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Journal of Asian American Studies 9.1 (2006) 87-106



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Identifying Talent, Institutionalizing Diversity: Race and Philanthropy in Post-Civil Rights America. By Jiannbin Lee Shiao (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005)
Ethnic Routes to Becoming American: Indian Immigrants and the Cultures of Citizenship. By Sharmila Rudrappa (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

When the late President Ronald Reagan complained about "welfare queens," one could sense that the War on Poverty was coming to an end, and without anything close to a victory. His successors reiterated similar themes: the first George Bush called for a "thousand points of light" to replace big government, while Bill Clinton promised to change "welfare as we know it." Ever since, non-governmental actors have played an increasingly important role in social welfare policy as the federal government has indeed cut or eliminated many redistribution programs. At the regional and local level, "devolution" has meant that the federal government has given the separate states more authority to distribute a relatively smaller share of federal monies to a wider, looser array of redistribution programs—states and local governments have had to collaborate with one another, with non-profit organizations, and with private foundations, all in an effort to leverage their resources. The United States no longer fights the War on Poverty as part of a national effort; it has truly devolved into a de-centralized set of battles where the poor often struggle just to survive, in cities that are themselves struggling economically. And to complicate things further, these cities are also much more racially [End Page 87] diverse than when Lyndon Johnson was in office, largely because of an unprecedented era of immigration that began under his Presidency. If anything, these two books, by Professor Jiannbin Lee Shiao of the University of Oregon and by Professor Sharmila Rudrappa of the University of Texas, are timely, for they explore, in turn, how private foundations and local non-profit organizations have tried to cope with these daunting new realities.

The two volumes have much in common. Both projects examine complex organizations, and the authors relied primarily on ethnographic methods in sociology to collect their data. Among other things, Shiao interviewed several dozen staff members at two major philanthropic foundations, the Cleveland Foundation and the San Francisco Foundation. Rudrappa worked and volunteered at two non-profit organizations in Chicago's South Asian American community, Apna Ghar and the Indo American Center. Both authors paid very close attention to national trends as well as regional nuances in race relations, immigration patterns, and local politics. Reading these works together, there was an obvious and natural symmetry: Shiao mentioned that he began his project when he himself was volunteering for a pan-Asian non-profit organization not unlike the organizations that interested Rudrappa; Rudrappa noted that her two non-profits seemed ever sensitive to the funding criteria of the private foundations that Shiao had examined for three years.1 At the very least, Shiao and Rudrappa should each be commended for bringing to our attention a set of organizations that have received less attention than the formal government institutions that typically dominate scholarly discussions of race and public policy in the United States. Their conclusions are interesting and counterintuitive. Still, despite their many similarities and strengths, these two works are very different in their presentations, and so we turn to each separately.

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In his first chapter, Shiao notes that although the economic and political fortunes of people of color have fluctuated over the past five decades, public conversations about race in the United States have moved away from overt white supremacy. Even our conservatives are "multiculturalists" now, and ever since new immigrants began arriving in large numbers after the Immigration Amendments of 1965, more and more institutions, both public and private, have been adopting various "diversity policies." American race relations—which were never binary to begin with—became even less so over the past thirty years. But, the public institutions "doing...

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