This account is inspired by my 2015-16 role chairing the search committee for the UW-Madison Vice Provost for Diversity / Chief Diversity Officer. As the only white male on the committee, and as a professor and department chair in a white male dominated institution and academia, I have certain historic privileges, special knowledge, open doors and connections. I also have responsibility to lead this search with inclusion. It seemed useful, therefore, to contemplate the long arc of diversity in my life, and to share this story with the search committe and with others who are curious about my leadership grounding. Later I realized that my white privilege led me down this reveal, and that other members of the committee were not interested in sharing their stories.

Professionally, my discipline of statistics is dominated by international scientists, mostly Asian, and those mostly Chinese. Roughly half of statisticians nationwide are domestic. Further, only 4% are from under represented minorities (URMs). Statistics does quite well by women, and has had more than a few openly gay members, and some prominent transgender individuals. The low number of URMs in our field, and high D/F/drop rate in introductory statistics, point to challenges in our system of mathematics and statistics education, exacerbated and highlighted today by the needs of training in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Challenges range from improving accessibility of gateway courses, to preK-2 preparedness in both math and reading, to building supportive environments for all students to pursue majors in STEM disciplines. More importantly, we need diversity of thinking in STEM – new ideas and new voices. The challenges are not uniform across different dimensions of diversity and inclusion, differing by race, gender, socioeconomic class, sexuality, etc. I envision the VPD/CDO fostering interconnections among campus units to both strengthen campus inclusion and to bridge from campus to community groups. While the campus has much work to do internally, part of that work involves engaging beyond its ivory tower walls. I expect to play some role in this process moving forward, particularly regarding data literacy and analysis, although it is unclear to me whether that is best done within my department or at some campus level.

Personally, my white male privilege builds on over 400 years of ancestors in the United States, including 9 patrilineal ancestors named Yandell back to at least the 1730s in North Carolina. The first known ancestor arrived in Jamestown in 1610. Our extended family has had considerable time to connect with different aspects of diversity. Below is a mix of the generational and the more immediate diversity history that shape and influence who I am today. It is broken down by various dimensions of diversity.

Native Americans

Emperor Powhatan, father of Pocahontas, was succeeded after his death in 1618 by his brother, Opechancanough. Billy Pitard relates that, on Good Friday, March 22, 1622, the new leader attacked the white settlement in Isle of Wight County, Virginia, killing a third of the 1240 residents. [While Pitard’s account does not dwell on it, likely the white settlers had violated the Powhatans in some fashion earlier.] John Basse, age 6, escaped and reached the friendly Nansemond Nation. He was raised there, and at 22 (on 14 August 1638), he married Elizabeth (age 14), daughter of the Chief. Later, John’s brother Edward also married into this tribe. See detailed study by Lars C. Adams for more information. The Bass(e) family did not consider their Indian blood a skeleton in their closet. However, it became illegal for whites and Indians to marry in Virginia (see for instance Interracial-Marriage-Laws-History-Timeline), so some descendants got married in the Carolinas. I am a 12th generation descendent of John and Elizabeth Basse. Thus, I am 1/4,096th Native American through the Land/Wilson family (via my father’s father’s mother’s mother). This is the only non-European blood we have found in our family.

Enid Yandell (1870-1934), a famous sculptor, was my 2nd cousin, three times removed. She was in the Lunceford Pitts Yandell line, which diverged in the early 1800s. She created a nine-foot statue of Daniel Boone, commissioned by the Filson Club of Louisville, KY, which houses the Yandell archives. The sculpture was bronzed in Louisville in 1906 and is now located in Cherokee Park. Another casting from 1967 is on the campus of Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky.

Gov. Samuel Houston was 2nd cousin, 5 times removed. He became a member of the Cherokees, married a mixed race Cherokee, daughter of one of the chiefs.

A branch of the Lunceford Pitts Yandell line settled in Bishop, California. I heard that some Paiute Tribe members adopted the name Yandell. In fact, The Bishop Paiute Tribe newsletter for 2008 lists a Yandell on the Assignment Committee. At least one Yandell is listed in the 1885-1940 Indian Census Rolls.

I have been interested in Native American culture and the plight of Native Americans since my teens. I remember visiting a Native American meeting house in the SF Bay Area in the 1970s. I have attended a few powwows while at UW. However, I learned of the direct ancestry and some of the other extended family details only recently.

African Americans

My father was raised in Mississippi in a family network of multiple generations of cotton and oil wealth. He was waited on by the (great)grandchildren of slaves. As a young child, he visited often with his paternal great-grandparents, hearing first-hand accounts of the Civil War. Granddad, William Martin Yandell, Jr., himself grew up in a home with 83 slaves. It seems all other family branches of that generation owned slaves.

I have two adopted cousins who were born “mulatto” in Nigeria. We knew each other as kids, and remain in touch, but were never that close. Their lives have been challenging, in part due to their issues of identity.

As a child, I had two nannies, Gloria and later Bertha. Gloria once took me to her home in Oakland, CA, but would not allow me inside as she was too embarrassed. Bertha and Robert came to our home for many years after, into my teens, on Christmas day.

As a teen, I volunteered to teach math after school in Richmond, CA. This program was organized by Herman Blake. I invited Dr. Blake to speak at my nearly all white high school; he talked about the Black Panthers who had just been arrested in Los Angeles. Dr. Blake invited me to join him as he moved to North Carolina, but I turned it down to pursue math. Blake later wrote a book with Huey Newton and has had a distinguished career.

Latinos/as

I have two cousins who are half-Guatemalan. They have been challenged in school in Southern California, and one has learning disabilities and cannot even make change. He, in fact, has the exact same body build as me.

In the late 1960s, I went as a teenager to a youth conference the Asilomar Conference Center near Santa Cruz, CA, designed by Julia Morgan. The conference agenda was thrown aside by Latinos/as (then called Chicanos/as) in protest of farm worker and school conditions for Chicanos/as. This was soon before the massive Chinano walkouts in Los Angeles in 1968.

I grew up in California, largely a Spanish land grant state. I learned Spanish in middle school, and travelled to Costa Rica and Panama via Mexico in the late 1970s, and to regions of Spain in the 1980s. My brother is fluent in Spanish and travels weekly to Mexico for his manufacturing work with Fender.

Asian Americans

My younger daughter was adopted from China. My eldest niece married into a Chinese family earlier this year.

I have a foster son in Tibet. While we have never met, we have exchanged letters since he was a young teen, and send each other texts on major holidays. I have helped him financially at key points in his life.

I spent a half-year in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Ladakh (Western Tibet) in 1975. My family travelled together to China in 2005 to adopt our younger daughter.

My major department, Statistics, has ~50% Chinese faculty,~75% Chinese and other Asian graduate students, and ~50% Chinese and other Asian undergraduate students. I work with Chinese scholars every day.

Different Ability

As a kid, probably about 10, I met Rufus on the beach. I figured out pretty quickly that he could not hear, but he could read lips. We had a fun time building castles and running around.

In High School, I became friends with Earl, who had cerebral palsy. His father was a friend of my parents. We met through the school chess club, and he was the president. He later became Chief Justice for our school. Other kids made fun of him, imitating his uncontrolled movements, making a verb of “earl”; I spoke out at the time, and was not comfortable with this. We lost touch after school until we met on a BART train while I was in college. I later visited him at the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, which he directed. Years later, I tried to reconnect, but the director at that time said sadly that two drugged out kids broke into his apartment looking for money and killed him.

My sister developed multiple sclerosis around 1990. At the time, copaxone was the only known treatment and it was not yet approved in the US. My father arranged with a chemist to manufacture this drug and conduct animal tests to get her started more than a year before it was approved. [It was developed in Israel; he contacted the scientists.] My sister once said, “it is not if you are disabled, but when”.

One of my graduate school mentors was quadraplegic. I never took a class from Michael, but I would talk with him about philosophy of life and career options, but not much about my specific research. He was quite independent and had a great sense of humor. One of my neighbors now in Madison is quadraplegic and teaches at middle school. She sometimes calls on me to help with emergencies. I worked with her on running and interpreting a statistics project for one of her PhD prep courses.

In 1996, I reconnected with my college mentor, Bland Ewing, only to learn that he was seriously ill with Huntington’s disease. I visited him in CA for about a decade thereafter, travelling several times a year and talking by phone almost weekly. I obtained power of attorney for health and finance, and supplemented his MediCal care through a Special Needs Trust I established. I hired additional caregivers. Over several years, I captured his life story on tape, and we wrote and published a scientific paper. I also helped him connect with important people in his life. After his death, I helped with his memorial, and spread his ashes in the ocean.

Over a year ago, I developed a choroid neovascularlization (CNVS) in my right eye and have not been able to focus that eye since. While it does not hurt and is not visible, it affects me every day. I have no depth focal depth perception, although my peripheral vision is fine.

My parents are about 90, both showing signs of senility. My mother has had COPD for years, with limited mobility. I now manage their health and finances from afar. There seems to be a family history of late age senility, which raises some concerns for me about my later life.

Careers, Wealth and Poverty

My family has a long line of physicians, educators, farmers, planters, bankers, soldiers, blacksmiths, merchants, ministers, and at least one architect, miller and fisherman. We are a family of immigrants and pioneers who took great risks to come here and continued to take risks as they migrated into new territory–always in search of a better life and the freedom to believe what they wanted.

My father’s extended family is quite wealthy, based on slavery, cotton and oil in MS. However, alcohol soured the family unity, and my grandmother and great aunt took the five children to CA for a new life when he was 12. The divorce broke ties with the wealth, and my father went to college watching every penny. Dad strived through his adult life to overcome his past, becoming quite liberal, but it caught up with him at times, such as seeing a bi-racial couple and feeling that was wrong for just a moment.

Dad would much later in life learn that an affair by his grandmother led to his grandfather’s suicide, no doubt fueling some of the earlier estrangement. My father had a scholarship to UC-Berkeley and was sponsored by the military for medical school. My father became a doctor, following the model of ancestor Wilson Yandell, one of few doctors in the mid 1800s.

My mother’s mother came from Philadelphia wealth, but her elopement cut them off. Naming their daughters after the great aunts led to periodic inheritances of great wealth, which was quickly burned through by my grandfather. My mother recalls squatting in other people’s houses, leaving quickly in the night to avoid paying overdue rent. They ate squirrel and other wild animals and plants.

At age 6, my mother supported the family as an actress, working for Hal Roach of “Our Gang”. They lived next door to Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy. However, Grandpa was unemployed and jealous, and took the family off to rural Fallbrook to live in a neglected “holler” with moonshiners and others of questionable value to society.

My mother went to college majoring in English, and then travelled the world with almost no funds, working along the way. She ran out of money completely in the Phillipines, helped by a family on to a 3rd class steerage back to the US. As we grew up, my mother took up art and created many abstract paintings and several sculptures and mosaics.

I recall as a child going to Salvation Army to buy clothes, and handing down clothes and shoes. By the time I was in middle school, we were fairly well off.

Racism, Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements

My parents, particularly my father, were commited to civil rights and a world without war. He took me to a political party honoring Kenneth Galbraith, where I met the son of the William Byron Rumford of the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Dad wrote many letters and spoke passionately about the plight of disadvantaged people. We watched the segregation news in the late 50s and 60s together. Still, we were part of the “white flight” from Oakland/Berkeley to the “lily white” suburb of Orinda, with only one Black family at a time.

I recall my father speaking out about the rise of the John Birch Society in our community, arguing strongly that this was dangerous. It seemed that the community turned around, listening to reason. When I was in middle school, my parents invited the Black chemistry teacher and the Arab math teacher to our home for dinner to make them feel welcome. I remember the chemistry teacher diving too shallowly into our pool and bruising his nose. My parents once invited a set school teachers for dinner, and my father ejected one of them for being a bigot. My parents stopped being members of the Orinda Country Club when it became clear they were not allowing Jews or African Americans to join.

My father introduced me to the writings of Gandhi, and took me to hear Erik Erikson. He was heavily involved with Robert Pickus in the World Without War Council. Later, he supported my involvement in anti-war demonstrations around the VietNam War, and helped me develop my conscientious objector materials. While I never had to fight for CO status, taking a student deferment through 1974, I did have long talks about options, including flight to Canada.

Religion

My mother probably would have been Episcopalian if raised in Philadelphia, but was instead exposed to evangalist tents throughout the South. She had great passion about religion on one level, but later, under my father’s influence, bacame quite skeptical.

My father was originally a Southern Baptist, but in college after the break with the South, explored many different religions, including Buddhism and B’hai. When the family came along, he took us to Presbyterian Church. However, this only lasted a few years, as my parents and I (as older child of 6) gagged at the hypocrisy we observed. Since that time, we turned to secular humanism, but in no systematic fashion.

Growing up, some of our best friends were Jews–not surprising since my Dad was a doctor in the SF Bay Area. In fact, my best friend in high school was Jewish, and I attended his bar mitzvah. I understood there was a difference, but not the depth and breadth at that time. Now, my wife is Jewish and I am preparing from my older daughter to take her bat mitzvah. Also, my sister converted to Judaism some years ago, and her husband is Jewish.

Sex, Gender Identity and LGBT

Sexual identity is a private thing, and is often invisible in society. I am heterosexual and happily married with two kids, claiming that identity. I have had gay friends over the years. In college, I was asked out by a couple of friends, but politely declined any physical intimacy. I have never been sure quite why, but think fear and anxiety (homophobia?) played a role.

I have at least one cousin who is lesbian/bisexual. My kids have many friends with lesbian parents, and this just seems normal, to them and to us parents. We share meals and kids have overnights, and talk about everyday things, sometimes bridging to social/political issues surrounding treatment of LGBT. I have had gay students, with one being openly gay. One of my mentors was gay, although I only realized it later when I learned he died of AIDS.

I learned in graduate school of a prominent statistician who changed gender, presented to me as a puzzling but personal choice. After moving to Madison, I met a friend in music circles who was at that time male, but ready for transgender operations. Thirty years later, she is still happily with her female partner, who supported her emotionally through the difficult transition.

Geography

Thomas Garnett ancestor on my father’s side came to Jamestown in 1610 on the Swan, the same ship with the first Governor; we know him primarily through an arrest for disorderly conduct. Degory Priest, a separatist from Holland, arrived on the Mayflower in 1620 and died the first winter. His widow Sarah Allerton remarried and came on the Anne in 1623 to Plymouth Colony. I am a direct descendent of Degory Priest and Sarah Allerton.

The earliest US name is Thomas Yandle/Yonal, in Maryland and Virgina in the mid 1600s. My father’s family is from MS (Greenwood, Yazoo, Canton, Jackson, Vance), and before that Louisville, KY, back to four brothers in Mecklenburg Co, NC, in the mid 1700s. My father grew up in Greenwood, MS, but left at 12 with four siblings, his mother and aunt, to begin a new life in Southern CA.

My mother’s parents met in Philadelphia, PA. Their parents’ roots trace back to the mid 1700s, with the “King” surname arriving from Germany. My mother’s family left Philadelphia and travelled across the US, finally settling in Southern CA.

I have 15 ancestors who served/aided the American efforts during the Revolutionary War on my father’s side of the family and at least 5 on my mother’s side. There is one likely Loyalist, James Stokes who came to America to fight for the British and stayed behind and did quite well for himself. One relative of my father served the Confederacy as a drummer boy on a blind mule. Three relatives of my mother served for the North, all as surgeons.

I was born in Cape May, NJ, but grew up from age 4 in the SF Bay Area, CA, in the 1950s and turbulent 1960s. We first lived in Berkeley, then moved over the hills to the whiter and wealthier Contra Costa Co (Walnut Creek, Lafayette, Orinda). I went to college at Caltech in Southern CA (Pasadena), but did not really leave CA except for a few vacations until 1974. I received a Thomas J. Watson, Jr., Fellowship (yes, son of Mr. IBM), travelling to Europe and India for a year. I returned to graduate school at UC-Berkeley, taking two major research trips to Costa Rica. In 1982, I moved to UW-Madison for my present position, and have been here ever since (although I lived in Stevens Point for 2 years during this time).