Brookings pastor Carl Kline: Ending DEI programs is actually a blatant attack on hard-won diversity progress

I like macaroni and cheese for dinner now and then. But I wouldn’t want to eat it every night of the week.

I also have a favorite sweatshirt to wear in cold weather. But I’m not about to leave it on every day, especially as winter changes into spring.

In the same way, I value diversity in my friends and neighbors. There is age variety in our neighborhood. There are friends of color in the community and those of other religious traditions as well. I’m not interested in a white and “Christian” nation, but an interracial and inter-religious one.

I can’t imagine a university community with all white folks from the U.S. What wouldn’t students learn about the real world? The sign in our yard is one we believe and value: “Diversity Is What Makes Brookings Great.”

Our three-year graduate school experience was in New York City. The student body was international. My field work experience was at Riverside Church, declared to be international and interracial and interdenominational at its founding.

Our residence was three blocks from Harlem, and after growing up in the one-color state of South Dakota (except for those reservation-bound first inhabitants), we became accustomed to and appreciative of racial and cultural diversity. In New York the human life and witness of the whole world was at our fingertips, and we were able to take advantage of some of that worldly knowledge and experience.  

I understand that some people like to wear a suit to work every day. Others prefer jeans. We have preferences learned over months and years. Disruptions to our everyday habits and expectations can be unwelcome surprises. We might respond to the “new” with uncertainty or even fear.

We’d rather experience the norm, the usual, whether it’s a white customer or a same-age friend. The new can be challenging, but in the end, I’d suggest, enriching! What if we were to seek out the new outfit, the new experience, the new personal friend? It can only be enriching in the long run!

I wasn’t aware of any women clergy when I was young, probably because there weren’t many. Being a minister was a man’s job. I suppose it was because Jesus was a man?

The first woman ever ordained in a Protestant Church in this country was Antoinette Brown, ordained in the United Church of Christ (Congregational Church at that time), in 1853. Then in the 1970s, a couple of the Protestant churches, the Episcopal Church and the ELCA, decided to ordain women.

The first woman bishop was elected in 1980 in the United Methodist Church. Today, there are equal numbers of men and women in the clergy of the United Church of Christ and Unitarian Universalists.

I’m not sure about pay equity among male and female clergy. I expect it’s similar to the rest of the economy. In 2022, women working full-time, all year, earned 84 cents for every dollar a man made. And the gap was even greater for women of color.

This is one of the reasons we have had a federal agency working to advance equity in how men and women are treated in the American economy. Of course, some still believe women should be at home delivering and caring for babies as the men do the bread labor.

These folks, like Vice President JD Vance, are likely too well off to understand the necessity for some, to have two breadwinners just to make ends meet; or even the possibility of the male being a caregiver in the home while the mother brings home the bread.  

Equity also applies to race. As Calvin and Hobbes makes clear in a recent cartoon, “DEI initiatives were not put in place to ensure lower qualified minorities could get hired instead of more highly qualified white people. It was put in place to ensure lower-qualified white people were not hired instead of more highly qualified minorities.”

One of the people in the United Church of Christ national offices who opened our eyes and hearts to persons with disabilities was Harold Wilke. Born without arms in 2014, he experienced discrimination most of his life, as well as admiration for his work for the disabled.

The first time I ever saw him he was signing a paper with his foot. He had accepted a pen from President George H.W. Bush at the 1990 signing of the “Americans with Disabilities Act,” and held the pen with his toes. 

He also offered the invocation at the signing ceremony that day, saying the law was “the breaking of the chains which have held back millions of Americans with disabilities.”

I will never forget my visits with our church youth group to a state school in Massachusetts for the disabled. We were always met by people warehoused in bare rooms, starved for human contact. Walking into the room they would grab an arm, even a leg, hoping they were being chosen for something. Even taking them for a walk on the grounds for 20 minutes made their day (maybe their week). That school is closed now, thank God! 

One wonders where we are heading now? No more DEI, “diversity, equity, inclusion!” No more federal oversight to make sure all are treated well.

Can we still say it and believe it? “One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Carl Kline of Brookings is a United Church of Christ clergyman and adjunct faculty member at the Mt. Marty College campus in Watertown. He is a founder and on the planning committee of the Brookings Interfaith Council, co-founder of Nonviolent Alternatives, a small not-for-profit that, for 15 years, provided intercultural experiences with Lakota/Dakota people in the Northern Plains and brought conflict resolution and peer mediation programs to schools around the region. He was one of the early participants in the development of Peace Brigades International. Kline can be reached at carl@satyagrahainstitute.org. This column originally appeared in the Brookings Register.

Photo: U.S. Dept. of Energy diversity and inclusion town hall in Ohio, 2012, public domain, wikimedia commons