Where Movements go to Die

The Deradicalizing Effect of Nonprofits and NGOs

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

The 2020 uprisings against police violence appeared to signal a rupture—a long-awaited challenge to racial capitalism, state violence, and U.S. empire. Yet rather than producing structural transformation, much of that revolutionary energy was absorbed into nonprofits, NGOs, and corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. This article examines how nonprofitization and NGO-ization function as mechanisms of deradicalization, allowing states and corporations to offload responsibility, neutralize dissent, and reproduce their own legitimacy.

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About 45 minutes from where I lived at the time, a Black man was lynched in broad daylight. George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, Minnesota by police officer Derick Chauvin on May 26, 2020. In the days following the killing, protests demanding the arrest of police officers involved and in support of police and prison abolition filled the streets of Minneapolis and beyond. The air smelled of burning police precincts and rubber bullets deployed by the National Guard. Scores of people, all in COVID-19 protective wear, lined the avenues. Not coincidentally, the skeleton of a Wells Fargo branch engulfed in flames stood hollow (the bank is notorious for its nefarious involvement in housing discrimination, and its financing of illegal pipelines in indigenous territory and private prisons). The words “power to the people” filled the air as the atmosphere felt like an active war zone with its scents and sounds. This is it—my friends, myself, and many of the protestors thought. This is the revolution, the downfall of the racial capitalist system as we know it, and the moment we had all been anticipating for centuries. 

To the disappointment and detriment of marginalized people everywhere, everything but a revolution occurred. Despite global riots and mass protests throughout 2020, the following year, 2021, was one of the deadliest years in police killings. Every year since has seen an upward trend in police brutality, including incidents involving lethal force. Where did it all go wrong? And further, how did such revolutionary momentum with genuine potential for abolition and liberation manifest into lukewarm and often adversely effective Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) trainings? 

At its core, the movement was hijacked. While both major political parties have amplified racist rhetoric and policies in regards to policing before and after 2020, during the uprising, liberals and Democrats particularly capitalized on the instability during an election cycle, co-opting the movement to enrich their own political ambitions. They superficially adopted slogans like “defund the police,” or parroted the term “police reform,” only to shortly thereafter, advance budgets that funded police departments like never before. Other unsuspecting entities were also accused of co-optation. Beyond right-wing talking points, many, including activists, found the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization guilty of co-opting the movement as well; the organization’s leaders were accused of enriching themselves and depoliticizing the original demands of the protests. A registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the BLM organization was also called out for financially exploiting the families of police brutality victims it claimed to support, such as the mothers of Tamir Rice and Richard Rishner.

The 2020 uprising felt like the beginning of a revolution. Yet instead, much of that energy was redirected into nonprofits and NGOs, DEI programs, and institutional reforms that left the underlying system intact. This wasn’t an accident—it’s part of a larger pattern of how states and nonprofit institutions neutralize radical movements. There are millions of nonprofits and NGOs in the world and the rapid growth of such private enterprises comes as a consequence of neoliberalization’s rapid expansion, particularly over the past 40 to 50 years. As proxies of the state, nonprofits and NGOs too often deradicalize otherwise revolutionary movements; while some are able to develop a degree of agency to address locally pertinent issues using the state as a tool in their organizing, the warranted animosity and suspicion towards nonprofits and NGOs writ large has ushered in the expansion of mutual aid.  

Nonprofits/NGOs and the State 

As an integral part of the neoliberalization process, states defer their roles and responsibilities to the private sector, including nonprofits and NGOs, resulting in the privatization of otherwise public responsibilities and services. With the expansion of these private actors, the state subtly, or explicitly, divests from socioeconomic issues once considered its duty. Matters that once (or should have) belonged under the state’s purview are transferred to nonprofits and NGOs, who then facilitate and depoliticize formerly public services  (think Habitat for Humanity, for example, where aside from the host of controversies surrounding the organization, an NGO has taken on the state’s role of affordable housing, in turn depoliticizing the issue). In some contexts, an increase in nonprofit or NGO presence and subsequent reduction in state responsibilities leads to a total neglect of social services, such as in Haiti, where a surge in NGOs and parallel reduction in government power meant both the public and private sector abandoning essential services as basic as sanitation and garbage collection. 

States conceal their divestment from social and economic issues by purporting to care about and campaigning on such matters, despite the transferral of these responsibilities to nonprofits and NGOs. In the U.S. during the 2020 uprisings, Democrats peculiarly knelt in kente cloth and discussed “reimagining public safety.” Really, as upholders of U.S. empire and all that it entails, they had no intentions of materially addressing police brutality. Nonprofits such as the BLM organization would take care of the PR attempts to quell the matter, and the politicians would return to funding the police. As such, the BLM organization was not an ally for the cause, but instead a state actor, and a private one at that.

The Deradicalizing Effect 

In environments of pervasive liberalization, the state ultimately coerces people into abiding by particular rules to achieve any degree of material gains, in turn repressing revolutionary movements. Organizations become pressured into attaining 501c3 or NGO status and formal recognition to receive funding. The official registration process necessitates direct cooperation with the state. In registering to become a nonprofit or NGO, organizations dilute their radical visions, ultimately neutralizing revolutionary mantras. Aside from it being a right-wing talking point to accuse the BLM organization of fraud and “reverse-racisim,” the group’s accumulation of wealth and donations from multi-billion dollar corporations immediately raised valid and honest suspicion about its commitment to the abolitionist demands created during the 2020 uprising, particularly from activists and communities most affected by police brutality. 

Similarly, DEI became an industry, a business model that nefarious corporations adopted to whitewash and divert attention from their contributions to the racial capitalist system that caused George Floyd’s murder to begin with. DEI was palatable, not radical. Did Amazon, a company who provides data to police and ICE, really care about police brutality? Was a company who routinely abuses its workers, and in particular Black and brown employees, truly concerned about equity? No, but in response to the public outcries, DEI was not only a bandaid, but also profitable. The commodification of the cause and the privatization of slogans–albeit birthed out of a true hunger for abolition–diluted the movement significantly. While grassroots organizing and radical traditions continued, national momentum was stifled as a result of nonprofit co-optation, NGO-ization, and the rerouting of energy towards DEI. And it is a story as old as the liberalist framework, extending U.S. borders. 

In Trinidad, NGO-ization transformed marxist guerilla fighters of the country’s 1970s Black Power revolution into self-regulating employees. The National United Freedom Fighters (NUFF) used militant tactics in a struggle against a government that while postcolonial on paper, maintained the oppressive economic rule of the colonial epoch. After the violent dissolution of NUFF by the Trinidaian government, former fighters founded the National Rastafarian Organization (NRO) to continue the push for social and economic justice. Rooted in Rastafarianism as opposed to NUFF’s militant Marxist principles, the NRO maintained a revolutionary agenda to address the needs of the community. Where the state of Trinidad neglected its responsibilities such as education and healthcare, the NRO would step in. Central to its organizing aims, the NRO anticipated and facilitated the fall of the state and global capitalism, which they referred to as Babylon, indicating they did not originate as a politically neutral or obedient organization.

However, as local communities' needs grew in an increasingly neoliberal environment where the state rolled back, to compete with large and impeding NGOs for funding, the NRO eventually became an NGO itself, and the bureaucratic NGO registration process ultimately reconstructed their revolutionary social vision. Registration was more than just paperwork, as it invoked self-discipline and self-censorship in an environment pervasive with fear of surveillance. The registration process turned a radical organization composed of revolutionary former guerrilla fighters with radical principles into a state abiding entity, focusing less on feeding people and educating the masses, and instead shifting its attention towards state compliance.

State and Corporate Legitimization  

Although nonprofits and NGOs often have a deradicalizing effect—allowing the state to withdraw from its obligations and responsibilities—the state nonetheless retains its legitimacy by maintaining dominance over these private actors. Formally becoming an NGO or 501(c)(3) registration requires a particular involvement with and relationship to the state, ultimately recognizing the state’s authority. As aforementioned, in Trinidad, the omnipresent fear of state surveillance and repression made the NRO engage in self-discipline. Having once been labeled enemies of the state, the organization’s members internalized a fear of surveillance and a compulsion to comply with institutional rules. The transition to NGO status intensified this dynamic: registration restricted the organization’s actions to state-approved initiatives. In this way, NGO-ization functioned as a mechanism of manufactured consent, reinforcing the legitimacy of the very state that had once targeted them.

When activist organizations are absorbed into the nonprofit and NGO sector, their revolutionary aims are reshaped to comply with state rules, reproducing the state’s role and legitimacy in the process. Conditions the NRO once resisted through armed struggle were later reinforced through institutional compliance. Likewise, the U.S. empire challenged during the 2020 uprisings was ultimately stabilized through collaboration with NGOs and DEI initiatives. This process of legitimization, however, is not confined to the state. Corporations similarly cloak themselves in the language of social responsibility—adopting hollow DEI policies and donating to compliant nonprofits—to secure tax benefits and an image of altruism, even as they continue to function as primary antagonists.

The Radical Nonprofit /NGO 

So, are all nonprofits and NGOs inherently counterproductive to revolutionary movements? Despite the structural issues of NGO-ization and nonprofits, some formally registered organizations are able to advance some of their initiatives, pressure the state into meeting some of their demands, and to a degree, maintain the radical spirit in which they were founded. During the neoliberal Margaret Thatcher era of the late 20th century, Northern Irish community organizations that formally registered with the state saw their roles as rerouting state funds to local priorities, such as education, healthcare, and housing. Leaders of these groups did not become deradicalized, and were sustained dissenters of the state rather than representatives of it.

In the United States, formally recognized organizations can and do make political, social, and economic gains. Groups such as the New Economy Coalition, which works to build solidarity economies, and various 501(c)(3)s that provide material support to migrants offer clear examples of this progress. However, these advances must be measured against the broader system in which they occur. Collaboration with the same state responsible for producing oppressive conditions in the first place requires sustained critical scrutiny. In the lesser known words of MLK jr., “I fear I have integrated my people into a burning house.”

The longstanding question of working within the system versus outside of it is illustrated when articulating the ways most nonprofits and NGOs uphold the status quo, and some incrementally disband it. As hesitation and suspicion of nonprofits, NGOs, and the charity sector continue to permeate our society, many have turned to mutual aid as a means of addressing communal and individual needs. Digital organizing in particular has expanded organic and revolutionary infrastructures such as mutual aid. Long after the cameras left George Floyd Square, the autonomous zone continued to supply food and clothing to the local community. As conditions globally grow more precarious and the call for abolition is as necessary as ever, even the radical nonprofits and NGOs cannot be our only strategy moving forward, let alone the BLMs and DEIs of the world.