In my grandparents’ southern, rural community, there was a man who frequently gave birth to the truth. Unwittingly.
He imbibed about as much as he talked, and when he talked, when he held court rather, his words were elaborate, ornate and thick with brown liquor, hard living and an accent that was an intersection of patois and antebellum.
He would tell us about the importance of school and education, even if he didn’t do much in the way of formal education. And he would tell us about the dangers of drinking “corn,” even though he always had plenty to drink.
I remember this man, whose name is important because he is an ancestor, but not important for this work, saying out of his mouth on more than one occasion that if we really want to know what is going on in our world, we had to “follow the money.”
Nine-year-old me couldn’t begin to understand what he meant. But the phrase was so peculiar to my ear, that I carried it with me like a plot device in a Hemingway novel, or old keys I was certain I’d use again. One day.
What I didn’t understand then, I understand perfectly now. It’s the money.
It is an old habit of this country to confuse charity with justice, to believe that a check drawn from the accounts of the powerful can somehow wash away the structural debts accumulated over centuries.
In recent decades, this habit has found a comfortable home within the courts of Anglo evangelicalism. We see it in the intentional seeding of Black ministries, the corporate-style financing of inner-city nonprofits, and the sudden, enthusiastic embrace of urban church planting.
On its surface, this is presented as a work of reconciliation, a holy partnership designed to lift up the broken places. But history, if it teaches us anything, warns us to look closely at the machinery behind the miracles. Power does not fund its own dismantling. I’ll say that again. Power does not fund its own dismantling.
To understand the silence that now blankets so much of modern Black civic leadership, one must understand the transactional nature of Anglo-evangelical benevolence. The capital offered to these new Black institutions is rarely unconditional. It arrives wrapped in a specific theology — one that prioritizes individual piety over systemic transformation, and personal reconciliation over political disruption.
When an Anglo mega-church or a conservative foundation finances a Black nonprofit, they are not merely purchasing brick and mortar; they are purchasing a veto over the radical imagination. They are buying the right to dictate what can be said from the pulpit, what demands can be made of the state, and where the boundaries of respectable protest begin and end.
The tragedy of this arrangement is not that the funded programs fail to do good. They often feed the hungry, tutor the young, and offer comfort to the weary. The tragedy is what happens to the leaders themselves. A leadership that depends on the favor of outside capital is a leadership that has been effectively housebroken.
That kind of leadership cannot cry out against the plunder of the municipal budget, or the violence of the carceral state, if the architects of that plunder are sitting on the board of trustees. The Black leader becomes a manager of survival rather than an agent of liberation. They are forced to speak in a sanitized language of “uplift” and “racial unity,” terms designed to soothe the conscience of the donor while leaving the underlying structures of inequality completely untouched.
This is how a community is rendered politically inert. By capturing the leadership class through the wallet, the broader evangelical apparatus ensures that the Black church —historically the incubator of our most disruptive and democratic impulses — is transformed into a franchise of a larger, conservative cultural project.
It replaces the prophetic tradition of Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells with a quietism that mistakes access for authority. In the end, the money does not bridge the chasm between the powerful and the powerless.
When we follow the money, as the brother from my grandparents’ community said, we see that it merely builds a gilded bridge, allowing a select few to cross over, provided they leave their grievances and their people behind. And this all absolutely matters, because it is happening right in our own community.
