Primary Source: Field notes on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Wokeness

Everyone has a DEI story.

Every story is different.

At some point in our childhoods we encountered people who were different from ourselves. Someone explained things. We looked around for ourselves. We put diversity into context.

My own story is short. As a Medford, Oregon boy and youth, I encountered no diversity at all. Because of my school district's "tracking" policy, people of similar interests and skills got assigned to a narrow set of the same classes. In my case that was college-bound students interested in debate and public affairs. My story, such as it is, was having my eyes opened when I entered college. I met a Black person, and a Jew. 

However this photo of my section of the Freshman Register -- a predecessor of Facebook -- indicates what diversity there was. It was mostly diversity within the subset of academically ambitious White males.

I am on the lower-left corner of the left page. Future senator Chuck Schumer is in the lower left corner of the right page. 

College classmate Tony Farrell encountered diversity and inclusion early. Tony is the guest-post author famous for having managed the Trump Steaks account at The Sharper Image. He also worked as a marketing executive for The Nature Company and The Gap. But before all that, he had a childhood and youth.

Farrell, 1967

Farrell, 2025

Guest Post by Tony Farrell

Random Notes from the Field: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, and Wokeness

By the summer of 1965, I’d completed 8th, 9th and 10th grade at Bremerhaven (West Germany) American Military Dependents High School. My father, a civilian, chose to move our family there, on the North Sea, because my three siblings and I could attend respectable American schools for next-to-no money, as he headed European sales for States Marine Lines.

At the end of our three-year European family adventure, we moved back to the States and Mom guided me into an impressive private school to complete my last two high-school years. Sidwell Friends is the elite Quaker school in Northwest D.C. where Obama’s girls graduated, as did Chelsea Clinton. (Julie Nixon had been in my class. Charles Lindbergh attended when his father was a congressman.) I graduated Sidwell Friends in June, 1967—its first year to ever graduate any student who was Black. Good grief!

Today, Sidwell Friends is about the most “woke” school in America. But they certainly have a history. When I entered in the fall of 1965, they were busily but painfully patting themselves on the back for having integrated. Before, they were yet one more Southern prep school in the Washington area; white as snow. But in the early 60s, incoming New Frontier parents shamed the Sidwell board into integrating. (The chair resigned in protest.) Sidwell handled it sort-of okay. Nonetheless, the only female classmate to join me at Harvard, one of the four Black pioneers, was lauded (quite infamously) in our yearbook as an “outstanding Negro girl.” You can’t make it up.

As a 16-year-old, I did not “get” all this. My Department of Defense (DOD) school in West Germany had been integrated since Truman’s order in 1946. (Bremerhaven HS was established in 1948; its predecessor had been established in nearby Bremen in 1946.) Heck, even my parents’ high-school yearbooks from the 1930s in Yonkers, New York (Gorton High, a Catholic institution, and Yonkers High) had many Black faces. 

Daily, I engage on Facebook with the “Bremerhaven American High School Alumni” group. From my long-ago era (1962 to 1965), fellow military “brats” celebrate the experience there as the best of their lives. Unlike States-based schools, overseas DOD schools turned-over the student body every two years or so. Therefore, no cliques! Newcomers were genuinely welcomed with open arms and sincere inquiries: “What sports can you play?” And “Do you sing?” And “Do you do theater?” It was a uniquely positive social experience. At Bremerhaven HS in 1964, I saw Southern crackers comfortably bond with Northern Blacks, easily and naturally. Why not?

The American military was 20 years ahead of American society—and certainly ahead of the closer-to-God-than-thee Quakers at Sidwell Friends. I didn’t know it; I just felt it. When I settled in at Sidwell, I had no idea what they were talking about—all that celebrating of integration as something notable. Hurrah for them, I thought to myself, with quiet cynicism.

Fast forward a few decades. Sidwell’s alumni magazine lauds a school-wide student protest that results in banning the wearing of any “Redskins” apparel at the school. The headmaster wrote that this showed so much awareness and courage and empathy. Sidwell students were doing such brave and righteous things, right? Oh, sure, there might be genocide somewhere, but this is so important! (“Redskins” was the long-established name of the local professional football team.) Hard to express, but I deeply loved the Redskins, and how my father and I bonded over them. When Dad was in hospice, my last words to him, literally, were, “Hail to the Redskins,” the fight-song lyrics which were shorthand for so many years of joy and sweet memories. I detected a faint smile in Dad’s stroke-frozen face, the last time I saw him.

I’m not here to debate anything. I’m just here to say the word “Redskins” did not mean anything but love and joy to me. I and no one I knew had ever said or heard it spoken pejoratively. (And why is “Yankees” still okay? Ask the citizens of any banana republic…or Boston.)

I’ve been married more than 45 years. Our first child was born in 1992. (I joke that I decided to have my own grandchildren—skip the middleman!) Around 2000, it was time to check out local Bay Area private schools, to see if any would be right for our young daughter. On the application for one particularly earnest institution, they asked (with glaring superficiality), “How will your family add to the diversity of our school?”. With perhaps too-visible spite, I responded, “We’re white; heterosexual; long married, once each to each other; never divorced; natural child; Republican; military veteran.” 

We did not get in. I guess there’s only so much diversity one can handle.…

For more than three decades, I’ve interviewed high-school seniors applying to Harvard College. It’s something the College has required for more than a century, and it’s good. It can also be frustrating, because Harvard admits fewer than 4 percent of applicants; we interviewers can go for many years without “getting anyone in,” (as we like to say). But one interviewing season, after 15 years of futility, I got in four applicants—in a row! I was famous for this. 

My applicant draw, I now realize, had given me an unfair advantage: Applicant #1 was an albino Black girl from Ethiopia, raised in Italy and now at Berkeley High. Applicant #2 was an forever-home-schooled boy with two moms, who also was close to his sperm-donating “uncle” dad. Applicant #3 was a girl who had transitioned to male (so, a trans-boy) who’d led a student protest, in “his” freshman year at an elite prep school, against various not-PC Halloween costumes at some random school event. Applicant #4…I can’t remember! (I’m sure they were equally unusual.) When I tell this story to my fellow interviewers, they go nuts.

Soon after the turn of this century, a friend from my Navy days in 1970s Norfolk, Virginia, invited my family to an outdoor play at the California Shakespeare Theater, in nearby Orinda. He was on their board and, for years, had donated significant money to support the company’s four plays each summer season. We loved it and became season ticket holders for 20 years, raising our daughters to appreciate live theater. 

At some point, Cal Shakes went crazily all woke. Just before Covid, they premiered a new play titled “Romeo Y Juliet,” a lesbian love story (of course)—half in untranslated Spanish (why not?). The following (and final) play was pitched as a “modern language” interpretation of “Macbeth”, based in San Francisco’s Fillmore, a Black neighborhood, before it was overrun by development. What does that even mean, Shakespeare but in "modern language”? (Even the 17-year-old high-schooler Orson Welles wrote to pay no attention to Shakespeare’s “plots” but only the language.) 

My Navy friend quit the board; I’ve since met other good-hearted supporters who also quit (protesting in the same way). Anyway, Cal Shakes is gone now. Decades of goodwill tossed aside for what I see as dimwitted wokeness.

All the foregoing had occurred when, two seasons ago, my daughter and I were attending a Stanford football game when, at halftime, the stadium announcer introduced the Stanford University’s Vice President of “DIVERSION, Equity & Inclusion.” 

He did not correct himself, and I loudly exclaimed, “Sign me up!”

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