Regarding the "DEI": Letter to the Editor
The letter I wanted to submit, but had to chop down to 500 words.
DEI Offers of “Help”- My Opinion.
It’s time for us to consider whether the town’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committees are making our community more welcoming, fair, and free, or are doing exactly the opposite. The all too recent history of aspersions cast against our neighbors by these groups is well documented, and one of the DEI groups is now attempting to restrict and mandate language.
The town’s DEI Committee brought two proposed policies with significant speech implications to the January 8th Town Council meeting. Each was separately discussed. Thankfully far more ‘public comment’ers spoke out against the “Respectful Speech” language-code proposed by the group, than for it. Most saw the code’s official statement, which was intended to be added to all public meeting agendas and read aloud before ‘public comment’ periods, as an unneeded attempt to infringe the free-speech rights of town-folk. Clearly a policy delineating acceptable speech, would place the town’s DEI committee in the role of official arbiters of acceptability.
Since within the last year, the Massachusetts Supreme Court held that even uncivil speech is protected speech, what was the goal of the DEI Committee in rolling this proposal out for discussion?
The second proposal was a “No Tolerance Condemnation” policy mandating that the towns leaders issue public statements condemning anything the DEI chose to classify as a hate incident. This policy would clearly force speech onto the town’s officials, and by extension every member of the town. Comments made by members of the DEI group who were present for the discussion, betrayed what seemed like a desire to use the leadership of this town as a bullhorn through which they could force the official town stamp-of-approval onto the committee’s chosen correct-think narratives. The prospect of this is terrifying, especially given the narratives we’ve seen advanced in recent years.
For example, we have seen multiple attempts to shame other residents of this town with unsubstantiated assertions of hatefulness and wrong-think, using two separate incidents, each of which had all the hallmarks of hoaxes (of which we have seen many in this nation since 2016). The targets of the aspersions are innocent residents who simply hold unfavored political views. These unfortunate events, one around mysterious “pamphlets” and the other a spray painted symbol, always serve the same purpose: they cause division here in town, and are intended to imply the need for the re-education of residents of the town….. by the DEI committees, no doubt. These divisive aspersions do not help our town to be more diverse, equitable, or inclusive.
I recently heard a first-person account of one of our neighbors in town who had been directly “spied” upon by one of our DEI committee members, via infiltration of her open-to-all children’s story-time at the Barrington library. After having first found herself to be mysteriously blocked in her attempts to reserve a public room at the library, she was next confronted with the realization that she had become an agenda item on the DEI Committee’s next meeting. The issue? The story-time she’d organized featured children’s books by a Christian book publisher.
It is eye opening to see that a neighbor’s holding a Christian story-time at the library could have put her into the crosshairs of the town’s DEI. Is that what respect for diversity looks like?
Lastly, close readers of this paper are aware that I have been vocal in my opposition to what I see as a blatant and ongoing shaming attempt by DEI zealots. This is the “Land Acknowledgement”, delivered at the beginning of every Town Council meeting, immediately after the Pledge of Allegiance. It asserts that we live on stolen land and that they owe a personal and societal debt to The Pokanoket. Despite the fact that the insinuation of shared guilt being levied against the current residents of this town is completely unfounded, it still manages to deliver to the unguarded, the slight pang of shame that is intended- it’s just human nature. And, thus, DEI’s goal is realized.
Here is a list of apparent wrong-think, gleaned from actions and statements of the towns DEI committees or their members in recent years:
1. Believing that you have freedom of religion and should be able to use public resources in the same way as other residents for your group’s activities.
2. Failing to feel shame and a need to take reparative actions for acts of The British in the prerevolutionary colonies in North America.
3. Failing to immediately attribute to the belief system of members of your own community, an offensive but unattributed graffiti mark or leaflet which has not yet been determined to be real or a hoax.
4. Feeling entitled to express concern over the lives of Palestinian innocents, in light of actions being undertaken in GAZA, because you believe that war-crimes are not acceptable on behalf of any government- “ancestral homeland” claims mattering not a wit.
5. Failing to judge, promote, hire, or alternatively shame others for the color of their skin.
6. Failure to support adult-entertainers’ attempts to conduct story-hours for children, in full adult-entertainment regalia. (Even though you would support those same individuals should they feel the desire to read stories to children while not in adult-entertainment character.)
If we look back in history for the movements that were averse to freedom of religious belief, speech & thought, and property rights, we won’t come up with the names of many worthy actors. Let’s be super cautious about outsourcing our sense of right and wrong to any group that aligns in the ways that our local DEIs do, or to anyone else for that matter. Trust yourself and your neighbors instead. We really do have a community of smart, caring, diverse and welcoming people, here in Barrington. Aside from an over-abundance of DEI Committees, we are truly blessed.
- Janine