How to Improve Diversity Training

by

Special to United Methodist Insight

Efforts to promote diversity in workplaces and higher education are under political attack lately. President Trump is trying to shut down all federal Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs and major corporations have announced that they will follow suit. This is discouraging to all who have suffered inequity and exclusion—and all of us who long to see our nation become the Blessed Community that MLK dreamed we might one day achieve. But it is also a chance to take stock of how we might pursue diversity more effectively.

Ironically, American workers mostly support DEI, even if they find some efforts a bit lame. In a recent Pew survey, 52% said focusing on DEI at work is a good thing. Only 21% objected to them.[i]  To attract the workers they need, employers must create workplaces that are welcoming, diverse, equitable, and inclusive—particularly as the Trump Administration makes it harder to recruit employees abroad.

As many corporations have realized, this also means making them religiously inclusive. A report by the Religious Freedom and Business Foundation found that the number of Fortune 500 companies paying serious attention to faith in their diversity and inclusion programs had doubled in a single year. In Silicon Valley, workers commonly gather in specific-faith affinity groups during breaks to study Scripture and request prayer from colleagues as they anxiously await the results of medical tests and similar challenges.

No educational strategy is perfect, of course, but some diversity training alienates people needlessly and thus fails to be effective. How might we better train people—whether future pastors or office workers—how to be welcoming?

First, help people deal with religious differences. When the Long Island Council of Churches and the LI Multi-Faith Forum began offering “Building Bridges” programs to help people understand the religious backgrounds of their neighbors and co-workers, we found audiences eager to ask questions. Managers at a local utility had been meeting regularly for years to discuss DEI issues but had never broached faith topics. They wanted to know how religious practices affected vacation requests, bereavement leave, and other issues. New corrections officers at the county jail needed to know what normal behavior in the worship services was they supervised and how to search a Bible or Qu'ran for contraband without starting a riot. Hospital staff were eager to learn about religious sensibilities affecting the care of patients and their families. Nearly all of us want our neighbors and co-workers to understand our beliefs—and our doubts.

Effective multifaith education creates a safe space for people to ask the questions they want to ask. One of our first “Building Bridges” audiences was a Sunday School class at a United Methodist Church. When a child asked a panelist “What’s that red dot on your forehead/:’ a teacher shushed the child, thinking the question impolite, but the Hindu speaker quickly replied. “Oh, that’s called a bindi. And I wear it because. . . “

Second, keep your eyes on the prize.[ii] DEI workshops sometimes spend more time analyzing problems than solutions. Diversity efforts are more successful, evidence suggests, when they focus on belonging rather than classifying people, United Methodists have commissions on combatting racism, but Muslims focus on the unity of the ummah (the community of the faithful): Mosques end up far more ethnically inclusive than churches. diversity efforts are more successful, many experts find, when they focus on belonging, not on classifying people.[iii]

Third, stop talking about race as if our categories are based in reality. Race is an artificial construct taught to us by our culture: How others perceive your race affects how they teat you, but racial differences are largely illusory. You would say that Michele Obama is black, wouldn’t you? But she is descended from both the enslaved and enslavers. A forefather of President Barak Obama’s “white” mother was an enslaved African.

Historian Nell Irvin Painter has demonstrated that the notion of a white race emerged only as Europeans tried to justify colonizing and enslaving people in Africa, Asia, and the Americas—and it took a long time for racial categories to harden.  European visitors to the United States two centuries ago often did not believe poor Euro-American Southerners were white. Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants often were not classified as non-white until decades later: Ralph Waldo Emerson, a leading American intellectual of his day, thought the Irish belonged to another species.  Italians were called black—and eleven were lynched in New Orleans. One reason Italian Americans cling to Columbus Day is because its adoption was part of a campaign to overcome discrimination against them.[iv]           

There are differences between various populations, but they seldom correspond to our racial categories. Genetic predisposition toward sickle cell anemia is more common in some ethnicities than others, for example, but thousands of “nonblack” children screened for it in California turned out to have the condition. It makes sense to talk about the influence of ancestry or genetics on health factors--but not to think of patients as black or white.[v] There is less genetic difference on average between Sudanese and Swedes than between Northern and Southern Africans. Culturally, soy un gringo. Biologically, we are all Africans. Genetically, Adam Rutherford explains, no group of people has common heredity that might classify it as a race: “As far as genetics is concerned, race does not exist.”[vi] Asking anyone’s race is like asking “What’s your sign?”

In overcoming our racial divisions, we could also learn something from the Bahá’í faith. Their belief in the unity of all humanity helps them see differences as national, cultural, and linguistic rather than racial, and this smallish faith includes people from 2100 ethnic groups. As Bahai’s often say, there is only one race, the human one. Our goals they believe, should be the “race unity” of the single human race.

Focusing on this goal, we might learn to live with diversity. We might even celebrate it joyfully.

[i] Rachel Minkin, Pew Research Center, Nov. 10, 2024.

[ii] Jennifer Miller, “The D. E. I. Movement Picks Up a Word: Belonging,” New York Times May 14, 2023.

[iii] Jennifer Miller, “The D. E. I. Movement Picks Up a Word: Belonging,” New York Times May 14, 2023.

[iv] Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People, chapters 8 & 9; Brent Staples, “How Italians Became ‘White’ “ New York Times Oct. 13, 2019.

[v] Moises Velasquez-Manoff, "Should Doctors Ignore Race?" New York Times Dec. 10, 2017.

[vi] Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016, 218.

The Rev. Thomas W. Goodhue is a United Methodist clergyman who led the Long Island Council of Churches for seventeen years. His most recent book is Queen Kaahumanu of Hawaii (McFarland).