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The son of academics Monica and Godfrey Wilson, Francis Wilson (b. 1939) was raised in a Zulu-speaking locale of rural South Africa. Despite a keen interest in history imbued by his anthropologist parents, Wilson completed his undergraduate degree in physics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) before pursuing his doctorate at Cambridge University. Fascinated by the economics of discrimination and their relationship to the Apartheid regime in South Africa, Wilson spent a year in the United States as a visiting graduate fellow at the University of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy (TJC) in 1964.

This chapter is a conversation between the three authors, an Indigenous person, a multigenerational White settler, and a White immigrant, about how equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) connects with the history and pervasive practices of colonialism, White supremacy, and embedded racism, and what might be done to create a new future that is individually and collectively just. EDI has become increasingly embraced by organizations and governments to overcome bias, to increase representation of underrepresented groups, and to revise discriminatory policies across almost all areas of intersectionality. But EDI has no answers for the issues of Indigenous reconciliation and decolonization that seem to exist in a parallel world. A deeper understanding is needed about the individual rights roots of “equity,” as well as knowledge of Indigenous history, since Indigenous communities are not simply additional cultural groups in Canada. The British Royal Proclamation of 1763 initially codified a “nation to nation” relationship, but subsequent broken treaties, and the 1876 Indian Act, imposed a White supremist relationship on Indigenous populations, stole lands, and attempted to eliminate traditional cultures. Since 1970, Indigenous organizations have sought a “citizenship plus” relationship with Canadian federal and provincial governments, a direction supported by more recent court decisions. This chapter includes examples of how these ideas have been applied by some organizations and concludes with a model for developing personal stamina and resilience for learning, reconsidering, and interacting with others about identity issues given the complexities of personal learning and system change.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.