In this episode of the “ Collage ” podcast, Rev. F. Willis Johnson and Rev. Gregory Kendrick explore the profound intersections of faith, history and preservation. They delve into the power of sacred spaces and how maintaining and honoring these place can be a form of advocacy.
Conceptual image of multiple human face shapes in a variety of colors illustrating different races
It is no secret that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs are under attack in our country. They have been blamed for undermining free speech, meritocracy, and America itself. The University of Virginia is the latest to settle with the government and walk away from its DEI initiatives rather than defend its programs or find a new solution.
Those who decry DEI say they do so in the name of meritocracy. They argue that those who benefit from DEI programs do so at the expense of other, more qualified individuals, and that these programs are weakening professions such as our military, science, education, and healthcare. But these arguments have it exactly backwards. DEI programs were never designed to give privilege to underrepresented people. They were put in place to chip away at discrimination and nepotism, both concepts that are antithetical to meritocracy.
The idea that we had a merit-based system before DEI is a fantasy. A true meritocracy is devoid of racism, sexism, and agism. It doesn’t exclude based on ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, sexual identity, or other biases. In a true meritocracy, no one would have an advantage simply because of the socioeconomic station into which they were born.
Yet we do not all start on a level playing field. Consider the systemic and structural racial and ethnic discrimination built into our system. Consider low funding levels for non-white schools. Consider repeated instances of environmental racism and poor access to healthcare for minorities, which result in high rates of both acute and chronic illnesses, increased school absences for children, and greater morbidity and mortality rates in adults.
According to a 2024 White House report, Racial Discrimination in Contemporary America, racial discrimination accounts for the loss of trillions of dollars in the U.S. When kids go to poorly funded schools, they can’t access the stepping stones to success, such as basic healthcare, college training programs, afterschool activities, and standardized test training.
Then there’s persistent sex discrimination. A recent study found that in all but one age group, men continue to earn 15% more than women. The gap has continued even as more educated and experienced women enter the workforce and attain the managerial and higher-paying jobs that had been reserved for men. Women also report being treated differently by employers, and sexual harassment remains an issue for more women than men, both in public spaces and within the workplace. The MeToo Report found 26% of all respondents experienced sexual harassment or assault between 2018-2024, with women more than twice as likely to experience this than men (32% vs.15%).
Critics of DEI programs have offered nothing to replace DEI other than a return to norms that perpetuate their false meritocracy, like legacy preferences in university admissions. The Institute of Higher Education reported that 42% of private four-year colleges considered legacy in their admission process in 2022. Unsurprisingly, it also found that the more racially diverse universities are the ones that do not consider legacy. Although these impacts on racial diversity might be small, they are meaningful and clearly unmeritocratic.
Nepotism has a similar antimeritocracy effect in our other institutions. Indeed, nepotism was so alive and well in 2020 in the Army that they wrote a policy to stop it.
DEI programs were introduced to counter biases such as legacy and nepotism. The goal was to level the playing field, expand access to opportunity for a broader range of students, and identify and develop the most talented individuals.
Our society improves when we include more voices and talents in our institutions. A study published by the Boston University School of Public Health found that when DEI programs are successful, they reduce racist and sexist attitudes, reduce ageism, and improve organizational culture, as well as conflict resolution and job satisfaction. This study also concluded that successful DEI programs are those implemented at the institutional rather than individual level and include longitudinal training.
We should not now run from DEI programs and look to the past for false meritocracies. Rather, we need to learn what works and what does not work when it comes to identifying, nurturing, and promoting talent.
Studies show that DEI opponents object to perceived threats to the status quo. To forestall these objections, new programs aimed at leveling the playing field could emphasize that the workplace will continue to uphold its values and that everyone—including the majority—will remain treated fairly.
Rather than truly attempt to problem-solve, diminish discrimination, and allow institutions to draw on the broadest pool of talent available, today’s DEI opponents have only resurrected the discriminatory policies of the past. We all must have the courage to imagine what a truly inclusive and fair society could look like.
Nina Stachenfeld is a Senior Research Scientist at Yale University School of Medicine, Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences. Dr. Stachenfeld is also a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in partnership with Yale University
Conceptual image of multiple human face shapes in a variety of colors illustrating different races
It is no secret that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs are under attack in our country. They have been blamed for undermining free speech, meritocracy, and America itself. The University of Virginia is the latest to settle with the government and walk away from its DEI initiatives rather than defend its programs or find a new solution.
Those who decry DEI say they do so in the name of meritocracy. They argue that those who benefit from DEI programs do so at the expense of other, more qualified individuals, and that these programs are weakening professions such as our military, science, education, and healthcare. But these arguments have it exactly backwards. DEI programs were never designed to give privilege to underrepresented people. They were put in place to chip away at discrimination and nepotism, both concepts that are antithetical to meritocracy.
The idea that we had a merit-based system before DEI is a fantasy. A true meritocracy is devoid of racism, sexism, and agism. It doesn’t exclude based on ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, sexual identity, or other biases. In a true meritocracy, no one would have an advantage simply because of the socioeconomic station into which they were born.
Yet we do not all start on a level playing field. Consider the systemic and structural racial and ethnic discrimination built into our system. Consider low funding levels for non-white schools. Consider repeated instances of environmental racism and poor access to healthcare for minorities, which result in high rates of both acute and chronic illnesses, increased school absences for children, and greater morbidity and mortality rates in adults.
According to a 2024 White House report, Racial Discrimination in Contemporary America, racial discrimination accounts for the loss of trillions of dollars in the U.S. When kids go to poorly funded schools, they can’t access the stepping stones to success, such as basic healthcare, college training programs, afterschool activities, and standardized test training.
Then there’s persistent sex discrimination. A recent study found that in all but one age group, men continue to earn 15% more than women. The gap has continued even as more educated and experienced women enter the workforce and attain the managerial and higher-paying jobs that had been reserved for men. Women also report being treated differently by employers, and sexual harassment remains an issue for more women than men, both in public spaces and within the workplace. The MeToo Report found 26% of all respondents experienced sexual harassment or assault between 2018-2024, with women more than twice as likely to experience this than men (32% vs.15%).
Critics of DEI programs have offered nothing to replace DEI other than a return to norms that perpetuate their false meritocracy, like legacy preferences in university admissions. The Institute of Higher Education reported that 42% of private four-year colleges considered legacy in their admission process in 2022. Unsurprisingly, it also found that the more racially diverse universities are the ones that do not consider legacy. Although these impacts on racial diversity might be small, they are meaningful and clearly unmeritocratic.
Nepotism has a similar antimeritocracy effect in our other institutions. Indeed, nepotism was so alive and well in 2020 in the Army that they wrote a policy to stop it.
DEI programs were introduced to counter biases such as legacy and nepotism. The goal was to level the playing field, expand access to opportunity for a broader range of students, and identify and develop the most talented individuals.
Our society improves when we include more voices and talents in our institutions. A study published by the Boston University School of Public Health found that when DEI programs are successful, they reduce racist and sexist attitudes, reduce ageism, and improve organizational culture, as well as conflict resolution and job satisfaction. This study also concluded that successful DEI programs are those implemented at the institutional rather than individual level and include longitudinal training.
We should not now run from DEI programs and look to the past for false meritocracies. Rather, we need to learn what works and what does not work when it comes to identifying, nurturing, and promoting talent.
Studies show that DEI opponents object to perceived threats to the status quo. To forestall these objections, new programs aimed at leveling the playing field could emphasize that the workplace will continue to uphold its values and that everyone—including the majority—will remain treated fairly.
Rather than truly attempt to problem-solve, diminish discrimination, and allow institutions to draw on the broadest pool of talent available, today’s DEI opponents have only resurrected the discriminatory policies of the past. We all must have the courage to imagine what a truly inclusive and fair society could look like.
Nina Stachenfeld is a Senior Research Scientist at Yale University School of Medicine, Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences. Dr. Stachenfeld is also a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in partnership with Yale University
A personal journey through Alabama reveals a family's buried racist past, confronting slavery, lynching, and civil-rights history while seeking truth, healing, and accountability.
I come from a long line of racists.
Tracing my ancestry back to the early nineteenth century, I discovered that my great-great-great-grandfather emigrated from Ireland and then drifted south, eventually settling in Dallas County, Alabama. Daniel Brislin called Selma home.
He was a cabinet maker, and a decent one at that. The Selma Times Journal reported that he was also exceptionally generous: “The respect and esteem in which he was held by the whole town, and especially the poor, whose staunch friend he was, was attested at his death.” A George Bailey-like figure, Brislin (our surname would morph over time into “Breslin”) was known to forgive payment on a table or a chest of drawers he crafted for a fellow Sel-towner. He regularly fashioned furniture on the commitment of a handshake, a promise, an IOU. That’s what you did in Alabama, I’m sure he would say. You trusted your neighbor.
Unless that neighbor had a different skin color.
Now, there is no historical evidence that my great-great-great-grandfather was an enslaver. And there is no suggestion that he treated the growing Black population of Selma with conspicuous disdain. But he was friendly with Edmund Pettus, the infamous U.S. Senator and white supremacist who fought for the Confederacy and who wore the distinctive costume of the Grand Dragon, the state’s ranking Ku Klux Klan officer. They walked in the same circles; they worshipped in the same churches; their children went to the same schools. To be sure, the two enjoyed the privileges of whiteness in an antebellum Alabama. No one should doubt that my forebear shared much in common with the famous bridge’s namesake.
How do I make sense of this past, this blemish on my family name, this dent to my identity? Daniel Brislin bore me, after all. Not literally; there were many Brislins and Breslins between him and me. But it seems the prejudice of my earliest forefathers only diluted over time. It never fully disappeared.
To start, I realized I could not make much sense of anything in the comfortable confines of my home. Upstate New York has its demons, but it does not carry the heavy burden of American slavery. Or at least not outwardly.
So I recently accompanied my adult daughter on a journey to our ancestral homeland. She’s been to Alabama before—we’re enormous Crimson Tide football fans—but never exactly on a civil rights pilgrimage. Specifically, I wanted to explore Montgomery’s unique legacy in the nation’s enduring struggle for racial equality. I’ve been to Selma and I’ve walked the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I’ve stood in front of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. I’ve even traveled to Scottsboro. But I had never been to Montgomery. I felt I needed to go.
The city, of course, is the epicenter of the civil rights movement. The state’s house of government, Montgomery, was also the first capital of the Confederate States of America. It thus has profound symbolic importance. It was the final destination of the Voting Rights Marches organized by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and others. It boasts more than its fair (or should I say “fare”) share of historical heroes—none grander than Rosa Parks, who famously refused to surrender her seat to a white man on a Montgomery city bus. Americans forget that Dr. King cut his pastorate teeth at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church across the street from the State Capitol and just around the corner from what was the first Confederate White House. It was in Dr. King’s place of worship that so much of the civil rights strategy was birthed.
Today, the Legacy Sites are the heart of Montgomery’s racial retelling. Three spaces in all, the Legacy Sites are intended to “invite visitors to reckon with [America’s] history of racial injustice in places where that history was lived.”
The Legacy Museum is a powerful and interactive object space that transports visitors from the slave ships—where more than 12 million Africans experienced the brutal conditions of the trans-Atlantic passage and more that 2 million died on the voyage (the mental image of a cemetery with several million souls buried at the bottom of the sea is hard to forget)—through Reconstruction, forced segregation, Jim Crow, and finally mass incarceration.
Freedom Monument and Legacy Park include a boat ride on the Alabama River, a major waterway supporting the slave trade.
Both are impressive. But it was at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice that my daughter and I began to understand the significance of our family’s legacy. The six-acre outdoor space is both commemoration and exhibition, deeply somber and penetratingly artistic. It tells the story of America’s racial terror lynchings. Over 4400 Black men and women were murdered because of their skin tone, tied to trees and posts and bridges, and left to hang limp and exposed. Each victim of these racial executions has their name inscribed on one of the corten steel blocks that, together, form an indelible sight. The memorial is beautiful and despairing in equal measure.
The exhibition is also allegorical. Visitors navigate the space by walking under blocks that are attached to rods by noose-like connectors, unsubtly suggesting that we are all spectators and participants in a real-life lynching. The blocks themselves resemble both coffins and the human form. The durability of the steel stands in contrast to the frailty of the deceased. The indifference of the executioner is powerfully vanquished by the permanence of the blocks themselves.
Lynchings were a display of racial power – THE most jarring and vicious show of racial control invented by man. The snapping of the neck or the suffocation that occurred were meant to convey dominion. Lifeless bodies were left for all to see. Nineteen of these gruesome demonstrations were staged in Dallas County during the Jim Crow era, the second-highest number in the entire state. Selma claims its share of them.
Deep down, I know that my great-great-great-grandfather must have been part of that terror. In a sense, then, that terror now courses through my veins. And my daughter’s. Aside from facing our past through education, dialogue, and raised awareness, I can’t shield us from the cruelty we inherited.
They say that silence is acquiescence. At best, Daniel Brislin stayed mum while Black persons in Selma and throughout the South were subjected to unimaginable cruelty, torn from their families, treated with scorn and reprisal, lynched for the most inconsequential “transgressions,” and taught that the white patriarchy considered them morally inferior. My condemnation of his silence is easy, trite, almost. And yet even in this vastly polarized moment, I think we can all agree that any form of racial dominion is wicked. It is now; it was then. I journey on.
Beau Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair in Government at Skidmore College.
WASHINGTON—For high school students across the country and the world, it’s college application season, where one decision can change the trajectory for a teenager’s entire life. However, some students of color aren’t even exposed to all of their options, in particular, minority serving institutions (MSIs).
In the United States, MSIs, which include historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs), enrolled over 5 million undergraduate and graduate students in 2016. That’s around 25% of total college enrollment, according to 2015 data.
High schoolers can apply to any school they want, but some say they aren’t being exposed to all the options they deserve. Deborah Santiago, the co-founder and CEO of Excelencia in Education, an organization dedicated to the success of Latino students in higher education, is one of them.
“Institutions have a responsibility to do that marketing [to students,]” said Santiago. “...At Excelencia, we focus more on...what institutions are doing to reach out to students. Students already have a lot of burden and expectation to do some of the homework to figure out what’s a good fit for them.”
One study found that when college recruiters are sent across the country to high schools, they tend to visit schools in wealthier neighborhoods with predominantly white student bodies. That means many students of color, who often live in lower-income areas, are not having college recruiters visit them, and if they are, they’re not recruiters from MSIs.
College Campus Tours LLC (CCT) is an educational consulting firm that is working to bridge that gap. For almost 30 years, instead of relying on colleges to come to students, CCT has been bringing students to colleges through its diverse bus tours. They offer a variety of tour groups, including an HBCU tour and a Latino college tour.
Owner and President of CCT, Shaun Lain, said there is a substantial difference between having high schoolers meet with college recruiters and having students actually visit college campuses.
“Most people learn through visual, auditory, or tactile [experiences.] ...[Students] need to smell, feel, and touch if this is the right environment,” said Lain. “You can’t do it on a view book, you can’t do it online. You need to go there and see the environment, see the experience that the college has [to] offer.”
Art student Amalia Muñoz attends an HSI in the western suburbs of Illinois, Waubonsee Community College. She said she didn't remember her high school having college recruiters from diverse institutions, and it wasn’t until she actually got on Waubonsee’s campus that she learned about its diverse offerings.
“When I attended some events, like orientation, I remember [seeing] tables for a Latina/Latino club. I know [the Hispanic community] is a big thing, big enough for us to get emails,” said Muñoz.
Lain said it’s important for students to have access to multiple higher education institutions and see what they have to offer before actually committing to a college.
“We want to make sure that students get a good glimpse on what speaks to them, and that's why we want to emphasize them actually getting on a bus,” said Lain.
Although CCT does help bring students to diverse college campuses, its services may not be accessible to all students and their families. Santiago said financial literacy and familial support are among the most crucial factors when making college decisions.
"Recruit the whole family, you don’t just recruit that individual student. A student relies on their family and support to be able to be successful,” said Santiago.
At CCT, on average, their Latino college tours cost just under $235 per day, per person. While this includes bus transportation, some merchandise items, and sightseeing activity fees, it does not include the recommended $40 per day for dinner, additional money for souvenirs, or transportation to and from the departure cities—which are all larger, metropolitan cities.
Lain said that because many people come from different financial backgrounds, through CCT, he tries to expose students to successful career paths in case they are not receiving proper support from their high school guidance counselors.
“It hurts me to my heart when motivated students go to college and complete college, but they major in something that really can't propel them for the next 40 years,” said Lain. “We go through those five essential majors of the unemployed and we go through those five majors of the employed, because it's very important that they realize that we need to have transferable skills.”
Myla S. Roundy is a third-year journalism student at Howard University. She is a fall 2025 Common Ground Journalism fellow and the investigative section editor of the student-run newspaper, The Hilltop.
