Philanthropy and Racism

To the Editor:

In the space of an op-ed of only 1,400 words (“Philanthropy’s Jeremiah Wright Problem,” May 15), William Schambra has managed to throw mud at the leading Democratic candidate for president, several respected foundations, and organizations that have established track records of working for equality of opportunity.

Mr. Schambra’s primary technique is the use of guilt by association, so shamelessly as to qualify him for an award if one is established in the name of the late senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

So in the case of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, an organization on whose board I serve, he charges that the views put forward by the author of an opinion piece published in 2002 were written “for” the organization when the piece was only one of a number of articles of widely divergent views published in the council’s periodic journal.

So, too, the Ford Foundation is taxed with the views of a “philanthropist quoted in” one of its publications. Mr. Schambra also charges that unnamed “structural-racism theorists agreed with Pastor Wright.” As to Barack Obama, “he seized the Jeremiah Wright controversy as an opportunity to explain his broader view of race” and “ultimately decided” that Rev. Wright’s language was harmful, a not-so-veiled suggestion that Obama was simply playing politics with the issue.

As to the substance of Mr. Schambra’s piece, there is none. He uses the words “structural racism” and “social inclusion” as epithets, never explaining what they mean or why he regards them as so repugnant. If Mr. Schambra lives in a world where racial discrimination has disappeared and institutions are not responsible for denials of equal opportunity, he is certainly entitled to his illusions. Most of the rest of us do not live in such a world.

I have been a civil-rights lawyer for 52 years. I helped the State Department write the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in the 1960s. It took an unconscionably long time for the United States to ratify the treaty. But the United States has contributed much to other nations in developing such concepts as affirmative action and the collection of racial data to help identify disparities.

But the effort to advance social justice and equal opportunity continues and will not be daunted by invective and bigotry from any side.

William L. Taylor
Chairman
Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights
Washington

To the Editor:

Structural-racism training programs have helped hundreds of nonprofit organizations and community foundations, many of which are administered or operated by white people but primarily serve people of color, learn how to orient their theories of change from charity to empowerment through the simple act of analyzing whether their work is passively advancing “invisible” racism or actively dismantling it.

I believe philanthropic institutions have not done enough to help the nonprofit sector understand the complex ways that racism plays out in our work and our lives on a day-to-day basis.

For three years the Atlantic Philanthropies, where I work, have supported the Aspen Institute’s Roundtable on Community Change to offer structural-racism seminars to our Children and Youth and Aging grantees in the United States and Bermuda.

The seminars are not mandated, and participants are not awarded any credit or consequent grants for having attended them. Yet the seminars are incredibly successful, the demand far outweighs the supply, and the outcomes are many-layered and very impressive.

The Roundtable staff is steeped in the subject and has a special talent for convening diverse individuals to discuss race in honest and productive ways. And they’re not just committed to explaining the dominant construction of race as a black/white phenomenon. They are able to facilitate nuanced discussions that result in a greater understanding of the ways in which Latinos, Chicanos, Mestizos, Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, and others are woven into the racial narrative.

The seminar facilitators also layer gender, language, and socioeconomic analyses onto the discussion, which leaves the seminar participants with an even greater appreciation of the interplay and interdependence of these issues.

Seminar participants acquire an understanding of the problem with structural racism, and gain the vocabulary and courage to communicate and apply this knowledge to their organizations. Some participants have committed to increasing the diversity of their executive staff and boards to include a set of voices and faces that genuinely represents the constituents. Others have developed and implemented an organizationwide racial-equity agenda. Many participants say they experience a deep, personal transformation, in which a newfound appreciation of systemic racial inequity provides a wholly new perspective on their work and interactions with co-workers and clients.

What do we intend by giving money to organizations that advance a structural-racism critique?

First, we intend to help our grantees understand their task on a deeper level. Second, we intend to offer more individuals, organizations, and communities the tools to achieve this task.

And finally, we intend to advance the task as aggressively as possible to achieve racial equity and make long-overdue progress for the poorest communities of color.

Nicole Gallant
Program Executive
Atlantic Philanthropies
New York

To the Editor:

The letters to the editor in the May 29 issue of The Chronicle taking issue with my article, “Philanthropy’s Jeremiah Wright Problem,” accuse me of sullying the patriotism of those who adopt the structural-racism critique of America.

In fact, the harshest treatment of that kind of critique (and the only one to raise the question of patriotism) came not from me, but from Sen. Barack Obama. I quoted his “A More Perfect Union” speech from March 18, in which he argued that Pastor Wright’s views, so similar to the structural-racism framework, “denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation.”

Now, Senator Obama’s effort to distance himself from his old pastor might be dismissed as mere politics.

But many progressive foundations today, especially those that fund structural-racism analysis, want above all to become political players in their own right, the better to reform deeply discriminatory American institutions. Clearly, the signatories of the letter from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy — while accusing me of “gratuitously politicizing” structural racism nonetheless themselves urge more political engagement around that problem.

They need, then, to ask themselves: How politically persuasive can a structural-racism critique be, if even Senator Obama, hardly a benighted conservative, was compelled to denounce it vigorously as a denigration of the greatness and goodness of the nation?

Senator Obama’s extraordinary political appeal presents a broader dilemma for structural-racism theorists.

As the Structural Racism Caucus noted in its letter to the editor, the “historic possibility of an African-American candidate becoming our next president” may lead some foolishly to “take comfort in the idea that we have achieved a post-racial, ‘colorblind’ society.”

But the caucus is confident that the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors “know enough to avoid this false assumption.” After all, racism in its most profound, structural form has never been seriously challenged, much less significantly reduced.

Senator Obama seems to encourage, indeed, to embody a different view.

In his March 18 speech, he noted that Pastor Wright’s “profound mistake” was to speak “as if our society was static; as if no progress had been made; as if this country, a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land¿is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.”

But that’s exactly the way the structural-racism theorists speak as well. No wonder they don’t want us to take too seriously Senator Obama’s argument that electing him would be a significant step toward a new era of transracial national unity.

It may be, however, that structural-racism theory makes up in analytical power what it lacks in political appeal. Without emphasizing “the historical and ongoing ways in which racial dynamics produce inequities between whites and people of color, the social-justice and antipoverty field risks pursuing strategies that are misguided, incomplete, or inappropriate to the field,” notes the Aspen Institute’s “Structural Racism and Community Building.” Indeed, according to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy letter, approaches that “are not racially specific are futile.”

The Structural Racism Caucus’s letter presents the subprime-mortgage crisis as “an excellent example of how the lens of structural racism” can lead to a superior understanding of public problems.

Here are the remedies that flow from structural-racism analysis: “greater regulation of mortgage finance,” “financial education in poor minority communities,” and “municipal efforts to manage abandoned foreclosed properties.”

But couldn’t we have reached exactly the same proposals by starting from the premise that the subprime-mortgage crisis disproportionately involves low-income communities of all sorts, regardless of color? Does this example explain the need to throw all those sharp elbows at other progressive modes of analysis that may not put race at the center of the picture?

Finally, a question for foundations like Ford, Rockefeller, and the others that provide funding for the structural-racism critique: What happens to you when the question is raised about structural racism within philanthropy, as it has been by the backers of AB 624? (AB 624 is the proposed California law that would compel the state’s largest foundations to collect and publish data about the race and gender composition of its boards and staffs and those of its grantees, in order to help gauge progress against racism.)

One might have supposed that the funders of the structural-racism critique would have thrown their considerable resources and prestige into a highly visible, concerted national campaign to pass such a law, not only in Sacramento but in Washington as well. To my knowledge, there has been no such campaign. Apparently their awareness of hypocrisy, so acutely attuned when it comes to the nation’s treatment of race, fails them when attention turns to their own behavior.

William A. Schambra
Director
Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal
Hudson Institute
Washington