by Sherman Gillums, Jr., Guest Contributor

President Donald Trump’s Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping presents yet another Rorschach Inkblot test for our society. For some, calling for an end to claims of institutional racism is the surest way to perpetuate it. For others, it’s past time to put away old narratives that ignore the tremendous progress we’ve made in America. Like most arguments on social issues, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, I argue. 

For one, I never saw evidence that diversity and inclusivity training worked very well during my careers in the military and corporate America. That may not be the case for others, but that’s been my experience. You simply can’t inspire tolerance and compliance by fiat. Forcing the hand of those who want to discriminate has simply made it harder to detect, making it the case now either everything or nothing looks like racism. 

Does the president’s executive order take it too far in the other direction though? I can see why some might think so. It’s not that systemic racial bias doesn’t exist. I do believe “white male heterosexual Christian identity” has been the default for just about everything in our society, to our detriment in some ways. This makes it easy to get away with true racism or bias under the guise of “that’s just the way it is” for those who do harbor racial animus. 

Case in point, what the CEO of Wells Fargo, Charles Scharf, recently said about the lack “diverse talent” in the finance industry was ignorant. How did homogenous leadership teams work out for Enron, Painewebber, Arthur Andersen, GM, Worldcom, and Lehman Brothers? Racial bias is a bad idea not just because it’s morally wrong. It also tries to validate mediocrity and excuse failure, which is canting for a society that claims merit is supposed to matter above all else.

That said, the more we tag every consequence with facially racial implications as racism, while ignoring individual actions and self accountability, the bridge goes farther and farther even for those of us who want to see greater equality. Race, being black in particular, has been a proxy indicator for socioeconomic deprivation for a long time. Living in “urban” areas subliminally suggests poor and downtrodden blacks while ignoring the growing highly educated, economically advantaged black class in our country, which includes my family as well as 90% of my black contemporaries. 

It may in fact be time for a shift in the narrative, even if we cannot agree on whether the president’s shift is the right kind. 

During my lifetime, as a Generation Xer raised in post-segregation America, we’ve had a black U.S. President, two Secretaries of State, three National Security Advisors, two U.S. Attorneys General, two U.S. Supreme Court Justices, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, eighteen Fortune 500 CEOs, and heads of the RNC and DNC — several of the most powerful roles in this country. By the way, women have also occupied most of these positions. Conversely, Latinos, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, and others are still vying for seats at many of these tables for the first time. 

Two things can be true: we’ve made tremendous progress, but it needs to continue.

We’ll see whether this executive order offers the right shift. Many people will simply consider the source in this case and react. But how this plays out is really up to us. I teach my own kids the version of Columbus’s “discovery”, the Civil War, and the history of the African continent that I want them to know. Our formal education systems, from pre-kindergarten to doctoral studies, are just one dimension of learning and can indeed be biased in many ways, not just in terms of race. But my kids never saw their non-black peers as any better off than they were, and I preferred it that way. 

Whether you believe we’ve gone too far or haven’t gone far enough, in terms of either distorting or correcting history, you’re probably right to an extent. Having an officially recognized Black History Month in a country that’s “irredeemably racist” does indicate the bipolar nature of our collective psyche. As such, there will be legitimate concerns on all sides of an argument where consensus may be impossible to achieve. But then again, historical “truth” by consensus and its attempt to settle matters as intractable fact haven’t worked out well for many in the first place.

Thinking that an executive order is somehow going to help or harm what’s been a problem centuries in the making should perhaps be the larger concern for a country that has reached an inflection point in terms of our American identity.

Disclaimer: The views expressed by our contributors are solely those of the individual and do not necessarily represent the views of the PW Perspective, LLC or its staff and stakeholders.