DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) has been in the news a lot lately.
President Trump sees DEI as a four-letter word and wants to eliminate it from the government’s vocabulary. What Trump abhors, we in Forest Park seem to value.
We are a DEI community. We have a black mayor; our fire chief is a woman; for the last two years we’ve had a drag queen performance right in the middle of our business district; and we have three nonprofits in town devoted to serving the disability community.
In 2014 my co-columnist, John Rice, wrote a piece in which he said, “When we moved here in 1980, I thought we had landed in a racial paradise. Blacks and whites, Latinos and Asians associated freely at school events and community gatherings. Skin color lost its stigma and I’ll be forever grateful our kids grew up in a color-blind community.”
So how did we as a village get to DEI?
Our proximity to Oak Park begs me to make comparisons, so here goes.
Oak Park got to DEI by adopting an intentional strategy to control the process of demographic change. Oak Park has always been proactive in that way.
Oak Parkers have a long history of trying to control their destiny, dating back to when it was incorporated in 1902. Originally it was a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) lifestyle enclave which had a clear picture of what it wanted to be.
Oak Park Temple acquired the property where it is now located by means of a “straw purchase.” In the 1950s.
Oak Park remained a dry community until 1979.
In 1991 James Bundy wrote, “Temperance is the moral symbol of Oak Park’s commitment to an ideal of community life. … The temperance laws were Oak Park’s assurance that the population would remain homogeneous.”
My point is not to slam our neighbor to the east but to point out that a continuous thread in Oak Park’s history is the attempt by church and civic leaders to be actively intentional in the shaping of the village’s society and culture.
For example, Oak Park’s attaining of racial diversity did not happen by accident. It happened because Bobbie Raymond outlined an intentional roadmap regarding how to get from homogeneity to DEI.
Roberta “Bobbie” Raymond did not single-handedly transform Oak Park from a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, conservative, Republican community into a model DEI village. What she did do was provide a plan that became known as the Oak Park Strategy, which provided a road map for how the village could intentionally pursue diversity.
And here is where the contrast between the two neighboring communities is instructive. Although they both arrived at a DEI destination, they took different routes to get there.
John wrote, “Oak Park’s leaders resorted to racial steering and other quasi-constitutional practices to prevent re-segregation. It worked. Oak Park became a national model for achieving racial balance and harmony. Unlike Oak Park, Forest Park did not attempt to control integration. It seemed to occur naturally.”
For example, no one seemed to have a problem with Jewish cemeteries being founded in Forest Park way back in 1870. There was no grand plan to include or exclude the minority from “residing” in the mostly German community.
For example, Forest Park voters elected Lorraine Popelka to be mayor in 1987 and Rory Hoskins to the same office 32 years later. It wasn’t an ideological thing or part of a strategy to move the village toward DEI. It wasn’t because we felt obligated to elect a woman or an African American. They just seemed to be better candidates. DEI was in the cultural atmosphere, if you will, and as it turned out it was not the enemy of meritocracy.
You see the difference in temperaments?
Forest Park got to DEI by a different road than did its neighbor to the east, I think, more because the residents in town have been more pragmatic and in a strange way less idealistic. They were in the beginning working folk who had a no-nonsense approach to demographic change. “If you move into the house next door and are a good neighbor, I don’t care if you are green.”
I’d like to call it “blue collar DEI.”
And that sensibility was attractive to high profile, educated, white collar leaders like Art Jones who seemed at first glance to fit better in Oak Park than in this village with small-town charm. Dr. Jones, you might say, had a white collar head and a blue collar heart.
I have three graduate degrees, including a Doctor of Ministry, but I’d rather reside in the village with big city access and small-town charm. So do a lot of other people with my credentials. According to the Census Bureau, 49.8% of residents in Forest Park have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Nothing against Oak Park. In fact, I’m not sure Forest Park would be where it is today, if Oak Park had not been intentional in responding to demographic change.