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Notes -
On Free Association vs. Exclusion, or: can white people just do stuff together?
Yesterday I went to church. I would estimate that there are about 150 people at my church. There are exactly three people of color there:
One black teenaged girl, who I believe is the adoptive daughter of a white couple there.
One old guy called Antonio, who I think came from Argentina a long time ago.
A Hispanic woman who is the wife of an old white guy.
The demographics of this church are, basically, the demographics of the immediately surrounding neighborhoods and of this demonination nationally: the people who go there go there because A.) they live close by and B.) they think the EFCA has good teachings to offer about God, the world etc. Everyone comes there of their own free will; all are explicitly welcome. We have never turned anyone away - I am one of the greeters and I try to take seriously my responsibility to make anyone that arrives feel welcome.
Still, when thinking about this, something apparent to me is that this church has no racial diversity. Are we under a moral obligation to try and change that?
If we are: why is that? How did we incur it? Is it not enough to be welcoming, do we need to actively change our demographic composition? What if, as seems to be the case, there are hardly any non-white people that want to come to our church?
If we are not: why is that? Other voluntary organizations come under pressure to diversify, all the time - see "knitting too white," "hiking too white," etc. Would our church not qualify because it's too small? Because it isn't a business? Because we do not have any status to award? Because we have no social media presence?
There is a black church less than four miles away - I cannot imagine them ever coming under pressure to diversify, even though they have the same level of diversity as my church does. Why should that be? I can already think of the Conflict Theory explanation - but what would the Mistake Theory explanation for that be?
I guess what I'm wondering about or driving at is, as my title indicates - is there any limiting principle to the drive for making groupings reflect the population distribution of the country as a whole? Are there organizations for which it would be unreasonable to ask this - or are there simply only organizations whose undiversity hasn't been noticed? I'm not asking this out of any animosity towards any racial group; we would really just like for everyone to come to our church. I just find myself wondering why similar bodies, who didn't choose their racial composition at all, nevertheless come under criticism for that, and some don't.
One of the steelmen for diversity initiatives is that groups (racial or otherwise) can have blindspots, different priorities, and so on.
Thus increasing diversity is a hedge against failure modes.
For a corporation, this might be something as mild as failing to support other timezones or as dramatic as marketing pork to Muslims.
For representative organizations, mainly democratic governments, there are other factors at play.
To some degree the government “owes” all its citizens similar opportunities as part of the social contract.
Perhaps more importantly, it derives its power from consent, and relies on fairness or the perception of such.
If citizens don’t believe the government respects their interests...Things get messy.
This latter type has a natural (compromise) target of matching the constituency.
On the other hand, the first case can expand to fill all available space as long as proponents can claim to be silenced.
Obviously such claims may be legitimate (Jim Crow) or realpolitik.
Given that your church isn’t designed as a government, and probably isn’t hitting any of the big risks for blindspots, it’s probably fine.
When someone can point to harm inflicted by its monoculture, then perhaps you should worry.
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