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.
As mayor, one of my primary goals has been to provide opportunities so that anyone of merit could be mayor or anything else. It is absolutely possible to create such pathways within a meritocracy, and it ensures that meritocracies are authentic. This is hard work, but to do nothing, to pretend those conference room walls reflected our aspirations, is simply unacceptable.
About 60 percent of the children in Oklahoma City are nonwhite, and half of the city is female. To provide them with clear ways to achieve their highest potential is a legitimate way to open the doors of opportunity.
I have used my office to involve the city’s communities as never before. I call it “One OKC.” I proclaimed Indigenous Peoples’ Day and Pride Month in Oklahoma City for the first time. I regularly attend our annual civil rights commemorations, march in our Latino parades, became the first mayor to visit a mosque and regularly attend events in our Asian community. Though that outreach is largely symbolic, many people have told me how much it meant to them, because they felt a part of our city as never before. We are building pathways for them to the rooms where decisions are made.
We have also taken more substantive actions. We have recreated our Human Rights Commission, which had been dissolved in the 1990s because it took a stand in favor of protections for the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community. When I took office, the unpaid volunteer appointees on nearly 60 oversight and advisory boards were roughly 90 percent white and 79 percent male. Mayors often appoint who they know, and by broadening the outreach of the office, the perspectives of those appointed has also broadened. The positions now held by people of color have tripled, and the seats held by women have doubled. I have appointed women to chair nine of the 10 boards we have created since 2018.
Broader perspectives yield more inclusive outcomes. We are now investing in all the quadrants of the city and in initiatives that support residents at all socioeconomic levels. We are building a civil rights center to better tell our city’s journey.
These efforts have been validated by our residents, whose demographics and political breakdown largely reflect the nation as a whole. My electoral coalition represented a broad spectrum of the city partly because we do not have partisan primary elections. Voters consider candidates of all parties and positions, and if no one receives a majority, the top two vote-getters face off in a runoff. Elected officials have to operate in the best tradition of American democracy, building a coalition of Republicans, Democrats and independents. I was elected in 2018 with 78 percent and re-elected in 2022 with a 40-point lead overall and a 46-point margin over an opponent who ran with a slogan of “It’s time to take our city back.” (From whom? many of us wondered.)
On the day I took office in 2018, we respectfully relocated those pictures of the former mayors. In their place now hang 20 images of Oklahoma City kids. By gender and ethnicity, they are demographically representative of the kids of Oklahoma City. They gaze down on us and remind us that the decisions we make in that room will affect them most of all. And hopefully, all the kids of Oklahoma City, regardless of race or gender, will increasingly believe that they can grow up to sit at the head of that conference room table, or any other table in America’s 20th-largest city.
We are making progress in delivering equal opportunity for all residents, and the politics of the moment can’t stand in our way. Divisive rhetoric has come and gone throughout American history, but equality has always won out in the end. And that’s what we owe those kids on my conference room wall.
David Holt is the mayor of Oklahoma City, president of the United States Conference of Mayors and a member of the Osage Nation.
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