Skokie Vision 19

Vision #19: No matter how you spell it, everywhere I go in Skokie, residents tell me they are most passionate about our racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity. But in these utterly baffling days, when the Trump administration is shutting down web pages merely due to the presence of the words "diversity," "equity," and "inclusion," we can't assume any common understanding of these words. After all, Justice Clarence Thomas asserted in 2022, in hearing arguments around affirmative action in college admissions, "I’ve heard the word diversity quite a few times, and I don’t have a clue what it means."

So I will make an attempt to define diversity.

The value behind an appreciation of diversity is a respect for the different experiences, beliefs, and ways of thinking that we bring to the communal table. Yes, we are all human beings no matter what color, with the same basic values and desires, including a commitment as Americans to the notion of "e pluribus unum": out of many, one. A respect for diversity means we understand that our own lives are enriched by taking into account other perspectives.

Here's a simple example of the value of diversity. Back in the early '90s, while leading the Tenant Ownership Project at the Center for Neighborhood Technology, I worked with a group of low-income women in Chicago called FIRST who sought to build from the ground up a housing cooperative that they would share. We found an architect who cared about affordable housing and was willing to work with us. In looking at the initial drawings, however, the women commented that the kitchens didn't have enough cabinets. The architect, an affluent man who didn't spend much time in kitchens, felt that he learned something he wouldn't have otherwise thought of. This was a fully collaborative and mutually respectful endeavor in which the outcome was a design that everyone liked.

Similarly, we are conducting bad science if we have clinical trials on heart medication, say, that only use male subjects when we know that women have different heart attack symptoms. We are conducting immoral science when we purposely inject poison into people, as we did against Black men in the reprehensible Tuskegee Syphillis Study. Both of these are examples of the opposite of valuing diversity: it's deciding that some lives either don't exist or don't matter.

Diversity doesn't mean that there aren't basic how-to rules like how to do hand surgery. Diversity means that no one group holds a patent on what a good life constitutes. At a certain level, we already know this. What's more American than "fusion" cuisine, or than every ethnic group eating bagels, tacos, sweet potato pie, and ramen?

Diversity is also like a three-legged stool of stability. What accountant tells you to put all your money in one pot as opposed to "diversifying your assets"? Promoting "biodiversity" is another common-sense practice.

In fact I can't think of any example in which "monoculture" is anything other than either unhealthy, unjust, or plain boring.

Which gets me back to Skokie. There's a difference between the right way to pilot an airplane and the right way to make political decisions in a democracy in which diverse parts constitute a whole. As Trustee, I would operate from the premise that no one should be left behind and everyone has something to contribute.