October/November 2020 Newsletter

On September 22, the White House issued an Executive Order, intended to eliminate most, if not all, diversity training provided to government employees and all of its contractors and suppliers. Its stated intent is to “prohibit racial stereotyping, divisiveness and discrimination” but it actually wrongly portrays diversity training as something that is causing “distress, discomfort, guilt and anguish” to people who, frankly, may simply be invited to reckon with what has undeniably been a history in our society of marginalizing populations due to their gender, race, ethnic background, or other traits.

Whatever the intent, this order seeks to have a silencing effect, an effort to suppress what has over the past several years often been an important and freeing conversation within this Country. The United States is and continues to be a magnificent, though imperfect, nation. The facts of history clearly reveal the disparate treatment that has been inflicted on certain segments of our population. Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her 2018 naturalization ceremony speech, spoke eloquently of the disparities that existed at the founding of this Country. Voting was only a right provided to white, male property owners. Not only were women denied that basic citizen’s right but, further, they saw oppression in numerous other ways such as the denial of ownership of property. Well beyond this, of course, we are aware of the ways in which African Americans were enslaved for centuries, only to be released from legal bondage in 1865. And even since then there have continued to be enumerable ways, both legal and psychological, that people of color have been deprived of the full opportunity to pursue prosperity and grow into the citizenry that most of us have enjoyed, without even a thought.

Diversity Equity Inclusion training, which we have promoted within Family Services, has been an opportunity to hear voices who have not been heard in the past. It is an opportunity to come to terms with the means by which those in power, primarily people who are white, have benefited from how others have been discriminated against, systemically reducing their opportunities for a better life. Such training is intended to not induce guilt, but rather accountability for what we can and should do moving forward for the sake of justice and our common humanity.

Those of us who have had the clear privilege to be part of a powerful and advantaged set of people within this Country are now in a position to actually reckon with and find ways in which we can be accountable in opening opportunities to people who had heretofore been denied those opportunities. The purpose of these efforts is not to cause “anguish, guilt, division”, but to allow each of us to recognize and reverse the divisions that have kept us apart from one another.

Recognition and reversal of oppressive systems within our society, coupled with an acknowledgement and encouragement of an individual’s and a culture’s assets and agency is a powerful means of promoting positive change.

This Executive Order is perilous in that it threatens to reverse positive headway that has recently been undertaken to acknowledge the oppression that has existed and still exists and finally find ways in which those oppressions can be eradicated. This work when properly exercised does not intend to create division but reconciliation around those systems that HAVE divided us to date.

At Family Services, we are bringing this issue to our partners and colleagues in the community, seeking their joined advocacy, in exposing what is disingenuously garbed as an effort to combat “race and sexual stereotyping and scapegoating” but is actually a further promotion of deep denial.