Stuck in Another Pointless DEI Training

The workplace. You know it. The one from your job. Where you go every day to clock in, nod through meetings, and pretend to be busy when your boss walks by. Or maybe you’re like me and it's just another one of those places where you have to pretend you don’t notice that you're the only person of color in the room. I mean sure, you’ve been doing it so long that now it comes to you fairly naturally, or maybe it's just a flickering thought that barely registers anymore. That is until that staff-wide HR meeting where they announce an addition to their annual ‘How to Act in the Workplace’ training. And you get excited because maybe it's finally that workshop that tells us how to exist in these spaces without the constant, unspoken weirdness (I’m not the only one who feels that right?). But then you hear it, those dreaded three letters: DEI.

Enter Robin DeAngelo, and now you know the next three hours are just going to be you watching your paler-skinned co-workers shift nervously in their seats while trying (and failing) to steal glances at you. Okay, I’m half exaggerating. I’ve never been in a DEI training with Robin DeAngelo and I am not the only black person in our office--there are actually two of us. But, I have witnessed my nice enough, well-meaning co-workers shift nervously in their seats at the mention of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. And, I have to admit, I also shift nervously. There is a lot that feels paradoxical about these initiatives. There’s always been something odd about the intent of the programs being to teach inclusivity, yet often alienates the very people they aim to support. It feels like DEI facilitations often boil down to a white person telling a room full of other white people they are racist. And also the fact that the programs themselves are the product of a system that has monetized it and placed a definitive value on its usefulness.

With this in mind, I’ve been thinking, “Have DEI initiatives even been useful? Do they do more harm than good? And, can the idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion being useful, be saved?

Pause. What even is DEI?

I will try to avoid the trope of providing Webster's definitions in this article, which is easy anyway, considering there is no standard definition, and everyone seems to be making it up as they go. However, history can give us a few glimpses of what it is supposed to be. DEI as a concept began in the throes of the Civil Rights movement. It was black Civil Rights leaders’ calls for Black economic empowerment that echoed through the booming voices of MLK, Malcolm X, and Fannie Lou Hamer that laid the groundwork, but it was really advocates such as Shirly Chisholm and Whitney Young that led the charge. As you can imagine, their work was developed with the goal of black (and, in Chisholm’s case, women’s) economic justice at the forefront, and for my part, I will extend their goals to minority groups et al. Chisholm and Young’s effort argued that centuries of oppression had created economic gaps between minority groups and the majority that could not be solved without deliberate action and intervention. They fought for, and in many cases, achieved, large-scale affirmative action programs in hiring, education, and business development with the goal of “parity, not charity.” From the onset, the goal behind diversity training and affirmative action programs, programs that are under the umbrella of DEI, was aimed at correcting centuries of discrimination in the workforce that had led to a degradation of economic power. It was never about handouts or giving away jobs but about ensuring that organizations were providing the same opportunities to people of color as they were to their white counterparts. As I alluded to earlier, Chisholm, also included the struggles of women in her fight, becoming a pioneer of intersectionality and how race and gender put women of color at a disadvantage even to the black men who they’ve marched alongside. However, their ideal of affirmative action extended beyond the workplace. Both leaders championed the need for such programs across large swaths of social infrastructure such as housing, education, and urban renewal.

With this in mind, it would be fair to say that modern DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs trace their roots to a movement led by figures like Whitney Young and Shirley Chisholm, who sought to correct racial and economic disparities through direct, large-scale policy interventions. Their work focused on eliminating historical barriers to economic mobility by securing protections for Black and minority workers, expanding access to education and skills training, increasing investment in minority-owned businesses, and ensuring equitable access to housing.

Thus, if we were to define DEI based on its roots:

DEI is a framework that holds governments and corporations accountable for advancing racial and economic justice through proactive measures that eliminate systemic barriers. It does this through affirmative action in hiring and promotions, clear and enforceable diversity policies, targeted recruitment efforts, and creating structured pathways for minority employees to reach leadership roles. DEI initiatives must go beyond passive non-discrimination; they should be deliberate, proactive, and systemic, ensuring that minority workers are not only included but empowered to contribute meaningfully in education, business, and the economy.

”We cannot talk about justice in America without talking about jobs, about housing, about education. And we cannot talk about these things without talking about who gets opportunities—and who does not.”

- Shirley Chisholm

So, as the country reckoned with the problem of a segregated society, calls became more frequent for government, companies, and society to dismantle barriers to racial equality, and in 1961, we saw the first of a string of successes for the Civil Rights movement and the basis for modern-day DEI programs. The largest employer in the US led the charge, with Kennedy issuing an executive order on hiring practices within the federal government stating agencies and contractors should “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” In 1964, Young advised President Johnson on the Civil Rights Act, which led to the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A few years later, Young would see his work with companies bear fruit as Xerox, a Fortune 500 company at the time, launched its “Corporate Minority Affairs Division” with the goal of addressing racial inequality by creating workshops to educate managers on the effects of systemic bias, training to dismantle barriers, and implementing aggressive hiring goals for black employees. The division also led Xerox to partner with Black-owned businesses for contracts.

If you’re like, “WOW I didn’t know Xerox did all of that,” I would like to remind you that this is what we in the biz call “foreshadowing”

“Work can work better”

Xerox became a trailblazer in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. The Corporate Minority Affairs Division (CMAD) was in direct response to the civil rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. That same year the Founder and CEO of the Xerox Corporation, Joseph Wilson, declared DEI is a “business imperative.” And it was with this declaration that Xerox was off to the races. They set ambitious goals. By 1973, Xerox had doubled its Black employee representation and increased its contracts with minority-owned suppliers, reportedly working with more than 300 by the end of that same year. Xerox allocated 5% of its budget to minority-owned suppliers, became an early adopter of the National Minority Supplier Development Council, and inspired companies such as IBM and GM to launch their own similar programs. By all accounts, Xerox's DEI framework was a bold and effective way to incorporate economic justice as part of its business plan.

By the 1990s, diversity initiatives had become a corporate staple. They had evolved. No longer simply focused on racial justice, they now sought to extend their initiatives to women, LGBT employees, and those living with disabilities. The multiculturalism movement of the 1980s—with its celebration of difference—provided the cultural scaffolding to embrace diversity as an ideal. Meanwhile, neoliberalism’s rise provided a tangible incentive, assigning a dollar value to diversity and inclusion. With this combination, the “business case” for diversity was born, and DEI became a ledger entry, touted to boost innovation, customer reach, and profit margins.

“Diversity wasn’t about altruism. It was about outthinking competitors…”

- Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Former IBM CEO (1993-2002)

In 1995, IBM adapted the diversity framework laid out by Xerox. In a diversity strategy report that same year, IBM began to tie executive bonuses to DEI metrics. 20% of their cash bonuses were directly tied to meeting metrics such as hiring targets, promotion rates, and retention rates, to name a few. In 1998, McKinsey, a dogpoop, criminally overrated, world-renowned business consulting firm, released a report linking diversity with profitability. With an increased incentive, eager shareholders from companies throughout the corporate world adopted IBM’s diversity initiative, and DEI scaled massively. The corporate world had finally seen the light and moved from merely complying with federal regulations and seeking to boost their diversity numbers, not because it was the right thing to do, but because it was the profitable thing to do. Corporations sought out women and minority workers in the hope that their cultural knowledge or lived experiences could help them expand their products to new markets.

The business case, as adopted by IBM, and later Microsoft and other larger companies, is still the dominant case for DEI today. In 2019, the World Economic Forum reaffirmed this approach, citing a Boston Consulting Group study (2018) that found: “companies with more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenues due to innovation.” It would appear that the case is clear. By tying DEI to corporate profits and highlighting the ability of minorities to increase the profits of the shareholders, then “work can work better” for everyone, right?

Losing the Blueprint

Remember that foreshadowing I spoke about? Well, as IBM saw new financial success by adopting a new framework for DEI, our pioneer company, Xerox, began to take a turn for the worse. The Document Company had a series of misplays. By the 2000s, the Fortune 500 company was facing bankruptcy. During this period, the turmoil didn’t just wreak havoc on their bottom line, but the layoffs and cost-cutting eroded its DEI programs. Its once radical innovations in the space lost funding and influence both at the company and in the broader societal and business landscape. Much of its downfall is primarily attributed to the company’s inability to capitalize on its innovation. Instead of being leaders in a space to the point where giants followed their lead, their DEI programs are now a shell of its 1970s radicalism. Xerox, once leaders, now bought into the business case gospel, restructuring their diversity programs into the business case model embraced by Microsoft, Google, and Goldman Sachs. Now capital was the only thing that mattered. Diversity was no longer about altruism, it was about market forces.

“We didn’t just lose a company—we lost the blueprint.”

— Ursula Burns, reflecting on Xerox’s decline in a 2021 interview

Xerox’s story is illustrative, a company that once sought to dismantle systemic biases now offers checkbox webinars. And that's the problem with the business case--it's a fair-weather ally, loyal only to the bottom line. At the height of its radicalism, Xerox was head of the game in workforce diversity, established robust and important Employee Resource Groups for marginalized staff, and invested millions in mentoring leaders and managers on how to work with marginalized staff to dismantle biases. Today, it has been replaced by what scholar Sara Ahmed calls “diversity theater.”

DEI today has been distilled down into a neoliberal cocktail forced on companies and employees alike. Diversity is not about doing what is right; it is about creating a “profit engine.” Corporations race to hire diverse talent, not to dismantle barriers, but to mine marginalized communities. It is identity arbitrage--exploiting the cultural knowledge, lived experiences, or social identities of marginalized employees for market gain without addressing systemic inequities or empowering those individuals. Diversity initiatives serve to extract value from underrepresented groups while offering only minimal, surface-level structural change at best. This approach is only as good as the market it exists within. Which is why today, as people are faced with economic hardships and companies are forced to cut costs, the very idea of diversity and equity is a scapegoat. In this way, it feels no different from a marketing gimmick, only as useful as the measurable profit, or image-enhancement results would have you believe. The larger issue is that DEI is also tied to those marginalized groups it touted as necessary. Once it's tossed to the side or scapegoated as a sham, then so too are the actual hardworking marginalized groups.

“When diversity is a commodity, it’s only valuable until the market crashes.”

— André Brock, Distributed Blackness (2020)

When outlining this article, I initially started with the premise that the problem with DEI is that it doesn’t know what it wants to be. But that's not true. Many of those who tout it today know exactly what they want it to be--and what they want to get out of it. This leads to an execution that tends to go one of two ways: either it’s a corporate pep talk filled with buzzwords and painfully sanitized conversations, or it’s an uncomfortable guilt session where employees are reminded—yet again—that systemic racism exists, with no real discussion about solutions. And for those of us who already know (and live) this reality, the entire ordeal feels like an exercise in endurance rather than empowerment. And in this way, DEI initiatives always feel disingenuous, to everyone.

So what is the solution? Well, we laid it out in the beginning. DEI needs to be about going beyond passive non-discrimination, being deliberate, proactive, and systemic, and ensuring that minority workers are not only included but empowered to contribute meaningfully to education, business, and the economy. This means modern DEI programs need a complete overhaul, a restructuring back to the blueprint laid out by Civil Rights leaders Chisholm and Young, but modernized to reflect today's struggles. True equity demands dismantling systems that commodify identity and rebuilding institutions where justice is intrinsic, not incidental. We don’t have to abandon the concept completely, but as Chisholm herself warned, “Tinkering at the margins won’t suffice.” We need to begin with dismantling the “business case” model for diversity and frame DEI as a non-negotiable ethical obligation, not a profit lever. We need to take affirmative action to ensure that diversity is a societal imperative by implementing transparent salary audits that help us ensure truly equal pay and deliberately direct resources to BIPOC-owned businesses and startups. Organizations such as the EEOC need to be given actual teeth, as Young argued, to ensure that companies can be held accountable for advancing equity efforts. We can replace self-reported diversity metrics with evaluations by independent groups like the NAACP or Color of Change. We should regain our support for unions, and use them to amplify calls for diversity and equity in the workplace. And finally, and most controversially, we need to support calls for reparations, not just for Black Americans but for Indigenous peoples, women, and other POCs. Companies like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase have pledged billions toward racial equity funds. These should prioritize direct investments in Black-, Indigenous-, and minority-owned businesses.

Corporations have immense power in our country to drive social change as illustrated by Xerox who inspired other companies to do so. But, we shouldn’t leave it up to them to do so themselves, or simply take their word for it. We need to hold their feet to the fire. But, this also means a societal attitude shift away from DEI as being unfair, but seen instead, as a restorative measure to better ensure fairness and balance.

My fear is that the backlash against diversity is a backlash rooted in assimilation and erasure. We have made the mistake of shoving the noble ideas of acceptance and understanding through the grinders of neo-liberalism, capitalism, and consumerism. The result is a shell of multiculturalism that promotes shallow initiatives it sees as quick ways to boost bottom-line returns, and then an easy scapegoat when those returns do not materialize. Because of these bad-faith executions, the program has not only been not helpful, but harmful to the groups it hopes to help. It is now an easy target for republican politicians and conservative commentators. But, when they take aim, it isn't just DEI in their sights, it's the very idea that cultures, backgrounds, and identities matter and have value. I fear that if DEI goes down, it will take the notion of understanding, compassion, and acceptance with it. We can stop it by actually being serious and true to calls for equity. Turning society on its head may sound extreme, and the solutions may sound radical, but we have to remember, that’s exactly what DEI was founded in--radical change. We need to stop fearing it, embrace it, and dare to be as radical as the Civil Rights movement.

“The solution isn’t to abandon DEI but to reclaim its radical roots.”

- Shirley Chisholm