The News & Observer of Raleigh reports this morning about the diversity woes of a task force in Chapel Hill.
Members of the Sustainable Community Visioning Task Force (too bad they couldn’t get the word stakeholder in there somewhere) are not happy that its composition is lily white:
A new task force charged with advising the Town Council on what the town should look like by 2020 got off to a bumpy start.
At its first meeting Wednesday, members of the Sustainable Community Visioning Task Force criticized the makeup of the committee and a process they said had been dictated to them by the town.
Member Etta Pisano, a professor of radiology and biomedical engineering, said the task force was not diverse enough. The 18-member group has no black, Latino or Asian members.
“There isn’t a lot of diversity in this room, and it bothers me,” Pisano said.
I can give you a clue why Chapel Hill’s task force is not very diverse — Chapel Hill is not very diverse. One would expect such a bastion of liberalism to look like the United Nations, or at least have a better mix of races than North Carolina as a whole. Not so.
According to the 2000 U.S. Census, 73 percent of North Carolina’s total population was white, 22 African American, and 4 percent Latino or Hispanic.
Comparatively, Chapel Hill was 78 percent white, 11 percent African American, and 3 percent Latino. So, CH has about half the number of African Americans as the state as a whole.
One potential reason: Chapel Hill is not exactly the go-to area in the Triangle for affordable housing. I sure as heck can’t afford it. But I imagine they want to keep riff raff like me out.
