The recent Eaton Fire that ravaged parts of Altadena and Pasadena left a trail of physical destruction, but its impact goes far beyond property damage. Even as officials announce that the wildfires in L.A. have at last been fully contained, this disaster threatens to upend decades of progress in creating a diverse, thriving community where Black families were able to overcome the extreme challenges they still face in this country toward homeownership.
This is not a success story of just homeownership, this area represented a real win in how Black people built a community where they felt safe, where legacies were seeded and the soul and vibrancy of a culture flourished. Altadena highlights the expansive ways in which Black people define and understand wealth outside of traditional definitions of retirement accounts and home equity.
Altadena has long represented an oasis for Black residents, with an impressive rate of more than 81 percent homeownership — nearly double the national average. This community, where 58 percent of residents are people of color, established a sort of “promised land” of what California — and the rest of the country — could become in terms of equity of opportunity.
It also serves as a microcosm for what we stand to lose under the second Trump administration’s attack on racial justice efforts: more than a half century of hard-won progress. In reversing the protections from discrimination in federal hiring practices in recent days, he didn’t just undo the work of the prior administration; he set the country back 60 years. When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the order that Trump has now ended, the makeup of Altadena was nearly all white. But the advent of the Civil Rights movement ushered in a tremendous shift, with the share of Black residents going from under 4 percent in 1960 to more than 30 percent four decades later.
In the wake of these compounding inequities of the decimation of one of our biggest cities’ most diverse areas and a government actively promoting racial injustice and chaos, funders must serve as a foil and address the urgent need to invest in efforts to uplift and understand Black and other invisibilized and forgotten communities’ experiences in order to create a thriving, multiracial society.
Before the Eaton Fire, Altadena was a true melting pot; with demographics that aligned closely with the general population of the country. With the lower levels of wealth and income that Black people already face in America and the anticipated rise in home insurance prices following the fire, it is reasonable to predict that Altadena’s once-diverse population will likely dwindle.
When President Trump visited Los Angeles last week to tour fire-ravaged areas, he conspicuously left out Altadena and focused on the heavily-white neighborhoods of Pacific Palisades. For the President to focus only on a wealthy and predominantly white audience is representative of his racist and anti-black worldview.
In emboldening the worst of American nature to say the quiet part out loud when it comes to discrimination, Trump is continuing a long legacy of political abandonment of Black people and the disproportionate impact our inequitable systems and structures have on them; like the fact that a lack of homeownership protections left Black women still reeling from the foreclosure crisis of the Great Recession far longer than their white counterparts.
In the face of a government that has gone from apathetic to outwardly hostile of its Black constituents, funders must understand and act on the crucial opportunity they have to fight back. Making investments in nonprofits at the intersection of racial justice and narrative change is just one way to wield this power by combatting the history revision enacted by the Trump administration’s efforts to rebrand something as core to the American ethos as civil rights to a more easily dismissed and less understood idea of DEI, as journalist and scholar Nikole Hannah-Jones has astutely pointed out.
To fight this weaponization of language, funders need to support narrative change efforts that push the public’s understanding of who is deserving of government protection and who is not. It is clear that the Trump administration is working to advance the narrative that Black people are not worthy of government investment. We need philanthropy to support organizations that are willing to speak hard truths and push out alternate inclusive narratives that humanize Black people and push back on anti-black sentiment.
In addition to narrative change, we need to ensure research on the unequal distribution of wealth, income, and power is well-resourced; efforts such as economist Michelle Holder’s work on the double gap Black women face when it comes to race and gender income disparities.
There are dire consequences to taking a “colorblind” approach to funding. Take for example our current understanding of wealth and economic precarity. Previous support for funding on racial wealth inequality has taught us that Black Americans do not necessarily build wealth in the same way as white people because wealth for white people is largely accumulated from previous generations. These generational transfers have enabled white families to finance their children’s college education, give them down payments for houses, and more generally provide them with inheritance and other gifts to seed asset accumulation.
The Black middle class — like the people in Altadena — is more fragile and lives with greater economic precarity, making them more likely to fall into a lower economic status with the onset of just one event like a fire, hurricane, or major illness in the family. We need more funding of qualitative research on these nuances, such as a variety of funders who supported the work that allowed us to collaborate on a narrative and research project on Black women’s homeownership with organizations providing cash transfers to Black women in the South. Furthermore, Black people understand and define wealth in a much more holistic manner than their white counterparts. Philanthropy must make investments in exploring the Black experience the Trump administration is dead-set on erasing, such as the work done by the The Highland Project, including a survey of 3,000 Black women showing they specifically have an expanded definition of wealth.
We need funders who are willing to stand by their commitment to equity and achieving racial justice. This will require a renewed dedication on the part of philanthropy to support those at the frontlines of the racial justice fight. According to Candid, a nonprofit that gathers data on the social sector, commitments for racial equity soared to $16.5 billion in 2020, but slipped to less than half of that a year later. While this figure remains above pre-2020 levels, it represents a significant decline that could have far-reaching consequences for communities of color.
With the cascading effects of the new administration’s attacks on equity and the fact that Black and brown communities will continue to bear the brunt of natural disasters like the Eaton Fire, now is not the time to cower. The questionable fate of Altadena serves as a stark reminder of the economic fragility most Black and brown Americans face. It underscores the critical importance of sustained, focused investment in racial justice initiatives; particularly research shedding light on the deep racial and gender inequities that persist in our economy. Philanthropy must resist the urge to retreat from these commitments and instead double down on efforts to support communities of color.
Jhumpa Bhattacharya and Anne Price are co-presidents and co-founders of The Maven Collaborative.
