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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.
By "X theory explanation", do you mean "if you are an X theorist, you could explain it like this" or "if [your opponents who are responsible for this state of affairs] are X theorists, this is how they would justify their choice"?
Assuming it's the former, it doesn't seem like a hard exercise. I'd think that the mistake that camp pro-SJ does in this and many other scenarios is assuming that just because certain minorities have inferior SES nationally on average, they always and everywhere can not possibly be at a local advantage or have something to bestow withholding which on an ethnic basis can be unfair to individuals and ultimately to the detriment of all. Maybe there is a white or Asian teenager who grew up over in the neighbourhood of the black church, in a particular subcommunity where all his friends and social superiors are black. The only status that he would be feasibly placed to pursue in his life is status in his local community, which is significantly gatekept by the black church in question, and even if they aren't formally rejecting him, in practice he would obviously, visibily be out of place if he tried to join and participate.
The easiest way to make the mistake-theoriness of the view stark is to then treat both sides as sum utilitarians. If we compelled the black church to make an explicit effort to admit more people who look like him, would this on balance do more good by helping people like the hypothetical black-neighbourhood kid (or any number of other effects which I didn't address, such as the sense of civic belonging that may be fostered by everyone being subject to the same rules), or more bad by making the job of running a $disadvantaged_minority church even more onerous than it already is (and accordingly keeping the black-white SES gap greater, with all the disutility this entails)? Presumably the SJ utilitarian response is the latter, but are they right about this?
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