. @mackenziescott may be making the best of a bad situation. But let’s be clear. Much of the money she is donating should have been paid as wages and taxes. So it is Amazon workers and U.S. taxpayers, in a sense, who are funding these causes. https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/15/business/mackenzie-scott-charity-donations-trnd/index.html

Accordingly, I’d propose that any naming rights associated with these gifts to HBCUs, any plaques and signs, be given to Black workers at Amazon who would have had this money instead of her in a fairer world. Especially Black workers who tried in vain to organize and unionize.

The risk of Scott’s gift is that the real good it will do in people’s lives will be overshadowed by another effect it has: legitimating the system that makes lives harder on an infinitely greater scale.

Just witness all the positive coverage. Good plute deeds aid plutocracy.

Even in some of the replies to my original tweet, you see this dynamic.

Leave her alone! She’s doing the right thing! These are good causes!

And from there it’s a short stroll to: Without billionaire benefactors like her, these causes wouldn’t have these resources.

But...

But...if more of that money had been paid in taxes, more public money would be available for HBCUs.

If more of that money was paid in wages, HBCU graduates would encounter a better job market.

And then multiply this by every great fortune in the country, not just one.

What I’ve tried to show in my work is that gifts like these have at least two societal effects, not just one.

The obvious one is the lives they are intended to help. Scott will achieve that, and her choices are worthy.

The less-obvious effect is on the larger system...

In this category of systemic effects, Scott’s gift may: Buff and polish the idea of plutocratic saviors; douse some amount of anger about Amazon; give her more power over the American education system; and persuade some people that extreme inequity is fine if people give back.

So I am not denying the real lives that will benefit. I am suggesting that this other set of effects may ultimately have more negative impact on more lives than the good effects will have.

To oversimplify slightly, the risk of this kind of philanthropic activity is that it funnels the equivalent of a few thousand dollars’ worth of resources to a student, while also serving to prop up and prolong an economic system that makes that graduate’s life harder for decades.

A great many mega-philanthropic gifts help a modest number of people trying to survive plutocracy while also serving to shore up plutocracy for thousands of times as many people.