When Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States in 1980, former social activist Joan Steinau Lester said she realized with alarm that everything she had fought for in the last two decades was imperiled.
“I suddenly found myself propelled out of comparative hibernation and back into the public arena,” she said in a recent interview. “Reagan’s social agenda openly espoused total indifference to women and people of color. He was on the attack to dismantle all the affirmative-action programs of the 1970s. His anti-abortion stance threatened women’s hard-won reproductive rights. I was stunned that one person could so quickly and easily return our country to the darkness of the 1950s.”
It was a personal and professional call to action for Lester, the mother of two biracial teenagers then on the verge of adulthood.
“I feared for my children’s futures as African-Americans in a society where minorities again were being harassed on the streets,” she said. “I personally had lived a life in which diversity was honored. Now I knew I must dedicate my life’s work to helping others understand and appreciate how individual differences actually strengthen the social fabric.”
Lester, who has a doctorate in multicultural education, left academia to tackle issues of diversity where she could expect the greatest impact: the organizational sector. In 1982, she co-founded the non-profit Equity Institute, a national diversity consulting firm committed to eliminating the “isms” that separate individuals.
“We strive to teach people how to successfully reduce racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, heterosexism, ageism, ableism, classism and sizism within their organizations and show them what they need to do to support an inclusive rather than an exclusive environment,” she said. “And we help them ally with each other in practical, everyday ways. The interrelatedness of the `isms’ becomes clear as participants in our programs learn to value their own backgrounds and better appreciate diversity in others.”
By providing public and private entities with tools to create organizational harmony, Lester has worked to spearhead the movement for diversity nationally. Since its inception, Equity Institute’s mixed-gender, mixed-race consulting and training teams have worked with many of the largest organizations and institutions in the country, including the American Red Cross, Harvard University, Pacific Gas and Electric and Stanford University Medical School.
Today, a recognized leader in the diversity movement, Lester has helped more than 100,000 individuals and 1,000 organizations reap the benefits of bringing different dishes to life’s party, a lesson she considers herself fortunate to have learned in childhood.
Growing up in a progressive, left-wing bohemian family in the 1940s and 1950s, Lester developed an early appreciation for cultural differences.
“My parents were social rebels who included a black man and several gays among their friends at a time when legal segregation was in full force and homosexuality was not tolerated,” she recalled. “When I was 9 years old, they hosted a black teenager who was attending a youth conference in my hometown of Palmyra, N.J. They warned us children not to notice the boy’s blackness, nor to say anything about his race. We wondered whether our house would be bombed or we physically would be attacked. It was terribly thrilling and confusing at the same time.”
Lester acknowledged as a child that her parents often embarrassed her by being so very different from other mothers and fathers. She cringes when she recalls their participation with five other townspeople in a candlelight vigil to support the Ban the Bomb movement in the mid-1950s.
“Although privately I agreed with their position on the issue, I was at that awkward age when I was trying desperately to fit in,” she said. “Yet everything about my parents made me an outsider with my peers.”
On the contrary, Lester the adult expressed her gratitude for the rich, multicultural heritage she received, which allowed her to welcome diversity into all aspects of her life.
Despite their liberalism, Lester said, her parents could not hide their consternation when in 1962 she married an African-American man she had met through her involvement in the civil rights movement during her college years. Racially mixed marriages were still illegal in many states, but not in New York, where the ceremony took place.
“Although they raised me to believe completely in egalitarian relationships, my mother and father still were products of their society, and they worried about the discrimination I faced as the wife of an African-American.
“But just a few months after my marriage, they were reading `The Autobiography of Malcolm X’ and buying multiple copies to give to friends and colleagues for discussion. Soon they were marching against the Ku Klux Klan and encouraging others to help fight racism. My parents were ahead of their time in every way. They were deeply concerned with the very kind of social relations that today we call diversity.”
If Lester’s marriage thrust her into a completely new racial universe, her reading of French existentialist writer Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” that same year opened her eyes to the possibilities of an utterly different world of the sexes.
“De Beauvoir was the first woman I had ever heard of who consistently chose a life, rather than being handed the traditional one, that of wife and mother,” Lester said.
“After questioning the whole institution of marriage, she decided to remain single and to devote herself to intellectual pursuits. I tried to follow her example even though I already was married. I envisioned myself as an intellectual, which became increasingly difficult after motherhood. So I would simply confront each life situation and figure out what De Beauvoir would do in my place. I really began to think of myself as a `Simone de Beauvoir with children.”‘
Within six months of the first meeting of female activists in New York City in 1967, Lester threw herself into her second equal rights movement-that of women, a minority group protected under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 only as an afterthought, she said. She started a women’s rights organization in New York and became a delegate to the first National Women’s Liberation Conference, held in Chicago in 1968.
“As I attended (women’s liberation) conferences around the country and acted out my growing awareness of feminist issues through grass roots consciousness-raising and political writing, I began feeling very angry with my husband over what I perceived as his sexist behavior, particularly at home,” she said.
“I’m afraid I wasn’t very balanced about the situation, displaying that complete lack of discernment and judgment typical of minorities who first learn about the ways in which they have been oppressed. So much raw emotion spewed forth without restraint that the relationship itself started to crumble.
“Looking back, I now realize my contribution to the two greatest social revolutions of this century was the backdrop for the rest of my adult life. Of course, at the time I recognized these were vitally important issues, but I never understood how much of my life and my work would be devoted to eradicating racism and sexism.”
After her divorce in 1970, Lester stepped back from the public light to focus her energies on education and raising her daughter and son. While taking graduate courses at the Bank Street School of Education in New York, an old, progressive teachers college, she established several “free schools,” independent, community learning centers based on the principle of Summerhill School in England that “children are people too.”
In 1977, she decided to pursue a doctorate in education. She moved with her children to Amherst, Mass., where she had received a fellowship from the University of Massachusetts. When she was invited to teach a new course there called multicultural education, it was like returning home.
“I was lucky enough to be in one of the first institutions in the country that offered this type of course,” she said. “I was part of a small group of teachers that pioneered interest in the new discipline. It was an easy progression for me because it blended my background in education with racism and sexism, about which I had first-hand knowledge.”
Although Lester now views Equity Institute, based in Emeryville, Calif., as a natural outgrowth of her passionate interest in equality, she is certain that this chapter of her life would not have been set in motion but for the political climate of 1980.
“At the time, my activist cravings were being satisfied through my efforts in academia,” Lester said. “I truly believe I would not have felt compelled to return to public life had Reagan not been elected. I was terrified to think that all the changes we had dreamed of and worked so hard for were evaporating. But I was confident we could prevent the backslide if we succeeded in educating the highest-level policymakers of America.”
To fulfill this mission, Lester teamed up with Carole Johnson, an evening law student who by day ran federally funded educational programs on racism and sexism for several school systems in New England. While helping others manage their adjustments to diversity, they themselves have forged a personal and professional partnership that continues today.
“We called our early programs `Unlearning Racism’ and `Unlearning Sexism,” Lester said. “Gradually we switched to the more active term `dismantling’ and extended our reach to other barriers to cultural diversity, including heterosexism, which we both personally have experienced as a result of our current romantic relationship.”
As our society shifts from being imbued with a single culture to being influenced by many different ones, Lester prides herself on meeting the challenge.
“In the past, we knew what to expect,” she said. “White men ran not only the meetings but the country; women raised children; people of color served. Gay men, lesbians and people with disabilities didn’t exist, not in polite company, anyway. And now the rules are changing, right in the middle of our lives. We don’t know how to act, what to say or what to expect. Equity’s task is to guide people through the diversity maze.”
Mary Maples Dunn, president of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., views the school’s three-year consulting contract with Equity as “part of our trip to the future.” And Dave Jankowski, captain of administrative services for the police department in Amherst, Mass., says the departmentwide series of seminars gave him “a real understanding about why a multicultural approach is crucial to police officers’ work.”
In addition to long-term organizational projects targeted at exposing discrimination and developing action plans for systemic and positive change, Equity’s Public Service Program Division subsidizes low-cost educational programs around the country for representatives of community organizations. It offers one- and two-day programs and weekend retreats for individuals and groups desiring to eliminate stereotypes from their language and thoughts.
Lester, a respected public speaker, author, columnist and National Public Radio commentator, conducts one-on-one executive coaching sessions with those who view themselves as agents of social change, yet who want guidance in making that change comfortable for others.
Lester was quick to point out that managing diversity does not involve pretending everyone is the same, as her well-meaning parents did with their black house guest in 1949.
“There is tremendous variety among groups of people,” she said. “And there is even greater variety among individuals of every social identity group, which is why stereotypes so rarely fit.”
But Lester, 54, acknowledged achieving cultural diversity in daily life is an ongoing process that she too must practice rather than simply preach. In her inspirational social perspective, “The Future of White Men and Other Diversity Dilemmas” (Conari, $9.95), she admitted to having doubted a young woman’s ability to set up a rental computer for her at a writing retreat in Bozeman, Mont., in 1991.
“Even after all the years I have spent ridding myself of the limiting images of women, they still creep in,” she wrote. “Only after she did a terrific job of getting everything hooked up did I realize how my age and gender stereotype had skewed my perception of her.”
Using the metaphor of a table with differently sized seats and wheelchairs arranged around it, Lester depicts in her book every person’s struggle to obtain or maintain a place. But while admitting that historically the chairs were suited only to tall, white males, Lester appreciates they too have suffered from stereotyping.
“White males definitely have had the advantage on a material level, but they have been shortchanged in vital emotional and spiritual areas,” she said. “Because of this, I view them compassionately and encourage them to focus on what they can gain through sharing power and taking on more fluid roles. Far from being multicultural `has-beens,’ I show them how they can benefit from being `also-be’s’ instead of `only-be’s.”‘
Lester said she remains excited about the future of white men and every other group of individuals seated together at the new welcome table, preferring not to dwell on gains yet to be made in the diversity movement.
“Sure there’s a lot more work to be done, but so much dramatic change has occurred in such a short time that I hardly ever feel discouraged. The wonder of human beings is our seemingly limitless capacity for growth.
“My children’s generation already has more equal opportunity than ours did. There is a conscious national movement today to make diversity work. Just about every major American corporation now has diversity counsel and employee groups with mixed representation.
“As a country, we are poised for global leadership in the diversity movement. And just as with the women’s movement, I take immense pride in knowing I was one of those on the front lines, seizing a big dream and making it an even bigger reality.”
