EP4: Class Traitors: A Feminist Push for Wealth Redistribution

Feminist By Design: A Blueprint for Philanthropy

In the compelling season finale of our limited series, host Khara Jabola-Carolus invites listeners to embrace radical shifts in philanthropy to address systemic gender inequalities. We highlight the role of philanthropists who leverage their wealth to fundamentally dismantle the harmful class structures they belong to and benefit from. Featuring insights from Rachel Sherman, author of "Class Traitors," and personal stories from philanthropists Cynda Collins Arsenault, we critically examine the motivations and impacts of wealthy individuals advocating for radical systemic changes and economic equality. This powerful finale calls for a reevaluation of the role of wealth in society and encourages a collective reimagining of how philanthropy can be a tool for radical change, not just a band-aid on systemic inequalities.

Rachel Sherman is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. She is broadly interested in how and why unequal social relations are reproduced, legitimated, and contested, and in how these processes are embedded in cultural vocabularies of identity, interaction, and moral worth. Her first book, Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (University of California Press, 2007), draws primarily on participant observation research to analyze how workers, guests, and managers in these hotels make sense of and negotiate the class inequalities that mark their relationships. Her second book, Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (Princeton University Press, 2017), uses in-depth interviews to explore the lived experience of privilege among wealthy and affluent New York parents. As a 2018-2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, she conducted research for her current book project, titled Class Traitors. Here she explores the world of wealthy progressives who are challenging the unequal social systems that have enabled their wealth--analogous to, and often overlapping with, white antiracists striving to dismantle systems of white supremacy. An early essay from that work is here.

Cynda Collins Arsenault is a Co-Founder and Board Member of One Earth Future and the Arsenault Family Foundation. She is also co-founder and President of Secure World Foundation an operating foundation promoting cooperative solutions for the secure and sustainable use of outer space for the benefit of humanity. She has 45+ years of experience in non-profit work including peace and justice, criminal justice, mental health, disability rights and environmental issues. In her personal philanthropy she focuses on bringing women’s critical skills to the table for solving the difficult problems we face, with a particular focus on women, peace and security. She helped establish and works with OEF’s Our Secure Future program. She is a member of the Women's Donor Network, Women Moving Millions and The International Women’s Forum. She is the founder of Women Powering Change, an annual gathering of women working to create a better world. Collins Arsenault received her BA in Sociology and Psychology at University of California Berkeley and her MA in Education from Colorado State University.

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Calls to action/who to support:

• Patriotic Millionaires

Further reading:

• ARTICLE - Against Accumulation: Class Traitors Challenge Wealth and Worth
• ARTICLE - The Conscription of Wealth: Mass Warfare and the Demand for Progressive Taxation