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Identifying Talent, Institutionalizing Diversity
Race and Philanthropy in Post-Civil Rights America
By Jiannbin Lee Shiao Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-3447-X
Chapter One
Diversity, Philanthropy, and Race Relations
Bill and Melinda Gates are giving $1 billion to fund scholarships for minority college students in the hope of producing "a new generation of leaders."-Seattle Times, 16 September 1999
When the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced its Millennium Scholars Program, it articulated in one moment two of the most intriguing phenomena for Americans: affluence and race. Though some commentators disagreed with the race-consciousness of the Millennium scholarships, none suggested that Bill Gates had stolen from his predominantly White Microsoft employees and customers to give to undeserving youth of color. Though Americans might decry his company's monopolistic practices, they also admire its results and tend to attribute such success more to personal leadership than to the combined activities of the firm. Furthermore, though few Americans would require their rich to act like nobility, the media routinely praise acts of charity and philanthropy as enlightened self-interest, the American "free market" version of noblesse oblige. Still, race relations have been so influential throughout U.S. history that one might have expected the Gates announcement to rile more than a few feathers. This book is about a quiettransformation in U.S. race relations: the institutionalization of diversity policy among elite private organizations in the wake of a conservative backlash against the progress of racialized minorities.
With the scholarship initiative, Bill and Melinda Gates joined the long ranks of White philanthropists who have devoted a portion of their wealth to the education of non-Whites. In distinction from the historic philanthropists, however, the initiative targets not only African Americans but also American Indians, Alaska Natives, Asian Pacific Americans, and Hispanic Americans-a diversity of ethnoracial groups refracted from the ongoing shifts in U.S. demography. Despite the usual individualism trumpeted in news coverage of philanthropy, there were also signs that the Gates initiative was not entirely free to address social changes in whatever manner might please the Gateses. This book thus examines the emergence of diversity policy by focusing on the political and institutional realities behind the generosity of philanthropic institutions seeking to privately intervene in U.S. race relations.
The system of segregation known as Jim Crow would have provided southern Blacks with even worse schools if not for the intervention of northern philanthropists. Their critics, however, charge those philanthropists with cowardice for not confronting southern racists directly, if not also for privately covering up the systemic hypocrisy behind "separate but equal" education. In addition to evaluating the available political opportunities, philanthropy has also had to work through a preexisting institutional landscape, especially since it often has the finances but not the infrastructure to pursue its goals. Consequently, the young Gates Foundation has contracted the administration of these diverse fellowships to the over fifty-year-old United Negro College Fund, to which the Foundation left the task of convening other racialized minority organizations, including a new Asian Pacific American Advisory Committee.
Given the political and institutional worlds in and through which philanthropy makes "private policy," studies of patronage confront unique questions at a tangent to those postulated by classical theorists of "social classes, bureaucracy, ideology, and charisma" (Lagemann 1999, ix). How much freedom does government actually permit organized philanthropy to pursue unpopular causes? How unique are philanthropy's contributions if it relies on the same nongovernmental actors participating in government contracts?
These structural challenges for organized philanthropy raise parallel concerns for diversity policies, which likewise have risen from political origins, thrive in elite private institutions, and yet purport to influence U.S. society in ways beyond the capability of government. How much autonomy does diversity policy actually have from the racial politics from which it arose? Can diversity policy be more than a weak form of affirmative action? Would it survive without affirmative action mandates? How unique is the impact of diversity policy if the targeted intergroup relations are between already politically defined actors? Can diversity policy replace unequal group competition with new relationships? Would it survive if it attempted to veer from federal racial classifications? The answers lie not in a "perfect" policy model for all institutions or a "perfect" situation with visionary leadership from all groups, but rather from an examination of how the imperfect, field-specific policies arose in response to imperfect, locally specific situations. Accordingly, this book answers these questions through the story of how two philanthropic foundations arrived at diversity policy three decades after the civil rights movement.
In the middle of the twentieth century, when Edsel Ford's Foundation sponsored "desegregation experiments," segregationists boycotted Ford Motor Company products and facilitated the congressional investigation headed by Eugene Cox (D-Georgia) charging "that America's largest private philanthropic foundations had been infiltrated by communists who funded subversive activities" (Raynor 1999, 200). By the late twentieth century, however, times had changed. By then, foundations were following other notable institutions that were committing themselves to policies pursuing something called diversity. Repudiating a "one size fits all" model of American culture, many institutional fields declared instead that they would value cultural differences as central to their varied missions. Increasingly, this notion of culture has included gendered, sexualized, and other social differences, but even in its most inclusive form, Americans have understood that "diversity" refers primarily to valuing ethnoracial pluralism.
On learning of this topic, many individuals, including race and ethnicity scholars, are no doubt wondering, Why foundations? Some will assume that ethnic studies should focus on the marginalized and historically underrepresented rather than privileged groups and their elite institutions. Others will question the need for a narrow focus on foundations in race relations theory, rather than a wider focus on Whites or on the affluent classes, which are predominantly, but not exclusively, White. This chapter provides substantive and theoretical answers to these concerns, but a personal response might interest the reader and better prime her= for the sociological explanations to come. It may be surprising that the book grew out of research that began not with foundations but with a youth gang whose pan-Asian character made it an anomaly for the usually middle-class phenomenon of panethnic formation. However, these youth were in regular contact with the middle-class staff of a pan-Asian nonprofit organization, for whose afterschool program I volunteered as a tutor. When the agency later hired me as a strategic planning consultant, I discovered that the design of its new programs often depended on what the staff believed foundations would support. The usual story of the racial and ethnic formations occurring between the gang and the agency would involve the factors of ethnic group identification, shared experiences of racism, emergent collective traditions, and the state racialization of distinct class segments. What these usual understandings miss, though, are the role of foundations in providing rare venture capital for developing new racial projects and, more generally, the role of private organizations in moderating the interplay of racialized minority groups and the larger society. Rather than only dutifully mediating the interests of constituent groups to the government, these organizations also feed back and influence the groups themselves because these institutions are the means by which the groups relate to one another.
It is a mistake to characterize all race relations as equally "political" when significant aspects are quite institutional rather than exclusively subject to group solidarity or intergroup conflict. On the one hand, Americans across the political spectrum do tend to view race relations as a "struggle," whether between Whites and non-Whites, democracy and racism, or the moral majority and the special interests. Within this metaphor, racial political theory has largely adopted the Gramscian distinction between a war of maneuver and a war of position (Omi and Winant 1986, 1994)-in other words, between movements to end racism "in a single stroke" and efforts to end its effects by means of a "long march" through various societal trenches. On the other hand, the theoretical emphasis that scholars give to solidarity and conflict may be excessive if the trenches in question operate by distinct institutional logics or possess particular relationships with each other. In fact, foundations adopted diversity policy not because people of color united to demand it or because the federal government required compliance to it but for institutional reasons, namely, protecting their ongoing project investments from an increasingly hostile context or securing their historic niche within local political regimes. Similarly, racial and ethnic groups can behave institutionally rather than only politically or traditionally. Substituting "race" for "class" in the Marxist distinction between objective class membership and subjective class identity, I suggest a critical role for the emergence of non-White institutional behavior. The development from being a "race in itself" to becoming a "race for itself" may pivot on an important threshold wherein the process of collectivization requires institutionalization or the adoption of organizational forms recognizable to others outside the group. In contrast to a purely political approach to studying race relations, an institutional approach might thus view the risk of co-optation not as exogenous to non-White insurgency but as inherent to its growth and effectiveness.
I rest the arguments in this book on three years of research on the racial/ethnic priorities and debates of the San Francisco Foundation, the Cleveland Foundation, and the national philanthropic field of which they are members, from the civil rights movement to the advent of philanthropic diversity policy. Studying the period from the 1960s through the early 1990s, I interviewed forty-five foundation trustees, program officers, local political informants, and directors of grant-seeking nonprofit organizations in the two metropolitan regions of the San Francisco Bay Area and the Greater Cleveland Area and also analyzed the oral history transcripts of deceased foundation personnel. In addition, I reviewed decades of each organization's annual reports and studied the trade magazine of the Council on Foundations, currently titled Foundation News and Commentary.
The 1965 Hart-Cellar Act established immigration trends that will continue to reshape the racial and ethnic composition of U.S. society into the twenty-first century. Although diversity policies in philanthropy and other private institutions have typically addressed the new immigration, I argue that the new immigration was only one of the forces behind their advent. In fact, these organizational policies have significantly reflected previous institutional experiences with race relations. Notwithstanding the plethora of how-to manuals, workshops, and conferences on managing the new demographics of the United States, how organizations previously "did race" still shapes how they now choose to "do diversity."
Many institutional actors employed the demographic "threat" to rearticulate racial politics anew. In this chapter, I first integrate disparate discussions of diversity policy into a sociological "ideal type" with four dimensions, by which to evaluate philanthropic diversity policies. Second, I argue that the complex nature of diversity policy necessarily emerged from private, nongovernmental institutions rather than U.S. legislation and laws. Third, I explain why studies on diversity in the new millennium should attend to not only the national demographic shifts but also their uneven local impacts and institutional receptions. Last, I outline the remaining chapters that make my argument in this book and suggest an alternative chapter sequence for readers more interested in an organizational analysis than a racial and ethnic account.
The Many Faces of Diversity Policy
By the 1990s, organizational diversity became a symbolically resonant policy with which leaders of private organizations tried to resolve a host of anxieties: about the demands of African Americans, the rise of non-Black people of color, the growing visibility of class differences between and within groups, and the ascendancy of conservative political interests. Consequently, discussions of diversity have been extremely wide-ranging in subject matter, from multiculturalism in higher education to corporate diversity management to the new Asian and Latino immigration to political correctness to globalization to the new Whiteness studies to racial reparations. In outlining this chapter's first task of mapping out a sociological analysis of diversity policy, I argue that discussions of diversity policy have involved combinations of its four major aspects: (1) its path-dependence on its "older sibling" policies of affirmative action and multiculturalism; (2) its greater breadth of race relations concerns in comparison to the civil rights era's emphasis on Blacks and Whites; (3) its recombination of domestic and international intergroup relations; and (4) its return to or reinvigoration of the concern for intergroup coexistence beyond competitive group politics.
Diversity policy began as a movement to put a protective spin on affirmative action and other explicitly racial policies that were under attack by conservatives; however, it developed beyond its utilitarian origins. The effort to shield affirmative action practices from declining federal enforcement and to hide goals of equality and justice under more acceptable goals actually resulted in new organizational policies that rhetorically connected productivity and difference. In higher education especially, these new policies highlighted the importance of difference by broadening the public image of policy beneficiaries beyond African Americans to other ethnoracial groups and illuminating the historic invalidity of the melting pot ideal for immigrants of color. As these strategies succeeded in shifting policy foci from equality/justice to productivity/difference, they also opened the door to challenges articulated within the new framework of demographic justifications. Although continuing racism invalidated the melting pot, rising intermarriage and "mixed-race" identification have begun to undermine the ethnoracial categories that diversity policy inherited from affirmative action. The possibility that sociodemographic heterogeneity could be more productive than homogeneity raised the additional question of whether some heterogeneities might be more productive than others. If affirmative action were diversity policy's older sibling, their parents were arguably the civil rights struggle and the changing international context. However, though diversity policy favors its parents more equally than does its sibling, its specific combination of civil rights and immigration concerns remains quite open. Also, the failure of civil rights enforcement to change intergroup relationships ironically became an opportunity to change the historical asymmetry of so-called minority policies into symmetric intergroup relationships. Their complexity suggests that private institutions have been a briar patch for race-specific social policy.
BEYOND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND MULTICULTURAL REVISIONISM
In the 1990s, a melange of diversity policies emerged in many fields, most notably in education and business management. In higher education especially, popular commentators have alternately noted and mocked the proliferation of programs and debates, such as graduation course requirements for multicultural competence, disputes over affirmative action in admissions, the popularity of ethnic student organizations, and campus responses to hate speech. Noted less by outsiders, but equally important for college insiders, have been the issues of faculty diversity, culturally appropriate student services, preorientation programs for students of color, and various group-specific official programming such as heritage months and awareness weeks (Valverde and Castenell 1998).
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