Real multicultural democracies

Chicago is a highly diverse city, and it is a good example of life in a multicultural democracy. The image above is a photo of the crowd on Navy Pier on a recent Saturday summer evening. According to local estimates, as many as 120,000 people visit Navy Pier on a Saturday night, and it is a good practical example of the benefits of multicultural democracy. The crowd is highly diverse, with adults and children from all racial groups and many ethnicities and language groups. And there is a substantial degree of social class mixing as well, from young professionals from the North side to working class families from the South and West sides of the city. Turn your head in different directions and you will hear a dozen different languages. The atmosphere is comfortable, fun, accepting, and interactive, with a Latino music performance going on in the open-air music venue, families enjoying a meal from the food court, and a beautiful view of the Chicago waterfront and skyline. It's a fun outing for all the residents of the city. (Chicago's population is about 2.8 million, so a typical Saturday night on Navy Pier in the summer draws almost 5% of the city's residents.)

What are the facts of Chicago's diversity? Chicago's population is now about 2.75 million, of whom 21% are foreign born. According to the US Census Bureau 2020 Decennial Census (link), the largest racial/ethnic communities in the city include White (36%), Hispanic/Latino (30%), Black/African-American (29%), and Asian (7%). 11% of respondents reported "two or more races" in the Census questionnaire. (It will be noted that these population groups add up to more than 100%. The Census Bureau provided some information about changes in methodology in 2020 which may account for this discrepancy; link.)

Segregation in Chicago region

So Chicago is highly diverse. However, the city remains significantly segregated by neighborhood, and these patterns of segregation produce a continuing legacy of disadvantage in terms of important measures of social wellbeing (health, economic opportunity, educational outcomes). The Metropolitan Planning Council and the Urban League have studied these trends carefully, and their "Shared Future" report (link, link) serves both to detail the facts of segregation in Chicago today and to outline some strategies for reversing these trends.

So Chicago's problems of achieving racial equality persist. And yet on a warm August evening in the center of the Chicago Loop, it is possible to see how this city is creating a climate of mutual respect and civic equality. Multiple community-based organizations do the work of striving for racial justice and establishing an inclusive community for all Chicagoans through ongoing efforts, programs, and community alliances. The city's political leadership recognizes that "unity within diversity" must be the beginnings of Chicago's public values and urban politics. And academic institutions like the University of Illinois Chicago's Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy (link) have a continuing commitment to documenting the facts about racial and ethnic equality in Chicago, and identifying policy initiatives that can lead to meaningful progress. It is possible for our society to become more just and more harmonious through our own patient collective efforts.

If we look carefully at the photo of the Navy Pier crowd, we will see something surprising looming over the horizon of this vibrant mass of multicultural humanity. We see in the distance the luxury hotel and tower developed by the president of the United States, located a half-mile up the Chicago River. The contrast could not be more striking, between the glittering symbol of the political movement that is demonizing diversity in our country, versus the social bonds and community spirit of mutual acceptance that constitute the reality of our multicultural democracy.

Langston Hughes caught much of the paradox of race in America when he wrote these lines in 1935:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

And Walt Whitman was right too when he wrote, "I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear" as his own celebration of the breadth of experience of American society. America sings on Navy Pier and the many other places where citizens do better than politicians at facing the challenge of creating durable multicultural democracy. Being there reinforces one's confidence that the community and diversity of our country will prove stronger than the forces of xenophobia, mistrust, and antagonism that are being mobilized against us.

Why "DEI"?

The current war on DEI has proven to be unrelenting and highly destructive to the independence, academic freedom, and inclusiveness of American universities. And yet the values that gave rise to DEI initiatives throughout the country in the past two decades are deeply grounded in fundamental American values of equality, freedom, and community. How did we get to the place where DEI is regarded as extremist and alien?

First, some background. DEI is a slogan; it stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The fundamental idea is that the basic institutions of a multicultural and multiracial democracy should actively embody the facts of social and cultural diversity of the population; they should welcome all comers in a spirit of democratic equality; and they should actively strive to create environments that are genuinely welcoming to people from all aspects of American society. Unlike elitist institutions of the 1920s, universities should not be places where economic, religious, or racial elites have primacy, and people from other groups are only marginally welcome. Instead, an institution in a democratic society, including especially universities, should actively embrace the equality, dignity, and worth of all its participants.

Given the history of discrimination in our society -- discrimination based on religion, ethnic origin, gender, race, and other social or cultural characteristics -- any thoughtful observer will realize that full democratic equality requires more than slogans, more than banners, and more than "celebrations of global diversity". Democratic equality requires active work on the part of citizens, leaders, and institutional participants to remake the culture and systems of the institution in ways that deliberately turn back the impulse of discrimination and disparagement across identity groups. If Chicagoans have the view that down-staters are backward, conventional, and generally not very innovative, then banks, labor unions, and universities in Chicago are likely to reflect those assumptions without any special effort on the part of "hate groups" to bring this about. It reflects what we might call "cultural-assumptions discrimination". So special efforts would be required to change the mentality and culture of all the participants, to un-do the workings of these forms of "implicit bias". And if down-state urban school systems are typically underfunded and under-performing relative to their counterparts in the affluent Chicago suburbs, then down-state urban students are likely enough to be under-represented at "merit-based" elite institutions in Chicago. This would be an example of "structural discrimination". And it implies that "affirmative" efforts would be needed in order to give down-state urban students an equitable opportunity of access to the elite university.

And what about inclusion, welcome, and equal dignity and respect for the individuals and groups who wind up participating in the institution? If the biased assumptions that color the perceptions and expectations of Chicagoans and down-staters alike persist in the institutional environment of the elite university, then we may expect that consequential inequalities of respect, dignity, and worth will persist into the institutional environment as well. This will have the effect of reproducing locally the group separation and disparagement that exists in the broader society. Active efforts at the local level -- in the classroom, in the residence hall, in the eating club or Greek organization -- will be needed in order to change the way that eighteen-year-olds think about themselves and their classmates, without falling into the traps of orthodoxy, political correctness, or ineffectual scolding.

Is there any doubt that cultures of discrimination, disparagement, and bias continue to exist in American society? Of course not; the persistence of these attitudes and behaviors are all too evident, even when expressed in indirect and "socially acceptable" ways. So people who are committed to full democratic equality as a goal, even though not a current reality, are forced to face the question: what kinds of social messages, programming, and educational initiatives can be imagined that have a real effect on each individual's private culture of bias and acceptance? Doing nothing means allowing patterns of bias and discrimination to continue indefinitely; enacting a program of "mandatory hidden bias training" may seem to be too prescriptive for an institution that respects the autonomy and dignity of its participants. So neither action seems right.

This is the problem that commitments to DEI are trying to solve: to find avenues through which inter-group antagonisms and suspicions, usually based on ignorance, can be relaxed in favor of an acceptance of difference and an eagerness for learning from people different from oneself. And significantly, participants in DEI initiatives have often made use of careful empirical research in various disciplines of the social and behavioral sciences. We might describe this as a challenging project of social engineering. Or more appropriately, we might describe it as the work of establishing and securing a robust multicultural inclusive democracy. And we have plenty of examples of leaders who understood the importance and difficulty of this challenge, including Nelson Mandela, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama.

This goal is indeed worth struggling for, and its roots did not begin twenty years ago when the phrase "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion" came into use. Rather, its roots go back to some of the most morally perceptive theorists of democracy itself -- not chiefly the classical liberal theorists like Hobbes and Locke, for whom a democratic society is simply an instrument through which rationally self-interested citizens pursued their own interests in their own ways, but in the more substantive theories of philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was Rousseau who formulated the idea that all citizens contribute equally to the "general will" and to the wellbeing and freedom of the whole of society; it was Rousseau whose views could be summed up in the phrase, "a free community of equals". And it was Rousseau who argued unflinchingly for the equal freedom, dignity, and worth of all human beings. This is what the slogan "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion" is all about and what its advocates are trying to achieve.