Revisiting Why is Evaluation So White?
Center for Evaluation Innovation
We believe in the transformative power of evaluation and learning.
To celebrate CEI's 15th anniversary, we're spending 2024 reflecting on 15 of our most favorite pieces.
What it is
Vidhya Shanker, PhD and Carolina De La Rosa Mateo presented the webinar “Why is Evaluation So White?” to our Evaluation Roundtable network in May 2020. In the webinar and summary they developed, these evaluation scholars, activists, and organizers explore the often-overlooked dynamics of race within the field of evaluation. They analyze how whiteness has shaped evaluation’s demographics, scholarship, and practices, often sidelining critical perspectives from Indigenous, Black, and People of Color (IBPOC) and equity-oriented evaluators.
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Why it’s a favorite
This is a crucial conversation for advancing racial equity. By analyzing how liberal narratives about diversity conceal deeper inequities, Vidhya and Carolina challenge the field to reconsider how evaluation reinforces or disrupts systemic oppression. It also highlights the transformative power of IBPOC-led generative networks that elevate community knowledge and foster equity-focused innovation.
For philanthropy, this was—and continues to be—a wake-up call to rethink how foundations structure evaluation efforts and who they center in those processes and products. It pushes us to move beyond transactional diversity efforts and instead invest in systems that empower IBPOC, equity-focused evaluators to lead. Ultimately, it underscores the need for foundations to align their learning and evaluation functions with their equity commitments, creating feedback loops that dismantle rather than perpetuate inequities.
What we are taking with us into the new year
In today’s polarized political climate, the fear of engaging in racial equity work has become more pronounced. This is precisely why philanthropy must double down on its commitment to equity. We’ve learned that avoiding these conversations only perpetuates systemic inequities. As we move forward, we must be unwavering in supporting IBPOC-led initiatives and fostering environments where critical, community-driven perspectives can thrive. Philanthropy has a unique role in challenging oppressive systems and it must use its resources, influence, and power to advance genuine equity and justice, despite the prevailing political challenges.
We are not alone in this work. As I reflected on in Community in Philanthropy: What it is, why we need it, and how we can build it, being in community is vital: “If we are to meet justice while working in a field filled with wealth gathered from stolen lands and enslaved people, then we need each other to move resources to where they should go. We need to hold ourselves accountable in an environment that asks very little of us, and to support and encourage each other when our surroundings try to pull us back toward a status quo that normalizes oppressive ways of being and doing.”
An interdisciplinary, intersectional, and interdependent evaluation scholar, practitioner, organizer, and activist
2 个月Grateful, thank you! Four years later, I will just add that phenotypic markers of demographic difference are insufficient at best and a distraction at worst. As current politics show, you can have a very "diverse," "inclusive" team in terms of its representation of the fictional categories of race, gender, etc. But what perspectives do those otherized bodies bring with them? More importantly, how are the teams organized to allow those perspectives to shape practice and policy, and what is the effect of those resulting policies and practices for the vast majority of members of those groups? As with Hindu nationalists, White nationalists have actively incorporated "the other" into their ranks while mocking DEI, illustrating how DEI is never going to get us where I for one want to go (and that much I knew 4 years ago!). If there is no stratification, there can be no racial or gendered stratification. We as a field need to interrogate everything we've been taught about "race" and "gender," about "culture," about knowledge, and about individual outcomes and hierarchy. FWIW, #TheMay13Group is trying to move that unlearning along through our podcast and other projects. Please join us in doing so at www.themay13group.net!