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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.
You say you have 150 regular members and only 3 minorities? I'm really skeptical that your comminity is 98% white. You don't have a specific responsibility to make your church less white, but if there aren't many minorities at your church there might be some deeper underlying issues.
Well, usually it's down to the history of racial bias. White churches have a history of excluding black people. I don't know if that's true for your church, but white organizations can't just say they're open to black people as if that undoes hundreds of years of discrimination.
Without doxxing myself, the latest census I saw for my town -- in 2019, as I recall -- has us at 96.something% White.
OP probably does not live anywhere near me, but outside of major cities and border territories, there remain a lot of very White communities. It's not terribly hard to believe he might live in one.
If you live in a community that is 95%+ white, there are probably some deeper structural forces at play here. After all America is only 60% white. I don't think OP has a responsibility to just recruit more members of color, but there's might be some other reason why his community doesn't have very many minorities.
Don't be shy, what are the structural forces? Don't mind the downvotes.
I had 0-1 black kid in my elementary school classes. Due to history, I saw more Natives. As I grew up, I saw more people of different races. Today, my city is more diverse than ever. I don't think we got less racist. I think that it's as simple as this: historically the place was settled by whites, and eventually the town became economically attractive to outsiders of any race.
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I agree with you in a literal sense but I'm not sure I agree with the connotations of your comment. In particular, I think discrimination plays a relatively small role in explaining the variation in racial diversity in the US. And in the cases where discrimination does matter it is often the case that areas with more historical discrimination have more racial diversity (e.g. areas with a history of slavery tend to have more Black people today).
I think that latitude explains a fairly large portion of the variation in racial diversity in America and degree of urbanization accounts for much of the rest. First, latitude: slaves were originally highly concentrated in the south and so Black people today are still concentrated there. Also Latino immigrants are naturally concentrated in the South. Second, degree of urbanization: it is much easier for immigrants to find jobs in big urban centers rather than rural areas, both because there are more types of jobs and higher turnover. Also jobs in rural areas are more likely to be seasonal and thus less likely to lead to permanent residence. Also it is easier for immigrant communities to form in urban areas due to higher population density and this has a snowball effect.
There is at least one way in which historical discrimination played a big role in the low levels of racial diversity in some parts of the US: the collapse of Native American populations caused by war, disease, etc. But given that no state has a very large population of Native Americans today, I don't think this explains much of the variation in racial diversity.
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I'd say a more productive avenue, other than worrying about demographics per se, would be to get some people started coordinating joint activities and projects with the black church.
They mention that there's a black church within four miles with reversed demographics. Given that there isn't an unlimited number of black people to go around, should the black church break up and distribute its members between the nearby white churches? If whites should be conscious of how welcoming they are to blacks, should blacks strive to embed themselves into white contexts, rather than self-segregating? Suppose black people actually enjoy being around other black people; would that be a problematic preference we should seek to change?
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