February 17, 2005 | Read Time: 1 minute
Identifying Talent, Institutionalizing Diversity: Race and Philanthropy in Post-Civil Rights America
by Jiannbin Lee Shiao
Jiannbin Lee Shiao, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, has written a study of the role philanthropy has played in promoting diversity since the 1960s. Mr. Shiao argues that by devising policies that encourage diversity, grant-making institutions have helped to transform race relations in the United States amid a backlash against affirmative action.
The author describes how foundations “institutionalized” diversity by promoting it as a goal in their own offices and programs, and sought to enforce policies that went beyond affirmative action to focus on identifying talented people and supporting people from an array of backgrounds. Mr. Shiao examines how philanthropic organizations responded to immigration, and how they helped to advance multiculturalism by shifting their support away from historically black universities to programs designed to help all minority groups.
Drawing on three years of research conducted at the San Francisco Foundation and the Cleveland Foundation, Mr. Shiao also analyzes how philanthropy in those two cities responded to issues of diversity. He writes that the foundation in Cleveland, a city that has a smaller population of immigrants than San Francisco, was more successful in advancing diversity in part because of its commitment to fostering ties between different ethnic and racial groups in the community.
Mr. Shiao also includes a chapter on how the Ford Foundation used its experience in financing international development projects as a model for encouraging pluralism in the United States.
Publisher: Duke University Press, Box 90660, Durham, N.C. 27708-0660; http://www.dukeupress.edu; 295 pages; $84.95 cloth; $23.95 paper; ISBN 0-8223-3447-x.
