Critics call philanthropy aimed at Black institutions “ideological excess.”
MacKenzie Scott and Michael Bloomberg are saying something simpler, and far more empirical: systems don’t self-correct.
The data proves them right.
Scott: Inequality Is Manufactured, and Requires Deliberate Counteraction
MacKenzie Scott has been unusually clear:
“The systems surrounding us have created and continue to exacerbate inequities, especially for people of color.”
(Source: MacKenzie Scott, Medium essays on philanthropic rationale, 2019–2021)
Her giving matches that analysis.
Verifiable scale:
- Since 2019, Scott has donated over $17 billion to more than 2,300 organizations through unrestricted grants (Yield Giving disclosures; AP, Inside Higher Ed)
- Direct gifts to HBCUs total hundreds of millions: Howard ($40M in 2020; $80M in 2024–25), Prairie View A&M ($63M), Morgan State ($40M+), UNCF ($70M+) (AP News; Inside Higher Ed; university announcements)
Scott’s thesis is structural: inequality was built deliberately, so undoing it requires deliberate intervention. Neutrality isn’t a solution. It's a stabilizer of the status quo.
This is testable.
What Happened When Institutions Stopped Looking
After the Supreme Court’s SFFA decision in 2023 banning race-conscious admissions, enrollment patterns snapped back toward historical defaults:
- MIT: Black enrollment dropped ~15% → ~5% in one year
- Yale: Black and Latino enrollment fell sharply while White and Asian shares rose
- Stanford (Class of 2029): Black students 7% → 5.8%, Hispanic 15% → 12.4%; White and Asian enrollment reached a three-year high
(Sources: Stanford Daily; university disclosures; Stacker News analysis)
Remove race from consideration in a structurally unequal system, and admissions default to proxies for prior access: SAT scores (income-correlated), AP availability (school-funding linked), legacy admissions (explicitly rewarding historical exclusion).
That isn’t merit neutrality. It’s hierarchy restoration.
Bloomberg: Neutral Systems Produce Unequal Outcomes
Michael Bloomberg makes the same argument without euphemism:
“When we leave things to the market, the result is often greater inequality. If we want different outcomes, we have to act intentionally.”
His philanthropy follows that logic.
Verifiable scale:
- Bloomberg Philanthropies has committed over $17 billion globally
- Education-focused giving exceeds $4 billion
- 2024–2025 alone: $600M to four historically Black medical schools, $20M to launch charter schools embedded in HBCUs as a K–12 → HBCU → professional pipeline for Black students
Bloomberg is doing in education what Scott is doing in higher ed: intervening upstream, before “neutral” systems quietly restore old outcomes.
Merrill and Kemper Understood This in 1963
In 1962, John M. Kemper said Phillips Academy Andover should recruit talented students “of all races, religions, and incomes.” Charles E. Merrill Jr. founded Commonwealth School in 1957 explicitly to serve underserved communities, particularly African Americans.
In 1963, they co-founded A Better Chance (ABC) with 23 prep-school headmasters for one reason: elite institutions were gatekeepers, and pretending to be neutral would leave exclusion intact.
Verifiable impact:
- First ABC cohort placed ~55 scholars in 1964
- Over six decades, ABC has served 16,000+ alumni who became leaders in law, medicine, finance, academia, and public service
(Source: A Better Chance historical materials; [Stacker News analysis] #1289513)
They didn’t say “let the system work.” They said the pipeline was built, doing nothing is a choice, and you have to go looking for talent where the system was designed not to look.
Standards weren’t lowered. Barriers were removed.
The Labor Market Confirms the Same Mechanism
BLS microdata from 2025 shows the same pattern outside education:
- ~600,000 Black women sidelined from full economic participation
- Unemployment rising 5.4% → ~7.5% (≈10% including labor-force exits)
- Losses concentrated in government, finance, professional services
- Gains only in lower-wage sectors: healthcare support, food service
(Source: BLS CPS microdata; Stacker News labor analysis)
When institutions shrink or “normalize,” inequality widens, not because of intent, but because access was never equal at baseline.
Forbes Is the Micro Version—Especially for Black Workers
The Forbes union pay-gap study makes the mechanism visible inside one firm:
- Workforce down 25%
- Median salary frozen at $80,000
- 56% saw real pay cuts
- Average pay: White ~$95k, Black ~$71k
(Source: NY Guild / Forbes union salary study)
No conspiracy required. This is what passive systems do under stress, which is exactly what Scott means when she says systems continue to exacerbate inequity even when no one claims to mean to.
The Conclusion They All Share
Gatekeeping systems do not become fair by pretending history didn’t happen.
Race-neutral policy in a racially stratified system doesn’t create equality. It locks in the last unfair equilibrium and relabels it justice.
Scott didn’t invent this logic. Bloomberg didn’t invent it. Merrill and Kemper proved it. The post-SFFA data, the labor data, and the Forbes pay data simply confirm it.
The pipeline runs both ways.
You can build for inclusion, deliberately, or preserve exclusion while calling it fairness.
But you cannot do nothing and call it neutral.
The only real question left is the one Scott and Bloomberg already answered with their checkbooks:
Which pipeline are we choosing to fund?