(upbeat music) - What's up, everybody?

We are here at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to speak with none other than Elizabeth Alexander, the president of Mellon Foundation.

I cannot wait for this conversation.

Come with me.

(upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) Elizabeth, thank you so much again for coming on "Flow" today, how are you?

- I am well, I'm looking forward to our conversation.

- So am I, so am I, I've been doing so much research, preparing for this interview, I feel like I already know you.

But for those who may not be as familiar with you and your work as I am, could you just share a little bit about yourself?

- Well, right now today, I am president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Mellon Foundation.

And it is a wonderful adventure doing this work, which is funding in arts, culture, humanities, libraries, archives, monuments, all through the lens of social justice.

And so I start there to say that my whole life has gotten me here, I was born in Harlem USA, I grew up in Washington, D.C. For most of my professional life, I was and am a scholar in African American studies, English PhD, a literature teacher, and a poet, a playwright, and a memoirist, and a mother of two amazing grown sons.

- Oh my goodness, how would you describe like your formative years growing up in D.C. What was that like for you?

- Yeah, well, you know, growing up with two Harlemites in another place, always thinking we were going to go back, and also having Harlem as a point of reference kind of tells you a lot.

Harlem, as they called it, "the Negro metropolis," Harlem as a place where the whole Black world was in one dynamic political complex creative space.

Harlem as a place where everyone in my family was of service in some kind of way and of service to community and of service in lots of different ways.

So I had a great uncle who was a painter, grandfather who was a community doctor, a father who was the building manager for the Harlem YMCA.

You know, so all of these ways of being in community and trying to think collectively and make resources available to more people and understanding also that healthy communities had all those pieces in them, and that culture was a part of it.

That's just very much an important thing to understand.

My father was a trained lawyer who worked for the government, as with so many other African Americans who graduated from law school, as my father did in 1958, genius though he was, the private sector was not open to him.

And so you, because of segregation, because of racism.

So you see that actually a lot of really interesting folks went into government, went into service, went into community at that time, and brought their tremendous, tremendous training to those spheres.

So that was what he did, and went to Washington to ultimately work as a lawyer and civil rights advisor for President Johnson, he first went to work for President Kennedy, but the important years were doing that civil, being a liaison with the civil rights community, bringing those people into the White House, working on the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, chairing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

So I name all of these things to say that that was why Washington and that was how he thought, again, about serving others at a time in our history that was pretty extraordinary and where people were able to believe that, however imperfectly, government was trying to move us forward.

- And sort of like thinking about this, could you describe a transformative moment, like in the earlier years of Elizabeth growing up, something that you really felt, you know, helped to shape your moral compass and sort of where we are today?

- Yeah.

You know, when all the grownups you know are trying to help Black people.

- Right.

- Sort of every day, there was, and these were very, you know, fun and cheerful and hilarious and, you know, it wasn't like every day, they put on their civil rights clothes and went out and did their civil rights thing.

But it was just very normative and again, very historical.

I mean, if you think about it, like in my lifetime, we did not have our full rights.

So, you know, the Washington, D.C. that we moved to was quite, though a predominantly Black city, quite segregated when we got there.

So I think actually seeing it as a gift to understand you are at a moment in history where, if you do the most that you can, that you can effect change, was something I took forward with me from my mother especially.

And my mother is a scholar, and my mother is someone who was just an inveterate reader.

I mean, my mother, literally, I say this, it's really true.

My mother pretty much read a book a night.

You know, we'd like have the TV on.

I love TV.

I love books too.

But she would sit in her, you know, comfy corner of the sofa and she'd read a book from beginning to end.

So that sense also of the tremendous knowledge and liberation that was in books, the learning, the importance of history and the infiniteness of books, she set that example even more than, you know, like, of course, you went to school, of course, you did your homework, of course, you tried to do your best.

But that was actually where I learned about the infinity of knowledge and, you know, came to think that it was something that should be available to everybody.

- Oh, you know, that's kind of a nice segue into Elizabeth Alexander the poet, the artist.

Would you be open to reading one of your poems for us today?

- So why did you choose this poem?

- So what really spoke to me in "Crash" that I really related to was this idea of picking up after the ruin, and kind of just thinking about the times that we're living in, I think the tools that it takes to recover are integral to this poem in itself.

That's what I took from it.

- I love that, I love that- - The listeners and watchers of this may take something else, but yes, I thought that would be inspirational for them to hear.

- Well, I love that read, and this is a poem called "Crash."

"I am the last woman off of the plane that has crashed in a cornfield near Philly, picking through hot metal for my rucksack and diaper bag.

No black box, no fuselage, just sister girl pilot wiping soot from her eyes, happy to be alive.

Her dreadlocks will hold the smoke for weeks.

All the white passengers bailed out before impact, so certain a sister couldn't navigate the crash.

Oh, gender, oh, race.

Oh, ye of little faith.

Here we are in the cornfield, bruised and dirty, but alive.

I invite sister girl pilot home for dinner at my parents' for my mother's roast chicken with gravy and rice to celebrate."

(clicking fingers) - Shout out to the sister girls out there.

- Well, and this poem came, it's from a book called "Antebellum Dream Book," which has a number of poems that began in dream space.

They're not transcribed dreams, but I've always believed in the space of our nighttime dreams as one of very unlikely juxtapositions.

Strange words, you know how in a dream, you think, why are, you know, why things are familiar and then not familiar?

Two words go together and you think, why am I thinking, you know, orange, you know, sycamore?

And it's a trick of language.

So I found that waking up from dreams is a very fertile space for making poems, but that also, you can, in the landscape of dreams, make things happen.

I have yet to fly a plane with sister girl pilot.

One time, I was going to Puerto Rico and there was a Puerto Rican pilot, I was so excited, I was beside myself.

I was, you know, hanging by the door like, hi.

And I have had on very few occasions, maybe three, and I've taken a lot of flights, white women pilots, African American pilot, male, maybe twice.

But I've never had sister girl pilot.

So I had to make that happen in my dreams, which I think is also about the importance of imagination, of freedom dreams in justice work.

Sometimes, you have to make things come true that ought to be true that aren't yet real.

And in so doing, call out the absurdity, you know, oh, ye of little faith, you don't think we're holding up the sky.

You don't think we built this country and are trying to keep this democracy together, right?

But in fact, we do.

The detail of the diaper bag, and this, you know, speaks to a time when my children were much younger but, you know, they're a year apart, and I had to be very organized.

And I just remember that sense that like, okay, here up in this diaper bag is everything that we need at a moment's notice for any eventuality that could arise, and that's a metaphor.

I think, you know, and this folds, I think, into the work that I'm doing now and in also trying to empower other people to bring them to work here is that, you know, we can do, we have so many potentials and competencies that we don't always have a chance to use because people don't have faith in our capacity and in our training and in our preparation.

So I find it very exciting here to work with so many people where we could say, okay, you ready to go?

You know like, let's do it, and I think that that metaphor begins here.

- Let's talk a little bit more about that, like thinking about the tools that it takes to think like an artist, even more specifically as a poet as you are, what is that journey like from being a Pulitzer Prize nominated poet to president of the Mellon Foundation?

- Well, I always, you know, since being a poet is, it is a calling, it is a vocation, it is a job, but it's not a remunerated job, right?

You know, I mean, you get paid to do a reading or, but you can't make a living.

I don't yet know anyone who, Langston Hughes made a living actually as a poet, but he was hustling all the time.

And to sustain it over a career is very, very difficult.

So I always knew that I would have to have a day job.

I always knew that I wanted to learn more.

So earning a PhD at a time when you could earn a PhD and get a stipend so that you didn't have to pay to earn your PhD.

You could teach in the program that I was in along the way, I always loved teaching.

And it seemed that that was a beautiful companion, the world of scholarship and African American studies, which was growing and burgeoning, and young people who cared about these things too, and institutions, which is to say universities, that cared about the arts, cared about poetry, and to whom a poet would be legible, you know, would make some sense.

So there was always that job and all of those pieces of life operating at the same time.

I think that, in the precision of language and expression, in the understanding the importance of details, the importance of small things that tell big stories, coming out of a world of creators and artists and knowing something about what that means and what the challenges are, a very, very under-resourced field, but also such a resourceful field that with a very, very little bit, poets can make it happen.

So with my work, helping to build the Cave Canem organization for African American poets, you know, we were sort of trying to figure out, okay, how can we do this?

We don't really have the money to do this.

And so Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady, I was a teacher in those beginning years, said like, "Well, maybe we won't pay you."

And I said, "That's fine, I didn't come here to get paid."

I came here to meet with the future, as it turns out, of American poetry.

- Yes.

- You know, I came because I taught at mixed institutions, which is where I've always been, lived, studied, taught, worked, all well and good, but what would Black space be like, Black creative space, where people didn't have to encounter the equivalent of, can I touch your hair, you know, in their work.

So it was, I mean, that was a formative community, but the liberation of saying, "We can do this without resources," and just keep on doing it until we figure out the next way to do it, was a very, very important lesson that I brought to philanthropy later on.

- Let's keep going down a little bit and thinking about the work here specifically at Mellon Foundation.

Like I think about Mellon Foundation's mission, right?

And in it, you see words like imagination, words like freedom, but you also think about like return on investment.

So what does a return on the investment look like in ideas and concepts like freedom and imagination?

- That's a beautiful question.

I mean, I think that, on the one hand, with the arts, you can't always measure it, but we cannot live without it.

And if you imagine a life without the, let's just stay with the literary arts for a moment, you know, without the language to give life meaning to describe who we are, to describe what we're living through, as I've often talked about, you know, to freedom, to imagination, the arts with the literal power of time travel, you know, that you will be transported either literally or even abstractly.

You know, if you walk into, I was talking with one of my sons who works in a museum today, and we were talking about going to and accessing a loved one through spending time in front of a painting that he loved and knowing that inside that painting was a world that was meaningful to the one that we loved.

So time travel, you know, what is a life?

You read a book and you're lost in that book and you're weeping.

Words, marks on a page, have made you had an involuntary human reaction that then lets you understand, ah, I don't live that way, but I have empathy for someone who lives that way, or I wanna live that way, or I wanna live in that place, or I wanna live in that time, that's what it was like?

I mean, think about, you know, infinite great books that have helped us to understand things.

So I think it really is a superpower and it's a superpower also of empathy, empathy being, of course, importantly distinct from sympathy, right, you know, and what does it mean to feel with, not to feel sorry for, to feel with.

I think that, you know, to take us to this moment in American society, how badly do we need that?

How bereft of that are we sometimes in public discourse?

And what does it mean, back to sister girl pilot, to be able to name, envision, and imagine the better and more just world that we hope for and strive for?

- So Mellon's funding priorities are really focused on long-term investments in areas such as mass incarceration, monuments, issues in higher education.

What is Mellon's approach to effectively partner with grassroots organizations who are really trying to see this change all the way through?

- Well, I think, you know, what is all the way through?

I mean, I think that we're always trying to achieve short, medium, and long-term effects, right?

So there are the goals of the project, right?

And those are ones that would be achieved in the near term.

And then there is the later on down the line when the work has had a chance to root, if you will, and perhaps the grant is over, but it's having its effect in community.

And then I think there is, again, the much longer-term work that it's harder to measure but that we know is there, you know, when, in our Monuments Project, when a monument is finally built, what does that mean to the, you know, in our Monuments Project, which is our biggest investment, a half a billion dollars.

- Oh, wow.

- Biggest investment in the history of the organization.

And when we started thinking about how stories are told in public spaces in the United States and how the complex American story is told, we realized that we didn't have enough data on, I mean, I just knew there were an awful lot of Robert E. Lee's.

- Right (laughs).

- And also that a lot of those Confederate statues gave the illusion of being history of a moment sometime in the late 1860s right after the Civil War.

But then when you realize the Confederates lost, many were stripped of their citizenships, they were traitors to the country, and that those monuments were put up, many of them, most of them in the next century as a way of, you know, enforcing and symbolizing values of white supremacy.

So I knew that much, but we needed to know, well, what are the real demographics of who is represented in public space?

And what we found is that the numbers are, you know, worse than you imagined.

You know, half of the people in American monuments owned other people.

Monuments predominantly showed white men in acts of war, usually solitary actors, right?

And that women were very, very, very infrequently portrayed as historical figures who actually have been actors and more likely to be fictional characters, Alice in Wonderland, mermaids, mythical creatures, right?

So I say that to say, how do we measure the impact of the stories of interned Japanese Americans, of Native folks having their mount stolen from them returned back to where it belonged, to a totem pole trail that tells the story of people, Native people in Alaska?

I mean, I could go on and on with the stories.

How do you measure what it means to learn in public space in the way that we all do from monuments?

And that's why we wanted to work there, because, you know, from when we're children, we're walking around and we are learning from what is ambient around us.

We're learning what's important, we're learning whether we should feel empowered or whether we should feel small.

We are learning about all of our stories and about what Americanness, such a contested thing right now and such a violently and narrowly defined by some thing right now, the question of who belongs here, who is an American, is something that we are affected by every single day.

You know, what does it mean to look like you belong here?

I mean, I was in Texas yesterday when that Supreme Court decision came down that said that, in Texas, if you look like you might have immigrated undocumented to this country, what does that even mean, right, you could be arrested.

So I think that, you know, this work has profound consequences and so to the very, very long term of the work, you know, it is vast but sometimes hard to measure.

In our work with the Mellon Mays Fellowship, which is designed to bring people into the PhD and through the PhD into professorships, people who've been underrepresented in the academy, we see those, I mean, we have people who've gone through our program who are now university presidents.

Sean Decatur, who leads the Museum of Natural History here in New York, is one of our first Mellon Mays students.

So, you know, he did the work, but he will talk about how the Mellon Mays program helped him get through the PhD with purpose and go into a life of knowledge and service and learning and teaching and educating.

So that, we can measure that.

- Yes.

Yes.

So I'm thinking a little bit around staying committed, right, to the cause, and you sort of alluded to this earlier.

But I think about, you know, foundations that fund things like, say, medical research or climate change.

- [Elizabeth] Yeah.

- These are fields where the research from before sort of, it's additive, right, like it builds upon itself and then, you know, new discoveries are made and the field keeps moving forward, more or less.

When we're thinking about social justice funding, right, some of it is so tied to, say, the political wins of change, right, and what sort of, apropos of the moment, how does Mellon stay committed to organizations, even when those political wins start to change?

- Well, I mean, we're not fickle, you know, to begin with.

And I think that also, if you look at, for example, 2020, you know, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, COVID, you know, these cataclysmic happenings in our country that garnered so much protest.

And that in the not-for-profit sector as we know occasioned a lot of organizations to have crises, to devote more funding to racial justice.

A lot of racial justice organizations received a great deal of funding.

Now, let's be clear, 2020 wasn't long ago, and a lot of that has completely dropped off, right?

- Okay.

Yes.

- And here we are now in a moment where, you know, diversity, equity, and inclusion as such is a contested value.

I mean, which is just, you know, so that's where we are from 2020.

But what I felt really good about as an organization is that we were prepared, we weren't surprised, sadly.

I mean, coming out of African American studies, you know, what do you know, you know that we are disproportionately affected.

Let's go to the medical, I mean, we're not a medical researcher, but the fact that Black and Brown people and poor people were disproportionately negatively affected by COVID is positively no surprise to someone who comes out of justice questions, a person of color, you know, I mean, surprise, surprise, right?

The fact that racial violence and state violence are still with us, you never know tragically what form or what name we will add to the litany, but you know there are names to add to the litany, right?

And you know that, as in the case of George Floyd, there will hopefully always be the Darnella Fraziers who will bear witness so that we know about this.

But we already had a justice lens, so we just kept doing what we were doing.

And I think also as an organization, as an organization that was rapidly and proactively becoming more diverse, we were in our purpose, we were in our community.

And so for us from then to now is staying the course.

I think it's too hard to go with the winds of change.

I mean, I am also very, very clear that we have to have absolute strategic, we cannot do everything.

We cannot know about everything.

So I am, I mean, it's a little hard, but I am extremely unapologetic about the fact that we don't address many of the tremendous and fundamental crises of society.

We address what we address, and we address it with, I think, you know, the best team in the land.

So I think that that's very important because there is a feel-good aspect to philanthropy if you do it.

- Yes.

- You know, because you make a difference, you have resources, you share those resources.

But we need to be focused about what it is we're trying to make happen.

- Yes, well, first, I just wanna say thank you for bringing our ancestors that, you know, we gain too soon into this conversation because that's also really important and, you know, I've been watching your career since you were at, well, Columbia and then also at Ford Foundation.

And one of the things that I've noticed that you're always very committed to is the idea of narrative change.

And, you know, what does narrative change mean for you and means for the Mellon Foundation and, you know, in this day and age?

- Well, you know, I think that I'm really interested in the narrative change that happens through culture.

So, you know, there's like narrative change the kind of technique, if you will, that I think is at its, at one end of things, it's PR.

And I don't think PR is bad, but I, and we see a lot of negative PR, you know, that gives us stereotypes of who people are.

So, you know, to talk about our initiative, Imagining Freedom, you know, right, all of the negative stereotypes about incarcerated people that, you know, they're bad people, they did bad things, they should be locked away, they should, you know, keep the rest of society safe.

Our Imagining Freedom work starts with, which I wouldn't necessarily call narrative change work, but I think that narratives change through culture.

So we start with a premise that, you know, to borrow from Bryan Stevenson.

I mean, you know, there are no bad people, you know, there are, what does he say exactly?

It's about there are bad choices or people making mistakes and that no one is the sum of the worst thing they ever did, the worst choice they ever made.

That people are not fully defined by the mistakes, even the grievous and consequential mistakes, that they have made.

And that most importantly, you cannot dehumanize people by putting them out of sight and not understanding that they are somebody's sister, brother, parent, friend, neighbor.

And so our work begins with the premise that we are one community and that there is porosity between those walls and that we are connected to each other.

I mean, the numbers of American children who have an incarcerated parent, right?

You know, so that's thing number one.

There's no out of sight, out of mind, dehumanized, over there.

There is no dehumanized to the extent that we cannot see the humanity in each other, even in the most challenging of circumstances.

And so in Imagining Freedom, thinking about the critical thinking, the knowledge, the archives, the creativity, the writing that comes out of not just people who are incarcerated but of, we say, people who are affected by the criminal legal system and by over-incarceration, because those stories are absolutely crucial to beginning to have a more fulsome picture of who we all are because we can't throw each other away.

So I think that the narrative change work of that is if you then see someone not as a caged animal who's been thrown away, but rather as a person who did or didn't make a grievous mistake and who is connected to other human beings and who, no matter what, has a story, because we all have stories, I think that there is tremendous potential for narrative change in there.

- Thank you for that and thank you too for bringing Bryan Stevenson into this conversation, like his fundamental principle of getting proximate to the person.

- Oh, yes.

Oh yes.

- Brian, if you'd like to come on the show, please do.

Please, I'm glad to have you.

I wanna- - One of our favorite grantees.

- And you know what, everything that you all did too with the Art for Justice Fund, phenomenal, and I saw the report that came out recently too sort of looking at the entire, you know, lifecycle of all those grantees.

- Yes, and that was pre, that came out of Ford work, but that was me.

- Right, right, I've been following your career.

- Yes, yes, yes.

- I guess kind of thinking about that as well, what are some of the issues, like most pressing issues in philanthropy that you feel people are either not talking about enough or not talking about at all that we should be?

- I think that, in philanthropy and across civil society, really, I think we need to be talking about the leadership crisis that we are in.

- Yes, yes, yes.

- I think that we are going through a time where women leaders and leaders of color are extremely vulnerable.

And what we are seeing is that a lot of people's tenure in their positions is not as long as we would like it to be.

And there are also a lot of people who are saying that service and public service is perhaps not for them because there is so much that it's hard to fight in the climate right now, in the fraught political environment and in a lot of the disproportionate scrutiny and, you know, attacks that are coming against so many of us.

So I think how to continue to value different perspectives around the leadership table, how to understand that sometimes, if you just look within one organization and go up the ladder, you won't necessarily find the leaders you are looking for because that ladder has not imagined us reaching the top.

So just as Darren Walker brought me from chairing an African American studies department to say, I think these skills are transferrable, I think the complex organization that's an interdisciplinary department that brings in people from, you know, a medical school, a divinity school, economics, history, art school, all of those things, trying to think about Black studies in all of its context and iterations.

He said that kind of complex thinking and leadership is exactly what we need in philanthropy.

Literally, I had never thought about philanthropy, let alone that it would be something that I might want to do, let alone that it was something that I would turn out to be good at.

And so I find it really kind of exhilarating, with so many of the folks who I've brought to work with me, that they come from, you know, I don't think that philanthropy is best served by having people stay in it forever.

I think you need to come with knowledge of fields and figure out problems with all of those diverse perspectives.

So to that, I think that we need to really, really think about who are the leadership, the people who are brought into leadership, and how do we sustain that when each of us moves on from our positions, which I think none of us should stay forever in our positions.

I think that those are resources to be steward not willy-nilly, but with people with different ways of seeing and solving problems.

- Well, first, you're not just good at what you do, you're phenomenal.

- Thank you.

- And the results speak for themselves.

- Thank you.

- And I guess as just a final question, yes, yes?

- And actually, I just wanna go back one more thing- - Yes, please.

- Because that's something I think people aren't talking about enough.

- Yes.

- Spending more of the money faster.

I think that institutions matter and building institutions and supporting institutions even in philanthropy that can go beyond one leader is obviously very, very important.

But I think that the idea of perpetuity and that building this forever thing for, you know, the zombie apocalypse, I mean, I don't know what's gonna be, you know, what we need all these billions for if we can't figure some things out now.

So I think having more flexibility, you know, not, again, to spend down endowments and close institutions, but at the same time, to think about, fundamentally, what is the problem we're trying to solve and what kinds of resources does it take with this particular leadership team and environment right now to be able to solve it?

And I felt very, very fortunate to have, you know, the backing of my board when I said, in the midst of George Floyd, in the midst of COVID, we have a responsibility, the arts and cultural sector has shut down, right?

I mean, if the financial model is, you know, people will pay to go to the theater and you're in a lockdown, there's nothing for that sector.

So we felt we had to, as the nation's largest funder in arts and culture, pour more money in that time period, it would've been irresponsible not to.

And that meant upping tremendously how much money we put out and keeping it there, and the board has been very supportive of that.

So that's another thing I think we should think about.

What are we trying to solve right now with what people?

- Thank you so much for sharing that.

Final thoughts.

Any final words of encouragement for those cultural workers, those artists, those people working in foundations to just give them a little bit of hope to maybe what the future will hold, you know, from a Mellon point of view?

- Yeah, I think to people who are culture workers and knowledge workers, we need what you have.

Honestly, I believe this, the future of humanity, the flourishing future of our communities, depends on knowledge, history, truth, and the power of art and culture.

So just like what you do is that important, you know, what you do is saving lives.

Dwayne Betts' Freedom Read Project, which is putting 500-book libraries in every single prison in this country, I believe that is life-saving work, I believe that is life-changing work.

So, you know, just to say like, we see you and we need what you support I think is the thing just to hold on to.

And that in that work and in that work that we do together, every morning, there is a story to tell of human beings doing extraordinary things despite the odds.

And that's the privilege, you know, to know that we have purpose and that we are servants and that we have a reason to do what we do.

So to remember that we're in that together.

- Wow.

Well, Elizabeth, I just wanna say thank you again for coming on.

You are a truth teller.

You are a life-saver.

And I just hope I am a worthy witness of the brilliance that is Elizabeth Alexander, so thank you again.

- Thank you, those are very kind words.

This was a wonderful conversation, thank you.

- Thank you.

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