White supremacy continues to be perpetuated in the U.S. because the knowledge producers that are amplified are predominantly White. In this episode of I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY, I talk with Dr. Maribel Morey, a historian of U.S. philanthropy, the social sciences, and racial equality. She is the founding executive director of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences, a nonprofit that is amplifying and centering the work of BIPOC/Global Majority scholars in the social sciences to improve the integrity of these fields and to build more inclusive national and international political economies. 

After her undergrad, law, grad, and Ph.D. studies and eventually reaching faculty status, Maribel realized, “It doesn't matter how brilliant my ideas are, if a man had those same ideas and translated those ideas into his own networks, he might be cited more and celebrated more. So, how do ideas work depending on how ideas are transported, the body, the person, and their own network? And so, I became very interested in that space, in the politics and the power structures of how ideas are created, and which ones and why ultimately went in the marketplace of ideas.”

Maribel had a choice, either assimilate to the power structure as it's designed or push back and disrupt it so it's equitable. She decided to launch the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences (https://www.miamisocialsciences.org) to counter the dominance of ideas of certain groups over others based on the United States’ long history of White Anglo-American supremacy at the expense of everyone else. “At the core, is anti-Black discrimination. So, we all have to come together as a Global Majority to amplify all of us, because those structures are affecting all of us. We have to collaborate in the knowledge production, which influences action, and collaborative action.” 

Maribel’s debut book, “White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s An American Dilemma and the Making of a White World Order”, reveals it was commissioned by Carnegie Corporation president Frederick Keppel, and researched and written by Swedish economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, with the intent of solidifying white rule over Black people in the United States. She shares that Philanthropy as we know it is not designed to be revolutionary or to bring forth real change. “The elite foundations in the U.S. are comfortable with the status quo so they will continue to fund the knowledge producers in elite universities over and over again,” she explains.