WASHINGTON, D.C. – During a week when the national media are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides and the progress made since then against racial bias, concerns persist about deep-seated racism in the United States.
Recently, leaders of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation were faced with accusations that their $75 million initiative to address structural racism in America was unnecessary. They answered their critics during a forum on race and racism hosted by the Hudson Institute.
Quoting author William Faulkner, Kellogg Foundation President Sterling Speirn told the audience that structural racism in America continues to affect people of color. “The past is not dead. The past isn’t even in the past. The past is alive now,” Speirn said at the forum entitled, “Race and Racism in America: Are We Now a Colorblind Society?”
Gail Christopher, the Kellogg vice president overseeing the foundation’s “America Healing” initiative, said, “Racism is a set of beliefs that helped to shape this nation. To suggest that centuries of institutionalizing those beliefs could suddenly be eradicated in less than 75 years is, I believe, simplistic, misguided, naïve at best.”
A Wall Street Journal editorial by Harvard University’s Stephan Thernstrom decrying the Kellogg initiative partly led to the Hudson Institute’s decision to host the forum. Joining Thernstrom on the panel were Speirn, Christopher and political consultant Ron Christie, author of Acting White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur.
Christie, an African American, said he was concerned that America was “self-segregating” again. He believes that a flourishing “cult of ethnicity” emphasizing origins through hyphenated identities was counter-productive in reaching an ideal where “we cherish our American citizenship.”
Thernstrom ceded that America’s past was once shaped by a caste system based on color, but he said the election of President Barack Obama was one of many indications of the capacity of the American people to look past race. Thernstrom cited the growing number of black-and-white friendships and the increased rate of interracial marriages as confirmation that America is at a very different place than when, as he put it, “the very heart of the caste system was sexual fear. Black men were lynched for even looking at white women in the wrong way.”
One audience member commented afterward that Thernstrom was disingenuous in citing statistics on racial intermarriage as a fundamental shift in attitudes on race and culture.
The person pointed to the 2006 election when the GOP ran an ad in Tennessee pandering to racial fears in the white community. It inferred that the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, congressional member Harold Ford Jr., an African American, was having sexual relations with white women.
“The ad was successful, I might add,” the attendee said, noting that Ford lost the election after the ad boosted turnout for his white opponent.
The Kellogg Foundation’s Christopher noted a 2002 Institute of Medicine report revealing how African Americans and members of other ethnic groups seek medical treatment for the same conditions, but are treated differently.
She said white privilege is rooted in a mythology which “suggested that the less pigmentation you had, the higher up you were on this hierarchy of race.”
“The systems that evolved from that mythology are alive and well,” Christopher said. “That’s what we mean by white privilege.”
Speirn asserted that one goal of the Kellogg Foundation’s America Healing grants initiative is to enable communities “to have courageous conversations about race and historic and structural racism, and current racism.”
Christopher said America Healing encompasses far more than just a black-white paradigm. She cited a California community including whites, Hispanics and blacks that used its Kellogg grant to delve into the reasons for its poor access to quality food. The researchers found that individuals doing the same job for the same employer were “paid differently by race,” directly diminishing their purchasing power for food and other necessities.
Christopher said that although America is not consciously racist, “our culture is racialized and our systems reflect that.”
At the conclusion of the panel presentation, Christopher took a moment to answer the question, “What does success look like?”
She said, “When all the nuanced histories of the diverse groups that helped to build this nation are part of the school curriculum, and residential segregation is no longer the norm; when poverty is no longer racialized in this country and a child’s race is no longer a major predictor of his future.”
