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Commentary: Who’s Afraid of DEI? – How the Assault on Diversity Harms Rural Places [1]
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Date: 2025-04-03
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is just the latest boogeyman; a catchall acronym for every type of racial fear and insecurity. Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory are in the same category, and before that it was the more expansive “multiculturalism.”
The list of related terms and the anxieties projected onto them is long, but attempts to tease out the complexities of these wildly divergent constructs, or show how they are dishonestly distorted by partisans is probably futile.
The current assault on DEI initiatives is a case study in actions that virtually guarantee rural people, and the places they live in will be disproportionately wounded.
When I first began writing grants and sitting on review panels, it was like learning another language. I won’t lie, part of the challenge was the specific parlance of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Those words are plain enough in everyday English, but it is fair to say they take on more nuanced meanings in grant-making jargon. But that is not because they are secretly coded to rob deserving individuals or agencies of opportunity in order to award substandard work on the basis of race or gender.
In almost thirty years of nonprofit work, I have never witnessed anything remotely like that, yet outlandish claims like that seem to be driving the heated national conversation about DEI.
Community and cultural development are where I have the most experience, so I will confine my comments to that realm, but diversity standards have been in place for many years in every sort of agency that awards or receives public funding. Yet, almost no one now objecting to DEI policies pauses long enough to ask why those policies were adopted, who is included in them, or what the outcomes have been.
To sum it up in one sentence, limited access to resources on a number of fronts—not just race and gender—inspired the thinking behind DEI initiatives and small communities may have benefitted more than almost anyone from their implementation.
Every time the topic comes up, I am reminded of a roundtable discussion involving arts leaders from across my state of North Carolina. The diverse group included everyone from professional administrators at major cultural institutions to small-town arts volunteers like me. When the conversation turned to the most intractable challenges facing nonprofit arts agencies, one of my thoughtful colleagues who works with urban immigrant populations observed that her constituents faced many obstacles navigating the paperwork, insider jargon, and procedural guidelines required to communicate with most grant-makers. Everyone in the room probably assumed she was talking about English language barriers—I know I did—but she quickly dispelled that notion by nodding at me and saying, “He knows what I mean.”
After I had a moment to process that, I knew exactly what she meant.
She intuitively recognized that rural communities and culturally isolated urban enclaves are often ignored, neglected, and deprived of opportunity in much the same way. We might not share the same language or customs, but marginalization only requires the contempt or negligence of the people who hold the power and purse strings. Expressed in those terms, it may be easier to understand how initiatives intended to combat systemic inequity and oversight—imperfect as they may be—are desperately needed to ensure access for underserved communities of every kind.
Most rural places are the very definition of underserved in the arts by federal and state grant-making guidelines. Before anyone jumps to the wrong conclusion, I have long been an advocate for homegrown culture and the value of traditional and folk arts, but even these are endangered by trashing DEI programs. Whether it’s growing the capacity of small-town arts agencies to serve such constituents, improving arts access for undeserved country kids, or just paying the pickers at the local bluegrass festival, a great deal of funding for rural cultural projects is doled out under the DEI banner.
Even when programs are not directly connected to DEI funding, rural communities benefit immeasurably from a civic culture of broad inclusivity. Diversity sometimes means opportunity on the basis of economic challenges or isolated settings. Equity sometimes means offering a leg up to rural artists and arts agencies. Inclusion sometimes means inviting rural people to the table and treating them with the respect and dignity they deserve.
There is no reason to pretend that race and gender parity are not integral to most DEI program goals. Because they are, millions of rural residents who fall into these categories endure insult on top of injury when these policies are indiscriminately gutted, as do military veterans, people with disabilities, religious minorities, elderly populations, caregivers, and those living with developmental disabilities. Sometimes diversity just means diversity, and taken together these populations make up a huge chunk of rural Americans who are now at risk of losing access to opportunity and critical services.
Presently, only federal agencies are impacted by the administration’s shortsighted executive order attempting to dismantle anything remotely resembling a DEI policy but the domino effect is well underway in state and local governments. Weak-kneed compliance in the private and nonprofit sectors only validates and emboldens these efforts, while suggesting we were never really serious about helping our neighbors in the first place.
There is risible irony in an executive order that reads, in part, “Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect.” The minimal protections DEI policies offer exist only because their government has repeatedly failed to affirm the equal dignity and respect of America’s most vulnerable citizens. Anyone supporting the rollback of such policies in the name of meritocracy would do well to think about who determines what qualifies as meritorious and recall that the traditional standards almost never tilt toward rural Americans.
Shawn Pitts is a community arts advocate who lives in Selmer, Tennessee. He has written for Southern Cultures, The Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin, The Bitter Southerner, and other periodicals. Shawn has served on the boards of The Tennessee Folklore Society, Humanities Tennessee, and The Tennessee Arts Commission, as well as numerous economic and community development agencies.
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[1] Url:
https://dailyyonder.com/commentary-whos-afraid-of-dei-how-the-assault-on-diversity-harms-rural-places/2025/04/03/
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