Ford Foundation Funding of the Diversity Demagogues

The Ford Foundation is a predominant funder of open borders, multicultural, and race-based "diversity" groups in the United States. It didn't start out like that; it was co-opted by those with a more strident political agenda. Now, when yet another legalization plan for illegal aliens is being pushed by special interests from within both political parties, one might question how massive funding of the diversity infrastructure has pushed the United States in this self-descructive direction. 

From Discover The Networks:

The Ford Foundation was chartered on January 15, 1936 by Edsel Ford and two Ford Motor Company executives “to receive and administer funds for scientific, educational and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare.”... [Yet] When Henry Ford II eventually resigned from the Foundation's Board of Trustees in 1977, he expressed his profound disgust with how the institution and most of its trustees had drifted so radically to the political left over time...

These objectives and worldviews [of organizations the Ford Foundation currently support] include: the weakening of homeland security and anti-terrorism measures on the theory that they constitute unacceptable assaults on civil liberties; the dissolution of American borders; the promotion of mass, unchecked immigration to the United States; the redistribution of wealth; the blaming of America for virtually every conceivable international dispute...

By using its enormous wealth (derived solely from investments in international securities) to promote these ideals, the Ford Foundation plays a major role in shaping American culture, popular opinion, and public policy. 

The article How the Ford Foundation Created Multiculturalism (FrontPage Magazine, January 9, 2004) notes that:

..."The Foundation is a creature of capitalism," Henry Ford II said when he resigned in disgust from the foundation that bears his family name in 1977, adding that it was hard to discern any trace of capitalism "in anything the foundation does. It is even more difficult to find an understanding of this in many of the institutions particularly the universities that are the beneficiaries of the Foundation's grant program." The foundation, lamented Hank the Deuce, was ignoring the very economic system whose abundance made it and all other philanthropic foundations possible.

In talking to Henry II, former Treasury Secretary William Simon noted that by the late 1960s Ford was "engaged in a radical assault on traditional culture, under the rubric of the 'public interest' and 'systematic social change'.-Simon asked Henry Ford II how such a thing could have happened. "I tried for 30 years to change it from within to no avail," said Ford.Ford Foundation, one of the largest in the U.S. and fourth largest worldwide, according to Wikipedia.com. The Foundation has long bankrolled some of the main opponents of immigration reform. 

A favorite sport of philanthropoids (as members of the philanthropic community sometimes call each other) is determining the moment at which the Ford Foundation lurched to the left.

The consensus seems to be that the Rubicon was crossed during the regime of McGeorge Bundy, the Foundation's president from 1966-1979...

According to a recent article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, every grant application must include a "diversity table"... which details "the number of non-whites and women involved in the project and, sometimes, at the entire institution." 

When he resigned from the foundation his grandfather started, Henry Ford II said that he hoped it would spend itself out of existence. But that is not going to happen. Ford has all the money it will ever need, and is able to function as an invisible government in a field like education. It can pursue its radical goal of transforming higher education and yet avoid scrutiny...

In the article Funding Hate - Foundations and the Radical Hispanic Lobby- Part III, (The Social Contract, Fall 2000), Joseph Fallon pointed out that:

While they promote similar views on 'Hispanic identity' and 'Hispanic history,' the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA), and the National Council of La Raza (La Raza) have separate corporate identities and histories. What is unique about both MALDEF and La Raza is that they are the creations of the Ford Foundation, which remains one of their principal sources of funding...

MALDEF was a creation of the Ford Foundation in more ways than just funding. The Ford Foundation soon took control of virtually all important matters from where the headquarters should be located, to the appointment of its executive director, and the type of legal cases it should pursue.

Initially, MALDEF addressed a variety of issues ranging from education to school desegregation, voting rights to job discrimination, composition of draft boards to legal advice for anti-Vietnam war protesters. The Ford Foundation found this tactic unsatisfactory. The cases MALDEF was litigating were not radical enough. The Ford Foundation wanted precedent-setting cases to go before the U.S. Supreme Court whose rulings would effect the entire country. MALDEF was duly restructured to achieve those goals...

In the article Buying Open Borders: Ford Foundation Funding of Open-Borders Groups (Summer 2008), the Social Contract published a lengthy table revealing Ford Foundation funding of radical open borders groups.

In the article City Journal article, Mistaken Identity (City Journal, Autumn, 1997) Heather Mac Donald asked:

Ever wonder what a quarter-century inside the Ford Foundation will do to a person? Susan Berresford's inaugural presidential message gives us a sad clue..

In between scattered non sequiturs and platitudes, one theme clearly emerges: the overriding, all-consuming importance of identity politics. Incredible to say, the head of the world's most prominent private foundation believes that one of the paramount "challenges of the 21st century" will be that of "strengthening . . . identity"—even though ethnic tribes and urban gangs are massacring one another over a surplus of the stuff.

Berresford's anonymous experts echo her fears. They, too, are "intensely worried about . . . whether today's attention to racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity is adequate." Never mind that every large American institution, from Fortune 500 corporations to the military, has embraced "diversity" with a vengeance.

Decoded, Berresford's statement really means that the foundation will continue bankrolling the corrosive identity politics that have already fractured American society...

Georgie Anne Geyer, wrote in her book Americans No More (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996), pp 197 - 198:

[I]n 1974, the Ford family and motor company broke financially with the foundation, and the foundation disposed of its remaining Ford stock, now to depend upon other more diversified income sources.

Henry Ford II's melancholy letter upon his own resignation as trustee, a post in which he had served since 1943, came on December 11, 1976, a date that in many ways marked the end of a period of Americana. Charging that the foundation no longer understood America as a whole, Ford wrote in what was to become his historic and famous missive that "the diffuse array of enterprises upon which the Foundation has embarked in recent years is almost a guarantee that few people anywhere will share a common perception of what the Foundation is all about, how it sees its mission and how it serves society ..."

Then he asked the activists to try to understand the very system that made their enthusiastic philanthropy possible. "The Foundation exists and thrives on the fruits of our economic system," he commented. "The dividends of competitive enterprise make it all possible ... In effect, the Foundation is the creature of capitalism – a statement that, I'm sure, would be shocking to many pprofessional staff people in the field of philanthropy. It is hard to discern recognition of this fact in anything the Foundation does. It is even more difficult to find an understanding of this in many of the institutions, particularly the universities, that are the beneficiaries of the Foundation's grant programs."

Ford went on, "I'm not playing the role of the hard-hearted tycoon, who thinks all philanthropoids are socialists and all university professors are Communists. I'm just suggesting to the Trustees and the staff that the system that makes the Foundation possible is very probably worth preserving. Perhaps it is time for the Trustees and staff to examine the question of our obligations to our economic system and to consider how the Foundation, as one of the system's most prominent offspring, might act most wisely to strengthen and improve its progenitor."