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 weve made phenomenal progress in this country at reducing the disparities at demonstrating the potential for us to see the benefits of better integrated schools, employment that works for more people, weve 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 bill, a challenge that we face as a country and theres a demonstration or series of demonstrations that show us what works, name something, how to increase student achievement for young black boys. We know how to do that in this country and there have been mind controlled trials 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, to demand that we look at the root causes of one, the problems we are identifying and 2, what is the root cause of our inability to invest in the things we know works . Andrew carnegie believed in literacy but he didnt question that a Negro Library got secondhand books or notebooks 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 negro women should have a four year degree was a radical idea. He wasnt creating scholarship programs to send him to rack but his daughters and there was a curriculum designed for those women that was different from the curriculum designed for his daughters but he believed they should be educated. But the root causes were left unexamined and part of the reason they were left unexamined is because privileged people do not like being made uncomfortable and to engage in a root cause interrogation makes the beneficiaries of the very systems and structures that produce their advantage, it makes them vulnerable. One of the great things about privilege because i have lived with privilege and lived without privilege, living with privilege is really good because what privilege is supposed to buy you is insulation from being uncomfortable. How many times have i heard parents say i worked hard so you could have the privilege that i didnt have so that those things 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 poor. But that privilege then insulates them from actually engaging in these difficult conversations. It sounds like you are talking about different but persistent ratifications of inequality so the second question from inequality to justice there is a rapidly evolving body of literature that addresses different types of inequality, racial, structural definitions of different types of inequality based on the response but 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. The root cause is racism and classism, and it becomes incredibly uncomfortable because in this country we believe, i believe, i believe in america. 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 we have experienced. I was born at the bottom and i am in the one . I am grateful for that but that does not blindly to the reality of the historic racism that is imbued in our very foundation. And how we in this country have that conversation where we are comfortable with the contradictions of who we are rather than a romanticized version. I love Thomas Jefferson and i get held because i opened my annual letter a couple years ago with a quote from jefferson to his friend Samuel Dupont in 1816 and he said the work of america is to build a just nation. I got some people saying on twitter why to be quoting that horrible racist, Sally Hemmings all that stuff, right . Because jeffersons words were brilliant. Were absolutely brilliant. Yes, he was a hypocrite, absolutely. But we, i want to hold jefferson to his words and so i use his words to demanded of him that he deliver on those words in spite of his hypocrisy. And to hold his hypocrisy and is brilliance at once because in spite of the fact that our founders were racists they also left us to fix what was wrong and so i think where we have to begin in this country is to have the ability to manage the complexity of both of those narratives, and a nation where we have only had a narrative of deification, we have had a narrative that is this romanticized idea of america and that romanticized idea, i hold that too, but i also hold a reality that is the lived experience certainly of folks of color, and poor white people and that to me is what is critical to our ability to engage in what has happened in our society today, too many of us are taking oppositional positions on the narrative continuum and some feel that it is important to protect and some feel that we have to tear it down and i believe that we have to be able to bridge, because we are like the soul of any of us. If you have any religious tradition or believe anything, i grew up in the south, baptist, we have a soul but our souls need nourishment and we, if left to our own will, will do things that are harmful to our soul and souls need healing and i think that is what this country needs and how do you think about the kinds of conversations that help us heal and understand youve got to diagnose what we are healing from. That is a part of it. Moving toward jefferson and the just nation, could you tell us what that would look like . What is justice like . What is the path . 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 the Economic System is designed to get us what we got. So there is no facet of our life in this country, no social problem we should be surprised about the outcome. 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. That is a fact and we have designed a criminal Justice System to get us that. Im not surprised. If you look at the inputs and the outputs, it is a perfectly designed system to get us that and 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 on every system and ask ourselves is this system designed to generate more justice, more fairness, or is it designed to create more injustice and this is not this is not a unique phenomenon. The Ford Foundation has offices all around the world and inequality is a function of the ways societies and particularly those who are privileged design society. I was in our office in Eastern Africa and the head of people and cultures said weve got to hire, we have hired an overabundance because the law ethnic groups in the office feel that is already printed in that society. Now too many of my colleagues, how hard can it be . They have inequality too and it is designed by the privileged ethnic groups to benefit them, the minority ethnic tribes and groups, it could be like a conversation in harlem in 2010. The conversation is about how they are excluded and how the privileged ethnic group at the top of the pyramid makes it hard for them to enter and have access to the economic benefits, benefits for land, benefits for agriculture, whatever. You go into the urban slums and look who is in the slums in nairobi and find out is often those ethnic tribes who are rural, a minority, you go to the other neighborhoods, this is because people design structures that are based on historic that are intended to create hierarchies and that is a global phenomenon and in the united states, it is absolutely manifested in the way in which racism and White Supremacy was designed, and everything around that. 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 that we have to understand how do we get it out of our system. You are suggesting that inequality is foundation to the construction of the nation, is attached to the structural mechanisms manifest in the institutions at either promotes or constrains justice so lets take a look at a practical example. In your book you mention worldwide improvements in birth outcomes as illustrative of how justice informs movements that improve conditions and reduce inequality. The us is not seen similar improvements in birth outcomes and black white outcome differences particularly Maternal Mortality actually increased with higher income the more formal education and White American women who have less than a High School Education have better birth outcomes than black american women who have college degrees. So how do we square that circle . To you, what does that reflect about the us social order and particularly the state of affairs on this inequality and injustice . It reflects the depth at which race 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 the four your credential, with higher income, achieving Poorer Health outcomes than white women without a four year degree, with less income. 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 and so i think we need to ask ourselves, that again is really, what do we do about that . One of the real challenges, one of the real challenges for white people is often on the journey with us to say what do we do about that . It is one of the frustrations for all of us, the diagnosis is not that hard. The data are pretty clear, it is 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 some about relationships between different groups who are invested in offsetting these inequalities, from your perspective what are the core characteristics of a Just Partnership between funders, universities and those individuals, families, communities, disproportionately impacted by