From a book review by Mackenzie Morgan on the Quaker Outreach site:
Often churches that fail to reflect their changing local community die off in a generation or two. Implicit bias has been a point of discussion in some yearly meetings in recent years, and this is related.
In fact, a Friend once told me they’d been asked, “can we target these Facebook ads only to people who are just like us?”
Actually, Facebook can create what they call lookalike audiences. It’s very cool and very creepy at the same time. It’s part of the suite of fine-grain targeting tools that’s letting political propagandists and lifestyle-focused companies control our media consumption at the social feed level and reinforce liked-minded groupthink. Attention silos are dangerous for our democracy and they’re no good for our churches. If the Quaker good news has any meaning left in it, it has to be widely applicable outside of our cultural, style bubbles.
Oh, I know Facebook has that. I (sadly) worked for a company that does social media ads for megacorps (because they bought the news software company I was working for), and that talk was part of what made me flee.
It’s just a galling question. The problem isn’t with the diverse visitors. It’s with the meeting that can’t welcome them.
Year ago, I found myself in an airport line with some other Quakers on our way to a committee meeting. One of my companions started hitting on a young woman near us. She was White and stylish in a way that would totally fit in a FGC AYF cuddle puddle and he was proselytizing. It was obvious he was responding to her lookalike style.