To Investigate The Rhode Island Foundation For Civil Rights Violations Or Not? That is The Question
“Should philanthropic organizations which create and fund racially discriminatory programming, particularly when it’s done in a public school district, be held accountable?”
I appeared today on the In The Dugout podcast hosted by Mike Stenhouse of the Rhode Island-based Ocean State Current and the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity to talk about my post The Rhode Island Foundation’s Discriminatory Grantmaking Warrants Civil Rights Investigation.
My segment starts at the 21:32 mark.
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Transcript Excerpts (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity)
Stenhouse:
Why do you think the Rhode Island Foundation should be the target of a civil rights investigation?
WAJ:
President Trump announced in an executive order that he’s requesting that each department designate nine large entities with over $500 million in assets for potential civil rights investigation. The Rhode Island Foundation seems to fit that bill.
First of all, it’s got over a billion dollars in assets, but most important, it is extremely aggressive in terms of discriminatory grant making and programming. They have funded in the Providence Public School District, the Educator of Color Loan Forgiveness program, where if you’re a teacher new into the system or recently into the system, you can get up to $25,000 of your student loans forgiven, but only if you’re non-white.
Open racial discrimination created by and funded by the Rhode Island Foundation. That’s a civil rights violation right there. It’s a civil rights violation by the school district. And we have filed a claim about that.
I think it’s something that the Trump administration needs to look into. Should philanthropic organizations which create and fund racially discriminatory programming, particularly when it’s done in a public school district, be held accountable? I don’t know the answer to that. I suspect that the answer is yes, they can be held accountable.
There’s also a whole body of law that racially discriminatory grantmaking violates the Civil Rights Act of 1866, I think it was. It’s so-called Section 1981. And there was a big case in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals a little over a year ago, and we called it to the attention of the Rhode Island Foundation, that said, when you have, as a private foundation, a contractual grant making process that excludes people based on race, you are violating that statute. It was a post civil war statute, which enforces non-discrimination in contracting, it was meant to make clear that freed slaves have the same contracting rights as … everybody else. And so the Rhode Island Foundation is highly likely to be violating that statute as well.
So there’s plenty of legal basis for them to be investigated.
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Stenhouse:
If there was an investigation and they found there was some violation for a nonprofit, it’s not a government agency, but for a nonprofit like the Rhode Island Foundation, what might be the recrimination or enforcement of that?
WAJ:
Well, the most likely, or the most obvious I should say, is some sort of enforcement action that forces them to stop, and perhaps imposes fines or other monetary penalties, perhaps requires them to reopen these programs and re-fund them, but open to everybody on a non-discriminatory basis. There could be a whole lot of remedial things.
I don’t know if this is what you’re hinting at, but they are a nonprofit. And whether or not the government would go to drop the equivalent of a nuclear bomb and challenge their nonprofit status, it’s not something that we’ve called for, but that would be the ultimate.
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Stenhouse:
That’s an important point because this is not just some vice president sitting there arbitrarily deciding who to give grants to. [DEI] is systematically enshrined probably in their minutes, probably in their their articles or incorporation or their, you know, whatever, you know, rules of the organization. I mean, this is who they are. Right?….
WAJ:
They had these plans before David Cicilline took over, but it’s even more centered now. And in the column that I wrote, the article I wrote in our call for an investigation, we are not calling for them to investigate the federal government to investigate the DEI portion of the foundation.
We are calling on them to investigate potential civil rights violations and people need to distinguish that. We are not saying the Rhode Island Foundation should be investigated because it’s big on DEI. We are saying it should be investigated because based on what we know and what we have written, there is credible reason to believe that there are civil rights violations going on. That’s what we focused on….
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Comments
Its quite clear that a philanthropic org that made only grants to white Christians would be pilloried.
Pilloried in public opinion, sure, but what legal action could or should be taken against it? It’s private money being given away. Surely Congress has no power to dictate to whom one must give ones money. If we allow the law to intrude into private charity giving, then how can we stop it from doing the same to private non-charitable gift-giving, and from there it’s only a short step to policing whom we invite into our homes, whom we socialize with, whom we date, and whom we marry.
Right on, Bro! Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
I think the professor is becoming intoxicated with his own success. Foundations should be free to make grants according to their own lights. I am aware of several fine foundations that make no grants to minorities, not because of any racial animus, but because they have other ends in mind. I can see a left-wing, attorney-crusader at least hassling them into expending serious money on legal bills due to some alleged pattern of less-than-proportional grant making.
Who are these fine Foundations you talk about?
I remember how they funded $14k so Race Grifter, Ibram X Kendi could hold a 30 min DEI Zoom meeting through the Barrington Public Library. No dissenting opinions allowed. All questions were cleared in advance. But when another group wanted to hold a similar opposing view forum, no funds were available.