CHAPTER TWO
Arriving at the Plantation
How the design, architecture, and location of financial institutions reflect and maintain colonization
In 2005, I was finishing my masters in health care administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Most of my friends in the program were going into hospital administration—it’s what our degree was focused on, and there’s big money to make in running hospitals. I had interviewed at a few of them, like the Mayo Clinic, but I just didn’t feel right about it. All they really wanted to know was if I could figure out how to save them money: healing and helping people was not the first order of business at all. I interviewed at the consulting firm Deloitte too. None of these jobs felt like ministry, like medicine, like truly being of service. My professor told me there was an opportunity at a foundation, the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust (KBR), and that they were interested in talking to me.
“I think you should go,” he said.
Frankly, that didn’t sound appealing either. For starters, I was not interested in living in Winston-Salem. It might be North Carolina’s fourth-largest city, but that isn’t saying much. I had my sights set on a real city, which at the time meant DC or Atlanta for this country boy. Still, I dutifully drove to the foundation for my first interview. My old Honda Civic rolled onto the idyllic property—acres of manicured lawns and gardens, a main house with 22 windows flanking the front, a chapel, and a greenhouse. The property even had a name, Reynolda. I had never been to a house with a name. What kind of person names his house?
Reynolda was built by R. J. Reynolds, the tobacco tycoon. When I picture R. J., I think of the Great Gatsby as played by Leonardo DiCaprio: charming and gregarious but also entitled and clueless. R. J.’s father had been a large-scale land and slave owner, a merchant, and a tobacco farmer. By 1860, when R. J. was 10 years old, his father owned two dozen properties, more than 10,000 acres. His 59 slaves made him one of the largest slave-holders in Virginia. After the Civil War, R. J. and his siblings had to help their father adapt to a world without slave labor. African Americans—now freedmen—were still critical to the tobacco business—now as sharecroppers and tenant farmers.
In 1874, R. J. sold his shares in the family business and started his own tobacco company in Winston with his younger brother William Neal. Things really took off for them after they invented prepackaged cigarettes. Long the county’s most eligible bachelor, R. J. finally settled down, got hitched, and built the 1,000-plus acre estate, Reynolda, basically a self-contained village for Reynolds employees and their families.
During his lifetime, R. J. supported many charities: schools, churches, orphanages, and hospitals. When he passed away in 1917, he was the wealthiest person in the state by a wide margin. His wife and his children continued his philanthropy, forming several foundations with the family money. The Reynolds name is on buildings everywhere in these parts. Kate B., for whom the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust is named, was the wife of R. J.’s younger brother and business partner William Neal Reynolds.1
In other words, this was quintessential “old money,” the inherited wealth of established upper-class families, sometimes called “gentry,” or the “de facto aristocracy” because the United States isn’t supposed to have an actual aristocratic class. On top of the colonial culture that goes with old money, the Trust also reflected the culture of banking.
In 1947, the Trust was created with just under $5 million from Mrs. Reynolds’s estate put in trust at Wachovia Bank, her personal bank. By 1988, assets totaled $129 million. A year later, a New York investment banking firm successfully completed a leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, including R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, and the Trust received $100 per share of its 2.4 million shares. Literally overnight, Trust assets doubled (several folks in Winston-Salem became instant millionaires), and the Trust began to review opportunities to reduce its initial tax liability by channeling some of the gain to qualified charitable organizations. They also decided to move the staffing structure outside the bank given the drastic increase in assets. Since then, from its more than 2 million shares of R. J. Reynolds Co. stock, the Trust has grown to over $530 million in assets and uses three-fourths of the investment income collected each year to improve the health of low-income people across the state, and the other fourth “to help the poor and needy” in Winston-Salem.
The irony that wealth made from cigarettes is being used to improve health is mostly lost on the community, eager to get a piece of the pie.
Because KBR was literally born and operated from a bank, banking culture prevailed. For most of its history, the leadership of the foundation had been drawn from within Wachovia or employees who left the bank to run the external operations. The first president was at Wachovia for 28 years before joining the foundation. He started out in the traditional role of a bank trust officer. He joined the foundation two years after the buyout of RJR Nabisco. He maintained a relatively formal, impersonal culture, including strict business attire. Men wore white dress shirts, neckties, and wingtip shoes. The foundation office—specifically built to resemble the original buildings on the Reynolda property, I later learned—had white walls, and all the furniture was heavy, wooden, and antique. It felt like a different time period inside the office.
It was my first experience of how anachronistic the field of philanthropy is, how formal, how distanced from ordinary people’s lives and experiences. The atmosphere that compels you to lower your voice and speak in a whisper when you enter. The lack of warmth and personality, the uncomfortable seating, the priceless antiques you’re petrified of breaking. Obviously all this is true of most bank buildings too, not to mention investment firms: all the hard edges, polished marble and glass and metal surfaces, the divided, soundproofed offices, the mostly rectangular meeting tables.
This observation turned out to be a recurring theme in my conversations with other people of color working as funders. One colleague, an Asian American, took a job with a corporate foundation after being recruited at the age of 27. Her portfolio alone was six to eight million dollars, with the whole place dispersing $30 million a year. She remembers her first day:
I was wearing a business suit and really nice shoes, because the place was formal, business attire, very professional. I walked in and it’s on the 13th floor, overlooking the water and the bridge. A view as beautiful as the day. I had a computer and my own office. And I was just like, “Holy crap. Have I arrived?” It was so quiet. And sterile. Not a lot of color, lots of gray. I just went in quietly and sat down in my office. My glass-walled office. I was used to working in basements and vans, around trash bags and vomit. It didn’t compute.
Of course, I was also kind of digging it, my own office where I could close my door and make my phone calls. It felt very special and also very scary. I didn’t want to mess things up.2
A Latina colleague remembers her first impressions of the institution that hired her:
It’s set on a campus. There are deer hopping around. There was something about the place that makes you feel like you’re entering a mausoleum. You almost want to whisper. I was like, “What is it about this that bothers me so much?” I couldn’t place it for a long time. I think it’s about wanting to silence reality to some extent. There is something powerful about the choice to physically remove yourself from the reality of the issues that you are working on. I couldn’t name it at the moment, but it has stayed with me for a long, long time.3
You know there’s a style of architecture called “colonial,” right? It’s not even one style, it encompasses all the examples of a colonizer’s style of building and the materials used in building in the home country, transplanted to the colony, so there are French colonial houses, Dutch colonial, and Spanish colonial. Embarrassingly for Britain, if there’s no country named, a plain old colonial building can be assumed to refer to British style.
There’s no doubt: most of institutions that move and control money exhibit colonial style. This is how the separation paradigm I mentioned in Chapter 1 shows up in design and architecture.
Professional buildings intentionally feel different from spaces where people live. The cold, hard style and feel of these spaces allows the decisions made there to be impersonal and rigid, following rules rather than flexibly adapting to the complexity of human situations. Their location, architecture, and design support colonizing tactics of division, control, and exploitation, which is why I call these spaces “ivory towers.”
Colonial Social Architecture
Just as the architects who were behind the physical space made design choices to reinforce the Us vs. Them separation worldview, there were also architects of the organizational design who made choices that had serious consequences.
Organizational design determines fundamental elements like how power is held and by whom, who makes decisions and how decisions are carried out, what the relationship of the organization is to resources, and what constitutes success, effectiveness, purpose, etc.
Most organizations and institutions operating in the world today, and particularly those that handle money, reflect the design principles of the social architects of the industrial revolution and the scientific revolution. They were mostly philosophers, economists, scientists, and statesmen working in the late 1700s through the early 1900s: almost exclusively white men who privileged the rational (the mind) over all else, intoxicated with the separation paradigm. When the philanthropic and social sector were developed in the early part of the twentieth century, the design elements were the same: bureaucracy, competition, specialization, and consolidation of power and resources. Tradition and the status quo were worshipped, resulting in conformity, formality, and arrogance. In other words, separation, separation, and more separation.
“It’s not hard to map the neocolonial DNA across our sector . . . the effect of concentrating power, hyper-professionalizing in a way that creates exclusivity, co-opting existing culture, forcing assimilation, leveraging local populations to obtain resources, and reinforcing larger systems of oppression,” write Stanford scholars Jess Rimington and Joanna Levitt Cea, who are cataloging the hallmarks of “colonized organizational design” in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors.4
The social architects developed a strict hierarchy of authority, the pyramid model, in which the small number of the Us perched at the very top, holding the authority and the vision. Pyramid processes are top-down, closed-door, and expert-driven. Populating the base of the pyramid, with the greatest numbers but the least power, were the Them—the Others, basically—less human and less valuable, due to receive fewer rights and resources. In between were middlemen (only more recently also middlewomen) who implemented the vision of the top and kept the bottom aligned to that vision.
Once these kinds of organizational structures became the norm, resources could be effectively extracted and consolidated for those at the top. The extracted and consolidated wealth was guarded and preserved for the Us, and kept away from the Them, which further reinforced the division between Haves and Have Nots. A particular type of ownership model grew dominant: the publicly traded corporation, in which shares of ownership are traded in the stock market among the elite. The extent of the wealth was often hidden, especially from those at the bottom of the pyramid. The fundamental dynamic is a one-way flow of resources—whether that means money, services, or information—from those more fortunate (the Haves) to the less fortunate (Have Nots).
In these organizations, the experience of the least empowered people/roles—often relegated to less intellectual, more physical tasks—is that their time has less value and is therefore compensated with less pay. Their thoughts are also less valued, their voices discouraged. Their experience of work feels more anonymous, more interchangeable, less meaningful, than the experience at the top of the pyramid. Their individuality and personal creative expression is likely not welcome in, and possibly strictly prohibited from, the workplace.
Leadership as designed by these same architects reflected the “great man theory,” where the leader is basically the alpha male. Usually white and heterosexual, and compared with the other straight white men, he is the strongest, most educated, and most focused, ruthless and relentless in pursuing goals. He knows where to go, what to do, how to do it, and his followers understand their role simply as: follow his lead. This leadership style is rigid and transactional. The leader’s commands must be followed, otherwise the consequences are discipline and punishment, so it’s often called “command-and-control leadership.”
In their Dismantling Racism workbook, Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun identified other characteristics of white supremacy culture, including perfectionism, sense of urgency, defensiveness, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, paternalism, either/or thinking, fear of open conflict, individualism, worship of unlimited growth, objectivity, and avoidance of discomfort. They note that these “are used as norms and standards without being pro-actively named or chosen.… Organizations which unconsciously use these characteristics as their norms and standards make it difficult, if not impossible, to open the door to other cultural norms and standards. As a result, many of our organizations, while saying we want to be multicultural, really only allow other people and cultures to come in if they adapt or conform to already existing cultural norms.”5
Colonial, white supremacist organizational practices seem inevitable because they were so universally adopted over the next centuries, and they still govern the great majority of our institutions, but they were design choices. This means that other choices are available, even when they seem far-fetched. We know what spaces and organizations look like, feel like, and function like when they are inspired by the colonizers’ principles of separation, competition, and exploitation. How would they be different if they were based on principles like integration and interdependence, reciprocity and relationship?