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Kellogg's Bet on Racial Healing

Ohanian Comment: My first reaction when reading Thernstrom's screed was that I'd rather see the Kellogg Foundation put its money and muscle behind something like a campaign for a living wage--for everybody. But at best, I could see that Thernstrom is being totally disingenuous here. At worst? You decide.

My worry about efforts such as this is that middle class advisors make a good buck and the poor stay poor. I learned this eons ago when I worked for the Neighborhood Youth Corps in Trenton, NJ. I quit over their decision to scrap the GED program. The executive director offered me a bribe of a year's salary to stay and write grants. Despite the fact I was supporting a husband in graduate school, I did not take back my resignation. Since then, I've regarded this as a valuable lesson: I may not be incorruptible but a year's salary isn't enough.

One thing I've always admired about the World of Opportunity in Birmingham, Alabama, which works hard at social justice, is that they put their meager resources into the community, helping people who are trying to improve their education and skills. Funds don't go to advisors and experts.

That said, at least one recipient of a Kellogg grant seems laudable:

The People's Grocery, a community organization in West Oakland, Calif., that is organizing low-income people from multiple racial groups to work together to build a local food system that provides greater access to fresh produce and nutrition education, seems like a worthy endeavor. And the fact that they are a recipient of a Kellogg's grant shows how distorted Thernstrom's description is.

Context: Abigail Thernstrom, Stephan's wife, is the vice-chair of the US Commission on Civil Rights and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute from 1993 to 2009, and a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education for more than a decade until her third term ended in November 2006.

In 2007 Abigail & Stephan Thernstrom, along with James Q. Wilson, Martin Feldstein, and John Bolton, were the recipients of a Bradley Foundation prizes for Outstanding Intellectual Achievement. If you want to know more about this conservative foundation, enter Bradley Foundation into a search on this site.

The Thernstroms are the co-authors of No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (Simon & Schuster, October 2003), which has been awarded the 2007 Fordham Foundation prize for "for distinguished scholarship."


By Stephan Thernstrom

Before you next pour yourself a bowl of Kellogg's Cornflakes or Special K, you may want to pause to consider what a foundation founded on W.K. Kellogg's fortune is doing with its money. Last week the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, whose assets include Kellogg stock but which operates independently of the company, proudly announced that it has committed $75 million to launch the "America Healing Initiative."

The foundation calls this "the most significant effort in our nation's history to bring racial healing to communities and dismantle structural racism in America." In fact, it's the largest single boondoggle ever created for the racial-grievance industry.

Kellogg has long concentrated its efforts on children's health issues, and on the needs of particularly "vulnerable" youth. It has sought to ensure that "all" of them will have "equal access to opportunity." Sounds fine. Yet the new program is almost exclusively focused on only some "vulnerable" children, i.e. those from "minority populations."

The foundation sees minorities as constantly victimized by pervasive racism. "Cultural, policy, and institutional forms of racism" are ubiquitous in our society, doing immense damage to innocent youths, its "Fact Sheet" asserts.

Appalling—if true. But what evidence convinced Kellogg that racism is such a clear-and-present danger to the children of America today? Foundation officials point to racial and ethnic disparities: Hispanics and blacks, for example, have much higher poverty rates than whites, and are far less likely to have completed college.

Well, yes. We did know that. But is it self-evident that these economic and educational differences are simply or even largely "the consequences of racism?" Might these disparities perhaps have something to do with the fact that many millions of Latino immigrants with an average of only eight years of schooling have flooded into the U.S.? It is not exactly surprising that they typically earn much less than native-born Americans, and that very few of them can afford to devote several years to getting a high school and then a college education.

As for African Americans, black students in their final year of high school have reading and math skills no better than those of whites and Asians who are still in the eighth grade. Their prospects of going on to graduate from college and to earn a decent income are inevitably not good. One obvious cause of the sharp disparities is the overwhelming preponderance of black single-parent families, a pattern that would not magically disappear if every scintilla of remaining racism vanished overnight.

Even if one accepts the dubious premise that "cultural," " policy," "institutional," "structural" or some other protean form of racism is driving the problem, how will the foundation go about "dismantling" it? Kellogg envisions a therapeutic program transforming us into "a nation where each community has reconciled its own history of racism." Dr. Gail Christopher, the foundation's vice president for programs, says the America Healing Initiative will "shine a light on racism so that we can put its effects on children and communities behind us."

To "shine a light on racism," real or imagined, is the easy part; putting its effects behind us is another matter. For communities to "reconcile" their "own history of racism," we are told, "acknowledging past wrongs and group suffering" is essential. The foundation is a bit more specific about how its money will be distributed. It will go to "community-based regional and national organizations" that "work to address racism and bring about healing in communities." The first round of awards, announced on May 11, went to more than 100 such groups from 29 states and the District of Columbia.

It is difficult to tell exactly what many of the grantees will be doing. Alongside language about building "inter- and intra-ethnic trust" their purpose statements tend to echo the grantor's vague language about healing and the like. Not many appear to have been as explicit in their aims as the applicant that proposed working "to achieve policy change in the grocery industry in low-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles."

It is conceivable that some of these organizations will be able to do something to improve the lives of young people. But the nation's seventh-largest philanthropic foundation might have spent its $75 million to attack the real problems that impede the development of many minority children (and many white ones as well). Improving our schools, the traditional avenue of social mobility for young Americans, deserves the highest priority.

The recently released results of the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading tests reveal that 52% of black 4th-graders and 51% of Hispanics lack even the most basic reading skills; in the 8th grade the figures are 43% and 39% respectively. Blacks and Latinos without a strong education are second-class citizens in a land of opportunity.

Some schools do far better than this, however. Kellogg could have offered to pick up the tab for the Washington D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that the Obama administration has killed off, or contributed to excellent charter schools like MATCH in Boston. It could have supported the further expansion of charter school networks that have proven results—KIPP and Uncommon Schools, among them.

If Kellogg wants to do something constructive for disadvantaged children, it should back such innovative efforts to improve their cognitive skills. The foundation cannot see that point, alas, because it has bought into the simplistic notion that all disparities in educational achievement are attributable to continuing racism—and thus is financing antiracist programs devoted to publicizing "past wrongs and group suffering." Nothing good is likely to come from this.

Mr. Thernstrom is Winthrop Research Professor of History at Harvard University.


— Stephan Thernstrom
Wall Street Journal
2010-05-21
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703315404575250643359879372.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h

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