Dissertation

Genesis of the Dissertation

While pursuing a Master’s degree in Sociology at the University of Chicago, I wrote a thesis on collective efficacy and neighborhood change. Additionally, I worked with the University of Chicago Southside Health Initiative on improving health outcomes of people of color. Both of these experiences brought me into direct contact with Black-led nonprofit organizations. I was fascinated by their work and motivated to think more about them in the future. These experiences were the catalyst for my dissertation.

Dissertation (Cliff Notes Version)

My dissertation is a comparison study that examines how Black-led Organizations (BLOs) navigate what I term the racialized nonprofit industrial complex – a sophisticated liminal-level social structure in which race influences the activities practices, and outcomes of BLOs (and others) through a complex underlying schema with the aim of undermining their agency. The comparison cases are Madison, WI and Montgomery, AL – chosen primarily because I can hold many things constant (e.g. state capital, total population, etc.) and examine how contrasting racial demographics might impact the racialized nonprofit industrial complex.

Contribution

There are three primarily contributions of this dissertation: (1) I develop a novel theory, the racialized nonprofit industrial complex, that advances a new way of understanding organizational outcomes within the sector. (2) I show that place matters for understanding the impact of race in the sector. (3) By focusing on cases outside of the sociological canon, Madison, WI and Montgomery, AL, I embark on a new empirical frontier that challenges longstanding theoretical and empirical views about how we understand the experiences of historically excluded individuals within cities.

Abstract (Academic Version)

The nonprofit sector has become known as a public good where organizations are created to address various kinds of social problems. As organizations carry out diverse missions, they are expected to encounter a standard set of challenges – regardless of who leads them. Despite extensive work on the intersection of race and nonprofits, the sector, itself, remains understood as a race-neutral space. This dissertation develops a novel theoretical framework, the racialized nonprofit industrial complex (RNIC), and shows how racial stratification shapes the experiences of Black-led organizations (BLOs) in two medium-sized cities that differ in their racial demography and structure. 

Using data from a four-year, two-city qualitative study, I ask three questions: (1) how and in what ways is the nonprofit sector, itself, racialized; (2) how does racialization influence the behavior, decision-making, and activities of BLOs in the nonprofit sector and does it vary by place; and (3) What strategies do Black-led organizations use in response to racialization?

Chapter 1 discusses extraordinarily unusual racial disparities across two unlikely cities and situates BLOs as playing a central role in addressing these issues on behalf of a predominately Black client base while also facing a unique set of challenges in carrying out their mission. Chapter 2 develops a novel theory of racialization in the sector that I call the racialized nonprofit industrial complex (RNIC). I define the RNIC as a racialized social system where Black-led and white-led organizations are placed into separate categories that differentially shape how they function and operate within the sector. Chapter 3 introduces the concept of middle cities where we might expect to find an RNIC and offers a justification for the two empirical cases: Madison, Wisconsin, and Montgomery, Alabama. Chapter 4 presents data describing how a small number of BLOs are impacted by racialization in the overwhelmingly white Madison sector and how they use strategies that reflect their unique relationship to clients to successfully navigate the city’s RNIC. Chapter 5 presents data describing how a critical mass of BLOs are impacted by racialization within a white-dominated sector in a predominantly Black city and how they lean heavily on a civil rights movement ethic to challenge and navigate the city’s RNIC. Chapter 6 offers a conclusion that contrasts the cases to show how the RNIC differs by place and how this impacts the capacity of BLOs to successfully navigate the system. This contrast serves as the basis for a discussion about how we might arrive at a more equitable sector where we radically redefine our expectations about what it means to be a successful organization – expectations often rooted in whiteness. This will allow us to move beyond merely proposing best practices aimed at situational equity to, instead, recognize BLOs as legitimate actors who have agency to best meet the needs of clients with whom they share a unique connection.