George Bernard Shaw once said, “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

And yet we live in an era where it seems everyone’s mind is made up about everything. If our politics seems broken, it is not because we have stopped speaking; rather, that we have stopped listening. New ideas have always faced skepticism, but the resistance they meet today can be unyielding.

It is not the story of America we have told ourselves.

Both of us are old enough to remember a time when smoking was practically encouraged everywhere, from workplaces to restaurants to plane cabins. As infants, we were each driven in vehicles without car seats that were fueled by leaded gasoline, to and from our homes colored by lead paint.

It is not that we were not loved. We just happened to be born before enough minds had been changed on the dangers of these practices to convince political leaders to take action.

A similar story can be told about the push for greater equality throughout American history. Despite our Declaration’s lofty rhetoric on men being created equal, the early American experience reflected something very different. It would take decades of advocacy, a deadly war amongst ourselves, and constitutional amendments to rid America of slavery and take the first major steps toward equality since our founding.

But for Black Americans, many of these gains were ephemeral. And in their wake came the advent of Jim Crow and the rise of groups and institutions embracing white supremacy through often legal means. As W.E.B. DuBois observed, “the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

A century later, it was increasingly obvious that those post-Civil War initiatives had fallen far short of their promises of equality. But this remained far from a majority view. And it took the sacrifices by those with names like Evers, Parks, Lewis, and King to challenge entrenched thinking and awaken our national conscience.

What followed were the seminal civil rights laws of the 1960s that put America back on a path towards greater racial and — let us not forget — gender equality.

Today, it is tempting to look at all the social progress made since and conclude that equality in the American experience has finally caught up with that promised by its laws. Because we are a more equal society today than we were then, we want to believe that every child born in America starts with every opportunity to succeed. But when confronted with evidence suggesting otherwise, too few of us seem willing to listen.

Here in Ohio County, 86% of Black students in our public school system are deemed to be low socioeconomic status versus 45% of White students. Can anyone plausibly claim that historical forces like slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, and so-called “urban renewal” efforts had nothing to do with this discrepancy?

And yet there are those among us who are quick to dismiss any such suggestion.

Some may even call it “woke” — which is more often than not simply an excuse not to listen to what is actually being said. And those who do not listen tend not to change their minds.

For much of the past year, the administrative staffs of the city of Wheeling, the Ohio County Commission and Ohio County Schools have been working toward a new shared Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) coordinator position to help each governing body foster dialogue and ultimately policies that better reflect our shared historical experience and encourage greater participation in community progress.

We believe that a shared DEI position would go a long way toward building a common vocabulary in our community for having the long-overdue conversations needed to ensure that every child born here begins his or her life without steep obstacles to success. We support the creation of this position not because we question the motives or qualifications of the 15 individuals who serve on these three governing bodies collectively; but rather because we recognize the fallacy in expecting any group of exclusively White people representing only the middle and upper classes of any community to understand the perspectives of every resident.

To this end, last December, Wheeling City Council voted unanimously in favor of the city’s support for and participation in a shared DEI coordinator position. That decision was made with the full expectation that the county and school system would follow suit. Since then, Ohio County Schools has agreed to move forward if the county participates, and collectively, we await the county’s final decision.

Let us be clear about our intentions: We do not see a DEI position as a societal cure-all.

But we do see it as an important vehicle for challenging our community to be better.

And we ask those who have greeted this new idea locally with skepticism to be willing to listen and allow their minds the opportunity to be changed.

Glenn F. Elliott Jr. is the mayor of Wheeling. Ron Scott Jr. serves as Program Director, Cultural Diversity & Community Outreach, at the YWCA Wheeling.