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Dear Folks:
In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. faced a crowd of 250,000 on the Washington, D.C., mall, and declared, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character….I have a dream… that little Black boys and little Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and little white girls as sisters and brothers.” It appears as if some in our nation feel we have arrived at that moment and we do not need to focus anymore on racial diversity, gender equality, or inclusion of underrepresented voices.
I have been surprised at how quickly institutions are renouncing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. All of a sudden those three words became bad words, to be erased from our history and culture. By removing them from our lexicon and common speech we are implicitly agreeing that racism, injustice, and rejection are no longer part of our common everyday experience.
I do not agree.
Racism continues to be strong and alive in our culture. Injustice is rampant. Rejection occurs regularly. While DEI may raise hackles for some, the reality is that we have needed to have these laws in place to assure that voting rights, job promotions, and success in life are just and egalitarian for people of color, women, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ folk. By stripping away these laws and policies, we imply that we don’t see the color, gender, or loves of people who have always been disadvantaged in the public sphere. By pulling away from the values of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, we sweep aside the progress we’ve made since the 1960s.
As a Christian, I cannot ignore the fate of vulnerable people. I cannot ignore the diversity of God’s creation. I cannot brush away the visible and physical differences of humanity. I cannot sweep away that these differences are used to suppress speech. I cannot forget that rape, separation from family, beatings and whippings, were common forms of control during American Slavery, the forming of Indian reservations and boarding schools, and the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII.
We now know that trauma can be passed down to future generations; at least 4-7 generations can receive that trauma through changes to genes, social pressure, family teachings. There are people alive today whose grandparents or great grandparents were enslaved. That’s 2-3 generations. And the trauma did not stop at the end of American chattel slavery.
There are people alive today who knew Jim Crow era repression including “Whites Only” signs, lynching, degradation at the voting booth, and brutal beatings by police. A family of parishioners at one of my churches was red-lined out of a desirable neighborhood. Two of my parishioners had been sent to Indian boarding schools, and one of them reported serious abuse and trauma at the school they attended. I knew a parishioner’s daughter-in-law whose grandparents were sent to Japanese American internment camps and whose property was saved for them by the Catholic church; and while they loved the UCC, they would not leave the Catholic church because of this loyalty. I worked with an artist whose parents survived the Holocaust; her mother kept a suitcase packed at the foot of her bed until she died. And I heard of one Holocaust survivor who always slept with her shoes on because when she was arrested, she had no shoes. The trauma is still present and it is still going on. We haven’t even gotten out of the first generation.
We cannot claim to be “color blind” without erasing a legacy of pain, shame, trauma. We cannot say that slavery was in the past when the generational trauma is still with us. I cannot move past the Holocaust while watching Palestinians being systematically oppressed and killed. I cannot forget about ethnic cleansing while several million South Sudanese are living in refugee camps across central Africa. I cannot blot out the Armenian genocide knowing that a colleague of mine grew up in Syria as a child of Armenian refugees.
In short, we are nowhere near the end of the trauma; we’ve got several generations to go even if we stop creating more trauma right now. And we seem to be addicted to causing trauma to others.
Removing DEI sugarcoats our history and makes it seem like we have arrived at an egalitarian nirvana. Rewriting history to be more pleasant ignores that the trauma of generations ago is still with us, and the trauma continues to be compounded at each turn by more trauma, more rape, more being disappeared, more injustice and ongoing disrespect. Living with memories sweetened by whitewashing over individual stories is like a solid diet of cotton candy; sure does taste good, but is vacuous as nourishment.
Peace,
Pastor Tony
1 Retrieved on 3-27-2025 from https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety
2 There are several good books that discuss this; here are two. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, by Joy Degruy, (2007); and My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, by Resmaa Menakem, (Central Recovery Press)
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