foundation Offices all around the world and inequality is a function of the way societies and particularly those who are privileged designed society, i was in her office in Eastern Africa and the head of our people said we have got to hire, we have hired an overabundance of cuckoo yes because the ethnic groups in the office feel like the cuckoo yes are already a privileged enough society and why is that the asset is in power et cetera. Too many of my colleagues, they are all black and east africa, how hard can it be. , they have inequality too, it is designed by the privileged ethnic group to benefit them. In the minority ethnic tribes and groups, it can be like a conversation in harlem in 2010. The conversation is about how they are excluded and have a privileged ethnic group at the top of the pyramid makes it hard for them to enter and 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 and then you find out there ethnic, it is often both technical tribes who are rural, minority, you go to the nicer neighborhoods and see whos living in those, this is because people design structures that are based on historic that are intended to create hierarchy and that is a global phenomenon, in the United States it has absolutely manifest in the way ifin which racism and White Supremacy was designed and everything around that, it is regrettable but is a fact and if that fact makes us uncomfortab uncomfortable, deal with the uncomfortable the discomfort, in order to solve what we have to understand how to get it out of her system. If im understanding correctly, youre suggesting inequality is foundational to the construction of the nation, its attached to the structural manifesto manifest in institution and either promotes or constraints justice. Ss lets take a look at the practical example of this. In your book you mentioned worldwide improvements in birth outcomes of how justice and for movements can improve social conditions and reduce inequality. You ask however, particular Maternal Mortality increase with higher income and more formal education and in fact White American women who have less than a High School Education have better birth outcomes than black american women who have college degrees. How do we square that circle to you, what does that reflect about the social order particularly the state of affairs on the inequality and injustice. It reflects the depth at which reese correlates with progress. Race, not income because income is not necessarily an equalizer. And so the conundrum of how is it that you have black women with a fouryear credential, with higher income achieving Poor Health Outcomes than white women without a fouryear degree with less, how else can you explain that. I think the data in the research on this, the way in which racism has prevented constrained, Even Economic gains do not translate into better social and health outcomes, it does not translate into more social mobility, it does not translate into less social isolation, i think we have to ask ourselves in that again what we do about that, one of the real challenge is for white people is often who were on the journey with us is to say, what do we do about that. I think its one of the frustrations for all of us, the diagnosis is not the hard, the data is pretty clear, its the what do we do about this and i think that is the hard work, that is the work of this nation. Thank you. Can we talk about relationships between different groups who invested in offsetting these inequalities, from your perspective, what are the essential characteristics of a just or in Just Partnership between funders, universities and those individuals, families and communities were living by extension just proportionally impacted by the inequality phenomenon funded and researchers like you and i are interested in proposed to stand and offset, how do we get those perspectives and this is a Community Generated question. I think one of the real important ways that we achieve that is first by recognizing and owning our power and the power imbalance. In the resource imbalance, and how that can distort our behaviors. We in philanthropy sometimes have a false sense of humility but its a fake sense of humility and that we simply are saying were justhe here to help i think that is harmful if we are not willing because in order to get to a better relationship and engagement with community, we have to recognize the power and balance and therefore how we own that, how the way in which we engage in it