Those who have always called Oakwood home, and those of who have moved here over time, celebrate the city for its friendly neighbors, excellent schools, and safe and walkable neighborhoods. As we have raised our families within the context of these shared civic attributes, we have come to appreciate further the opportunities to become involved in school and community activities, to get to know our neighbors better, and to understand that while we may not agree on everything, we do agree that an unprejudiced acceptance and advancement of all is at the core of what we value most about Oakwood.
Recently, stickers promoting white supremacy and the denunciation of others were affixed to Oakwood traffic signs and streetlight poles along our shared corporation lines with Dayton and Kettering. These postings represent the antithesis of what we believe in and value about Oakwood. This is precisely why the Oakwood Inclusion Coalition was founded in 2020:
to maintain and further promote all that is good about Oakwood as a welcoming and increasingly diverse community and to share that inclusivity with all who live in and visit the city, to the exclusion of no one. The OIC holds that there are constructive, civil, and elevating methods for sharing the many rich heritages, faiths, practices, and beliefs of Oakwood citizens and visitors, methods that will help us build an even stronger community, not just for Oakwood residents but for those who reside throughout the entire Dayton region. These anonymous postings represent the opposite of those methods as they’re instead designed to drive wedges between people, and possibly even to foment violence against others.
As the excellent Oakwood Public Safety Department continues to investigate the origins of this contemptible action, let us look beyond the postings and what they represent. Rather, let us focus on how all of us, as Oakwood citizens who want the best for our region and our city, work together to celebrate our rich differences in a civil community founded on the principles and practices of constructive discourse. And let us, above all, identify that which we hold dearest about our chosen city of Oakwood and all that makes it the special place we have found it to be. Oakwood is a community because it represents and defends community in all its good, constructive, and welcoming forms. Please join the Oakwood Inclusion Coalition in this unwavering advance of what does and does not characterize a healthy, forward-looking community by signing on as a member of the Coalition at https://www.oakwoodic.org/.