Race, Power, and Philanthropy: Exploring the Role of Race in Non-governmental Socioeconomic Interventions: Insights from Makhanda, South Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT Non-governmental socioeconomic intervention exists within a framework and history of racialised proximity to power and privilege. The arrangements of race and power in and beyond the sector along with the inequitable distribution of material and nonmaterial resources have therefore been used to affirm the sector’s affinity to colonial relations of exploitation and racism. This paper recounts the genealogy of this affinity and outlines the ways in which current arrangements of poverty, power and non-state mediation interpolate with the historical arrangements of race and power through non-state interventions. Data collected with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in Makhanda in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province inform the proposition that race and power remain central features of socioeconomic intervention in part, through organisational structures, traditions of engagement with communities, dominant explications of poverty and depictions of “the poor”. The paper concludes that the world and work of NGOs—despite dominant assertions of its independence and neutrality—is inextricably bound to its historical and sociopolitical context and is thus a site wherein race and power are not only present but at play.