Iremember the first time I heard about the case for diversity. It was 2008, and someone in my journalism class had raised the point that, in media and other industries, hiring a diverse team wasn’t just “the right thing to do” but it was also “good for business.” It’s a point that is never far off in a conversation about the “value” of diversity in the workplace. I remember wondering, Well, what happens when it stops being good for business?
In 2020, after George Floyd was murdered, the term “DEI” became more widely used as a corporate rallying cry in response to anti-Black racism protests. According to a Harvard Business School course, the abbreviation can be broken down into three pillars. Diversity: the presence and participation of individuals with varying backgrounds and perspectives, including those who have been traditionally underrepresented. Equity: equal access to opportunities and fair, just, and impartial treatment. Inclusion: a sense of belonging in an environment where all feel welcomed, accepted, and respected. Taken together, DEI—which is also sometimes referred to as EDIB (equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging), or IDEA (inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility)—is a lofty, worthy goal: the idea that everyone, no matter their identities and backgrounds, should have a seat at the table, be treated well, and feel like they belong and are worthy of respect and acceptance.
But I’m hardly the first person to have had questions about the gap between DEI’s promise and how it functions in reality. Activist, author, and academic Angela Davis wondered about it when she spoke at the University of Southern California in 2015: “I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice,” she said. “Diversity is a corporate strategy. It’s a strategy designed to ensure that the institution functions in the same way that it functioned before, except now that you have some black faces and brown faces. It’s a difference that doesn’t make a difference.”
Today, DEI programs are being shuttered across North America. Despite my own and others’ cynicism about how DEI is employed, this is an alarming development. Even before US president Donald Trump’s election, a Republican congressman sought to delegitimize the Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, by calling her a “DEI hire.”
I was in the audience at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last year in Chicago when a reporter questioned Trump about whether he would speak up against the supposed smear. Instead of answering her question, Trump repeatedly deflected it by asking her to define DEI. He has since shown very clearly what he thinks of it: after taking office on January 20, he has issued a staggering number of executive orders—at least ninety—some of which are aimed at shutting down diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the federal government and the private sector, calling them “wasteful” and “radical.”
A quick look into the history of diversity proves this to be false; it’s, after all, a type of inclusion policy that earned (initially only white) women the right to vote, for example. But then again, it’s worth asking the question: For whom, exactly, are today’s ideals of DEI “wasteful” and “radical”? What is radical about the concept of an integrated workforce? If an integrated workforce is radical, what, then, is normal to Trump and his supporters? Here’s the short answer: the modern anti-DEI backlash is really about resegregation and white supremacy.
The beginning of diversity initiatives is often linked to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed into law, following slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow laws, by US president Lyndon B. Johnson. Among other things, it forbade discrimination in hiring, promoting, and firing based on sex and race. Decades later, studies have shown that it’s primarily white women who’ve benefited from anti-discrimination policies. White women’s progress is also evident in executive leadership: while Black and Brown women remain severely underrepresented in C-suites, white women have made significant progress, outpacing all other racial and gender groups, except for white men, in promotions to the highest echelons of leadership.
In Canada, the beginnings of the institutionalization of DEI can be traced back to the adoption of multiculturalism as an official government policy in 1971—which sought to recognize the diversity of cultural and ethnic groups in Canada. In 1988, the Multiculturalism Act was passed into law, enshrining the responsibility of federal organizations to work toward equal opportunity and advancement in their institutions. The legal framework for respect and support for different racial and ethnic groups is preceded by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), which provides broad protections against discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, and mental or physical disability; and Canada’s Employment Equity Act (1986), which mandates federally regulated employers to actively pursue equitable hiring practices and report on their progress.
Even as the principles of fair and equitable treatment have been enshrined legally and theoretically, DEI has often failed to live up to its purported goal. In my own career as a journalist, particularly at the CBC, I saw the gap between the lip service that is paid to “diversity” and how newsrooms operate in practice. In 2019, frustrated with this dissonance, I left my long-time role as a producer at the public broadcaster.
Before Trump’s re-election, the war against DEI reached all the way up to the US Supreme Court. In 2023, the highest court in the country ended race-conscious admissions, often referred to as affirmative action, at universities like Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The court deemed it unlawful to consider race consciousness in higher education applications—a term that the Hult International Business School defines as being “aware of historic roots and the pervasive, systemic nature of oppression”—and how that has historically impacted access to education.
For the Supreme Court justices who supported this decision, it was a welcome move back to the original values of a “colour-blind” US constitution. (The US constitution was not, in fact, colour blind: it did not guarantee equal rights to Black people until the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified three years after the abolition of slavery, and hundreds of years later, true equality for Black people is still out of reach.) Outside of the Supreme Court, critics of DEI policies celebrated the move back to so-called colour blindness, alleging that naming racism and white supremacy painted all white people as racist.
This move undid forty-five years of legal precedent and racial progress. In 1965, Black students accounted for just under 5 percent of undergraduates in America, but according to a paper published in The Journal of College Admission, that percentage had more than doubled by 1998.
However, studies have also shown that even when race-based affirmative action policies were in place, wealthy white students still got the most preferential treatment when it came to admissions. A 2019 study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard University were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list—largely applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard. This belies a racist underpinning of the war against DEI: that those who benefit from it are “meritless” and haven’t adequately “earned” their place. It’s illuminating to see how rarely merit is questioned when the benefactors are wealthy and white.
Even removing wealth or athletic ability as a factor paints a clear picture of who is seen to have merit even when they do not have the qualifications. According to multiple studies, it’s race—and, of course, a culture of white supremacy—that puts white people at an advantage in the workplace regardless of their education level, while Black people are less likely to get callbacks from recruiters when they have clearly identifiable African American names.
To many of those who oppose DEI, there’s an underlying assumption that Black people, women and gender-diverse people, queer people, racialized people, disabled people, etc., are somehow less qualified, less worthy, less capable—and thus would have gotten their jobs only because of their identity. It’s the inverse that’s true: for many of us, we’ve succeeded despite having one or many of these overlapping identity markers. As Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes said earlier this year: “White men do not have a monopoly on being qualified.”
So why has the right latched onto DEI so rabidly? As Gabe Schneider of The Objective—a non-profit newsroom examining systems of power and inequity in journalism—says, this is about so much more than the abbreviation, and the media has not been talking clearly enough about what is at the root of the delegitimization: “DEI, taken at its most literal, is ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion,’” he wrote. “But it would be much more useful for journalists to spell out what the administration is doing: resegregation.”
This long-established skittishness of the media to name things as they are is well documented—using “racially charged” instead of “racist,” for example. “This administration is blatantly blaming desegregation and scapegoating diversity for America’s problems,” Schneider wrote last month. “Some mainstream journalism institutions would treat the idea that the president aims to resegregate the government as opinion. It’s not. It’s a clear reading of the facts.”
It seems, then, that the biggest critics of DEI are in fact themselves the biggest benefactors of a type of “affirmative action,” their gender and race putting them at a historic advantage against their racialized, disabled, queer, gender-diverse counterparts. As Princeton professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad wrote, “The call for color-blindness and merit is a dog whistle for a return to an America where some white people do not have to compete because the rules are rigged in their favor, just as has been the case for hundreds of years in the country.”
Despite the racist backbone of the anti-DEI movement, there are signs that the supposedly DEI-friendly corners also have their limits. Perhaps most damning of them is that even those tasked with carrying out the mission of doing DEI work can’t name the very privileges that its efforts are meant to be addressing.
Last year, Johns Hopkins Medicine’s vice president and chief diversity officer, Sherita Hill Golden, a Black woman and professor of endocrinology and metabolism, stepped down from her diversity role after receiving fierce backlash for a newsletter she wrote which offered a clear-eyed definition of how “privilege” works. She called it “a set of unearned benefits given to people who are in a specific social group.” She went on to explain that “privilege is characteristically invisible to people who have it. People in dominant groups often believe they have earned the privileges they enjoy or that everyone could have access to these privileges if only they worked to earn them. In fact, privileges are unearned and granted to people in the dominant groups whether they want those privileges or not, and regardless of their stated intent.”
An account on X called “End Wokeness” shared Golden’s email, which quickly travelled and was widely criticized by the likes of Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr. She later retracted her definition of privilege, one that she said she “deeply [regretted],” and, two months later, resigned from her diversity role.
The moment we are in now has further exposed the hollowness of diversity initiatives. Many institutions see the mere presence of racialized, marginalized, and traditionally excluded groups in positions of power as a sign of success. But in her acceptance speech for an honorary degree awarded to her by Spelman College, Princeton professor Ruha Benjamin warned against mere representation. “Our Blackness and our womanness are not in themselves trustworthy if we allow ourselves to be conscripted into positions of power that maintain the oppressive status quo,” she said. “Black faces in high places are not going to save us.”
Benjamin raised the example of Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the Black US ambassador to the United Nations, who repeatedly vetoed motions for a ceasefire in Gaza. In the lead-up to the US presidential election, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates was reported as saying that Harris’s potential presidency would be a “nightmare,” in which she would be “the first Black woman president . . . having 2,000-pound bombs with your name on them dropping on Gaza.”
In yet another example of the limits of even seemingly DEI-friendly institutions, Benjamin was under investigation by Princeton as of October 2024 for her support of students at the pro-Palestinian encampment on campus. Meanwhile, her institution publicly celebrated her selection for arguably one of the world’s most prestigious honours: becoming a MacArthur Fellowship recipient, also known as the “genius grant.”
In September, I addressed Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communications, in a public lecture called “Objectivity, Press Freedom and the Palestine Exception,” naming the journalism industry’s overwhelming skittishness in talking about Palestine and anti-Palestinian racism, which is rarely, if ever, factored into the diversity, equity, and inclusion conversation.
My talk was followed by a Q&A session hosted by three journalism students, all of whom were racialized young women. They asked me what the solution was. I said that for DEI to actually be meaningful, in practice, it had to challenge the status quo of power and who gets to hold it and wield it. I said that diversity was often nearly ornamental in practice, with industries boasting of racialized, minoritized faces they like to feature prominently on websites and brochures. Diversity, I said, is not decoration. If it’s not challenging deeply entrenched power, diversity is only serving it.
This application of diversity—one that doesn’t punish those of us who are invited to the table specifically for bringing our perspectives and experiences into our work—of course, flies in the face of the corporatization and co-opting of DEI as a public relations strategy and performative, surface-level representation.
New York University professor Jay Rosen illustrated this double bind in a series of posts on X last year: “Decades ago, the leadership class in American journalism accepted the argument that real pluralism had to come to their newsrooms, or the journalism would suffer. Or at least, this is what they said to themselves. But the bosses also said this: We can have a diverse and multi-colored newsroom, and maintain the view from nowhere. See the contradiction? Under-represented journalists are to simultaneously supply a missing perspective and suppress it—in order to prove their objectivity.” Given this contradiction, the view from the journalism industry is growing increasingly bleak: more Black and racialized journalists are leaving or are being forced out of the industry.
This, in a nutshell, is the crazy-making double bind of supporting the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion while simultaneously rejecting and criticizing the co-opting of those principles into DEI as essentially decorative corporate strategy. As the attacks on DEI continue, it’s best we be specific about what it really means and which meaning we really support.
The exodus of racialized and other traditionally excluded people from government and the press is alarming and a sign, perhaps, that DEI policies didn’t really provide equitable opportunities but merely the appearance of them. But at a time when it feels like the world is being undone and perhaps remade in real time, it’s worth asking a question put forward by Benjamin in a recent interview. When talking about ideals of inclusion, we should consider: What are we all being included into? She remembered how Martin Luther King Jr. began to fear how desegregation efforts in the civil rights era excluded the poor and disenfranchised. He said: “We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know that we will win. But I’ve come to believe we’re integrating into a burning house.”
Sixty years later, I can’t help but agree.
