Cracked Foundations: W.K. Kellogg Foundation

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, a philanthropic nonprofit, embeds into everything it does a commitment to “advancing racial equity and racial healing.” The foundation’s priorities include developing equitable communities through “grantmaking, impact investing, networking, and convening.”

To make communities more equitable, the foundation states that it “requires all of us to confront how racism and bias affects our history and present day [sic] experiences, to heal from the resulting fractures to our relationships, and to begin reshaping the systems that hold back so many among us.”

The foundation promotes “Equitable Communities,” which it explains “requires all of us to confront how racism and bias affects our history and present day [sic] experiences, to heal from the resulting fractures to our relationships, and to begin reshaping the systems that hold back so many among us.”

In 2016, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation released its “Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation Implementation Guidebook.” The document states that the foundation’s Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) is a multi-year effort to address “present-day inequities linked to historic and contemporary beliefs in a hierarchy of human value.” It continues: “This absurd belief, which has fueled racism and conscious and unconscious bias throughout American culture, is the perception of inferiority or superiority based on race, physical characteristics or place of origin.”

The document explains that the TRHT approach “examines how the belief system became embedded in our society, both its culture and structures, and then works with communities to design and implement effective actions that will permanently uproot it.” In addition, the organization believes that “since the first European settlers arrived,” the American culture has “placed the relative worth of whites above all others, and at times violently enforced this through annihilation, enslavement, colonization and cultural genocide.”

Additionally, the TRHT states that it is an “adaptation of the internationally recognized Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) models instrumental in resolving deeply rooted conflicts around the world.” Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are designed to “uncover and deepen the understanding of tragedies and/or human rights violations.” The document adds that communities are beginning a “long and complex journey, but one of deep societal transformation that promises rich personal and community rewards.”

The Kellogg Foundation’s Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation calls not only for reconciliation, but for a complete transformation of the United States. “The country was conceived in the Constitution and built on this belief in racial hierarchy, a collective national consciousness that has dominated the educational, economic, social and legal discourse for centuries.”