Foundations And The Racial Politics Of Knowledge http://www.swans.com/library/art16/barker54.html

Following on from such stellar contributions to foundation activism, Herskovits continued to be a "key player in the development of foundation-backed African studies programs" in the United States, and during the 1930s and 1940s he served as an adviser to the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Moreover, by 1948 he had set up the "first major interdisciplinary African studies" program;

in the early 1950s he was the key academic adviser on Africa to the Ford Foundation, and in 1957 "he played a pivotal role in the establishment of the African Studies Association (ASA) and became its first president." It is clear that Herskovits's scholarship fulfilled a critical role for capitalist elites during his fruitful academic career, but the irony is that he actually saw himself as a defender of freedom and liberty.

As Gershenhorn writes: "His beliefs in egalitarianism and cultural relativism convinced him to reject racial hierarchies, to oppose the notion of universal values, and to argue that no outsider could objectively evaluate another culture." (16) Yet, unfortunately, these were the characteristics that rendered Herskovits the perfect theorist of imperialist power brokers, which ultimately enabled him to help enforce and legitimate oppressive capitalist cultural hegemony worldwide.