Myth #4: If we are deliberate about diversifying our organizations, it will result in filling positions with inferior candidates.

Many Americans fear that if we take deliberate actions to diversify our organizations, positions will fill with subpar candidates.  Business leader Melvin J. Gravely challenges that narrative and asserts in his book, Dear White Friend, that deliberately diversifying our organizations will increase the time it takes to find qualified candidates, but that need not mean that we will start filling positions with less qualified candidates.

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In 2018, I made a motion on our church board that we express to our nominating committee that our heart was that within three years, one-third of our board would be elders of color.  One elder called me privately and said, “I don’t believe in quotas.”  “That’s fine,” I said, “because I’ve not proposed any quotas.”  At the time, Miami University had just decided to increase its African American student population from 2% to 8%.  I asked this elder, “How do you think they will achieve that?”  I imagine the president sitting down with his board, presenting the vision, and asking them what needed to happen to achieve that vision.  Then the board said things like, “We’ll need to start targeting black high schools. We’ll need to start including financial aid that targets black students.  And we’ll need students of color to welcome students when they arrive for their college visit and campus tour.”  And Miami University did those very things.  Increasing their African American student population required a deliberate effort to attract African American applicants.  The solution wasn’t achieved through quotas or reducing standards.

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Because of my passion for raising leaders of color within our church, I found myself on the Nominating Committee the following year.  I shared with the committee that our hearts were to raise elders and deacons of color.  Everyone on the committee was enthusiastically on board with that vision.  But we immediately ran into a challenge.  All the nominees for leadership positions were white!  Why was that?  Nominations primarily came from congregants who had previously served as elders and deacons, as they knew the importance of getting qualified names into the process.  And they nominated individuals they knew well, who they knew were qualified, i.e., those they had been in small group Bible study with for two or three decades.  We just didn’t know the black congregants who had been coming for five years or less, as well as our friends of five decades.  I realized that I didn’t know our new congregants well.  I felt convicted!  I’d fist bump James, the black man who sat behind me, every Sunday, but I’d not invested the time to get to know James.  As I then made the deliberate effort to get to know more of our black congregants, I discovered that while our black congregants often had different life experiences than my own, their spiritual qualifications to lead were no less than mine.