Ka.steiner@setonhill.

edu

April 15, 2022

Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer

Dear Ambassador Abercrombie-Winstanley,

“It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity, there is beauty, and
there is strength” Maya Angelou.

I have admired the work you have done in your life thus far, and what you continue to do
for our world every day. I read about you and your overwhelming accomplishments, in hopes
that one day I too can make such a difference in the world as you have. Your commitment to
racial justice, education, leadership, diversity, and inclusion, and equity in the United States as
well as many other countries are just a few reasons why I am writing to you. The ways in which
you have incorporated life and dignity of the human person in your efforts to achieve greatness
in diversity and inclusion inspire me to put my thoughts and feelings into action. I feel that all
persons that God has created on this Earth have the right to be exactly who they are in every
aspect of life. This goes beyond racism and discrimination. Our children and the youth of the
world are being handed down family traits and bias opinions before they ever have the
opportunity to go out into the world and experience the vast history and teachings of all others
for themselves.

I am aware of the many organizations that you have served as an active board member on
as well as the campaigns worked with. My request for you, is that you would consider a program
to be implemented in the national school curriculum. Whether you would be willing to help in
the organization of such teaching or provide the information to me as to how to start the program
and implement it in my community and then hopefully nationally. I believe if we can reach the
children before the racism and discrimination is fed to them, that we can open their eyes and
their hearts to how precious a gift every person of all ethnicities, races, cultures, religions, and
sexualities are to each of us. Our communities are our family and our home. We should take care
our family and give them knowledge and love, so that they can also blossom as a human being of
deep love. It is our responsibility to clothe them, feed them, and shelter them, and to also protect
them by opening their eyes and hearts to the world around them, to encourage them. This is our
call to family, community, and participation, and we need to answer it. The reason that I want to
work with the children and the younger generations are because, I think that there are many
adults who have already been brainwashed from their childhood and from their fellow bigots into
thinking the way that they do and some may never change, nor do they see an issue with how
they think, speak, and behave. As adults, we are to be the role models for the children and youth,
teaching morals, respect, and compassion for all living things. Thankfully, we still have the
opportunity to change the future by growing the children in diversity, inclusion, and equality. We
just have to take action and have a voice for each other. I want to be that voice.

I was reading an article last month entitled 3 white men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery
found guilty of hate crimes by Phil McCausland of NBC News. In this story, McCausland shares
the fate of three Americans who with all their “pent up racial anger” ran a 25-year-old young
man (Ahmaud Arbery) down with their trucks and then fatal shot him with a shot gun. All of this
occurred, simply because Ahmaud was a black man jogging on a public road in their
neighborhood. The reason that this story caught my attention, aside from the fact that this
behavior and hatred must stop, was that the 3 men convicted were: a neighbor, a father, and a
son. Greg and Travis McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan had a history of racism, negative
statements, and jokes as found in their social media (McCausland, 2022). The son, Travis has
had racism and hatred embedded into his being from his father Greg all his life. Travis was never
taught or had the opportunity to his own thoughts and feelings about race. He is a grown man,
guilty of an unthinkable crime and yet my heart hurts for him as though he were a child, with all
the odds stacked against him. He will serve life in prison as will the other two men, and he never
had the privilege of feeling compassion towards others. We must intervene before it gets any
worse. The Attorney General: Merrick Garland told NBC News, “No one in the United States
should fear being attacked or threatened because of their race, religion, sexuality, or ethnicity”.
This is what I want to help fight and cure within the hearts and minds of our children. We are
robbing them of history, culture, compassion, and love every time we do nothing, do not speak
up, lead by bad examples, and ignore this problem that plagues the world.

We know that history has shown how cruel and evil “man” can be to each other.
Examples like the attempt to exterminate the Jewish people, the Dalits in India, the enslavement
of African Americans in Jim Crow South, and destroying Native American civilizations. My
question is why? Why and when did people start feeling that they were better than or above
another person simply because of race, ethnicity, religion, culture, or sexuality? In Isabel
Wilkerson’s book: Caste: The Origins of our discontents, she explains some answers to these
questions as well as some history behind the unethical practices and teachings of racism and
caste. She states that “caste is an underlying grammar that we encode as children” and that “race,
in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste” (Wilkerson, 2020). The
caste of adults from the past centuries as well as those living today are still acting in this
insidious way. Though they may think that as time passes and they were not the people who had
slaves or followed Hitler’s regime, that they need not worry about their thoughts or feelings or
how they portray them to the children. They are under illusions that they are better than the one
before them or at least not as bad, and so they should be allowed to behave as they choose, no
matter how harmful to others. Hurt is not just physical, it is emotional, and mental too. We hear
the stories of the bullied children, teens, and adults who take their lives every day to the actions
and words from another person. Wilkerson describes, in detail, stories of hatred (laying blame
and punishment on innocent people), degradation (slavery), racism (black/white marriages, and
sexual relations), and violence (beatings, lynching’s, starving, raping) over the past few hundred
years. This has not changed, people have not changed, we must make the change now for our
future and for our children’s future. A powerful quote from Caste, in which Isabel Wilkerson
was saying the same thing as I am regarding the programming of the generations is: “To
dehumanize another human being is not merely to declare that someone is not human, and it does
not happen by accident. It is a process, a programming. It takes energy and reinforcement to
deny what is self-evident in another member of one’s own species” (Wilkerson, 2020). I find this
profound, and inspiring. Inspiring to stop the programming, brainwashing, and processes fed into
the children, young adults, and adults from older generations as though they were telling a story
of family legacy. It is wrong and we need to undo any harm that is already been done today, to
save our family tomorrow. Wilkerson shares a story at the end of part three of the book about an
essay contest for children in the “public school district in Columbus, Ohio. This took place in
1944, during the second World War. The children were asked to write their essays on: What
would you do with Hitler after the War? The girl that won the essay contest was a sixteen-year-
old African American girl. “She won the student essay contest with a single sentence: “Put him
in black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America” (Wilkerson, 2020). This is
heartbreaking, that a young girl has felt so much punishment in her life and has seen and heard
such terrible things, that it could even compare to how Hitler should be punished. Fast forward
78 years later and it is still happening in America: the land of the free. Our children need us now
just as much as they did then.

Ambassador Abercrombie-Winstanley, I would like to thank you for time and for being
so gracious as to read my request and concerns. My wish and prayers are that you will be in
touch with me soon, with help, advice, or encouragement for developing this curriculum and
dispersing it throughout the school systems both public and private in the very near future. Thank
you for everything that you do for all of us. I wish you many more years of success and my
sincerest congratulations for being appointed the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer. You are
a woman to admire.

“Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our
civilization” Mahatma Gandhi
Sincerely and gratefully,

Kelly A. Steiner
[email protected]

3 White men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery found guilty of hate crimes (2022, February 22).
By: Phil McCausland, NBC News.
Caste: The origins of Our Discontents (2020). By: Isabel Wilkerson, New York, New York:
Penguin Random House.