Spencer Overton on Leading a Think Tank Focused on Black America

Black-led organizations have long had a tough time raising money. They’ve scrimped along with modest budgets and small staffs. Yet in recent years, this has finally begun to change. Even before the protests in June 2020 over Geroge Floyd’s death, Black-led organizations were benefiting from an uptick in financial support from foundations and major donors that were bringing a stronger racial justice lens to their work. In the second half of 2020, that rising stream of funding has turned into a torrent of new support for Black-led groups. 

It’s anyone's guess whether that support will continue in coming years. But there is no question that today, there is a larger, stronger and better-funded infrastructure of Black-led organizations than ever before. Some of these groups are fairly new and connected to the Movement for Black Lives; others have been around for decades, like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. 

One Black-led organization that I’ve long kept an eye on is the Joint Center for Economic and Political Studies. It was founded in 1970, and for 50 years, it has been the only think tank that exclusively focuses on issues of concern to Black people. 

The Joint Center has gone through some tough times in the last decade. But lately, it’s been in a period of growth and renewal under the leadership of its president, Spencer Overton. A lawyer by training, Spencer is also a professor at GW Law School and is somebody I’ve known for many years, going back to when he was on the board of Demos, the think tank I co-founded in 2000. 

You can listen to the interview below, as well as other episodes of my podcast, Inside Change. Or you can read the transcript.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

David: Hi Spencer, thanks for coming on the show.

Spencer: David, thanks so much for having me.

David: Since George Floyd’s death, we’ve seen an unprecedented level of activism and grassroots movement building around challenges facing Black Americans. A lot of people in institutions are paying attention to these concerns like never before. What I haven’t heard much about, though, is the role of research and public policy at this moment. You lead an organization that calls itself “America’s Black think tank.” What’s the conversation among board members and staff been like since last June? And how have you navigated this moment and figured out where you all fit in?

Spencer: We were founded in 1970 to support Black elected officials as they were moving from being activists to a part of the establishment. To a certain extent, I think that there are some parallels with that time. Obviously, we’re in a completely different time, but in terms of people talking about how to convert protest into policy. How do we make real the demands that people are making to address structural racism? At the Joint Center, how can we leverage our relationships with the congressional Black caucus and other entities to really make those things real? How can we ensure that we’re connected to Black communities and ensure that they have a voice? We are very conscious about, how do we get outside of the Beltway? How do we stay connected, how are we listening to the right people? And how are we giving them a platform?

David: It’s a tricky role for think tanks. On the one hand, you have to really be focused on being in the mix with policymakers, with the legislators inside the Beltway. On the other hand, you need to be connected to people out on the ground, in communities. How do you strike that balance?

Spencer: I think that is a distinguishing factor of the Joint Center. I love our partners on so many things, whether it’s Demos, the Urban Institute, or CAP. But I do think that our direct relationships with Black communities are important.

Certainly, we believe in rigor, we believe in numbers and data. So, it’s important to pay attention to numbers, but this is also about relationships with people. I think that is something that we look at as a distinguishing factor in terms of these direct relationships with people who are in Black communities and community organizations.

David: I know the Joint Center went through some lean times. It kind of fell below the radar; its budget was down under a million dollars a year. 

Spencer: It was worse than that. There were a lot of problems, a lot of challenges there. And it’s funny, because I was just looking at Fortune 500 companies in 1970 when we were founded, one of the most popular restaurant chains was Howard Johnson. Now there’s one in the country. Borders Books was founded in 1971. And you know, those other companies are no longer with us. The Joint Center is still around, but more importantly, I’m glad that we have adapted. We’re focused on challenges today, not those of yesterday, but today, whether it is voter suppression online, or whether it is the future of work, or whether it is algorithmic bias, or the pandemic and its adverse impact on Black communities.

Certainly lean times, and there was a lot of stuff that’s not fun to deal with in terms of restructuring. But the mission was important, the organization is important and it remains relevant.

David: I wonder if you think that the challenge of funding the Joint Center during those lean years and raising money now is made more formidable by the fact that a largely white-led philanthropic sector has historically underfunded Black-led organizations. Obviously, we’re in a moment of opportunity right now for Black-led organizations, but do you feel like you have this extra burden to carry?

Spencer: There’s certainly an extra burden, but a point that I often make is that progressive philanthropy and philanthropy generally need to invest in Black institutions, as well as Black experts. The same applies to the Latinx community. We need all hands on deck in terms of systemic racism and the challenges that are there. You need strong Black institutions to be able to respond. These institutions are also important in terms of being training grounds, cultivating a class of Black leaders who may stay in that organization or they may go to other organizations. My point is that an important part of the progressive infrastructure is Black-led organizations. They’re worthy of investment. 

The same thing rings true with regard to experts. Too often in progressive circles, you get some Black folks who are doing engagement work, which is important. But in terms of policy experts, there’s an under-investment with regard to Black and Latinx experts. And we should all make a conscious decision to invest in developing that talent. Both at institutions like the Joint Center and at mainstream organizations.

David: I do think that there is a tendency among progressive funders to focus on backing frontline work. There’s been a lack of appreciation for think tanks. Conservative funders, in contrast, have been quite happy to lavish places like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute with tens of millions of dollars. As you’ve gone out there making the argument for a revived Joint Center, have you found funders to be receptive?

Spencer: I have found the funders to be receptive, but there’s really an initial question, which is having the capacity to follow up with funders. There are a number of asks that I haven’t made. For example, we just hired a vice president of development. As a professor—I’m at GW on the faculty there—I love the ideas and I’m excited about the ideas, but that’s only a part of running an organization. How do you have goals and move toward those goals and not get distracted by other things? How do you respond legitimately to things like the pandemic that come up, and how do you make the decision on when to stay true to the goals and when to revise?

Running an organization is different than just the substance of where we’re going to go in terms of the ideas. It’s fun to get in and talk about the ideas. The running of an organization is just a different animal. How do you find stellar talent? I think an appreciation of that from funders is important here in terms of how we scale and build infrastructure. As you mentioned, conservatives are very committed to building that infrastructure. There are problems that are going to occur five years from now that we can’t foresee, but if we have the infrastructure in place, we can grapple with those problems when they come along. If we don’t have the infrastructure, we’re just starting from zero.

David: You compared this moment to 1970, when the Joint Center was founded. One of the things that we all know about the civil rights movement 50 years ago is that it faded pretty quickly and was replaced by a backlash from the right. I’m wondering if you see the same risk today, that there’s been all this attention to the challenges of structural racism in U.S. society. Yet two years from now, this could fade, and corporations that have funded work in this area move on, the media moves on. Then we’re back to where we’ve been in the past, of this being a kind of second- or third-tier set of issues.

Spencer: Some of this has to do with circumstances, like George Floyd. But it also has to do with things like the hard work of tens or hundreds of thousands of young people, who have been out in the street really laying the groundwork for this movement. Some of this is within our control in terms of, what is the narrative in the country and how things are framed. 

I don’t look at this like an ocean that we just can’t control. I think that there are some things that we can do to extend the period where public attention will be on these issues. It’s incumbent upon us as leaders here to ensure that this window doesn’t close.

David: Let’s zero in on some of the research and policy work that you’re doing at the Joint Center. I know you have this Future of Work program. There is lots of talk about work and automation. You’re taking a particular lens to this, of looking at those issues particularly as they affect Black Americans. Can you talk a little bit about what that project is about and where that’s going?

Spencer: When we started looking at this about three years ago, we found people talking about the future of work, and they’d occasionally talk about economic impacts on lower-income people. There wasn’t a discussion about race and what the racial implications are. The fact that there are so many Black folks who work as cashiers or who work in industries as security guards, or drivers. In fact, we found that of the 10 most common Black jobs, about six all of them are at high risk of automation.

Those six are on the list of the 10 jobs that will displace the most Americans by 2030. There’s a large correlation there, and the remaining jobs are jobs like home healthcare work with low pay or low benefits. It’s very possible if we don’t do something, that a lot of Black folks could end up in those jobs. So how do we make those jobs better? 

When I say better, I mean better wages, better benefits. But also give people pathways to other opportunities and other professions that are higher paying. Sometimes companies say, “It’s not on us. If you just had the skills, you’d make more money, you’d be fine.” We know that’s not the only answer. There are issues like discrimination, other factors out there. The typical white household headed by someone without a high school diploma has more wealth than the typical Black household headed by someone with a college degree. It’s not just all skills.

David: I know another area that you have long worked on at the Joint Center is diversity within government, Black representation in Congress. We are in a period right now with the new presidential administration staffing up. There’s a lot of discussion about how diverse that administration will be, how representative it will be. Tell me a little bit about the Joint Center’s approach to this issue of diversity within government broadly, and then say a little bit about how you’re thinking about that within the context of the new administration.

Spencer: We have been working on this for about five years, that’s when we had our first report. Back then, we found that less than 1% of top Senate staff—staff directors on full committees, chiefs of staff, legislative directors and communications directors—were African-American, and maybe about 7% were people of color, despite the fact that people of color are about 40% of the U.S. population. We went over to the House, and interestingly, if you take out the Congressional Black Caucus and a bit of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the trends are the same.

For example, white Democrats do quite poorly, even though their districts are about 35% people of color. Only about a small percentage, like 7% if not lower, of their top staff are people of color. We’ve elevated those numbers and we’ve seen some procedural changes happen. Speaker Pelosi created a bipartisan diversity office. Senator Schumer basically created the same thing for the Democrats on the Senate side, and they release data annually about staff diversity. We’ve seen those procedural changes and we’ve also seen some uptick in the number. We are excited that there’s been a 200% increase in terms of top Black staff, but a 200% increase from less than 1% is only so much. We still have a lot of work to do as we look at a new administration. 

David: What do you see as the reason that even representatives representing Black districts would have so few Black staff and that the numbers for Congress would be so low? What’s the deeper explanation you have of why that’s been the case?

Spencer: There are a few issues that are going on. One would be that some of these members have at least more diverse staff in their field offices in the state. People are placed there, facing the public, but then people who are in Washington, D.C., who are making particular decisions, there’s not an emphasis on BIPOC staff there, they haven’t had that accountability. That is one factor. I think that people who get into hiring decisions focus on people they know, who they’re comfortable with. 

I found with people who are in elected office, you’ve got to give them a reason to focus on a problem, they’ve got a hundred problems out there. The question is, which ones are they going to focus on? How do you ensure that they recognize that this is a problem that warrants their attention? If we’re talking about people who can solve the stimulus or the pandemic, or we’re gonna do all these great things like put someone on a different planet, I’m confident that they can figure out how to diversify staff.

David: What about the deeper pipeline issues here that we hear about? I remember when I was at Demos, we thought a lot about how to get more candidates of color to apply for policy jobs. I remember meeting with a woman who ran an organization trying to get more college students of color to go to public policy master’s programs, so that those students would then go into government and go into think tanks. She said it was very hard work because a lot of these kids of color are first-generation when they’re in college. They’re under a lot of pressure from their family to go off and get jobs making good money. And public policy, think tanks, and politics is often not at the top of that list. Do you think that there’s any merit to that? How do you challenge and deal with that kind of dynamic?

Spencer: I think that’s a real factor. We can’t overlook it and we shouldn’t overlook it. This is one of the reasons I’m concerned about litmus tests, in terms of saying that folks who are coming from companies or whatever, shouldn’t be a part of a new administration. That’s a big debate in progressive circles. In terms of the particular issue you’re talking about here, one solution is doing things like offering paid internships. For a while, a lot of members of Congress didn’t have paid internships, they’d give the interns to, like, their donors’ kids.

That’s basically the pool of people who could move into staff positions, and the issue replicates itself. I do think that there are some structural factors like that. There are a number of really strong folks of color who would love to participate in government, and we’ve got to figure out a way to give them opportunities as opposed to putting up barriers to their participation.

David: In your research, what is the consequence of not having that kind of representation? You’ve talked about when you don’t have certain kinds of people in the room for important conversations, certain priorities affecting communities of color get left out. How do you document that and research it?

Spencer: We want to do some more qualitative work in this area. In the work that we have done, we have found a few different things. One has to do with the incomplete decision-making, in terms of not appreciating all of the issues.

For example, the PPP program was a response to coronavirus that left behind a number of Black businesses. It was set up to focus on mainstream businesses that bank with mainstream banks. 

I think when you have people at the table who can help center Black communities and Latinx communities, that is important. That’s one issue, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. These government jobs are really stepping stones to a number of positions of influence in our society. If people of color are underrepresented, it hurts us as a country in terms of our decision-making, but it also hurts us in these other ways, as well.

David: More broadly, how optimistic are you that the Biden administration will keep issues of racial justice front and center? That these issues will not just sort of fade away as George Floyd’s death proceeds further into the past, and that this will be an ongoing priority of the administration?

Spencer: I’m confident that will be the case, and I’m also confident in part because there are people like Mr. Clyburn and other organizations who will hold the administration accountable. I do think that there were so many African Americans who were so excited that President Obama won that maybe we weren’t as forceful in terms of what needed to be done. 

I think that there’ll probably be a different approach this time. I’m more optimistic about moving forward. 

David: Spencer, thanks for coming on the show.

Spencer: David, thank you for your work.