One of the things that makes America great is our collective resolve that every American should have an equal opportunity to succeed. We have never fully achieved this, but the Constitution gives us the tools to try, and we have used them. As a result, the arc of American history has bent toward greater equality for 249 years, passing through the Civil War, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, Obergefell v. Hodges and other milestones.
Of course, that progress is occasionally met with resistance. Oklahoma City, a purple city in a red state, where I serve as mayor, has witnessed Ku Klux Klan activities as well as successful sit-in movements.
As residents of a purple city in a red state, we’ve been hearing a lot of rhetoric that portrays the drive for equal opportunity as a form of reverse discrimination, that says we should not celebrate greater diversity as evidence that we have expanded opportunity, or even that we should not support Pride or other celebrations of our residents’ unique identities.
Sometimes this rhetoric is cloaked in patriotism, but it is really just repackaged bigotry, misogyny and racism. To cast equal opportunity as a threat rather than a goal is to move backward.
Before I took office in 2018, and for as long as anyone can remember, the mayor’s conference room at City Hall was adorned with the images of all 34 former mayors. All 34 were white and 33 were men. In the room where it happens, those images were a stark reminder that our aspirations for equal opportunity have fallen short. Those mayors were also overwhelmingly representative of how political power in Oklahoma City has historically emanated from the more affluent Northwest quadrant (where I grew up and live).
I’m a lifelong Republican who believes in meritocracy, but meritocracy cannot be exclusionary. Every person depicted on that conference room wall was a qualified and well-intentioned public servant, but there were women, people of color and leaders from other parts of the city who could have also been competent mayors. Heavy layers of history, exclusion, bigotry and glass ceilings stood in their way.
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The post I’m a Red-State Mayor Who Knows the Value of Diversity appeared first on New York Times.
