It was strong stuff: The State of New York was officially claiming that in taking Sackler money, arts institutions had allowed themselves to be used as lubricant in a death machine. “It’s a remarkable statement,” Benjamin Soskis, a historian of philanthropy at the Urban Institute in Washington, told me this week, “the sort of thing we heard from critics of philanthropy on the periphery of power but rarely, in recent decades, from those at the center.”

Are museums, opera houses, food pantries and other nonprofits to be held responsible for how their donors have made their money? It is a question being asked more and more as a century-old taboo shatters.

“No amount of charity in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them,” Theodore Roosevelt said after John D. Rockefeller proposed starting a foundation in 1909. It was not a lonely thought at the time.

But in the decades since, not least because of the amount of philanthropic coin that has been spent (can it still be called bribing when millions are the recipients?), touching all corners of our cultural life, attitudes have changed. And, as I found in spending the last few years reporting on nonprofits and foundations, a deeply complicit silence took hold: It was understood that you don’t challenge people on how they make their money, how they pay their taxes (or don’t), what continuing deeds they may be engaged in — so long as they “give back.”

When I speak privately with people working in nonprofits, as I often do, especially younger people, I hear this complaint again and again: They agonize about having to stay quiet not only about their donors’ membership in a class that has benefited from an age of inequality but also about specific conduct by many donors that often worsens the problems the donors and nonprofits are working to solve.