CGC Journal - December 2023
We're Building a Co-learning Community of Empathetic Societal Change Agents
DECEMBER 2023 | ISSUE 5
AMERICANS ARE DIVIDED OVER DEI
Where do you stand?
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Current Events - Big Picture, 3 Important Things to Know, Why it Matters
Americans are struggling over Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Which side are you on?
Emily’s Corner - Emily’s reflections and insights
White evangelical pastors in a former sundown town participated in our Conversations Journey. The extraordinary experience felt transformative.
Talking With Kids -
Do you Care? What does it mean to actively care about others? We discuss this with our kids.
Celebrating Change Agents -
We celebrate Cassie Preskenis, CGC’s December empathetic societal change agent
Conversation Starter -
This month we’re asking … Where are you seeing growth in racial healing in your life and/or environment?
Recommended Resources -
Mike and Emily share recommended resources to help our community of co-learners grow their library of knowledge and insights
Community Corner -
We invite our community of co-learners to share with us what they are witnessing and experiencing in society where they live, work and play.
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To learn more about CGC and our trademarked Conversations Journey® process for businesses, institutions and organizations of all kinds, please visit commongroundconversations.com. We’re also available for speaking engagements, curriculum development and consulting.
CURRENT EVENTS
Americans are divided over DEI
Where do you stand?
A growing number of states have introduced legislation that would restrict or ban diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at public colleges.
There are currently more than 30 bills across the country targeting DEI funding, practices, and promotion at schools. As of June 19, 2023 six have been signed into law by a governor: two in Florida, one in each of the Dakotas, one in Tennessee, and most recently, one in Texas. Only a few other bills have reached the final stages of approval while the majority are still moving through their state legislatures.
On June 29, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed the legality of race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions. The Court’s ruling against affirmative action policies and practices opened the floodgates that unleashed a cavalcade of hostile backlash which had been gearing up over the past three years in anticipation of the Court’s ruling.
That backlash has a primary target, as described on October 19, 2023 by Errin Haines, founder of The 19th media platform:
This month at an event in New York, I ran into Stacey Abrams, whose bid for Georgia governor I’d covered in 2018 and 2022 and whose work to fight voter suppression and expand voter participation I’ve covered for the better part of a decade.
I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in a while; I’d assumed we’d be chatting mostly about elections and voting, but there was an urgency in her voice on another topic: the backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts in American society.
It’s also something I’d noticed and been paying more attention to in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in June ending affirmative action in higher education. Edward Blum, the conservative lawyer who brought the case, didn’t stop there; his group, the American Alliance for Equal Rights, filed lawsuits challenging DEI programs at a law firm and a venture capital firm.
Just three years after the racial reckoning that made much of society examine the ongoing legacy and harm of systemic inequality, a parallel reckoning has also unfolded. It’s one driven by a sense of grievance from White American men, a movement that often co-opts women and even people of color, making them out to be victims of current efforts that are designed to right historic wrongs.
Such efforts, Abrams told me, are part of a larger strategy to roll back attempts to make our country more free and fair for women and people of color. It’s the same playbook that dismantled voting and abortion rights, aimed at rolling back racial progress in institutions across the country.
The former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said in October 2023:
“The through line is that our progress as a nation, our economic uplift, our continued dominance, is predicated on full participation. And diversity, equity and inclusion is the roadmap to get us there,” Abrams said. “The threat of lawsuits, the threat of public castigation, the threat of being called out for doing right, is compelling some to retrench. That is dangerous.”
(Stacey Abrams)
AMERICA’S DEI WAR
Americans up and down the socioeconomic ladder are engaged in a national debate over the value of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts across myriad industries of society. But nowhere is the struggle more intense than in the education sector.
The narratives about America that are taught from K-12 through higher education have produced generations of adults with deep fissures in our collective knowledge and understanding about race, economics and civic society throughout U.S. history. Conscientious Americans across all racial groups are actively engaged in efforts to fill in omissions of history, correct distortions, unveil propaganda and disrupt false narratives told about white-centric ideals in a multiracial, multicultural society.
But these efforts do not occur in a vacuum. An organized backlash has arose, just as it did in previous generations across each era of American history. The backlash seeks to defend and protect an incomplete narrative that all of us have been taught about America, “the beautiful, the brave, the free.” That narrative has been exploited to protect the power dynamic that guards America’s racial caste system, described in Isabel Wilkerson’s insightful book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” (also produced in 2023 as the film, “Origin” by Ava Duvernay).
It is unsurprising that today the struggle for control over formal education systems and institutions serving our nation’s children and young adults would still be fought as a political war through state legislatures and federal government policies.
PAST IS PRESENT
Since the Civil War, federal laws established by Congress, case laws established by the Courts, state laws established by state legislatures, local laws established by counties and municipalities, as well as private sector policies, have all been used to address what students are taught about race in America, how they are taught, when they are taught, and who can teach them.
The issue of race remains at the center of current political DEI battles in education, which is a thinly veiled war waged over controlling the narrative around America’s reluctantly evolving identity, character and brand.
SYSTEMIC CHALLENGE
Currently, at least 30 states have introduced anti-DEI legislation, while 18 states have passed anti-DEI legislation into law, according to PEN America’s ongoing database. PEN America divided its database into four main groups:
Education Gag Orders since 2021 (efforts introduced across all states)
Education Gag Orders passed into law across all states
Other Higher Education Bills of Concern (with descriptions of each bill)
State Policies / Executive Orders (10 states, with descriptions)
PEN America (Poets, Essayists, Novelists) was established in 1922 with a mission to foster international literary fellowship among writers that would transcend national and ethnic divides. Today, its members track and report across every state ongoing political efforts to attack DEI efforts and either ban or control them.
The Chronicle of Higher Education maintains a section on its website titled, “The Assault on DEI,” which provides an updated record of college and university reports, media articles and data that track an enormous amount of organized, mobilized and deployed action plans connected to a cohesive shared strategy targeting DEI efforts across the higher education landscape.
DEI OPPONENTS
In March 2023, Harvard University’s Business Review magazine published an article titled, “To Overcome Resistance to DEI, Understand What’s Driving It.” It offered some advice based on its own research:
We’ve done extensive research on why people resist social-change efforts and on strategies to overcome that resistance. If you want to make your efforts more effective, we’ve found, the key is to understand why people resist them. This applies to DEI initiatives, which engender several different forms of resistance, each of which demands a different strategic response.
In this article, drawing on some of our recent psychological research, we’ll identify those different forms of resistance and explain what psychological threats drive these modes of resistance. We’ll also offer guidance for framing your efforts in ways that will help you overcome that resistance.
We recommend you read the entire thesis, but Harvard Business Review boiled down its analysis of the resistance to DEI into three main categories:
STATUS THREAT: (White) people who experience it often perceive diversity initiatives in zero-sum terms. They assume that if members of minority groups make any gains — in opportunities, hires, the potential for promotion — members of the majority group (White Americans) will necessarily incur losses.
MERIT THREAT: Advantaged-group members (White Americans) feel that recognizing the existence of bias, discrimination, and inequality ‘explains away’ their own successes. Merit threat is especially common among majority group members (White Americans) who are strongly committed to value systems that prize hard work and individual merit.
MORAL THREAT: This is the sense that if you acknowledge your privilege, you tarnish your moral image by linking yourself to an unfair system. This is most common when majority group members (White Americans) are generally committed to the moral ideal of equality. Because people are fundamentally motivated to see themselves as good and moral, those committed to the ideal of equality may experience threat when a DEI initiative highlights how their group has violated this moral principle.
BIG PICTURE
The antagonists behind anti-DEI efforts are the same antagonists who opposed: the Freedmen’s Bureau, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution, all of the civil rights legislation in every generation since the first Civil Rights Act of 1866, and all Affirmative Action policies and laws from the end of WWII to the present day.
Today’s national debate over DEI isn’t new or unique to this generation. Opponents offer many of the same regurgitated arguments repeated across generations by the same defenders of the status quo. Listen closely and you will hear many of the same arguments being made today by opponents of DEI efforts that echo the actual words written by those in previous generations who feared the evolution of a White America toward becoming an Inclusive America.
IRONY OR HYPOCRISY? Note the argument made in the U.S. Senate against the Freedmen’s Bureau legislation in 1865. Consider the irony of White men proclaiming their opposition to funding a program specifically created to provide education and economic empowerment to Black people while the colonies, economic system, and the nation itself were all formed based on “providing special treatment to a specific group of people at the exclusion of others.”
…senators disputed the role of the federal government in providing special treatment to a specific group of people at the exclusion of others.
3 IMPORTANT THINGS TO KNOW
DEI isn’t an esoteric issue. It isn’t hard to understand. It is very simple. Did the 20th century reflect your ideal America? Are you content with the racialized power dynamics of the society we all inherited from a century of violent racial segregation? Your answer will help you determine which side of the DEI issue you most identify with.
DEI isn’t a “Black” or “minority” issue. It is very much about how a majority of White Americans perceive their/our country. Will a majority of White Americans support legislation and public policies that help direct the nation’s course toward developing a 21st century Inclusive America with equitable outcomes for a multiracial, multicultural society, and ensure diverse groups feel a sense of belonging and value as equal American citizens? Or will a majority of White Americans support legislative efforts to oppose DEI progress in both public policy and private sector practices and protect the status quo?
DEI matters. It isn’t a distant issue from anyone. We all have a stake in how this country evolves, right down to our local county governance, city councils, school boards, business chambers, faith communities and families.
WHY IT MATTERS
Every sector of society is impacted by DEI and the struggles to make progress in our racialized society or resist progress. We all inherited a responsibility for the society that we will pass to future generations. What kind of society do you envision that will be?
EMILY’S CORNER
Friends, I am so delighted to have you here. This will be a place of honest sharing; of reflections and insights and experiences that are unfolding in my journey as a co-learner. I welcome you here, and would love to hear your thoughts and ideas - feel free to reply to this email. I will read all that you share.
CAN WHITE CHRISTIAN EVANGELICAL CHURCHES EFFECTIVELY ENGAGE IN TRUTHFUL CONVERSATIONS ABOUT RACE IN AMERICA?
YES!
A few weeks ago, we were invited to lead pastors from 3 local churches through our CGC “Conversations Journey” process (in addition to the pastors, there were local community members and educators participating). Our gathering took place at the local Gospel Rescue Mission in a city that was once known as a sundown town.
I admit that I wrestled with nerves before our gathering (my hubby jokes that if I wasn’t nervous, something would be wrong, haha). But for this gathering, I felt extra tender and eager to deeply prepare.
I spent many hours and many days in quiet, in writing, in prayer, pondering and preparing. This gathering felt special.